Hell No We Won’t Go (To Mars)
While perusing my Google Reader I found an article over at Futurismic that linked to an article at Universe Today, the likes of which surprised me because I had missed it. I was immediately stunned. Why? Because the article talks about a former NASA engineer’s idea that our first Mars mission should be a one-way trip. Basically, we should plan it without thinking about getting the astronaut back: When we eliminate the need to launch off Mars, we remove the mission’s most daunting obstacle,” said McLane. And because of a small crew size, the spacecraft could be smaller and the need for consumables and supplies would be decreased, making the mission cheaper and less complicated. Excuse me? Okay, look, we took risks in the original space race, but the difference is that the chances of things going right were much higher than the chances of things going wrong. The astronauts who went to the Moon new they might die, but they also knew that their mission was planned for a return trip. This is nothing like those old days of taking risks and ‘getting it done’. In fact, it’s completely different. Who the hell in their right mind would volunteer to kill themselves just to go to Mars? Not even that, if the only option is a suicide mission, wouldn’t it be better just to wait until we can do a round-trip flight? It’s not going to take much longer before we have a viable, affordable solution, or someone ponies up the dough for the really expensive version.And Mr. McLane doesn’t call this a suicide mission: There would be tremendous risk, yes,” said McLane, “but I don’t think that’s guaranteed any more than you would say climbing a mountain alone is a suicide mission. People do dangerous things all the time, and this would be something really unique, to go to Mars. I don’t think there would be any shortage of people willing to volunteer for the mission […] That will be the easiest part of this whole program. No, Mr. McLane, I’m afraid your idea is nothing even remotely like a climb up a mountain alone. In fact, that’s an idiotic analogy. Lots of people come back from their climbs up mountains. Hell, there have been several who’ve gone up Everest and returned to tell the tale. See, there’s a fundamental difference between climbing a dangerous mountain and going on a one-way trip to Mars. In the former you know that there’s a good chance you’ll be coming back alive, you might even be pretty sure about it. In the later you know that there’s no chance you’ll come back, in fact you know that once your mission is over…you’re dead…muerte…And who would be willing to go on this mission? Not me. This has less to do with fear than to do with the fact that even if I was a little older than I am now I would still end up losing out on decades of life. The people who would be fit for this are in the same boat. You really think that someone in good shape and with good mental faculty would jump up and down and yell “yes, pick me, I’ll die, please, oh, pick me!”? I don’t think so.Bad idea Mr. McLane.
Should SF Be More Optimistic?
You should all be reading Futurismic by the way. It’s a wonderful blog with a lot of great articles, such as the one I’m about to talk about.Mr. Raven recently wrote about SF being so dismal and depressing and whether or not it should try to be a little more optimistic. While I agree on principle, I think there is something being forgotten about SF. SF isn’t a genre about bubbly happiness and it never was. Yes, there will always be that level of “awe” where new and bizarre things take place that inspire and strike people with interest. But, SF has evolved from the Golden Age and it is primarily dealing with real world issues that we may one day face. The genre is like an early warning system in that way. It deals with realistic issues of what may be based on the technological advances of today (for the most part at least).There is also the idea of conflict, which is central to any work of fiction being successful. Conflict, unless in a comedy, isn’t generally happy, since that would sort of defy the nature of conflict, barring of course the possibility that the main character loathes being happy.Is optimistic SF possible? Of course it is, and when you look at SF it is very optimistic. Granted, it deals with issues that are negative (technology going wrong, people blowing themselves up, war, etc.), but generally the end result is optimistic, right? Maybe a way to look at SF is trying to see the overall picture: that despite the negative future that might exist, mankind will prevail.But then we’re left with that negative future, which is the root of the issue, I suppose. Well, I think it would be incredibly difficult to move away from that inherently negative future. Part of what creates conflict in SF is that technology does go wrong, people do freak out and blow each other up, interstellar wars will exist so long as us humans exist. These sorts of things are just being realistic. There are always going to be negative things about society, no matter the time. If we look at today we can see all the negative bits in the world. Genocide still exists; governments are going wacky and doing crazy things; economies are struggling, etc. Perhaps being optimistic is to look at the bright side of things, and perhaps what makes SF so pessimistic is that the bright side is often only survival. To be optimistic might mean that SF needs to approach the future from a point where everything has gone right and only one person has done something stupid. I think of a murder mystery. Society is advanced, technology worked out, and wars mostly don’t exist (at least any more than they do today), and all you have is a cool detective hunting down a bad evil man who murdered and old lady. So, there’s optimisism, since the invention of technology has changed the world, in theory, for the better (maybe cops can do things better, crime is relatively gone in such a massive world that would be somewhat overpopulated, etc.). But there’s still the negative aspect to it, of course. I don’t know.So, what I ask is this: is there a way to write optimistic SF without it still being somewhat pessimistic? Is having the main character or the good guys win enough to make it optimistic? What exactly is optimistic in SF? Is it just having technology do nothing but good, and if so, how do you create conflict from that?
