POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS: Lonely Planets V - In Space No One Can Hear You...

I know I’m a few years behind, but I just checked out a copy of LONELY PLANETS: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life (2003) by David Grinspoon. He does, of course, have a “doctor” in front of his name, but it appears that he doesn’t use it very often. He also has the endorsement of Neil deGrasse Tyson – the quintessential new face of astronomy and the immediate successor to Carl Sagan.

Tyson said of Grinspoon’s book “…brings together what has never before been synthesized…he is a planetary scientist as well as dreamer, born of the space age.”

As is apparent to anyone who reads my blog, I LOVE aliens! I write about aliens! I do (guardedly) believe that there is intelligent life “out there, somewhere” – HOWEVER, I don’t believe that we have any real proof yet and that it is, at this point, an intellectual and philosophical exercise.

Be that as it may, I finished Grinspoon’s book and have skimmed his website (http://funkyscience.net/) several times. While it’s been “frozen” on his newest Pluto/Horizon book, I find myself looking forward to following this guy for some time to come!

I’m well into the book now (page 229) and I got my own copy on Wednesday through a Half-Price Books near me. After (*gasp*) dog-earing my Library copy, I transferred the noted pages to my own book.

So now I’m at the end…Dr. Grinspoon has titled this part of the book simply, “Belief” and he patiently teases apart the rationale of the SETI. However, outside of Grinspoon’s 2003 book, we have this: https://www.space.com/39474-search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence-needs-new-name.html

Twenty years past the book’s publication date, and even so a year old, Dr. Jill Tartar, the current “name” in the Human search for life beyond Earth, believes we need to leave behind the acronym to indicate the real search that is currently underway – the search for technological signatures that would be evidence of life off of Earth, a rebranding of SETI into something like the Search for Extraterrestrial Technology Signatures – SETS so to speak.

Dr. Tartar explained that the phrase “‘…search for extraterrestrial intelligence’ generates an incorrect perception of what scientists in this field are actually doing. A more appropriate title for the field, she said, would be ‘the search for technosignatures,’ or signs of technology created by intelligent alien civilizations.”

Grinspoon tentatively poses a sort of caveat to this idea in this part of LONELY PLANET: “The problem of survival is not fundamentally technological. It is spiritual and moral. It is evolutionary. Technical solutions may provide temporary Band-Aids, but they do not save us from our nature. If we want to be one of the survivors, we must create a global society where curiosity is tightly bonded to compassion, and where (this is hardest to picture) not a lot of people want to do violence to others. You’re probably not going to like this next though, but one solution would be to just surrender to the machines.”

Another thing that has happened in the fifteen years since the publication of the book is the call by scientists to throw out the Drake Equation as well as its successor in 2013, the Seager Equation (Sara Seager, MIT), which looks for BIOLOGICAL traces of life in the atmosphere of planets. At the time of her adaptation of the Drake, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite was in the works. TESS launched this year (April 18, 2018), but as I write this, there have been no real releases of data except for a scan of Southern skies and images of comet C/2018 N1 snapped by the craft (https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13030). There are plans for future conferences however: (https://tess.mit.edu/news/tess-science-conference/conferences/)!

So we’ll be seeing more data regarding the SETS or, alternately, the Search for Extraterrestrial Biological Signs – or SEBS.

Looking for technosigns based on the philosophy of Dr. Tatar; looking for signs of atmospheric modification via biology based on the philosophy of Dr. Seager; or looking for something else…

In a recent article, “Alien Hunters, Stop Using the Drake Equation” by Paul Sutter (Astrophysicist, Ohio State University; Chief Scientist at COSI Science Center. PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Paris Institute of Astrophysics, research fellowship in Trieste, Italy.) (https://www.space.com/42739-stop-using-the-drake-equation.html). He points out that “…the Drake equation's power is more as a philosophical treatment, to help guide our thinking and help us navigate the murky waters of a deep and fundamental existential question…huge uncertainties in the parameters, the unknown ways those uncertainties mix, and the absolute lack of any guidance in even choosing those parameters robs it of any predictive power. Prediction is at the heart of science. Prediction is what makes an idea useful. And if an idea isn’t useful, why keep it around?”

Grinspoon has an article of faith that more or less incorporates all three of the views above: “We calculate and speculate about finding others that are slightly spiffed up versions of ourselves and take it as an article of faith that such a stage will arise soon after the one that we are in now...it takes more than technology to be a broadcasting society. It requires that you survive with high technology for many thousands of years…they ‘must’ have solved many of the great social, political, and spiritual problems we now face.” (p393)

I’m not confident that ETs have “solved…the great…problems we now face.” That seems to ME to be in the province of spiritual changes that (at least as it appears to me) God in man in the form of Jesus Christ can cause (lectures about the Crusades, the Reformation, the Inquisition, and Manifest Destiny are not appreciated unless they acknowledge the POLITICAL aspect of all of the above, which, as politics always does, coopts whatever belief system is useful to create places for the majority of politicians to gain as much money, power, and influence. Call me whacko if you’d like. That’s where I stand. Grinspoon points out, “We blame spreading irrationality on scientific illiteracy. Yet, in my opinion, it is alienation from science, not science illiteracy that is the root problem…if we want the world to see us as wizards, not muggles, then we can’t sell our services to the highest bidder, and we need to spread the magical (and spiritually evocative) story of Cosmic Evolution…Technical advancement without spiritual progress creates a dangerous and unstable condition that will be selected against.” (pp411-412).

Hmmm…

“So say we all,” (Battlestar GALACTICA) or in Earth English, “Amen”.

Part I: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-philosophy.html, http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/
Part II: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-part-2-state.html
Part III: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-part-three.html
Part IV: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/12/possibly-irritating-essays-part-iv.html
Image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUGOthVSNSUaxivRh0p8U5Ub4NEr0KxiZyPOIBI91G4gAPdcWmSQ-krJynDH2RQu93hHeS6EFbgOFZiDNaZ3M35LGLVbwklBZDB_dEB6symLvWTaYSgbFymOAqbFO4rVwd4qGcEBnzlDk/s1600/Unknown-4.jpeg

IDEAS ON TUESDAYS 620

Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them. Octavia Butler said, “SF doesn’t really mean anything at all, except that if you use science, you should use it correctly, and if you use your imagination to extend it beyond what we already know, you should do that intelligently.”
SF Trope: Time Travel

Current Event: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2665781/Could-time-travel-soon-reality-Physicists-simulate-quantum-light-particles-travelling-past-time.html

Anton Naoumov shook his head. “You’re not going to get me into that thing. I signed aboard this ship to practice being a paramedic, not to have my atoms scattered back and forth across space by this gadget.”

Piia Takala grinned, “You’re not going anywhere in space, Anton! It’s...”

“I know – it’s a time machine. But didn’t Einstein have some theory that space and time are related? Intimately.”

Piia blinked in surprise and managed to say, “I’m sure you got that wrong. You never had a physics class, did you?”

“I didn’t need the class. I’m not a total idiot, you know! Medical majors can dabble in other stuff, so I did. And I didn’t get it wrong,” he said, tapping his handheld computer. “It says right here that Einstein wrote about it and W. K. Clifford described the effect of gravitation on space and time. He figured out it was easily visualized as a ‘warp’ in the geometrical fabric of space and time, in a smooth and continuous way that changed smoothly from point-to-point along the fabric of space and time.”

Piia pursed her lips. She’d never get him into the thing to go back with her if she let him dig any deeper. She said, “Granted. Space and time are intimately connected. But this isn’t going to be scattering your atoms anywhere. The only things that will be scattered are the quanta that make up the atoms. Those are only going to be shifted a little...”

He held up his hand and said, “What do you want me to do this for anyway? What’s so all-fired important about me doing this?”

