STARLINK VS. STARGAZERS

I suppose the course of progress has never run smoothly. Just look at the myriad ways we’ve screwed up our planet and all of its living species while trying to improve the lot of our own.

One of the newest examples is SpaceX’s ambitious plans for their Starlink internet service, intended to bring affordable high-speed satellite internet to even the most remote parts of our nations. As someone who lives in a rural area, poorly served by internet providers, this seemed like a great step forward to me. It didn’t cross my mind that it would conflict with my love of gazing into the night-time sky.

So far, SpaceX has launched more than 700 of their small Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit, has permission to launch 12,000, and plans to launch a total of 30,000. That’s a lot of metallic objects whizzing overhead! They call it a “mega-constellation”, and that cutesy name probably fits better than they intended because, just like the original constellations, the Starlink satellites can be seen, thanks to the solar panels they depend on for energy.

Have you ever watched a satellite speed overhead while you’re stargazing on a clear night? It’s interesting—not really an impediment. But what if you were seeing dozens of them like beads on a string? That could get annoying. Now imagine you’re a professional astronomer taking long-exposure pictures of the night sky in hopes of discovering new space objects like asteroids or comets, or learning new information about other star systems. Annoying doesn’t cover it. Infuriating maybe. And that’s exactly what astronomers have been facing since the Starlink launches began. In fact, the disruption may not affect only optical astronomy; the creators of a new radio-telescope array in South Africa complain that the Starlink satellites will broadcast on one of the frequencies they hope to survey in the search for organic molecules elsewhere in the galaxy.

Now, I’m sure none of this was ever intended by SpaceX engineers—the satellites are brighter than expected—and the company is trying some things to remedy the problem. They’ve made the satellites much darker and less reflective (I’ve never seen one, but apparently the first few hundred are visible to the naked eye) and added visors to block the most reflective components, but scientists say these measures aren’t nearly enough. Other possible solutions are being discussed. Meantime the satellites keep going up. And at least two other companies plan to launch large numbers of similar satellites in the coming years.

I’m sure that every satellite ever launched has interfered with some astronomer’s observations, but the Starlink plans elevate the problem to a whole new scale, and it will only get worse. Why? Because now that private industries like SpaceX, Blue Origin (owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos), and others are gaining a foothold in space, Low Earth Orbit will become the new frontier of manufacturing and even tourism. As I’ve said many times, as soon as the cost of launching materials beyond the atmosphere drops below a certain threshold, any number of space-based industries will become profitable, and private companies are steadily bringing that cost down. Everything from pharmaceutical laboratories and medical treatment facilities to hotels and habitats for the aged (and very wealthy!) will be put up there. There will be orbiting factories to produce super-conductive fibreoptic cable, semi-conductors, replacement human organs, exotic alloys and metallic glasses for a huge variety of applications, and who knows what else?

The next step will be staging platforms for deeper space travel, whether to the Moon, the asteroids, Mars, or beyond, since long-range spacecraft will be assembled in orbit and begin their journeys there. Traffic like that will steadily increase, leaving trails of ionized gases across the sky.

Precision optical astronomy based on the surface of the Earth is probably doomed. The writing is already on the wall.

That doesn’t mean the end of astronomy, of course. It will be a case of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”. We already know that telescopes and other scientific instruments can view the heavens with vastly improved precision once beyond the pesky interference of the Earth’s atmosphere. For now, the choice of whether to observe from a mountaintop or high above the ocean of air comes down to cost (and maybe convenience), but before much longer, there won’t be a choice. The sky near Earth will simply be too crowded.

I hope these changes won’t entirely spoil the pleasure of lying on your back under the sky on a summer night and wondering at a billion blazing points of light. There are few experiences more glorious.

Astronomers, I feel your pain.

PREDICT THE FUTURE? FOLLOW THE MONEY

Can we predict the future by studying the past?

Some insist that history is bound to repeat itself (especially if we don’t learn from it). It also teaches us a lot about human nature, which we can use to extrapolate future behaviour. But sometimes developments come along that really shake things up and send us off on a whole new tangent.

One of my summer reads, a book called Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, is a real eye-opener. It’s a hugely ambitious history of the human race from our beginning to the present day, but not a list of dates and facts. Instead it seeks to explain why homo sapiens rose to prominence instead of other human species like Neanderthals, and how we got to where we are from our humble origins. It especially charts the most significant changes in our history, and analyses their impact, from the births of spoken and written language to the rise of modern thought, the Agricultural Revolution, Scientific Revolution, Industrial Revolution, and more.

One of Harari’s key assertions that had never occurred to me is that, before the rise of modern science in the 1500’s, most people on the planet were encouraged to believe that all significant knowledge was contained in the foundational books of the main religions and the teachings of the ancients. What wasn’t revealed in those just wasn’t important to know. The findings of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and many others changed that, especially when they led to improvements in technology. It gradually became accepted that learning about how the universe works wasn’t just worthwhile, it could make life better for humans. Similarly, most people had believed that the human condition was stagnant, or even declining, including the distribution of wealth. The size of the world’s “pie” didn’t change, so for you to get a bigger slice you had to take it from someone else. Then came the “discovery” of the American continents and many other previously unknown lands offering huge wealth in conjunction with still more technological improvements, and suddenly there appeared the concept of progress: that the world pie could actually grow and benefit everyone (except the native people of those places, of course).

Enter capitalism. After all, scientific research and exploration are expensive. Those with the capital to pay for it want to see concrete (ie. profitable) benefits. That will continue to be true in centuries to come. Which means that science will advance in areas where there’s money to be made.