Waste, Recycling, and Space: Where Are Our Recycling Robots?
What is the world’s ugliest building? Esquire says it’s the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea. The interesting thing about the hotel is that it’s only ugly because it’s not finished, but if you finished it and get it a nice color and flashy lights it could very well be the coolest hotel outside of Las Vegas. It looks like a spaceship, or a spired pyramid of sorts. If you spruced it up it would look awesome. Heck, you could even go as far as to make it a space-themed hotel! So what’s the problem with the hotel other than it’s ugly? Well, apparently it’s unfinished and it will never be finished. That means that North Korea has poured millions of dollars into this thing only to quit a good portion of the way through for whatever reason. Rumors are it’s because there is some structural problems, but I don’t buy that. My guess is that they simply ran out of money, or stopped funding it, or some such. It seems too idiotic to build something so massive only to get most of the way through and realize “oh, well that’s not going to work”. The North Koreans are not that stupid. Sure, they might think it smart to shoot test missiles over Japanese waters, but since we’re dealing with a nation that has some idea what its doing, even if some of those things are rather stupid, we can assume they’re just not dumb enough to screw up on a project of this size. Additionally, if they never finish this hotel we can expect it will just rot. Not only did they waste money, but they also wasted a lot of material that could be used for other things. It’d be interesting to figure out how many houses or apartment complexes could be build from the materials of this hotel. This is a regular thing for us humans. We’re incredibly wasteful. All of us are, even in those little countries that think they aren’t. You’re lying to yourselves; you’re wasteful, just not as much. But this isn’t a contest. One pound of waste or ten pounds of waste is still waste we have to deal with. The U.S. might be one of the most wasteful countries in the world, but to point the blame at us is somewhat hypocritical. Until you’ve achieved zero-waste, you can’t really complain. We don’t just waste materials on the planet either; we waste in space. Sure, space is this vast, seemingly never-ending place, but space debris can be dangerous not only to us (the folks on the ground) but to the astronauts (those folks up in space). What do we do about it? How should I know? I don’t work for NASA. There are probably options, but are they worth spending the money on? A lot of the debris in space falls down of its own accord, burns up in the atmosphere, and is never seen again. Some of it stays up there for quite a while. Some of the oldest debris is from the 50s. One thing we really have to start paying attention to on this planet is our waste output, not just in space but everywhere. We could probably manage to ship a lot of our junk into space and shoot it off at the sun where it would burn up entirely–wouldn’t it be great to do this with nuclear waste? The problem is that any waste we send up to space is a potential disaster in the making. Space travel, as we are all painfully aware, is not 100% reliable. If anything it’s only about 90% reliable, which might be good, but isn’t what we really need for something as dangerous as moving waste. If one of those 10% times happens there will be massive problems for thousands, maybe even millions of people, especially if we’re sending anything more harmful than some typical garbage stuff from your average household. One screw up could ruin the lives of a lot of people. Probably our best bet for shooting waste into space is not doing it at all, or building a space elevator–there is a company actually doing that by the way, or at least planning it, since a space elevator is much more reliable than a space ship at this point. What about recycling? Well, unfortunately there is only so much we can do at this point for recycling. Currently most of us aren’t recycling everything. When I say “most of us” I mean everyone on the planet and by “everything” I mean anything and everything from banana peels to Styrofoam. One of the easiest ways to combat the ever-growing piles of waste is to develop the means to recycle everything. The problem with that is getting people to recycle properly. In all honesty I am not the type who likes separating the recycling into cans and cardboard, etc. Other people are like this too. The problem is that those out there who want recycling to be done by everyone are also trying to force laws on the rest of us that say we have to do it. The legal route is the wrong route because often times it punishes good people on top of the bad people. Some cities require you to pay a recycling tax and put your recycling in the little green bin. Some cities have fees and legal action if you don’t do what they want. Rather than thinking about this from a humanistic perspective, law makers are taking a rather dictatorial approach: “You will recycle or else”. The greatest way to fix the recycling system is to create a machine that automatically does it all. Create a machine that takes garbage, digs out all the materials and puts them in their own sections, breaks it all down so it can be used again, and repeats itself. This would be a lot easier than we might think. With the Japanese doing things with robots that were unheard of twenty years ago and
SF/F Links: February Roundup Part Two