She sat down on the stool in front of the control board. The time-shift chamber wasn’t really a chamber at all – it was a platform made of ultradense matter that was so massive, it was making a tiny dimple in local space-time. Above, a bank of high energy lamps pointed downward to an EM lens that would focus them on the head of the subject with enough force to shove the person through the dimple and into another time. The time period was pinpointed by the tightness of the focus and the depth of the dimple. Piia’d done the calculations three times. She took a deep breath and finally said, “I want you to stop the Finnish Civil War of 1918.”

He scowled then said, “How am I supposed to do that?”

“You have to let the one man who can stop the whole mess die.”

“What?”

“It has to look like a natural death, too. I figured all you paramedics know how to keep people alive when they’re on the brink of death, you probably know how to push them over, too.” She slipped the stun gun from her pocket, flicking it on to maximum strength and minimum dispersion.

“You want me to commit murder?”

“Don’t worry about it – if you’re successful none of this will ever happen.”

“What?”

“I want you to let my great, great, great grandfather die,” she said as she stunned him.

Names: ♀Finland, Thailand ; ♂ Bulgaria, Iceland
Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/Falcon_9_Demo-2_Launching_6_%283%29.jpg/220px-Falcon_9_Demo-2_Launching_6_%283%29.jpg

Blessed Christmas Eve and MERRY CHRISTMAS

It occurred to me that many bloggers, have somewhere stored, a Christmas blog they trot out each year to look at and revisit. Below is my offering for this venerable tradition…

Like many people, I have Christmas traditions.

I watch Jim Carrey’s HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS. I check out a copy of Dicken’s A CHRISTMAS CAROL (the version with Patrick Stewart, Star Trek:TNG’s Jean-Luc Picard playing Ebenezer Scrooge). I snuggle up to the TV to listen to Burl Ives sing in the animatronic version of RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER.

Of course, I read the Christmas story from Luke 1:1 – 2:20, but I dig out my old December 1997 issue of ANALOG and reread “Easter Egg Hunt: A Christmas Story” by Jeffrey Kooistra. I also find time alone to watch the video tape of a Christmas musical I scripted with music and lyrics by an old, old friend of mine, Lynn Swanson. The musical was called “Just In Time For Christmas” and was a children’s time-travel version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL with a couple of twists. Performed twice by a huge cast of kids from my church, it included both my son as an Outsider-sort of angel and my daughter as a shepherd who was watching her fields by night.

I conclude then that for me Christmas is about the past. It ranges from ancient times in far-away Israel to present day kerfuffles about what to do Christmas day when my sister is in Virginia with her “other” family and our get-together last Saturday was postponed because of a frigid blizzard and moved to January sometime and will include celebrating my mom’s 75th (As of this update, Mom passed away five years ago this past July) birthday and the fact that I’ll be working most of today at Barnes & Noble and Mom and Dad are coming for Christmas Eve dinner and I won’t be around to help get ready. 

This past includes my daughter’s concern about the commercialization of Christmas that led her to ask us to spend the money we would have used on her to get a sewing machine for an organization that teaches women in northern India to sew for a living. On the other hand, my son loves to seek out just the right gift for each person and disdains gift cards – he loves the giving part of Christmas. He started the small avalanche of gifts under the tree right now when he set out his college-student-meager presents.

My wife was talking to a cashier at a local warehouse grocery story a few hours ago and asked what the day held for her. The woman said that she hated working Christmas Eve because people were so crabby – they yell at cashiers because the store is out of “stuff” and if anyone bumps their cart, they explode into anger. As we walked out into a flurry of gently falling, diamond sparkling “crystal rain” (see Tobias Buckell’s fabulous book, CRYSTAL RAIN to discover the origin of that phrase), we talked about the cashier’s observations.

Under the guidance of Our Father Below (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwtape_Letters), we have taken a simple attempt to remember the birth of the Son of God and have turned it into a tension-filled extravaganza of over-spending, over-eating and secular glitz that eclipses the original pagan ritual from which it sprang.

The original event also included a kerfuffle as well as a brush with governmental bureaucracy, so maybe it was only natural that we perpetuated Mary and Joseph’s search for a place for her to have Jesus by our searches for the perfect gift, food or event.

Take a deep breath, Guy. Perhaps I need to go a bit further back in time; maybe to the announcement the angel made to Mary: “For nothing will be impossible with God.” Luke 1:37. Maybe that’s the message I’ll take from this season – that no matter what happens: kerfuffles, angry shoppers, divergent gifting and traditions; nothing is impossible with God. Peace on Earth? He can bring it. Deep security? He can give it. Salvation for everyone? He did it. “For nothing is impossible with God.” Amen. (First published December 25, 2008, updated December 22, 2021)

Image: https://thetylt.com/attachments/5c3590919e588b7110f3debff6f620a34446d685/store/fill/992/661/4de1aab3834876c0e96b75ecf4bd8b71a50d566c67eb401afb5643f64eee/XmasCarol2.jpg

IDEAS ON TUESDAY 619

Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them. Regarding horror, I found this insight in line with WIRED FOR STORY: “ We seek out…stories which give us a place to put our fears…Stories that frighten us or unsettle us - not just horror stories, but ones that make us uncomfortable or that strike a chord somewhere deep inside - give us the means to explore the things that scare us…” – Lou Morgan (The Guardian)

Horror Trope: “Another Man's Terror. This trope takes place where one character is thrown into the shoes of a dead man to experience his final moments....or he has to complete a dead man's task, witnessing and experiencing what killed the person before you.”
Current Event: Though I can't find this idea exactly, I'm sure it's out there somewhere...“Sister dies, deadbeat brother channels her dreams”

Chengpao Yang stared at his mother and said, “What?” She explained again in Hmong this time, because her English was so bad, even his sister couldn't understand Mom right now. If Mom was saying it right, Victoria would never be able to try and understand her mother again. He said, “Are you trying to tell me that Victoria is dead?"

The affirmative was a wail of grief.

What followed was both a long explanation of what happened and an accusation that if he’d been home, she never would have tried to protect her mother against the robber and died of a knife wound that had looked like a nick, but turned out to be from a poisoned knife.

“You mean you would rather have had me die than her?” Mother looked at him for a long time, then buried her face in her hands and wept harder. She collapsed to the floor in a puddle of her house clothes and hair. Chengpao stared down at her for a long time, torn between the urge to kick her, break out into tears and weep, or curse the world, his mother, his dead father, and his overachieving sister.

She rolled over on to her back, staring through him and at the ceiling. Shaking his head, he felt tears welling and finally said, “Fine then. If that’s what you want,” he raised his arms into the air and shouted at the ceiling, “If the spirit of Victoria is hanging out anywhere nearby, go ahead, take over my...”

Without missing a beat, his voice abruptly pitched higher, his posture shifted, and he made a motion with one hand that would have pushed a long strand of hair from his face – if he didn’t have a crew cut. He’d had a crew cut since his thirteenth birthday. He said, “Don’t worry Mom, I’m baaaack…”

Names: ♀ England, Laos; ♂ Laos, Laos
Image: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/56c4dfe127d4bd8ca39d3511/1508166190572-GLTT4CIQG9U30G5ST0NF/laos_house_lao_ghost_kasu.jpg?format=1500w

POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS Part IV – Contacting Aliens (Oh, NO!) and A Living World Idea…

NOT using the panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, CA in August 2018 (to which I be unable to go (until I retire from education)), I would jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not today. This explanation is reserved for when I dash “off topic”, sometimes reviewing movies, sometimes reviewing books, and other times taking up the spirit of a blog an old friend of mine used to keep called THE RANTING ROOM…

I know I’m a few years behind, but I just checked out a copy of LONELY PLANETS: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life (2003) by David Grinspoon. He does, of course, have a “doctor” in front of his name, but it appears that he doesn’t use it very often. He also has the endorsement of Neil deGrasse Tyson – the quintessential new face of astronomy and the immediate successor to Carl Sagan.

Tyson said of Grinspoon’s book “…brings together what has never before been synthesized…he is a planetary scientist as well as dreamer, born of the space age.”