We’re already seeing the space travel business pass from the hands of governments to private industry because companies like SpaceX can profit by providing space delivery services not only to NASA but also to everyone who wants to put a satellite, or anything else, into orbit. Since many chemical processes can be easier to carry out under zero gravity and with extremes of heat or cold (or are much safer accomplished far from human populations!), expect to see laboratories and chemical factories in space. The availability of abundant raw solar energy outside the atmosphere is another plus (and a potential industry of its own once it can be safely beamed to receivers on Earth). Future mining of the Moon, the asteroids, and the moons of other planets is something we’ve long assumed will happen. Entrepreneurs eager to carry out such developments are only waiting for the cost of space launches to drop below a certain level, to make the ventures profitable.

Space tourism is a fairly safe bet as a coming attraction, but also expect orbital or Moon-based health spas and retirement homes for those to whom gravity, weather, or unfiltered air have become undesirable. For those of us with insufficient incomes for an actual presence in space, there will at least be a lot of virtual experiences available, driving moon buggies, skating across planet-size ice rinks, or surfing Saturn’s rings. In fact, painstakingly accurate virtual experiences of every kind imaginable will be a growth industry for many decades to come.

The transportation industry has hit a speed bump with Covid-19 (and future pandemics) making it unwise to pack large numbers of people together, but new solutions will be found, and soon the race toward ever faster and pervasive travel will resume. Maybe it’ll be with individual pods linked like train cars travelling in vacuum tunnels. Or drones big enough to carry a human. Or maybe I’m wrong, and only goods will be transported over long distances while humans become accustomed to increasingly realistic virtual travel and social interactions.

Scientific progress isn’t only about space or speed, either. Genetic engineering has already made vast amounts of money for drug and chemical companies, and will only get bigger. Progress in medical science affects everyone, curing diseases, chronic illnesses, and hereditary health problems until life expectancy soars toward immortality. And there’s no question that drug and medical care can be very profitable (note that it will not be profitable for anyone to discover a permanent cure for anything, so don’t expect it. Profit lies in making customers pay for ongoing treatments!) And, like it or not, genetic modification will extend to humans, first for medical reasons but eventually for fashion and entertainment, because there is money to be made. Giant corporations will keep lobbying governments to relax rules against gene editing, cloning, transformative surgeries and the like, while aggressively persuading the masses that it’s what they want. From picking the characteristics of your children, to enhancing your physique with artificial muscle or mechanical accessories, to making you look (and smell) like your favourite celebrity or animal, it’s only a matter of time.

There’s another commodity side to genetic engineering: creating made-to-order creatures. Scientists have already been working to recreate extinct species like woolly mammoths, but you just know that mini-dinosaurs would be big sellers, and the new creations won’t be confined to real species. Chimeras out of legend, or pure fantasy, will be brought to life. Imagine the smile on your daughter’s face when you give her a real unicorn for her birthday!

(As for how we’ll treat the life forms we create, or any alien forms we might encounter, just remember the millions of Africans once condemned to lives of slavery, the billions of animals treated like mere raw materials by agribusinesses today, and the wild species we’re driving to extinction. Everything will depend on which is more profitable: cruelty or kindness. Humankind has a long history of turning a blind eye to the plight of others if that suffering benefits us.)

Don’t forget that profit can also include political advantage and power. The exploitation of the Americas and elsewhere led to European empires that soon surpassed the largest economies of their time, in India and China. It’s also important to remember that much of the wealth of recent centuries came from the discovery of wholly new materials like aluminum and plastics, and new technologies like electrical generation and global communication. The parade of new discoveries will continue as humankind reaches outward and more money is pumped into the science pipeline. Money will be made from things we don’t even know exist yet.

All in all, science fiction writers will be well-advised to plan out our imaginary worlds and empires based on a clearly established framework of trade goods and profit margins. Science depends on investment, which depends on capitalism, which depends on consumers who buy goods and services. (Although it’s also true that, where there’s no existing market, advertising will create one!)

In closing, I’m compelled to point out one more thing to the capitalists reading this:

Saving the planet can be a money maker too! Think of it as “preserving your capital”, “protecting your market”, or just “ensuring future growth”.

Right now, that’s the most important investment of all.

HOW MUCH WILL COVID-19 CHANGE OUR WORLD?

Articles are popping up everywhere with speculations about how Covid-19 might change our world, and you can expect a flood of fictional treatments along the same lines in the months to come. Because we all have the sense that the world has changed—it will never be quite the same even once this pandemic has finally died out. Will the change be large scale? Maybe even the collapse of our civilization?

That’s a bit extreme, but many countries will be facing record-high deficits and badly-hobbled economies, so a return to the status quo is not a sure thing. And history has shown that pandemics do have the power to trigger such big changes.

• An early pandemic is thought to have spread from Spartans to Athenians during their 5th century BC war and helped give Sparta the victory.

• When the bubonic plague appeared in the 6th century CE, now known as the Justinian Plague, it not only killed between 30 – 50 million people—nearly half of the world’s population at the time—but it ended Emperor Justinian’s attempts to revitalize the Roman Empire. Trade faltered, sources of wealth dried up, and the empire became vulnerable to both internal rebellion and external invasion. The so-called “dark ages” soon followed.

• And when Spanish explorers brought smallpox to the New World, the Aztec Empire was wiped out.

On the other hand, it could be said that some long-term good came out of such suffering at times. It’s been suggested that the horrors of the Black Death in the 1300’s (bubonic plague again) actually raised standards of living and brought about the end of the feudal system in places like Britain because the reduced population meant more work for the survivors. It may also have halted Viking incursions into North America. There have been numerous cases of disease-driven hardship triggering rebellions that changed the social order, leading to independence from colonizing powers, for example.

It’s interesting to note, too, that the fall of some ancient civilizations were hastened by climate disasters; the Minoan culture in the Mediterranean was rocked by the explosion of the Thera volcano around 1600 BC, and a number of Bronze Age cultures in that same region were laid low by a suddenly cooler climate after the 1100 BC eruption of the Hekla volcano in Iceland. Droughts and cooling weather are thought to have contributed to quite a few collapses.

