YOUR BRAIN ON SCIENCE FICTION

OK, that title may be a touch misleading because this isn’t a neurological essay. But I do believe that reading science fiction is unique in its benefits. Let’s start with reading in general, although lately the picture isn’t pretty.

Every year the Pew Research Centre surveys the level of readership among American citizens. In 2015 28% of Americans did not read a book, in any form, and the numbers are getting worse. Certainly we do a lot of reading online, especially social media, and maybe a lot of that is time we would otherwise have spent reading books. Of course, television has often been blamed as the enemy of book reading. When asked about it, people will complain about their trying work day and say, “I just don’t want to think for a while—I want to turn my brain off.” I’ve caught myself saying it (but then I read all day long, in some form or other).

Obviously our brains aren’t switched off when we watch TV or movies. We’re still analysing plot details, observing the characters’ behaviour, piecing clues together, absorbing setting elements of each frame, and predicting the action to come. We’re empathising with the people we like, mentally arguing with those we don’t, and whether it’s reality TV or fiction, our emotions are getting a workout. We face pop-up ads on the screen and, if we choose to watch commercials, a bombardment of information that we automatically begin to judge for its veracity and usefulness, enticements that we must balance against our own resources, and a whole range of other things that make our brains work pretty hard.

In reading a book, there is similar interaction with characters and plot, plus we also have to process written words and imagine what they describe (but don’t have to process the extraneous content included in a video picture). We  allow the interpretation of the words to trigger responses from our senses to a degree. But we don’t have to endure commercials—not even product placements, usually. We have to turn pages but we don’t have to master a remote control. We can skip or re-read any section we want, with no more effort.

Which one is really the most work?

The majority of people are readers, and since reading in school has been proven to encourage a lifelong reading habit (generally) and more people are attending college or university these days, the demise of the book is probably still a long way off.

Articles like this one cite research to claim that reading for pleasure makes us more satisfied with our lives, better able to make decisions, more connected to other people and more empathetic (by understanding that they share our experiences and feelings—take that, Facebook), with greater awareness of social issues and cultural diversity, higher self-esteem, and the list goes on.

What does this have to do with science fiction (apart from encouraging more readers overall)?

Well, reading for pleasure has been proven  to give us much greater general knowledge, and readers of science fiction are exposed to a huge range of extra information from every field of science, of course, but also philosophy, history, religion, and even art, as SF stories explore alternate timelines, alien cultures, and possible futures. I don’t think any other art form is as good at broadening our thinking and encouraging our imagination. It can both illuminate and inspire, warn us off and spur us on. Unlike most other forms of art and entertainment, the potential of SF to take us beyond the confines of our normal lives is almost limitless.

I will admit that reading SF is a little more work.

But it’s worth every bit of it.

VACATION AMONG THE STARS

Poster from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Take a once-in-a-lifetime vacation among the stars!

Or at least among the planets. And moons. And asteroids.

OK, not quite yet. But we can go a long way in our imaginations, especially with the help of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s new series of travel posters.

The travel posters are the work of JPL’s The Studio: “a design and strategy team that works with JPL scientists and engineers to visualize and depict complex science and technology topics. Their work is used in designing space missions and in sharing the work of NASA/JPL with the public.” And the posters are available for you to download or print off free-of-charge to help your imagination take you all over the solar system and beyond. Fine print at the bottom of each poster explains the known facts behind the artists’ inspiration.

On planets like Jupiter and Venus, we’re only likely to be able to establish a human presence in their upper atmospheres—Jupiter’s gravity and atmospheric density would crush us any lower than that, and Venus’s high atmosphere is its only zone with human-friendly temperatures and survivable pressure too. But what about a Jovian balloon ride or a visit to a Venusian cloud city?

Who knows what sights can be seen from dive suits or submersibles in the ocean under the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa? (Scientists and SF writers have considered Europa one of the most promising places in the solar system to find extraterrestrial life.) Or maybe an exotic boat ride on one of the liquid methane lakes of Saturn’s planet-sized moon Titan is more to your taste. From there you could skip over the rings to Enceladus and gaze at the famous geysers.

If we ever get the hang of interstellar travel you might check out the twin suns of Kepler 16-b (and pretend you’re on Tatooine with Luke Skywalker), or the red sun of Kepler-186f (like Krypton—do you think we yellow-sun-dwellers might gain super powers there?), or try skydiving on HD 40307g with its extra thick atmosphere. If you’re a true party animal and night owl (or an actual vampire who shuns the light of day) then the place for you would be PSO J318.5-22 which looks to be a rogue planet without any nearby star to give it light. Neverending nightlife!

Sure, a lot of this is speculation and all of it involves flights of fancy, but these free posters from NASA could be a great addition to the bedroom of a young budding astronaut. Or equally good for grown-ups like us who still allow our inner child to dream and dream big.

SMALL CAN BE A BIG GAME CHANGER

Image ID: 50753825Copyright Kts | Dreamstime.comhttp://www.dreamstime.com/kts_info

In the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage a team of scientists in a special submarine are shrunk down to molecular size and travel through the bloodstream of a scientist trying to save his life. I’ve always loved the movie (and the novelization by Isaac Asimov) but there’s no sign that shrink-ray technology will be developed anytime soon. So I wrote a (so-far unpublished) novel about how such a thing might be done with plausible tech—you can read a prequel short story to the novel here.

But while we haven’t developed a shrink ray and probably won’t, medical nanotechnology has been advancing in other ways. Nanotech is considered to include devices between 1 – 100 nanometres in size, with a nanometre being one billionth of a metre. That’s small! And if we can master materials at that scale, the possibilities are indeed fantastic.