As is apparent to anyone who reads my blog, I LOVE aliens! I write about aliens! I do (guardedly) believe that there is intelligent life “out there, somewhere” – HOWEVER, I don’t believe that we have any real proof yet and that it is, at this point, an intellectual and philosophical exercise. Be that as it may, I’m approaching the end of Grinspoon’s book and have skimmed his website (http://funkyscience.net/) several times. While it’s been “frozen” on his newest Pluto/Horizon book, I find myself looking forward to following this guy for some time to come!


I’m well into the book now (page 229) and I got my own copy on Wednesday through a Half-Price Books near me. After (*gasp*) dog-earing my Library copy, I transferred the noted pages to my own book.

Grinspoon flits effortlessly between history, the present, and the future. Occasionally, all three collide as when he begins to talk about the shift from the “wacky” field of exobiology to what that same field has become today: Astrobiology. It’s legitimized and not only is it part of NASA, it has its own Homepage (https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/)

What is it? Grinspoon defines it this way: “Astrobiology…is not for profit…We explore space for reasons that are romantic and idealistic…[it is] a scientific movement that is justified fundamentally on spiritual grounds…also potentially revolutionary in its attempt to reverse the slide toward increasing scientific specialization and isolation. We want to blur the borders and tear down the walls that modern academia has erected. Astrobiology at its best is a step toward the reunification of science and, perhaps, the rebirth of natural philosophy.” (p243)

Wow.

Astrobiology, the concept of discovering life somewhere besides Earth, is the foundational belief of NASA's astrobiology program. With it comes a strong belief: “I think we’re going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we’re going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years,” said NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan."

While the science of astrobiology has no detractors, what happens once we DO discover life elsewhere and in particular if we discover intelligent life elsewhere does indeed seem to have provoked dissent among the ranks. Some individuals have taken to the blogosphere and conference circuit with extreme confidence that their opinion alone is the correct one. To ME, they seem to flail wildly and appear to be close relatives of Chicken Little. One of their names became instantly recognizable by a large portion of the English-speaking world several years ago, and even before his recent passing, was spoken in the same sentence as Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and...Stephen Hawking; who said a bit before his death, that contact with aliens will be BAD: “One day, we might receive a signal from a planet like this, but we should be wary of answering back. Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn’t turn out so well”.(https://www.sciencealert.com/stephen-hawking-warns-that-we-might-not-want-to-reach-out-to-aliens)

Another, not-so-well-recognized-name, a science fiction writer popular in the 80s and 90s, David Brin has added his voice to Hawking's warning, “Optimistic scholars may be right that we have nothing to fear from that eventual encounter with wise beings from the stars. Still, we cannot be reminded often enough to look back on our own history of contact among humans here on Earth, a litany of dire cautionary tales. We are, all of us, descended -- only a few generations back -- from folk who suffered horribly because they weren't ready for the challenges brought on by new vices, new technologies, new diseases, new ideas, new opportunities, new people. And those ancestors were the lucky survivors! Many peoples and cultures – including every species of hominids other than our own – left no descendants at all...How ironic that this reminder should come from someone who is a dedicated believer in the new!...Ironic, and yet somehow apropos. For I would rather bet on a horse that I know – human improvability and progress -- than on salvation from some hypothetical super-beings high above...We have tried that route, countless times before, and the lesson has always been that we should rely (mostly) on ourselves...In this article I've only touched on just a few of the dangers conceived by various gloomy thinkers and writers over the years. I could go on, but a complete listing isn't necessary. What matters is the lesson, one of circumspection and caution. The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions.

"It often proved fatal.” (http://www.setileague.org/iaaseti/brin.pdf, page 22)

While he doesn't talk specifically about first contact, the general sense I gather from his writing is that he isn't quite to negative as the two quoted above...

Once we reach chapter 17, Grinspoon takes a decidedly spiritual turn – not Christian, certainly, he has the most respect for Buddhism: “Although I’ve never found a religion that seems a perfect fit, I love what I know of the teachings of Buddhism. Its most important principle seems to be compassion. If there is a perfect spiritual principle, I would vote for this.” (p384)

He takes time explaining complexity theory, though the book was published in 2003 and in 2018, Wikipedia has this to say: “The term complex adaptive systems, or complexity science, is often used to describe the loosely organized academic field that has grown up around the study of such systems. Complexity science is not a single theory—it encompasses more than one theoretical framework and is highly interdisciplinary, seeking the answers to some fundamental questions about living, adaptable, changeable systems. The study of CAS focuses on complex, emergent and macroscopic properties of the system. John H. Holland said that CAS ‘are systems that have a large numbers of components, often called agents, that interact and adapt or learn.’” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system)

It’s hard to summarize briefly what Grinspoon lays out in this chapter, but let me take a stab at it. Grinspoon wonders, (I think this is gist of it) if Earth itself is alive in a unique way.

The idea stems from the observation that not only does the planet – it’s temperature, composition, distance from the Sun, mass, and every other factor that we used to call the abiotic factors of an ecosystem – affect the biotic, but that the biotic factors are intimately entangled with the abiotic factors. It certainly seems logical, but in 2013, Toby Tyrrell, professor of Earth System Science (https://www.southampton.ac.uk/oes/about/staff/lrtt.page) seemed to drive a stake through the heart of the hypothesis: “I believe Gaia is a dead end. Its study has, however, generated many new and thought provoking questions. While rejecting Gaia, we can at the same time appreciate Lovelock's originality and breadth of vision, and recognize that his audacious concept has helped to stimulate many new ideas about the Earth, and to champion a holistic approach to studying it”. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis)

I'd never run across this more science-based Gaia theory. Grinspoon's presentation and enthusiasm for it won me over and the idea that biotic and abiotic factors are more intertwined than we thought is compelling. Even so, I'm not going to begin to worship Mother Earth. My basic belief is that while they have trouble stomaching any sort of supreme being or supernatural guidance, many scientists seem to hold with the idea that there's "something beyond us".

While I call that "something" a Someone, they struggle to give it a different name and add concrete proofs to construct a something to believe in. I am a realist -- I suppose, except in my belief in God and in the Redemption of Humans through his sacrificial death on the Cross. Was his sacrifice on the Cross for ONLY Humans, or was it for ALL beings who broke covenant with Him and chose disobedience over obedience? No idea.

I suppose in that, as well as in the argument over the efficacy of shouting out our presence to a universe that holds malevolent Intelligences who will soon come to stomp us out...I can only join with the rest of Humanity and wait and see.

Whew…lots to think about. Lots to consider.

Lots to figure out how to incorporate into my writing! I’ll take up the end of the book next week!

Image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUGOthVSNSUaxivRh0p8U5Ub4NEr0KxiZyPOIBI91G4gAPdcWmSQ-krJynDH2RQu93hHeS6EFbgOFZiDNaZ3M35LGLVbwklBZDB_dEB6symLvWTaYSgbFymOAqbFO4rVwd4qGcEBnzlDk/s1600/Unknown-4.jpeg

IDEAS ON TUESDAY 618

Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them? Regarding Fantasy, this insight was startling: “I see the fantasy genre as an ever-shifting metaphor for life in this world, an innocuous medium that allows the author to examine difficult, even controversial, subjects with impunity. Honor, religion, politics, nobility, integrity, greed—we’ve an endless list of ideals to be dissected and explored. And maybe learned from.” – Melissa McPhail.

F Trope: Most lycanthropy, telekinesis, etc starts at puberty why not at menopause…
A Not-So-Current Event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werewolf

According to the source above – “A notable exception to the association of Lycanthropy and the Devil, comes from a rare and lesser known account of an 80-year-old man named Thiess. In 1692, in Jurgenburg, Livonia, Thiess testified under oath that he and other werewolves were the Hounds of God. He claimed they were warriors who went down into hell to do battle with witches and demons. Their efforts ensured that the Devil and his minions did not carry off the grain from local failed crops down to hell. Thiess was steadfast in his assertions, claiming that werewolves in Germany and Russia also did battle with the devil's minions in their own versions of hell, and insisted that when werewolves died, their souls were welcomed into heaven as reward for their service.”