And here we are, in the early stages of a climate crisis, also facing a global pandemic with the certain knowledge that it won’t be the last.

But it’s worth taking a look at what’s considered to be the most comprehensive look at the rise and fall of human civilizations, historian Arnold Toynbee’s massive A Study Of History. Having analysed 28 civilisations, Toynbee saw strong patterns, one of the most crucial being the gradual failure of the creative minority that leads and drives a society. Such leaders become complacent, resting too much on their laurels rather than continuing to reinvigorate their societies. The rest of the population—the proletariat—become increasingly dissatisfied. Social upheaval begins from within, and outside pressures increase as the central authority weakens. The change that follows can take many forms, but it is inexorable. Environmental factors like disease and climate can hasten and shape the change, but the impetus for it comes from the civilisations’ own internal vulnerabilities. Some historians believe that social inequality is a powerful contributing factor too, and that societies can collapse under the weight of their own bureaucracies.

Does that sound like what we’re seeing in a world where wealth is increasingly hoarded by the one percent?

Just a thought.

Science fiction writers insist that our job isn’t to predict the exact details of the future, but to point out the many different futures that might happen, so the world can clearly see the ones it doesn’t want. So what are some of the long-term implications of this Covid-19 crisis?

We’ve discovered that a surprising percentage of office work really can be done from home with current and emerging technology. If the trend persists, the demand for commercial real estate could plummet, easing overcrowded business centres of cities (allowing them to be re-purposed or even re-greened), and shrinking concrete production (a huge polluter and consumer of energy). It could mean momentous reductions in commuter traffic too. With the price of oil already hitting unthinkable lows, a continued loss of demand might be the final straw that breaks the Big Oil camel’s back—the beginning of the end of our society’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Compounding that impact will be a significant shrinkage in the airline industry—it might be a long time before people again feel comfortable packed into pressurized tubes with hundreds of others for hours at a time, and navigating airports among travellers from all over the world.

Covid-19 has also taught us the dangers of relying on global commerce for essentials like personal protective equipment, medicines, and even food. We’ve allowed vast amounts of production to be moved to certain countries because of cheaper labour, only to be caught with our pants down when a crisis hits. Then we’re stunned to find that the things we urgently need are in short supply. If we learn that lesson (and we should!), more products will once again be produced close to where they’re consumed. This could have a real impact on global shipping and trucking, two more of the most egregious carbon emitters.

The above trends taken together could result in the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions we desperately need to head off the worst of climate change. A surprising benefit of a horrible event.

Another big change could be in the wind: When a financial recession hits, governments often try to spend their way back out of it, but they really count on consumers regaining enough confidence to go out and buy lots of goods. That’s the medicine that cures a sick economy. Well, in the past couple of months enormous numbers of people have been thrown out of work, at least temporarily. National and regional governments have had to step in with a whole spectrum of financial supports. Some countries will be judged to have done a better job of that than others, and if, after Covid-19 passes, the economies of those countries also perform a more successful rebound, it will be powerful evidence in support of a guaranteed minimum income or universal basic income for citizens. In some places, that idea is considered unthinkably socialist. In other places, it’s already being done. But if Covid-19 shows that citizens kept from bankruptcy by government support programs can quickly regain their confidence and spend their way back to communal economic health, that will be a persuasive argument for ongoing measures to reduce financial hardship and poverty.

All in all, I certainly don’t expect our current civilization to collapse, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see significant shifts in political power around the world, especially when some countries like the U.S have been let down so badly by their leadership.

And while these are some of the biggest changes we might see, there will also be hundreds of others, especially involving more spending on preventative medical research and treatment measures. Increased reliance on social networking, the internet, and nearly every aspect of communications technology. Remote education. Food delivery. Shopping online from local retailers. Just observe the creative ways people have coped with the lockdowns, and think about how many of those solutions will catch on and stick around.

It will give you something to do while you’re stuck at home!

A Sampling of Additional Reading

https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/these-4-ancient-apocalypses-changed-the-course-of-civilization

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse

https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/study-history  Arnold Toynbee

https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/pandemics-timeline https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-pandemics-change-history

https://www.businessinsider.com/pandemics-that-changed-the-course-of-human-history-coronavirus-flu-aids-plague#coronavirus-or-covid-19-2019-present-11

And an interesting panel discussion on the subject that includes science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaLphVBg9ew&feature=share

PRIVACY SURRENDERED

At a time when everyone’s offering their forecasts of what the new decade will bring, there are so many fronts one could explore. But over the holidays I was struck by how often one subject came up in conversation: surveillance technology. Not so much the kind forced upon us, but the kind we’re willingly embracing. Siri and Alexa. Google Nest. Facebook Portal. Some of us are willing to have internet-connected devices listen and watch us 24/7 for those times when we want to give a command to turn on a light, turn up the thermostat, place a call, or play a game that reacts to our physical movements.

Used to be that a peeping Tom had to sneak up to our windows. How times have changed!

I’m not a luddite—I use my laptop and smartphone constantly—but I have been known to put masking tape over the laptop camera and I’ve turned Siri off on both my Mac and iPhone (I’d never had the “Listen” feature activated anyway). Does that mean I’m now confident that my devices aren’t listening and watching? Not really. I’m counting on being too old, boring, and frugal to be of interest!

But isn’t it cool to think that you can just talk to your house and appliances and have them do the things you want without lifting a finger? Of course it is. And almost all of that functionality could be accomplished with a purely local non-connected system. Except that wouldn’t let the tech giants gather and sell information about you, and that’s how they make a big chunk of their money. As a wise person has said, if you’re not paying for a product (or you’re paying much less than its worth) then you are the product.

Along with all of this potential surveillance at home, there’s increasing use of closed circuit cameras and facial recognition in buildings and the streets of major cities (and smaller centres the moment they can afford it), police and military drones, and ever-more-advanced optics in reconnaissance satellites, so true privacy will be as rare as [insert your own joke about virgins here].