Current research includes very promising experiments with silicate particles covered in gold and with iron particles encased in a polymer. The idea with both is that they can float through the bloodstream and (hopefully) be induced to concentrate at the site of a diseased body part, like maybe a cancer tumour. Then they’re heated by non-harmful laser light or other methods until the shell/coating breaks down and therapeutic drugs are released exactly where they’re needed most. Such a system has terrific potential for delivery of medicines, yet it’s still primitive compared to what’s being imagined.

How much better if the nano-devices could be steered directly to the site of the disease? Especially if other nano-bots had already traveled through the patient’s entire body and mapped it down to the smallest capillary? What if we could program nano-drones to patrol the bloodstream and spot foreign bodies like bacteria and viruses that don’t belong, perhaps even attack and destroy them with chemicals or heat? Our biological immune system already does the same thing, but we know that it sometimes needs help. Those same drones could be sent to remove plaque from the linings of our arteries and veins, preventing high blood pressure and heart disease. As we age, much of the deterioration of our brain and certain other organs can be blamed on a buildup of a substance called lipofuscin in our cells—like trash clogging the streets of a town with no more room in its landfill. Specialized lipofuscin-removing nanodevices might prevent or even roll back many of the harmful effects of aging.

It would be even better if smarter nano-bots could find damaged tissues and repair them, not just protecting us against new disease but also healing the damage left by old infections. With enough advancement in the development of both artificial intelligence and nano-manufacturing we could eventually have germ-sized robotic doctors patrolling our bodies, keeping us young and healthy.

Research is exploring all of these possibilities and more, and although there’s no way to know how soon scientists will succeed, we should start planning now. Medical nanotechnology will eventually mean huge shifts in the allocation of health care resources, but even more importantly, it will result in a much longer human lifespan and much lower death rates from disease. Imagine if most humans survive for two or three hundred years (or even longer) and are in good health and able to do productive work for nearly all of that time. Population control will be unavoidable. Our whole system of older workers leaving the workforce and making job openings for younger people will take too long. Forget about the “retirement years”—no society can afford to support unproductive members in large numbers for many decades, and anyway we’ll need to have meaningful tasks to perform throughout our extended lives, if only to avoid death by boredom.

Such an increase in health and longevity could result in the most amazing progress humanity has ever seen, or the worst crises of inequity and deprivation. So while we look forward to the good health and long life, let’s plan ahead to make sure we can all enjoy everything that promise entails.

Remember what Spock said: “Live long and prosper.”

There’s more great reading on this subject here, here, and here.

AAAAH, BUT NOT AWE

NASA New Horizons image of Pluto's moon Charon

I recently listened to a podcast interview with science fiction writer David Brin in which he proclaimed that the past year was the best year ever for space exploration.

He made a good case for the claim: perhaps the biggest space story of the year was the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of Pluto in July that offered some truly stunning photos of our one-time ninth planet. But it was far from the only story. After visiting the asteroid Vesta a few years ago, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft went into orbit in March around the other major dwarf planet in our system, Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. The European Space Agency’s Rosetta craft continued to follow the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in its path around the sun, even briefly regaining contact with its lander Philae on the surface of the comet. A Japanese probe successfully made orbit of Venus (on its second try) and an Indian Mars probe was a thorough success.

Private space companies had a couple of setbacks, but significant successes too. Blue Origin was able to safely land a rocket booster on its tail, like something out of 1950’s space movies, and then SpaceX topped that by launching eleven satellites using its Falcon 9 rocket which was then successfully landed back on the launch pad for re-use. That technology should reduce the cost of sending things into space by a huge margin, which could well kick-start a revolution in the exploitation of space.

It’s been an amazing year.

Did anyone notice?

Oh, I know there were always some trending stories on Facebook and Twitter, but did anybody except science nerds and science fiction writers actually get excited—really celebrate the milestones being achieved? I don’t think so, not to the extent that they deserved. It seems as if, in these times when almost the whole of human knowledge is available to us through the internet, we take for granted that everything worth knowing is either already known or soon will be. Through digital media we’re constantly bombarded with new discoveries (many not yet substantiated) in the fields of medicine, physics, biology and, yes, astronomy…so the extraordinary achievements of space engineers who manage to hurtle high tech robots over ten-year-long trajectories to planets nearly five billion kilometers away just become more of the same. Expected. Not quite routine, but not life-altering. Not landmark events in the fabric of our lives.

Or maybe I’m blaming the wrong thing. Maybe we’ve become so used to seeing science fiction movies and TV shows with exceptionally realistic special effects that the actual pictures of a real place like Pluto fill us with aaah but not awe. We see rugged Plutonian plains of nitrogen ice, geysers on Jupiter and Saturn’s icy moons, rocky planetoids spinning in the vastness of space, and we say, “That’s cool” and move on to an article about the next iPhone, or ads for the next model of aerial drone. I don’t really know the reason. I know that in the middle of the last century each new achievement in space made us think of gleaming cities with tube trains or monorails, passenger rockets to Mars, and fantastic floating colonies in high Earth orbits. Now they only lure our minds away for a few minutes from thoughts of climate crises, terrorist threats, and burgeoning epidemics.

When did hope and wonder give way to fear and gloom anyway, and why? Hope and wonder are a lot more fun.

The next time you see photos of a new space discovery, take a few moments to really picture the scene. Picture the incredibly talented team of dedicated people that made it happen, the vastness of space and the incredible unlikeliness of the amazing objects out there, and our being alive at this time in history to witness it. Let the wonder really take hold.

Of that feeling are bright futures made.