Teodors Pakalns (Latvian) – who goes by Ted in his Minnesota high school is in his supposedly “native land” while mom and dad go clubbing on the French Riviera to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary. While admitting to himself that with the divorce rate at 73%, it might be something worth celebrating. But sending him to live with his LATVIAN grandfather in some dinky town of Lode! Near the bustling metropolis of Rujiena? What the heck is he supposed to do?

He frets, fumes and mutters about lousy internet connections until he’s so hungry, he can’t stand it. Coming out to eat, he finds that his grandfather has made a simple meal. It smells great and looks sort of like a calzone. Ted eats on, then eats another and then in sudden and surprisingly good English, grandpa tells him a story. He also tells him he needs to watch out – grandpa Pakalns is a werewolf. He’s a werewolf on a mission from God!

Jaanjika Kivi (Estonian) is called Jan in Helsinki where she lives with her artist mother. She drags Jan to visit her “she’s-been-dying-for-the-last-ten-years” grandmother in Mom’s home of Estonia, which she escaped as a kid by winning an art scholarship to Helsingin Yliopisto the University of Helsinki. Jan and her mother trek to the tiny Estonian town of Karski near the roaring metropolis...of Tartu.

*sigh*

Mom says she can go, but she’ll have to walk. Then Mom goes out to paint, leaving Jan with her elderly grandmother. Jan is mostly afraid of the old woman and doesn’t remember her speaking anything but some old language Jan assumes is Estonian.

Until suddenly Grandma starts to tell a story – in clear English – about how she was a werewolf, on a mission for God...then she turns to Jan and says, “You are my granddaughter. My own daughter refused to take up the mission. I am asking if you would take up my mission; complete it and do what our people have been called to do for five hundred years. I will be with you the entire time, but you must be my strong arms and strong legs. Will you do it, Jaanjika?” Grandma’s eye’s suddenly clear and seem to pierce her heart. “Will you?”

Jaanjika meets Teodors on the border between Estonia and Latvia – in the heart of the ancient land of Livonia, a land with an ancient history that may very well be poised at the dawn of a new era that rights an millennium old wrong.

But what about the forces that don’t want the wrong set right. The ones who have profited from the carnage? Who are they and what will they do to Jaanjika and Teodors?

Resource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livonia
Names: ♀ Estonia; ♂ Latvia

Image: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/98/71/e5/9871e52bbc09c525af21b8f6471eab15.jpg

POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS: Part III – 51 Pegasi and the Rest of the Mess

NOT using the panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, CA in August 2018 (to which I be unable to go (until I retire from education)), I would jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not today. This explanation is reserved for when I dash “off topic”, sometimes reviewing movies, sometimes reviewing books, and other times taking up the spirit of a blog an old friend of mine used to keep called THE RANTING ROOM…

I know I’m a few years behind, but I just checked out a copy of LONELY PLANETS: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life (2003) by David Grinspoon. He does, of course, have a “doctor” in front of his name, but it appears that he doesn’t use it very often. He also has the endorsement of Neil deGrasse Tyson – the quintessential new face of astronomy and the immediate successor to Carl Sagan.

Tyson said of Grinspoon’s book “…brings together what has never before been synthesized…he is a planetary scientist as well as dreamer, born of the space age.”

As is apparent to anyone who reads my blog, I LOVE aliens! I write about aliens! I do (guardedly) believe that there is intelligent life “out there, somewhere” – HOWEVER, I don’t believe that we have any real proof yet and that it is, at this point, an intellectual and philosophical exercise.

Be that as it may, I’m approaching the end of Grinspoon’s book and have skimmed his website (http://funkyscience.net/) several times. While it’s been “frozen” on his newest Pluto/Horizon book, I find myself looking forward to following this guy for some time to come!

I’m well into the book now (page 229) and I got my own copy on Wednesday through a Half-Price Books near me. After (*gasp*) dog-earing my Library copy, I transferred the noted pages to my own book.

And…I haven’t finished the book yet, partly because I got a book from the library (THE TEA MASTER AND THE DETECTIVE by Aliette de Bodard). If you like Sherlock Holmes homages (and I do!), and you liked Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw (and I did!), then is a masterful book for you! Anyway, onward.

51 Pegasi – the fifty-first brightest star in the constellation Pegasus, the Winged Horse – is a Sun-like star that has an entire suite of planets and has long been in the “exoplanet limelight”.

We’ve even gone and named one of the planets Dimidium (from the Latin, dimidius, which means half or halved, because it appeared to be about half of Jupiter’s mass…), and it’s the first of a now long-line of planet types we have called “hot Jupiters”. This is because it orbits very close to its sun every four days and has an average orbital distance of one one hundredth of an AU (Earth is 1 AU from the Sun, 157,000,000 km (or more familiarly to us Americans, 93 million miles)).

It’s kind of funny, because when I teach a summer school class called Alien Worlds, I insist on students NOT naming the planets of their star system until their intelligent aliens evolve both language and a knowledge of the planets in their star system – in other words, not until Thursday. But here we have Humans naming the worlds of someone else’s (conceivably) star system. Don’t you think there’s a certain amount of hubris there? Hmmm…

At any rate, when Grinspoon wrote his book, there were some 100 or so planets discovered orbiting fewer than a hundred stars. Many of the stars were NOT Sun-like, 51 Peg was the first. Today, there are literally THOUSANDS of exoplanets and hundreds of stars. That leads to this statement: “What if we live in a completely deviant star system, and our presence here indicates that such an unusual location is required for something like us to come along…From this we are tempted to conclude that ours is not a garden-variety solar system, but we don’t know this…We won’t know definitively how typical our own planetary system is until we take a more thorough consensus of the planets in our stellar neighborhood.” (p 215)

Today, “As of 1 November 2018, there are 3,874 confirmed planets in 2,892 systems, with 638 systems having more than one planet…About 1 in 5 Sun-like stars have an ‘Earth-sized’ planet in the habitable zone. Assuming there are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way, one can hypothesize that there are 11 billion potentially habitable Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way, rising to 40 billion if planets orbiting the numerous red dwarfs are included.”1

Space is an exceedingly strange place and the question STILL comes back to something called The Fermi Question and can be stated most simply as “Where is everyone?”

The Fermi Question has been made into a "mathematical formula" of sorts called the Drake Equation. It has also been amended recently with the Seager Equation: (both are included here: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2013/05/seager-equation-based-on-detected.html)

Most recently: “The Drake equation has been used by both optimists and pessimists, with wildly differing results. The first scientific meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), which had 10 attendees including Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, speculated that the number of civilizations was roughly equal to the lifetime[non sequitur] in years, and there were probably between 1,000 and 100,000,000 civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. Conversely, Frank Tipler and John D. Barrow used pessimistic numbers and speculated that the average number of civilizations in a galaxy is much less than one. Almost all arguments involving the Drake equation suffer from the overconfidence effect, a common error of probabilistic reasoning about low-probability events, by guessing specific numbers for likelihoods of events whose mechanism is not yet understood, such as the likelihood of abiogenesis on an Earth-like planet, with current likelihood estimates varying over many hundreds of orders of magnitude. An analysis that takes into account some of the uncertainty associated with this lack of understanding has been carried out by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord, and suggests that with very high probability, either intelligent civilizations are plentiful in our galaxy or humanity is alone in the observable universe, with the lack of observation of intelligent civilizations pointing towards the latter option.”

Wow. Really. Wow.