I see no signs of this trend ending anytime soon—privacy legislation is being enacted, but can laws protect the privacy of someone who willingly gives it up? So my crystal ball says that by the end of this new decade the feeble struggle will have ended and society at large will have fully accepted that Big Data companies, governments, and faceless tech employees can see and hear everything we say and do, anywhere anytime. No big deal. Right?

What will this look like? Well, of course, the reason companies want to know so much about you is so they can sell you things, and by the end of the decade all advertising will be personalized advertising. Compliment a friend on their choice of jeans and a moment later your devices will be showing you how and where to buy them. I know people who’ve already experienced something like this, even when their phones have been locked. In ten years it will just be assumed. Store signs you pass will point out that they stock the product you were looking at on the person who just walked past you (thanks to eye movement analysis). If you still read physical magazines and linger over a particular ad, your favourite device will add that product to your wish list with a helpful link to the retailer who placed the ad. Your fridge will reorder groceries automatically based on not only your regular use but also your plans to entertain, host a kids’ sleepover, or go on a trip. Your home office will reorder supplies. So will your bathroom.

This personalized marketing will surround you in cars as well as your home, whether it’s a private car or, more likely, a shared ride or Uber-type vehicle (self-driven, though). And don’t worry about having to rummage through your purse to find a payment card. Apps will know the expression on your face when you’ve decided to buy something, and they’ll take it from there. Your closets and cupboards might remind you about articles you’ve bought and aren’t using, but you’ll be able to turn that function off, because who likes a nag anyway?

It also goes without saying that, even without posting on social media, all of your friends and acquaintances will know what you buy because that just might convince them to buy it too. You’ll be OK with that, because it’ll all be part of the social status game that no one will be able to avoid without going off to live in a cabin in the woods.

Buying things won’t be everything there is to life…not quite. People will still do other things in their homes and cars, and companies will find ways to monetize that. The most obvious way is pornography. Yes, I mean starring you. In ten years companies will no longer even pretend that they’re not recording and storing the things you do that might interest other people, and sex will be at the top of the list. Mind you, they won’t want you trying to sue for a cut of their profits, so they’ll probably use “deep fake” technology (already very advanced) to alter the appearance of you, your partner, and your home. Not only will such “amateur porn” be in demand, and accepted, but people will enjoy the game of watching it to see if they can spot themselves or others they know. After all, they’ll be able to set a preference for local subjects, maybe even neighbourhoods, just like the Find Friends apps you use now.

Bedrooms aren’t the only places people get intimate, and by 2030 most cars on the road will be self-driven. Freed of the burden of having to drive themselves, people will do other stuff. Though the fad will probably ease off after a few years, there will be an exuberant competition to see who can do the most outrageous things in their cars. Sex too? Of course!

Won’t all of this surveillance make us safer? How will criminals get away with anything when somebody’s always watching?

I think it’s pretty obvious that, as technology advances, so will the means to spoof or defeat it by those with enough money, like organized crime organizations. Or there’s always the low-tech method: bribing underpaid employees with access to all these feeds. One thing’s for sure, every item of value you own, your home and business addresses, your schedule, and your real-time location will be available at any time. Not to mention every other form of personal information imaginable. What more could a criminal ask for?

Is this just far-out paranoid conspiracy theory stuff? I only wish. Since much of it is already feasible, I’m probably being too conservative.

We’ll know in ten years. Maybe sooner.

WHERE WILL THE PAST DECADE'S DISCOVERIES LEAD US?

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

At the end of each year we humans love to take a look backward and review the changes that the passing year has brought. That urge is even stronger when we come to the end of a decade. The folks at National Geographic have provided a great overview of twenty of the key scientific advances of the 2010-2019 decade here, and there were some exciting ones: the discovery of thousands of planets around other stars, fantastic close-up views of Pluto, Vesta, and the Kuiper Belt object named Arrokoth, dramatic progress in rocket launching technology, the gene-splicing potential of Crispr-Cas9, and new insights into our ancient human ancestors. There was also one looming shadow over everything: the spectre of human-caused climate change.

For a refresher on the science, read the article and maybe follow the links or do research on your own to learn even more. But a science fiction writer can’t help but look at a list like this and wonder which of these developments will have the greatest impact on the human race in the years, decades, and centuries to come.

New knowledge about the ancient past of our species and others is fascinating, but barring major surprises (like finding out we’re descended from aliens) it probably won’t have much effect on how we move forward as a race. I believe that what we’re learning about the universe beyond our planet will have a bigger impact: not only knowing that there are potentially hundreds of habitable planets we might someday reach, but also that organic molecules—the building blocks of life—are present even on other planets and moons of our own solar system. Add to that the data we’re gathering about other celestial objects from asteroids, to comets, to dwarf planets, and recently two visitors from outside our solar system (the object Oumuamua and Comet Borisov), plus the rapid improvements in the technology we use to get beyond the atmosphere and function in outer space. These advancements all mean that the prospect of breaking out of our cradle Earth to other worlds is coming closer and closer to reality. I know that SF writers have often been overly optimistic on this subject, but I really do think it will happen within the lifetime of today’s children, and it will change everything.

Humans will live on other planets, maybe someday in other solar systems. There’s a good chance we’ll find life on those planets. We might even meet other thinking beings with advanced civilizations. All of those things are huge.

Sooner than space colonization, though, we’re going to witness the ramifications of gene-splicing technologies like Crispr-Cas9 along with rapidly advancing reproductive science. These things won’t just affect where we live, they will impact what we are as human beings. We could eliminate devastating genetic conditions, horrible diseases, and maybe even repair severe physical injuries. But we might also choose to “improve” the human body via cloning, tailored genes, and nanites (like microscopic repair robots in the human bloodstream), and those alterations could just as easily become driven by fashion as by medical necessity. Sure we’ll choose to bequeath our children with good genetic health. Will we also arrange for them to be born with cat’s eyes? Webbed fingers and toes? Genius IQs? We will link computer interfaces directly to our brains, and order replacement organs every few decades. The very definition of what it means to be human could change in ways we can’t even foresee now. I’d wager we’ll face some very challenging decisions on this front before the coming decade is through. The processes are already here, we’ve just been really lax about deciding how far they should go.