(My apologies to anyone who was trying to get to the post via the “Read More”. It wasn’t working for some reason. Now it should be. Thanks for your patience.) Alright, time for part two of this month’s link roundup (click the read more): La Gringa over at The Swivet is officially a literary agent. Read the announcing post here. Remember that air car I talked about a while back? Well it’s probably being released this year or early next year! It’s a compressed air car that can go 125 miles at 68 MPH. Guess how much it costs. $2 USD per fill-up. That’s better than your gas engine by a long shot. 10 SF movies every SF fan should watch. Including the SF staple food group Blade Runner. Space junk. Want to know what our immediate space looks like in terms of what’s left behind up there? Now you can know. It’s really crowded. The maps are rather cool too. Reaction Engines Limited is another company trying to help push space flight into the commercial scene. Of course by the time this stuff happens it will only be for rich folks and chimps, so, yeah. How common are Earth-like solar systems? Well they might be more common than we once though since we’ve found one that is similar to our own. The digital tattoo display. Basically a Bluetooth device you shove under your skin that displays imagery (like a touch screen) that you can poke at and make do things. Well, it’s more complicated than that, but you get the idea. Futurismic also has an article on it here. Dark Party Review doesn’t like Blade Runner and here’s why. They also have a list of notable gunslingers, thieves, etc. from the old west. Awesome list! Nancy Kress found the following YouTube video which is rather bizarre. People just froze in the middle of Grand Central (New York)!! The Stargate is real. Okay, no it’s not, but CERN really looks like the Stargate This is what the world looks like at night. Big Belly Solar. A trash disposable that uses solar energy to reduce waste. Really interesting. How does it work? I haven’t the foggiest. Neuromancer concept art! Really cool! The solar flare. Dangerous, destructive, and beautiful. The power of the sun in nobodies hands. Futurismic: Gravitational Lensing is pretty, and really useful. We can find golden pieces of candy with it (yes, that part was a joke because the lensing makes it look like there is a little ball of golden, glowing candy in the middle). Haagen Dazs wants to help with the honey bee problem (you know, that they’re dying out due to things like Colony Collapse Disorder). How are they going to help? Make a bee-themed honey ice cream and give the profits to bee research. The first video of an electron! This is so cool! Nokia is making a flexible phone that can be worn as a bracelet. Tis cool. Needless to say, nanotechnology is involved. The next big thing in energy might be these energy islands that use ocean waves to produce power. The list of alternatives to nuclear and fossil fuels gets bigger. io9: Georgia Tech students are building a fossil fuel car that has no emissions. Good luck with that. Post-apocalyptic concept art: More post-apocalyptic are here. Disney’s House of the Future is getting an upgrade. See Mickey Mouse as a cybernetic killing machine. Well, not really, but that would be cool. Nuclear power plants that are almost waste free. I’m in, let’s do it. While we’re at it let’s build a plant that runs on old banana peels, since I’m sure there is an overabundance of those anyway. Well, we might not need to go to another star system to find another Earth. Apparently scientists believe there are loads of Earth-ish bodies out in the Oort Cloud just waiting to be pushed into a new, warm orbit and defrosted. Sort of like a mini-pizza, only more valuable and without the freezer burn. Apparently New York had something called a Pneumatic Subway that pulled a little car back and forth via air pressure. Really cool and totally retro. Self-healing rubber. Self-explanatory. Journey to the Center of the Earth, a remake for the twelfth and a half time with Brendan Fraser, looks like crap. Slapstick idiocy. See the trailer here. How many internal organs can you live without? Well, quite a few it seems. Technology has come a long, long, long way. 5 Ways to Hack the Surface of the Earth. Granted, stupid ways, but interesting nonetheless. It’s not meant to be taken as serious things to do, but more like a way of looking at what we can do. Akira, one of the greatest anime films ever made, is being turned into a live action flick! I’m stoked! A-ki-ra! This disease map gives an idea where we can expect the next epidemic to hit. Somewhat scary, but the Chinese should be a bit more worried than us. I mentioned it before, but we’ll be able to manipulate a single protein in your brain to turn you autistic, like an on/off switch. Scary, but strangely intriguing. Remember that satellite us Americans were planning to shoot down just to show that we could? Well, watch it happen for real! We did it! Kaboom! Eat that China! This chart is fascinating. It shows that when the economy is doing well, then there are more dystopian novels, but when it’s doing bad, there are less! Really cool! Patrick Stewart is to be in a new show called The Eleventh Hour. I’ll watch it because it’s Patrick Stewart and he is possibly the coolest actor ever. He makes fun of himself in American Dad! A LOT! Massive radio telescope project in Chile due for completion in 2012. Yay for space exploration and discovery! Proof that the Internet won’t bring us together. Pakistan, in all their ever so free glory, have banned YouTube. Yup, because that’s progress. The
Controlling the Weather: Stupidity in a Pretty Box