If that’s not a “religious” statement, I don’t know what is. It’s like saying, “Either Christianity is true or it’s not.” It’s not particularly profound and in fact, might be considered a sort of…woo woo statement, that is, “descriptive of an event or person…[that/who espouses] authentic religious tradition[s] such as Hinduism or Zen Buddhism, but now practices an Eastern-influenced yet severely watered-down and Westernized pseudo-mysticism…” In other words, it’s always a safe bet to say something that sounds definitive but is carefully designed to not take ANY kind of stand.

Despite the fact that we have 2892 star systems that have confirmed planets, there is still no evidence whatever that there is anything approaching a Human level of intelligence – at least none that is leaking coherent energy of any sort. That then always leads back to the suspicion that we are alone in the universe. Unique or not, it just doesn’t seem likely at this point (without doing teleological [the philosophical idea that things have goals or causes -- like how Dr. Eleanor Arroway responds to the question from a child about if she thinks there's intelligent life "out there" and she responds saying that if there ISN'T, it would seem to be an awful waste of space...] or mental gymnastics that include STAR TREK’s Prime Directive (that intelligenes higher than ours are keeping their hands off so that they don't interfere with our development) that there's nothing but wishful thinking that there's anyone out there for us to talk to…

Resources:
Part One: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-philosophy.html, http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/
Part Two: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-part-2-state.html
Exoplanets Defined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet 1
Image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUGOthVSNSUaxivRh0p8U5Ub4NEr0KxiZyPOIBI91G4gAPdcWmSQ-krJynDH2RQu93hHeS6EFbgOFZiDNaZ3M35LGLVbwklBZDB_dEB6symLvWTaYSgbFymOAqbFO4rVwd4qGcEBnzlDk/s1600/Unknown-4.jpeg

IDEAS ON TUESDAYS 617

Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them. Octavia Butler said, “SF doesn’t really mean anything at all, except that if you use science, you should use it correctly, and if you use your imagination to extend it beyond what we already know, you should do that intelligently.”

SF Trope: Isaac Asimov’s Three Kinds Of Science Fiction: “Gadget sci-fi: Man invents car, holds lecture on how it works.”
Current Event: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131210071936.htm

Khünbish Qureshi said, “Once we drill through the ice, we can begin extract the uranium. But we have to do it fast.” He tapped the wide pipe with his heavily armored hand. While there was no true atmosphere and the surface of Europa was exposed to the radiation sleet from Jupiter, they both wore flexible suits and had ridden to the surface on little more than a hovering plate.

“You think extracting a few metric tonnes of uranium from this moon would have any kind of effect at all?” asked Yelizavta Zaya. She bounced a few meters back after stomping her foot.

“I can’t say for sure.”

“Why not?”

“I’m a geologist...”

“You mean a Eurologist?”

“That makes me sound like a bladder specialist!”

“Well, it’s not Earth, so you can’t be a ‘geologist’.”

“There’s not a bladder in sight, either!”

Beneath their feet, the ice sang. On any other world, it would have been a quake, but here the ice vibrated, shifting, sliding along cracked edges. Immense crevasses sang bass that shook the world like a drum head; smaller ones sang faint hymns of joy; the smallest sang beyond the hearing of Humans.

Khünbish slapped the pipe again and said, “If there were living things under the surface, maybe my sucking the lifeblood from the water will make them sit up and take notice.”

“I doubt there’re sitting beings under our feet, Khun.”

He grimaced at the diminutive – Americans and Loonies made a habit of lopping parts of people’s names off willy-nilly – and said, “Whatever they’re doing, I’m hoping they notice.”

“And if there’s nothing under our feet but ice, water, uranium?”

“Then we stand to make a fortune and retire wherever we want to.” He bounced back as the ice began to sing again. As he fell to the surface, he grimaced and said, “Can you hear that?”

Names: ♀ Russia, Mongolian; ♂ Mongolian, Pakistan
Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/Falcon_9_Demo-2_Launching_6_%283%29.jpg/220px-Falcon_9_Demo-2_Launching_6_%283%29.jpg

Slice of PIE: Young Adult Living For The MUCH Older...

Eight billion people live on Earth along with 400 million iPods and 60 million iPads.

Next year, the total number of active cell phones on Earth will surpass the total population of that same planet.

We have (guessing) five billion people who spend more time on their phones talking to people far away than they spend physically talking to the people they live next door to.

The generation to which my two adult kids belong to has even made a sort of “game” out of the dilemma. Ask your nearest thirty-something if they’ve ever played the game where a group of friends gets together at a bar, a restaurant or a party and they pile their cell phones in the center of the table. The first person to give in and answers their phone during the face-to-face event pays…the tab, the bill, for the next party…whatever.

My guess is that even if they have never played it themselves, they know people who have and almost universally they find the idea offensive, horrifying, unbelievable, or ridiculous.

It is not at all uncommon for my kids to come home with friends and have the entire group sitting in the living room not interacting with each other at all, but hunched over their cell phones incidentally not talking to each other. In fact, they are not even really communicating in English but in a dialect that has replaced “you” with U; “to” with 2; and has created LMFAO for…well, I have no doubt that you know what that stands for.

What does this have to do with the writing life?

Everything. While people are still reading – more and more are moving to ebooks, but that’s a completely different issue that I addressed in a published short story I wrote (http://www.perihelionsf.com/1306/fiction_6.htm) – they are reading less and reading shorter.

It’s also nothing new. Teaching a writing class to young people, we do a brief unit on journalism. The journalistic writing style is best defined as an inverted pyramid:




It would be easy to say that today’s text language is simply a logical growth from this style. The question remains: what does this mean for writers? For me?

What would it have meant for Tolkien? What kind of impact did it have on the Harry Potter books? How does it affect a midlist writer?

It is my belief that among other things, the “novel” will shrink. The move to “shorter” novels has already begun as young adult fiction sales have experienced a tremendous upsurge – and the people who are buying and reading YA fiction are full-on ADULTS. In September of 2012, over half of the consumers of YA fiction aren’t young adults. (http://www.bowker.com/en-US/aboutus/press_room/2012/pr_09132012.shtml) My guess is that number has grown. CURRENTLY, TODAY: "Over half of the people (55%) who buy YA books don’t follow into the YA category but are over 18 years old; 51% of YA book buyers over 18 years of age are between 30 and 44 years old, accounting for 28% of all buyers."

There’s all kinds of speculation about why adult adults read young adult novels. Young adult author and professor of English, Marie Rutkoski summarizes them neatly: “…adults like YA because young people feel things very strongly, and the representation of this makes for a potent read…YA is ‘easy,’...adults these days live in an unnaturally prolonged state of adolescence... Perhaps the best explanation given to me, though, is that readers are drawn to stories about first experiences...readers...want to behold a transformation. First experiences draw us in because they are the crucible for change.”

While I’m sure all of these factors come into play, I believe that the main reason is that adults began to read “little” stories in programmed reading books; they graduated to newspapers; then online news sources mostly supplemented by Youtubes and video clips. This condition was exacerbated by television programs in which every event is compressed into a slice of thirty minutes – which is actually 22 minutes of programming. An hour-long television show like BONES (one of my favorites), solves a grisly murder in 44 minutes.

Even when directors strive for reality in movies like Warren Beatty’s REDS (compresses two years into 3 hours and 25 minutes) and Richard Attenborough’s GHANDI (compresses seventy-nine years and the lives of nearly one billion people into 3 hours and 21 minutes) or Fox Television series 24 (24 episodes, each one 44 (“one hour”) minutes long) which attempt a realistic representation of a twenty-four hour event – they compress time into watchable bytes.

Why would ANYONE be surprised that adult adults have embraced generally short YA novels?

If what I believe is true, then Robert Jordan’s WHEEL OF TIME is the end of an era and the Harry Potter books are the last time we’re going to experience extended stories of nearly two million words.

What we once called a novella (17,500-40,000) will become the New Novel (surprise! This is how long the average YA “novel” is!); and the categories will change name and move backward until what we think of as a “long” novel will be what our forebears thought of as a longer short story.