Yet even space travel and extreme human modification are a little ways off. The most imminent development we face as a race is global climate change.

We’ve had warnings about it since the 1970’s. Week after week we learn more. And even the frightening forecasts of climate scientists consistently turn out to be too conservative. Polar ice is melting, ocean levels are rising, coral is bleaching, extreme storms are increasing in frequency and strength. Our coastal communities will flood and dry regions will become full-blown deserts, forcing millions of refugees to flee across borders, sparking international conflicts. Food production will be threatened as weather ruins crops and fisheries are depleted.

That’s not being alarmist, that’s just science.

Bottom line? Climate change is, hands down, the most critical science story of the decade we’ve just lived through, and will have the biggest impact in the decade to come. If we can survive the mess we’ve made of our home planet, things could look very bright. We know that we can further reduce the suffering caused by disease and injury and continue to extend the human lifespan. We can find other places for us to live and ways to adapt ourselves to living there, which will relieve the population pressure that has caused so many of the current problems here on Earth.

2010-2019 has been a ground-breaking decade.

The decade to come just might be “make or break” for the human race.

WILL YOUR STUFF STAND THE TEST OF TIME?

Global disaster. World destruction. The Apocalypse.

They’re the stock and trade of science fiction writers. After all, when you’re imagining the future, Earth could become the hub of a galactic empire, the gleaming homeworld of a cosmos-spanning race. Or the coin could land tails and our few thousands of years of human history will in some way be derailed, leaving behind wilderness or wasteland. Post-apocalyptic worlds have been imagined hundreds of times, and as I sit at my laptop mulling over one such concept that might form the setting of a novel, I find myself wondering, “If civilization were to hit a brick wall tomorrow, and Earth returned to a world of wild forests and primitive villages, what remnants of our technology would still be useful?” Say a tribal chieftain and his flunkies somehow dug up a long-buried Walmart or Canadian Tire store, how much of what they found would be of any use to them?

It’s easy to guess what would be useless junk. Anything that requires electricity to function.

Without the infrastructure to produce 110V 60Hz electricity, microwaves, toasters and toaster ovens, vacuum cleaners, blenders, hot plates, George Foreman grills, Instant Pots, electric shavers, hair dryers, clothes dryers, washing machines…a long list of items would become no more than shiny doorstops. Freezers and air conditioners would tease with their unfulfilled potential. Televisions, radios, projectors, iPads, cell phones, game consoles and more would not only be inoperable without power, they’d have no content to deliver anyway. Certainly, all of the ‘smart’ fridges, heaters, lights, music players, and security systems would merely mock us with their brilliant—and completely useless—sophistication. Computers and smartphones—the technological darlings we can’t live without (we think)—would be inert lumps of exotic materials.

Gasoline would be worthless after a few decades, so forget about cars (sorry Mad Max). It’s conceivable that some contrivances powered by rechargeable batteries might last a long while, if kept topped up by solar chargers, but that doesn’t make your Tesla a sure bet because synthetic hoses, gaskets, and a host of other parts break down with time. Heck, most roads would crumble thanks to thermal expansion and contraction, and pervasive weeds growing through every available crack.

Another category that would no longer be useful is items that are too specialized for a particular purpose or related product. Forget refills for this or that air-freshening system. Motor oil might still come in handy for lubricating wooden axles or something, but fuel injector cleaner not so much. Not gas stabilizer, not carburetor cleaner, not rad stop leak, brake fluid, or a whole department’s worth of Canadian Tire stock. All those car parts and fancy accessories to pimp out your wheels would be only curiosities. The same with all those star-athlete-endorsed pieces of esoteric equipment for all of the strange sports and recreational activities that somebody has talked us into trying but will leave future generations stumped. Our twelve-and-eighteen-speed bikes might amaze until they hit the first big rock.

Fishing rods would attract some initial interest, though they’re not as practical as nets or spears. Firearms would be treasured marvels, but only while ammunition supplies lasted, if it had never gotten wet. And not assault weapons—or not for long, They might put a warlord at the top of the hill, but wouldn’t keep them there because of their voracious appetite for ammunition. Boring old rifles and shotguns would be the real treasures to a hunter-gatherer society. While camping gear made of advanced materials would be a coveted prize, the use of accessories like Coleman-type stoves would have to be so rigorously rationed as to be nearly useless. Water filters and firestarters, yes. Hiking GPS, nope.

It occurs to me that our far-future descendants won’t much appreciate the fancy-looking and amazingly lightweight plastic gardening tools and wheelbarrows we consider so convenient (and cheap!) once they break after the first hard use. Think of how many of our consumer goods fall into that category, quickly obsolete or broken, meant to be discarded and replaced.

Lightweight, durable, and even dirt-repelling clothing and footwear would be a hit (although eye-stabbing colours might not serve well for hunters stalking their supper). Current styles might well run afoul of the moral standards of tightly-knit rural communities, though. I suspect the swimwear section might well end up in a big bonfire.

You know what I think would be among the most desirable department-store items to a future subsistence society? A good sharp knife and a non-stick frying pan. Seriously, what preparer of food can’t use a knife whose blade keeps its sharp edge and a cooking dish that doesn’t require big muscles and handfuls of beach sand to get the bear grease out? And let’s not forget books! Real, hardbound paper books chocked full of valuable information or entertainment.

Try this out for fun: look around your home and calculate which of the things you see would still be valued in a world stripped of our technological infrastructure. (Voilà! You’re a science fiction writer!) In a way, it’s an exercise to decide which of our clever creations has lasting value because, when you think about it, the more technically advanced an object is, the more likely it is to be rendered obsolete by new advancements too, not just a societal breakdown. I’d love to know what you come up with.