(Edit: Helps if I spell “controlling” correctly)A relatively recent article over at io9 presented the reality that we are already fiddling with the weather, which seems to me to be somewhat of a stupid thing to do. That’s right, we’re actually messing around with the natural order of the Earth. Now, setting aside that we’ve already pretty much messed with how things work on this planet as it is, there is a serious issue with screwing around with something as strong and destructive as the weather.The story has it that Chinese meteorologists can actually ‘seed’ the clouds, or make them drop their payload of lovely, beautiful, useful rain at another location, rather on where they might drop them, wherever that may be. The reason for the article is that China wants the meteorologists to step it up a notch and fiddle with heavier rains to make sure the Olympics are rain free.I see lots of issues with this not because I think it’s somewhat environmentally immoral to play around with things that occur naturally, but because this has to be a big step towards that little realm we call stupid.I don’t know if fiddling with the weather the way these meteorologists are will have any adverse effects on the environment, but is that a risk worth taking? What I don’t understand is why they don’t just fling a giant tarp over the top of the dome, or build something over the top to keep the rain out. This seems like a risk not worth taking. Let’s propose some what-ifs in this case. What if we fiddle and nothing happens?Then we fiddle some more until something does happen and someone paying attention throws a fit. Humans are impulsive and we’re always pushing the boundaries without paying attention to the long-term effects. This is especially so in political policy, but science too. I don’t think anyone paid enough attention to the atomic bomb before two were dropped on Japan (perhaps if more people realized how bad radiation is they’d think twice). Often times, when we look at such events in science, this means that new policies are put into place that hinder the ability to do things in a non-damaging way. Take cloning technology. Well, they jumped ahead and made themselves a sheep, and some other things, and people had a fit and said “oh it’s immoral” and “it’s playing God”, and completely ignored all the medical benefits that can be learned from cloning. We might develop ways to create new, perfect organs personalized to your DNA, which could rid all those pesky problems of bodies rejecting new organs. But we don’t have that. Instead we have a society afraid of cloning technology.In this case, we fiddle, something goes really wrong, and nobody is allowed to fiddle with much of anything anymore. Yes, I can see that happening. If you screw up the weather permanently, by some stroke of misfortune, who the heck is going to let you fiddle with anything life-changing again? What if we fiddle and something goes wrong, but it’s not so bad?So if we fiddle and something minor goes wrong, say we change a simple weather pattern and it messes up some crops or something, then we will see a reversal of science that will put ridiculous and detrimental restrictions in place. Such restrictions will be narrow-minded, as they always are, that manage to stifle scientific advancement. Scientists are forced to waste time working around these restrictions to find different ways that are much more difficult and expensive to do the same things they were doing before. In this case, however, we’d see a complete shutting down of the science, rather than allowing scientists to learn from it so they can reverse any negative effects or even find ways to do good things with said technology. What if we fiddle and something goes very very wrong?This is the worst case scenario, actually. Everything goes wrong, the weather gets messed up, and we’re screwed, or at least things have to change so drastically for us that a lot of people end up screwed. The likelihood of this happening, of course, is very slim, but that’s not the point. If it does happen, we’re screwed. There’ll be three outcomes of this: Religious zealots take over and drive us straight into a time of oppression–of science, removal of freedoms like speech, thought, etc. among other problems. This is probably your worst case scenario, though, because here everything really goes wrong. We see civil liberties go out the window, human rights trampled on, war, death, disease, and hatred clouding everything.Yes, this is a legit claim against religious authority in a post-disaster world. As much as religious folks would like to think that things wouldn’t go so far downhill, they will, as has happened in the past repeatedly. Religions want to keep a hold on things and when it comes to survival they will take drastic steps to ensure control. Science takes over and does two things: We end up in a huge recession where death, disease, war, etc. all take over nad people start dying and fighting desperately for survival. We end up figuring out either the miracle cure OR we somehow figure out how to survive in the changed world. Religious zealots and science fight for survival, bringing us into a battle that may or may not be violent, but will have adverse effects on society economically and environmentally. If the world is already suffering from extreme environmental downfall, then so too will it suffer from the doings of a political or militaristic war between the two factions. To put it simply, this is utterly stupid. Why would we even consider messing with the weather in this fashion? Granted, nothing may go wrong, but what if it does? Think a little more outside the box and be certain that nothing is going to happen before going off and messing with things as powerful as the weather.