As a writer, I need to plan several things:

1) Write shorter
2) Show dramatic transformation with a “first experience” sensibility
3) Drop big words which, while making for precise ideological communication, take too long to read and are subsequently skipped
4) Make the characters adult, but younger – even the old folks (oh, that’s right, there’s no such thing as “old adult” fiction – ‘cause even though they can read, they can’t see)
5) Don't do anything TOO new

There you go. Comments?

Resources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_iPod_models, http://ipod.about.com/od/glossary/qt/number-of-ipods-sold.htm, http://adrianofarano.com/2012/01/how-many-ipad-have-been-sold-in-the-us-so-far/, http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/mobile-phone-world-population-2014/, http://io9.com/the-real-reason-why-grown-ups-love-young-adult-fantasy-1172843218, https://wordsrated.com/young-adult-book-sales/; http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090118200609AAgNayT

Image: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_me7k3m9ysC1qdx4lmo1_500.jpg

IDEA ON TUESDAY 616

Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them. Regarding horror, I found this insight in line with WIRED FOR STORY: “ We seek out…stories which give us a place to put our fears…Stories that frighten us or unsettle us - not just horror stories, but ones that make us uncomfortable or that strike a chord somewhere deep inside - give us the means to explore the things that scare us…” – Lou Morgan (The Guardian)

H Trope: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BarredFromTheAfterlife
Current Event: “…theorize that the nuclear war destroyed the afterlife…”, “…some people...have studied and manipulated The Dark to such an extent that they've become functionally immortal…”

Functional immortality: “Research suggests that lobsters may not slow down, weaken, or lose fertility with age, and that older lobsters may be more fertile than younger lobsters. This longevity may be due to telomerase, an enzyme that repairs long repetitive sections of DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes, referred to as telomeres. Telomerase is expressed by most vertebrates during embryonic stages but is generally absent from adult stages of life. However, unlike vertebrates, lobsters express telomerase as adults through most tissue, which has been suggested to be related to their longevity. Despite internet memes, lobsters are not immortal. Lobsters grow by molting which needs a lot of energy and the larger the shell the more energy, eventually the lobster dies from exhaustion during a molt. Older lobsters are known to stop molting which means the shell will become damaged, infected, or fall apart and they die.”

Juana de Forlán shook herself hard, took a deep breath and said, “I can feel the synthetic lobster juice in me…”

Shaking his head, Koegathe Melamu, “You can’t possibly feel a hundred milliliters of a transparent liquid in your...”

“I know that!” Juana exclaimed. She shook her arms, “My head knows it, but my body says otherwise.” She took a deep breath, shuddering. “I feel like I’m getting younger by the moment.”

“It’s not an elixir of youth! If it worked the way we thought it should, the telomerase will let your cells keep dividing – more or less forever. But it’s not going to make you younger.”

She held out both of her hands, palms up, and said, “Might as well. I’m gonna live forever!”

Koegathe shook his head, saying, “Maybe – but we have no idea what the long-term effects of living forever as a lobster might be.” They both laughed, but after a few minutes, Koegathe reigned his mirth in when he noticed the pitch of his voice had been climbing. He took a deep breath then said, “Maybe that wasn’t as funny as it sounded.”

She shrugged, suddenly feeling light-headed.
"What's wrong?" Koegathe said, stepping toward her. "I think I'm going to..." It seemed like the world around her rushed into a single dot of focused, bright light. Everything else was dark around her. The point of light remained steady for some time -- she wasn't sure how long because her *-sense of time was abruptly gone. Then the light moved toward her. She might have been moving toward the light. It didn't make any difference. It might have taken time. It might have happened instantaneously, she had no idea.

Once the light grew around her, she found herself standing on solid ground of pearly white. In a throne of the same pearly substance, there sat a being. She knew that it was Death. There was certainly some kind of harvest implement laying on the ground beside the throne, though it looked more like a silver weed whacker. Death didn't wear a robe, it -- he? -- wore solid work clothes, more or less like a technician in a computer manufacturing plant, though he didn't have a mask or gloves. He did have protective goggles pushed up on his head. Black, well-trimmed, wavy hair made it look like he was wearing a cap. The name badge clipped to his collar read, "Greaper".

"Cute," Juana said. "You're the Grim Reaper?" She rolled her eyes as only a young woman who grew up in the booming first two decades of the 21st Century could.

He lifted a leg to drape it over the arm of the throne and said, "You've presented me with a problem I've never faced before, young lady."

"What?"

"You're dying -- but you are functionally immortal -- and I have no idea what to do with you."

Names: ♀ Uruguay; ♂ Botswana Image: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51niGRrH6DL.jpg

CREATING ALIEN ALIENS Part 32: AN EXERCISE: Same Environment, Different Aliens – the Koalas and Sloths…

Five decades ago, I started my college career with the intent of becoming a marine biologist. I found out I had to get a BS in biology before I could even begin work on MARINE biology; especially because there WEREN'T any marine biology programs in Minnesota.

Along the way, the science fiction stories I'd been writing since I was 13 began to grow more believable. With my BS in biology and a fascination with genetics, I started to use more science in my fiction.

After reading hard SF for the past 50 years, and writing hard SF successfully for the past 20, I've started to dig deeper into what it takes to create realistic alien life forms. In the following series, I'll be sharing some of what I've learned. I've had some of those stories published, some not...I teach a class to GT young people every summer called ALIEN WORLDS. I've learned a lot preparing for that class for the past 25 years...so...I have the opportunity to share with you what I've learned thus far. Take what you can use, leave the rest. Let me know what YOU'VE learned. Without further ado...

You know what a koala is, don’t you? It’s an Australian animal that, while it resembles a small bear, it’s not. In fact, it’s entirely a vegetarian, eating ONLY eucalyptus leaves, while true bears are omnivores.

You know what a tree sloth is, don’t you? It’s a small bear-like animal that lives in Central and northern South America. While it resembles a bear, it’s not. It is also a vegetarian, but it eats MORE than just eucalyptus leaves.


So, two similar animals, they even have similar – but not exactly the same – environments.

I’m going to give them events and creatures that will force them to adapt as Humans had to adapt what they could find in their environment, see if they end up differently or pretty much identical…

Similarities: both are slow-moving (other differences are obvious, but I'm going to play off this one...)

Differences:
Koalas: Predators: goannas, dingoes, powerful owls, wedge-tailed eagles, and pythons – mostly dangerous to young koalas; marsupial; eat primarily eucalyptus leaves; smaller, “simpler” brain; they defend themselves using their extremely large claws and lashing out; good hearing and they have good vision; NOT a community creature; with two sets of vocal cords (one for mating purposes), one for everyday use, they make grunting and whistling sounds; they walk on ground only when changing trees, and then they are slow – unless they are startled, then they can sprint up to 30 km/h…

Tree sloths: Predators: harpy eagles, ocelots, and jaguars; placental; they have large claws and lash out; poor vision and hearing; wiry muscles, they cannot walk well on the ground; interact with a large bacterial and arthropod communities; NOT a community creature; they make sounds that have been described as “Humans who haven’t learned to talk yet”; they can barely walk, but are extraordinarily good swimmers…

All right, I’ve got enough here to initially develop two societies that might come about if koalas and tree sloths faced environmental challenges that DID NOT wipe them out.

Koala Civilization

As their usual predators increased, the koalas learned to use their heavy claws to fight off the mostly flying predators. Rolling over on their backs in a burst of speed, they learned to rake with their claws as the birds dove at them. They also became “attack huggers”, when a python attacked, they rolled and clasped, counter squeezing the python until their claws touched skin; then they suddenly raked their claws in opposite directions, sectioning the reptile. The claws were also useful for harvesting branches in order to build more permanent shelters that were used to stay safe from the flyers. The society would then, when a python was discovered nearby while on their slow meanderings for food, gather to create a trap but building it as they did the shelters. A young male or female would then volunteer to act as bait. This initially worked so well at reducing the python population, that an inventive koala built a large, basket/nest higher in the trees. A young one would volunteer to give their lives (or was accused of a crime and tied as a penalty), and the birds were killed when they were trapped.