And that’s not even talking about our cultural products—music, art, movies, literature, and games. Those might leave people scratching their heads only a generation or two from now, no apocalypse required.

HOPE IN SCIENCE

It’s impossible to ignore all of the discouraging stories in the news these days, but there are also stories of great hope, including in the various fields of science. Here are a few recent ones:

In October 2017 a couple of teenage Cystic Fibrosis patients in the UK who’d been given double lung transplants developed bacterial infections that didn’t respond to any of the drugs available.

A University of Pittsburgh micro­biologist named Graham Hatfull had been gathering the world’s largest collection of bacteriophages—viruses that prey solely on bacteria—more than 15,000 of them, so a colleague at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital called him up. Although Hatfull’s team couldn’t save one of the patients, they were able to identify four phages that would attack the other patient’s infection once they were “activated” via some genetic modification. That patient is slowly recovering. The drawback is that this method is ultra-specific—it involves tailoring a cure for each individual patient. As bacteria and viruses become more drug-resistant, this development offers hope, though it needs to be greatly improved in efficiency to be practical on any larger scale. And there are an estimated nonillion phages that haven’t yet been discovered and catalogued (a US nonillion is a 1 followed by 30 zeroes). Other top-level medical science facilities are now exploring this territory.

With climate change threatening to make some dry areas of the planet even drier, and with industry and agriculture’s voracious appetite for water, the need to reclaim industrial waste water and even produce drinkable water from the oceans will become increasingly urgent. Now some researchers from Columbia University have developed a process called Temperature Swing Solvent Extraction which involves mixing amine solvents with heavily-salted water at room temperature. The solvent-and-water is lighter than the salts and can be extracted, and then higher temperatures separate the solvent from the pure water. Experiments show that up to 98.4% of the salt can be removed, which is comparable to reverse osmosis. But this new process requires relatively little energy and produces very high water recoverability compared to current desalination methods. If it can be scaled up, it could be a real lifesaver in the world of the future.

Researchers who call themselves agroecologists are promoting more natural ways of growing crops. This approach not only nourishes soil, which makes it more productive and its crops more nutritious, but by helping the microorganisms in the soil to flourish, it also helps to absorb carbon dioxide and water vapour from the air at a much greater rate than scientists thought possible. CO2 and water vapour are two of the most prevalent greenhouse gases driving global climate change. Plants soak up carbon and share it with the microbes in soil, which helps the soil retain water. Scientists warn that, although reducing the amount of CO2 we produce is absolutely necessary, it’s no longer enough to ward off serious climate effects. So we need to find ways to remove excess carbon and water from the atmosphere, and the methods of agroecology could be very effective in doing this. Plus it reduces dependence on chemical fertilizers and pesticides while making food more nutritious. Sounds like a big win in my book.

In a similar story, though on a much smaller scale, astronauts on the International Space Station will be testing an algae bioreactor—a contraption that will use the CO2 the crew exhales to grow algae which can be used as food. On one level, this could be a great help for long space voyages and colonies on other planets, but it has often been proposed that large algae farms here on Earth, perhaps on the oceans, could be an abundant source of food while, again, removing a lot of unwanted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

All of these stories offer much-needed hope in trying times. Science fiction has been coming up with ideas similar to these, and many more, for decades, as authors imagine the exploration and exploitation of outer space. Science is constantly proving that radical ideas can be turned into reality, and I would argue that science fiction provides the fertile imaginative “soil” from which harvests of new scientific developments spring.

Examples like these also reinforce my belief that hopeful and optimistic SF is still not only defensible, but perfectly sensible. We can’t ignore the potential hazards of human technology and growth, but we also have a duty to promote science as a force for good.

It truly is, when we make it so.

A NEW GOLDEN AGE OF SPACE EXPLORATION?

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Unless you keep up with current space news, it may be easy to feel that the Golden Age of space exploration is behind us. After all, the last time humans set foot on the Moon was the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Heady stuff, but really, there hasn’t been much going on since, has there?

Actually, the amount of space exploration that’s been happening in recent decades is astonishing. It’s just that almost none of it has involved human crews. The one major exception is the International Space Station, which recently marked twenty years in space (its first components and first occupants were launched in November 1998). It’s been continuously manned since November 2000, and has hosted 227 crew and visitors, some as many as five times. It’s operated by a partnership of five space agencies (representing 17 countries) and has been visited by citizens of seventeen different nations. I’m not sure which is its most important contribution: the amount of data the ISS accrues every single day about how humans can live and work in space, or what it teaches us about the international cooperation needed to make us a spacefaring species. Nonetheless, because the ISS has been around for twenty years, and we can even watch it go by overhead, the general public probably underestimates its importance and may simply have lost interest.

So what else has been going on?

2004 may seem like a long time ago, but do you remember the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko? We watched its Philae lander drop toward the barbell-shaped object with fascination, and held our breath as it bounced and ended up at a angle that prevented it from collecting solar energy, which spelled its doom. But we did witness comet off-gassing and a snowstorm. Then in January 2005 NASA’s Deep Impact mission visited two other comets, 9P/Tempel and 103P/Hartley.

The Dawn spacecraft was deactivated just one month ago after visiting the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres (in the asteroid belt), producing amazing photos and detailed maps of these remnants of the solar system’s formation (or possibly fragments of a planet that broke up). It was also an important test of ion thrusters for propulsion instead of standard rocket motors.

NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto was a huge success in 2015 when it sent back photo after brilliant photo of the icy world and its moon Charon, after already providing fantastic imagery and data from Jupiter and the Jovian moons in 2007 en route. But New Horizons isn’t done yet. It’s speeding its way toward a Kuiper Belt object designated as 2014 MU69 (nicknamed Ultima Thule, meaning beyond the farthest horizon) and will reach it this coming New Years Day (Jan. 1, 2019). Such objects are also thought to be leftover material from the solar system’s formation, probably slush and ice balls—after all, that’s the region most comets come from.