Studying Science Fiction Politics: Perhaps
I’m considering doing an independent study course next quarter. My reasoning is this: I already have to take one course that is required that I really don’t care about and since the number of modern literature courses offered (seeing how I’m a modern lit major) are rather crappy, I don’t want to have to take three courses that I hate. So I’ve resolved to considering independent study as an option to do something interesting. I don’t want to discuss race because, quite frankly, I’m not that interested in any subject of race within science fiction beyond tropes of racism and the data I’m collecting for the project I’m working on for this blog (which serves no academic purpose other than to educate myself and anyone else interested on what minority categories look like in the spectrum of science fiction and fantasy). My interest, I think, is in politics. Now, when I say politics I don’t mean in the same sense of the types of politics we encounter in the United States. I’m more interested in the representation of government within science fiction societies, and in particular, dystopian societies. What I’m considering is doing a study of the nature of government within several works of science fiction and perhaps arguing that government acts as a negative force and in some ways is like a corporate entity that uses desperate measures of control to maintain dominance. To put it more simply, I want to argue in a short set of works that government acts like an agent of slavery, using policy and the rule of law to enslave, imprison, and otherwise take complete control over a populace, often under the guise of fear. The most obvious way of taking such a subject on is to include 1984 by George Orwell into the equation, which is a consideration. I’m also considering We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and perhaps several other novels from the newer period of the last 30 years of science fiction. I’m not sure what works I’ll choose. I could certainly use Neuromancer by William Gibson or Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, or a myriad of other novels. Needless to say this is still in the works. I’ve just begun to think about it. I think the argument itself is rather interesting, though perhaps somewhat simplistic, which begs the question, what do I do to make it more complex and interesting? We can all think of governmental forces as enslavers, because we have learned or seen the use of government in that manner. So what is it about this interesting subject that makes things complex? Is it that people allow it to exist and don’t take measures to change things? 1984 would say so, since the main character witnesses several times the nature of ‘doublethink’ and even stops himself to ponder it. But he never does anything, he only considers it, except when it’s far too late. It could possibly be assumed that people before him did the same, and the people before those people, for how else could something so wicked that is used as a method of otherwise illegal control gain so much momentum? The same might be said of the people in We where the rules have changed so drastically in the domed, closed-off city that even sex is done by appointment and without preference. Certainly the benefit of having easy selection of the partners you want has benefits, unless you’re the type that wants nothing to do with someone. Such a world leaves no room for choice and nobody truly complains until the end when it is discovered that there’s nothing really wrong with the rest of the world (sort of like The Island with Ewan McGregor). You can imagine, though, being forced into sex by appointment and being required to perform sufficiently, or be docked points or whatever it might be that a government could use to control your enjoyment. And what would you do if you found you liked a particular person and someone else screwed up your plan of only enjoying their company? These are things that are perhaps created by a negligent public, since such policies either came out of nowhere and nobody did anything, or not enough was done and whatever revolution might have occurred simply failed. These are the thoughts in my head on this subject. I don’t know if it will become anything or if I can even find a sponsoring professor to take me on, but I do intend to try and see if I can make it work. It sounds like fun. On to the subject of what books to read: Do you have any recommendations? Anything really, so long as it’s SF. I’m curious to see what you folks think!