Koala civilization was cooperative, though typically moved slowly. However, some members developed longer and longer sprinting abilities and as they became a specialized caste of runners, koala societies were able to spread out. Maintaining eucalyptus trees was accidental at first as like their sloth-neighbors did, they went to ground to expel solid waste. One smart koala learned to drop a seed in the waste, then return to the spot, nurturing the growing eucalyptus tree. These clusters grew and eventually extended for hectares.

Others learned to not only cut the branches but weave them together for structures and eventually capture water from the infrequent rains.


Sloth Civilization

Though they initially couldn’t see well, they learned to use their claws with greater precision. While sloths do NOT have great vision, they began to rely on their tongues to “taste” their environment as their young learned what to eat by licking the lips of their mothers. The tongue became the primary organ of sensing, while vision faded and their sense of taste and smell grew. They became adept at tasting and arranging their environment, moving toxic plants to the edges of their dwellings for protection and their foods closer to the center of their territory.

Sloths rarely gather together, mostly during breeding season. Females began to band together, and it was these bandings that led to the growth of Female Villages. While still slow, Sloth youngsters could move fastest and became “sentinels” for protecting the Villages. When they reached sexual maturity, males were chased out to fend for themselves. This led to males forming triads of the strongest, all other males being killed.

While outright combat between the Female Villages and the wandering Triads was rare, the division of Sloth society grew more obvious. In order to protect themselves, the Triads learned to engineer compounds in the trees to keep themselves safe.

The Villages learned something similar. But the problem remained of what to do with their male young. Constantly killing them was wasteful, so they offered them up to the Triads. The Triads, recognizing that they could accomplish more, developed “apprenticeship sites”. The sites morphed as the females sent their males to these Apprentice Homes; and the Triads protected them. Some males – as well as females developed certain skills in weaving branches and doing wood work. (Because they were tree-dwellers, Sloths never really developed metal-working. If they needed something to last, they developed a way of growing plants and weaving flat slate into the pattern. With time, the “slate trees” were as effectively protected as solid rock).

Sloth Swimmers explored the world, sometimes coming into contact with the Koala runners. In time, they formed partnerships, playing off each other’s strengths.

Technology? Hmmm…food for thought. Maybe next time…

Sources: https://www.quantamagazine.org/arik-kershenbaum-on-why-alien-life-may-be-like-life-on-earth-20210318/
Koala: https://friendsofthekoala.org/wp-content/uploads/We-Restore-Habitat.png
Tree sloth: https://www.thefactsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/sloth-facts.webp

Image: https://image.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/alien-human-600w-136457129.jpg

IDEAS ON TUESDAY 615

Each Tuesday, rather than a POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAY, I'd like to both challenge you and lend a helping hand. I generate more speculative and teen story ideas than I can ever use. My family rolls its collective eyes when I say, "Hang on a second! I just have to write down this idea..." Here, I'll include the initial inspiration (quote, website, podcast, etc.) and then a thought or two that came to mind. These will simply be seeds -- plant, nurture, fertilize, chemically treat, irradiate, test or stress them as you see fit. I only ask if you let me know if anything comes of them? Regarding Fantasy, this insight was startling: “I see the fantasy genre as an ever-shifting metaphor for life in this world, an innocuous medium that allows the author to examine difficult, even controversial, subjects with impunity. Honor, religion, politics, nobility, integrity, greed—we’ve an endless list of ideals to be dissected and explored. And maybe learned from.” – Melissa McPhail.

F Trope: Fairy Tale
Current Event: http://www.moonlyf.com/2013/07/the-magic-onions-2013-fairy-garden.html

"Fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already because it is in the world already. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St George to kill the dragon." —GK Chesterton

Leyla Manghirmalani wrinkled her nose at the overpowering smell of onions and called out, “Jie? What are you doing?”

Jie Busiri leaned back from his dorm room desk, holding a chopping knife and said, “What’s it look like?”

“That you’re stinking up the whole dorm floor on purpose?”

“No, not stinking up anything. I’m calling the onion fairies,” he said it like he was a little kid.

Leyla shook her head, “Another one of your lame attempts at recreating ancient fairy magic?”

“Hey! That’s not fair! Didn’t I make it rain last week after I did that Lakota rain dance?”

She snorted, “After checking the weather report for three weeks straight and then picking a day even the weather divas all agreed had a greater than ninety percent chance of rain.” She waved her hand in front of her face and backed up, “I don’t want to weep over spilled onion juice. I’ll come back...”

“No! Wait!” Jie grabbed something from his desk and strode across the room, chopping knife in one hand.

Leyla laughed, “If I hadn’t known you since pre-school, I’d have just gone running down the hall dialing 911 and telling them a freshman U of M student had just gone crazy.”

Jie shook his head, handing her a piece of pink gum. “Chew this, it’ll keep your eyes from watering.”

“Why didn’t you just soak them in cold salty water?”

He looked at her like she was crazy and said, “They won’t be magic then, stupid.”

“Hey! Don’t call me stupid! You’re the one they’d throw in the loony bin if they asked why you were chopping onions!” She chewed and stepped into the room and her eyes didn’t tear up automatically. “Hey, it works.”

He blew a bubble and said, “Why do you think I’m doing it?”

“I thought you wanted to be struck by your onion magic?”

He sniffed in disdain and went back to his chopping board. “I’m not interested in helping myself. I’m going to place the slices of onions with a slice of mushroom on top...”

Leyla cut in, “If I get a pain hamburger from Mac’s, can I just put them on and make a Whopper?”

“Ha, ha, ha,” he said, chopping again. “Just wait and see how well our floor does on finals – then we’ll see who has the last laugh!”

They hung out the rest of the night and Leyla helped him place the mushroom and onion slices in the rooms of the people willing to go with his craziness. By the time they were done studying and onion-placing, it was past two in the morning. “I gotta get some sleep,” she said, “I have a chem final first thing.”

Jie gave her a hug, saying, “I made sure I put the biggest onion slice in your room and I piled the rest of the mushrooms on top of it.”

“Oh, thank you so much,” she dead-panned. “Thank you so, so much for your fairly wonderful generosity.”

He smirked then said, “Just you wait, Leyla Higgins, just you wait.”

She smiled at the MY FAIR LADY jab and headed for bed.

Names: ♀Iran, India, ; ♂ China, Egypt Image: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/98/71/e5/9871e52bbc09c525af21b8f6471eab15.jpg

POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS: Part II – The State of Life in the Solar System and Exoplanets

NOT using the panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, CA in August 2018 (to which I be unable to go (until I retire from education)), I would jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not today. This explanation is reserved for when I dash “off topic”, sometimes reviewing movies, sometimes reviewing books, and other times taking up the spirit of a blog an old friend of mine used to keep called THE RANTING ROOM…

Grinspoon was appointed to a new NASA post in July of 2023. Formerly (or STILL?) Senior Scientist at Planetary Science Institute is now the new Senior Scientist for Astrobiology Strategy. 

"Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution and distribution of life in the universe. As Senior Scientist for Astrobiology Strategy at NASA Grinspoon will serve as the Agency's senior leader for astrobiology, spearheading efforts from NASA Headquarters to ensure significant progress is made in the field."

After reading LONELY PLANETS: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life (2003) by David Grinspoon, his words sparked several thoughts and speculations. He does, of course, have a “doctor” in front of his name, but it appears that he doesn’t use it very often. He also has the endorsement of Neil deGrasse Tyson – the quintessential FACE of astronomy and the immediate successor to Carl Sagan.

Tyson said of Grinspoon’s book “…brings together what has never before been synthesized…he is a planetary scientist as well as dreamer, born of the space age.” Now, that was in 2003. 