Although it met its end a little over a year ago (Sept. 15, 2017), deliberately plunged into Saturn’s atmosphere, can we forget the awesomely majestic pictures provided by the Cassini-Huygens probe? It spent thirteen years exploring Saturn, its moons and its rings, and the results were astounding.

Fast forward to this year: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe was launched in August 2018 and will fly through the outer atmosphere of the sun, known as its corona, seven times closer to our star than any spacecraft before it. But the big attention this week was the successful arrival of the InSight lander on Mars, which is tasked to penetrate into the Martian soil and probe the crust of the planet for the first time. Because of the high risk of failure, the landing got ‘live’ coverage and lots of media attention when it succeeded.

Yet we shouldn’t forget two more asteroid missions: the Japanese Hayabusa2 spacecraft, which has dropped a small lander onto an asteroid named Ryugu and is still in orbit there, and the NASA OSIRIS-REx probe that will arrive this Monday Dec. 3, 2018 at the asteroid Bennu. (Both of these asteroids are called “diamond-shaped” but they remind me of those old pressed charcoal briquettes for the barbecue!)

In the meantime, there have been lots of missions within the Earth-Moon system, and the U.S. is working with private companies and other countries toward a return by humans to the Moon by 2023. Closer to home, there have been important advances in rocketry, especially from Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is capable of launching satellites, and then landing safely back on Earth, enabling it to be re-used (most recently on Nov. 15th). This is a vital advancement toward making commercial uses of space affordable. And, of course, the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, the most powerful launch vehicle in current use, ostentatiously launched a Tesla Roadster into space Feb. 6, 2018 on its first test flight, carrying a mannequin nicknamed Starman in a space suit at the wheel.

Why is all of this important? What are the benefits?

If you’re reading a blog like this, you probably don’t need a sales pitch. But the more we learn about how the cosmos, our world, and our species came about, the more we can predict where we will all go from here. That’s just good survival protocol. Exploratory missions to comets and asteroids in particular are potential goldmines of information about the early solar system, but also may answer the question of how life arose on Earth, since scientists speculate that life here may have come from “out there”. They could also bring us closer to understanding how to protect ourselves from extraterrestrial microorganisms drifting down onto our planet from the far reaches of space. Not to mention identifying potential collision risks to our home from all of the celestial objects whizzing through the solar system.

The more we can learn about how humans can survive, thrive, and work in space environments, the closer we come to making use of them in ways that will benefit all of us. Conditions of zero-gravity, readily-available vacuum, and deep cold can facilitate the production of medicines and other exotic substances very difficult to make on Earth. Mining of asteroids, the processing of ores, and other manufacturing processes performed in space could bring much needed relief to the stressed environment of Earth. If we can find other places to live, or adapt other places to make them liveable for humans, we can help ease the population pressure on our home planet and, maybe more importantly, ensure that humanity would no longer be at risk of extinction from a planet-wide disaster.

Even the process of all this exploration is beneficial. Partly because of the cost in resources, material, monetary, and mental, large-scale endeavours like these demand international cooperation at government and corporate levels, but also one-on-one between members of space crews. Our best hope of survival as a species is to curb our tendency toward conflict and live together peaceably.

Exploration? Oh yes! And I haven’t even mentioned astronomical endeavours like the Hubble and Kepler telescopes that have peered into the farthest depths of the universe and confirmed the existence of planets around other stars.

A Golden Age? Actually, that’s selling it short. This kind of exploration is priceless.

HOW FAR WILL ADVERTISING GO?

When science fiction stories describe a world of the future, it’s the story that grabs and holds our interest but it’s the little details that bring that world to life. How do the characters entertain themselves when they’re not battling to save the world? What do they buy and how do they buy it? What information systems tell them how to navigate their lives?

A few of those questions got me thinking about advertising.

Once upon a time, word-of-mouth was everything if you provided a product or service to a special clientele or the general public. At some point, some cynical soul decided it might be a good idea to put a sign that said “Blacksmith” above his door, just in case the smell of the forge, clang of iron, and giant anvils standing everywhere weren’t enough to clue people in. And then, if there were two smith’s in the same town, a family name on the sign would distinguish it from the competition, and maybe something like “official smith of His Lordship, the Duke” wouldn’t be amiss either.

Advertising really took off once the printing press became widespread. Even Will Shakespeare couldn’t count on an audience magically appearing—they had to be told where and when a performance would take place, along with a little sales pitch to draw them in. Before long, it wasn’t enough to just tell people that you provided a service, and why yours was better than others—you could actually create a market for your deliverables by persuading people they needed what you were offering, even if they didn’t…um, I mean, if they’d never realized it before. Snake oil salesman of all stripes have taken that to heart ever since, and advertising has become as slippery as politicians (who took to it with a vengeance, naturally).

Flyers and newspaper ads weren’t enough—they could be ignored—so some genius came up with the idea of interrupting content on radio and then television with commercials. It became a pact between advertiser and audience: free entertainment in return for paying attention to the ads. Not a bad deal, really. And it worked so well that before long we were subjected to ads attached to content we were already paying for (movie theatres, I’m looking at you). By then, billboards had been blocking scenery for decades, buses and other vehicles had become moving billboards, and even gullible people blithely allowed themselves to become mobile signage by wearing brand names on their clothing, somehow believing it gave them membership in the cool crowd.

The advertising bargain had broken down by then, and we never noticed. We no longer had to implicitly agree to be subjected to it—we had no choice.

Whoever gave advertisers the right to fill our every view, every moment of sound, everything we experience with their messages? It’s like the frog-in-a-pot story: heat the water slowly enough and it will never realize its danger until it’s cooked.

Defenders of advertising will tell you it’s a public service: informing people about products and services they might want. I don’t know about you, but if there’s something I actually need to buy, I can look up where and how to buy it in about thirty seconds with an online search. I don’t need, or want, somebody interrupting my life to tell me what they want me to want. My wife and I only watch streaming and pre-recorded content at home—no commercials. We mostly listen to public radio—no commercials. And we’ve opted to receive no flyers in the mail. Do I sometimes miss flipping through them? Sure. But my impulse purchases have gone way down.

What does all this have to do with the future? Well, as technology becomes ever more pervasive and invasive, so does advertising. Do you think it will be cool to walk past a billboard and have it address you by name and show an ad for stuff you really like? In fact, it’s already happening whenever you surf the internet or use social media, and personalized ads show up. Think about how much some company has to know about you to do that. Just add facial recognition and gait recognition capability to the billboards, and you’ve got a sales pitch just for you…that everyone walking nearby can also see. Watch out for the lamppost! Oops, too late. And forget about just enjoying the ambience of a neighbourhood street, because the next billboard will call out to you just as insistently, and the next, and the next. If regulators don’t prevent them, the billboards will send urgent messages to your phone telling you about the big shoe sale a block ahead. Might be kind of cool, you think? Until you get twenty such messages in a ten-minute walk to your favourite coffee shop.

Forget about movie stickers on bananas; what about when each section of orange, slice of melon, cross-section of cheese is imprinted with slogans? When your toaster etches your slice of bread with “30% Off Sale Today at…!” When your shampoo contains fluorescent glitter micro-particles that coalesce into product placements for everyone to read. So far, you’re allowed to turn your TV to a channel that doesn’t play commercials, but what about when your TV forces you to watch ad messages first whenever you turn it on?

I’ve written a novel about internet-capable brain augments. One of my speculations is that unscrupulous advertisers will figure out how to use them to directly stimulate the vision and auditory centres of the brain. Suddenly you see a giant bottle of [insert your favourite cola brand here] floating in front of your eyes and hear their latest jingle in your ears. I’ll leave you to imagine the results if it happens while you’re riding a bike, crossing a street, or about to descend some stairs.

Far-fetched, you think? Absolutely not, I promise you. We’ve already allowed ourselves to be subjected to advertising in virtually every aspect of our lives, in increasingly intrusive ways. If a method arises to directly access the minds of consumers, it will be used. Unless we act to prevent it. And I’m not talking about writing to your local politician (although it wouldn’t hurt)—it’s your money that talks. If you want to send a message to advertisers that it’s all too much, stop buying the products and services of the companies that use advertising methods you don’t like and tell them why. Shut off all the personalized advertising functions of your social media. Cancel all your rewards programs accounts. Boost privacy settings on all of your electronic devices.

I’m expecting too much, right? You like a lot of that personalized advertising, not to mention rewards points. And buying things gives you a buzz.

Yeah, I know. Which is why intrusive advertising has come this far, and will go every bit as far as we allow it to.

Do you feel the water getting hot yet?

NANOBOTS TO THE RESCUE

Image courtesy of ASU Biodesign Institute

The invention of the microscope might not have started humankind’s interest in the study of very small things, but it certainly provided a major boost. Within the past century we’ve seen advancements like the electron scanning microscope that enables scientists to not only see atomic-sized objects but also manipulate them, and chemical technologies like CRISPR/Cas9 used to edit living genes. Nanoscience is making significant progress in medical fields, including  the prospect of some day having robotic devices too small to see programmed to circulate through our bloodstream and keep us healthy.

Maybe that idea was inspired by the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage which featured a team of scientists in a submarine shrunk down to microscopic size, racing through a bloodstream to dissolve a potentially fatal blood clot and save a man’s life. Loving that idea (but reluctant to write about shrink rays) I wrote a (so-far-unpublished) novel and published a prequel story to it called “Shakedown” that featured a nano-scale submersible piloted remotely through the bloodstream using virtual reality. You can read “Shakedown” here. While both stories are science fiction, the reality is coming closer than ever.

New work performed by Arizona State University along with China’s National Center for Nanoscience and Technology is an astonishing step forward.

Cancer tumours are like other living tissue in that they need circulation of blood to survive. They have their own blood vessels, just like our skin and organs. So what if you could cut off that blood supply to a tumour without harming healthy cells around it?

Great idea—the problem is how to do it. We know that an enzyme called thrombin is used by the body to seal wounds and keep our blood from leaking out. Thrombin binds a substance called fibrin with platelets to produce clotting at the wound. A good thing. Mind you, blood clots in the wrong places can be deadly to tissues, causing embolisms and possibly strokes. A bad thing. Unless you could find a way to cause blood clots only in the blood vessels of cancer tumours.

That’s what the Arizona  and Chinese scientists have done, and in a brilliant way.

They had to solve two problems: how to deliver thrombin through the bloodstream to the site of the tumour, and how to keep it from accidentally affecting blood vessels of healthy tissue. The delivery system they developed uses DNA—yes, the stuff in our genes that carries the information that makes our bodies the way they are. Turns out DNA can be folded in lots of ways. So these scientists have performed DNA origami, making little DNA tubes with thrombin molecules inside them. Kind of like a tube of tennis balls. Then, to make sure this special package gets delivered only to the right address, they attached a chemical called a DNA aptamer that’s attracted to a protein only found on the surface of the tumour cells, not on healthy cells.

Apparently, the system has worked well in tumours in mice, producing substantial blockages and the consequent deaths of the tumour cells.

You’ll know by now that lots of work remains to be done before the technique can be used on humans, but there’s no reason to believe it won’t happen. And that’s just one example of the progress being made. Maybe, you’ll quibble, a folded tube of DNA isn’t exactly a robot, and a chemical bonding agent can’t truly be called “programming”. Well, I think that will come too, someday. In the meantime, every new nano-medical success is something worth celebrating.