As is apparent to anyone who reads my blog, I LOVE aliens! I write about aliens! I do (guardedly) believe that there is intelligent life “out there, somewhere” – HOWEVER, I don’t believe that we have any real proof yet and that it is, at this point, an intellectual and philosophical exercise. In fact, I (with all due respect) believe that astrobiology is an...imaginary science. Though I suppose genetic engineering was imaginary once, long ago...

Be that as it may, I’ve only read the first 20 or so pages of Grinspoon’s book and skimmed his website (http://funkyscience.net/), but I find myself looking forward to following this guy for some time to come!

I’m a bit over halfway through the book now (page 198) and I’ve placed an order for my own copy through a Half-Price Books near me. I’m even (*gasp*) dog-earing my Library copy for later transfer to the book when I get it.

Couple of things I noticed thus far: the book is old. Published in 2003, (TWO FREAKING DECADES AGO!!!) it was most likely written in 2002. This was substantially BEFORE the Kepler Telescope was launched into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit in 2009, and absolutely FOREVER before the Webb Space Telescope. 

Six years later, Kepler celebrated the discovery of its 1000^th confirmed exoplanet. Another three years followed Kepler sweeping more and more prizes into its discovery bin. Then “On October 30, 2018, after the spacecraft ran out of fuel, NASA announced that the telescope would be retired. The telescope was shut down the same day, bringing an end to its nine-year service. Kepler observed 530,506 stars and discovered 2,662 exoplanets over its lifetime…” (Anyone else hear a faint echo of “…its five-year mission, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no [one] has gone before!”?)

Despite the age of the book and now that I’ve read half of its 416 pages, I’m puzzled by Grinspoon’s not mentioning “hot Jupiters”. With statements like: “In the hot regions near the Sun, it snowed flakes of metal and rock. Farther out, around the present orbit of Jupiter, it was cold enough for ices to form: both the familiar snowflakes of water ice that adorn winter on Earth and more exotic snow of frozen methane and ammonia.” (page 82); and “The initial segregation of material by temperature, which made metal and rock near the Sun, and ice farther out, has been preserved.” (page 83). He obviously doesn't mention the Grand Tack model of the solar system (Proposed in 2018, it states "In planetary astronomy, the grand tack hypothesis proposes that Jupiter formed at a distance of 3.5 AU from the Sun, then migrated inward to 1.5 AU, before reversing course due to capturing Saturn in an orbital resonance, eventually halting near its current orbit at 5.2 AU.")

Why is that? He DOES mention the discovery that the star 51 Pegasi had a planetary companion. That happened in 1995 (embarrassingly, this story doesn’t start until page 209 and as I mentioned, I’ve only just today reached page 198!). After this account, Grinspoon goes on to marvel at the discovery of some hundreds of extrasolar planets (!), having only a faint idea that Kepler would soon blow that number out of the water.

My other trouble is that when discussing Venus, he makes virtually no mention of the fact that it has a retrograde rotation when compared to the rest of the planets (I don’t count Uranus among those having a retrograde rotation. That gas giant’s rotation is retrograde only because its “north” pole is actually south of its “equator” (the Solar Equator, if you will. That is, the planets and minor planets orbit the Sun orbit in the same direction on pretty much the same plane. Confused? OK, this is how I explain it to my astronomy classes. Imagine your head is the Sun. If you stick your arms out and start to turn slowly in (ignoring the direction at this time) and stuck ball bearings of increasing sizes on your arms with duct tape at increasing distances from your head, you would have a basic illustration of the Solar System as it turns in space. Imagine then, that each of the ball bearings are turning the same direction: except for Venus. It rotates in the opposite direction of everyone else – and it turns VERY, VERY slowly. When you reach Uranus, let it keep spinning in the same direction, but tip its north pole 98 degrees (90 degrees is like a “90 degree angle” or as you may remember from geometry or trigonometry, a “right angle”.) Uranus is tipped MORE than that…but it’s still rotating the same direction as it did when it was upright…but now it’s spin, relative to the other planets, is backwards (aka “retrograde”).

At any rate, Dr. Grinspoon talks about what it is that has created Venus’ hellish conditions and while he does include its location (closer to the Sun than Earth), the fact that the Sun is brighter and hotter today than it was when the Solar system formed), and a peculiar venology (it can’t be “geology” and “aphrodology” just sounds weird…) that includes a sort of cyclical disruptive plate tectonics (pages 171-173); he doesn’t mention the slow, retrograde rotation. By slow, I mean that a “day” on Venus is 243 Earth days; and the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east…eventually.

It could be that I haven’t reached those pages yet, so we’ll see.

Perhaps the biggest “kick-in-the-teeth” is that he clearly lays out what happened to alter our Solar system longer ago than 65,000,000 years: “As the planets approached their final sizes, giant also-rans, the contenders that could have been planets, came hurtling down to Earth (and Mercury, Venus, etc.) at speeds of tens of thousands of miles per hour. These final giant impactors left a trail of destruction throughout the solar system, stripping Mercury of its outer rock mantle, leaving Venus spinning backward, and knocking Uranus on its side And in an event as propitious for us as it was random, a Mars-size protoplanet smacked into the young, still-forming Earth, splashing a massive ring of vaporized rock into Earth orbit, which quickly condensed to make out singular, giant Moon.” (page 82)

If any of you ever read the first book of my proposed series HEIRS OF THE SHATTERED SPHERES: Emerald of Earth (which is serialized here https://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/ starting in January or so…), I have a slightly more fantastic explanation for the current state of the Solar system. Emerald Marcillon’s mother, Nhia Okon, explains to a group of high-ranking military brass:

“The evidence we’ve gathered so far clearly indicates that a massive object, probably a microscopic black hole, grazed Uranus and tipped it on its side….A fleet of invading interstellar warships, using black-hole-energy technology probably experienced a disastrous explosion shortly thereafter. Debris swept through the solar system, probably missing Saturn but raining down on Jupiter and setting off the Great Red Spot hurricane…The worst was yet to happen…Mars had shallow oceans that teemed with microscopic life forms. A large rock, possibly an asteroid knocked from a stable orbit and carried on the shockwave of the explosion, slammed into the planet, blowing away much of its air allowing the oceans to boil away under low pressure…Another asteroid carried on the shockwave struck off the coast of what would one day be the Yucatan Peninsula. The dinosaurs and thousands of other life forms, already environmentally and genetically stressed, were launched into extinction…This is the world of an alien, probably sauroid intelligence native to the planet we now call Venus. They were aggressive and powerful. Spreading through our solar system, we have evidence that they conquered beyond it. The invasion fleet had come to put a stop to it….But the accident that destroyed the fleet and saved the sauroids from certain invasion, next threatened them with the mindless destruction of chance…An object nearly large enough to split Venus in half hit the sauroid moon, knocking it cleanly out of Venus’ orbit, where it drifted until the sun captured it again, the molten scar on its surface glowing red hot for nearly a century. The world we call Venus was pounded by meteorites sleeting through the vacuum of space. A second monstrous object was large enough to reverse Venus’ rotation…The solar system had been reshaped and the intelligences on the new, second planet of the shattered star system were extinct. We are the heirs of those shattered spheres. We are the ones who must piece together the details. We are the ones who must find the bits of technology that we can use to go to the stars...”

I’ll leave you with this, and I’ll continue next time.

Links: PSI's David Grinspoon Appointed to New NASA Post (spacedaily.com)

Resources:
Part 1: http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-philosophy.html, http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/
Part III: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/11/possibly-irritating-essays-part-three.html

Image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUGOthVSNSUaxivRh0p8U5Ub4NEr0KxiZyPOIBI91G4gAPdcWmSQ-krJynDH2RQu93hHeS6EFbgOFZiDNaZ3M35LGLVbwklBZDB_dEB6symLvWTaYSgbFymOAqbFO4rVwd4qGcEBnzlDk/s1600/Unknown-4.jpeg