MARS FEVER IS HEATING UP AGAIN

A scene from The Martian from 20th Century Fox

If you follow the news at all, you’ll have heard the big news from NASA this week:

They’ve confirmed evidence that liquid water sometimes flows on Mars.

The evidence relates to certain kinds of darks streaks that have been observed down mountainous slopes in a number of locations. The streaks appear to ebb and flow according to the Martian season. The NASA scientists are convinced that the streaks are flows of liquid water just beneath the surface which occur when the temperature rises above minus 23 Celsius. Obviously that’s a lot colder than the freezing point of fresh water, but this Martian water thaws and stays liquid at that temperature because its full of various perchlorate salts (the same principle as the ice melting stuff you might sprinkle on your driveway in the winter).

Why is it important? Because liquid water is considered to be a prime requirement to support life. Mind you, this Martian water is probably too salty to support life as we know it, but never count life out—it’s constantly surprising us. So this is the best evidence yet that there has been/is now/could someday be life on the Red Planet (take your pick).

We’re eager to know if Earth is the only home of life in the universe. And there are many reasons we might want to establish a permanent presence there—if we do, we’ll want to take some of our plants with us. A planet with the means to support life just might be coaxed into supporting our kind of life.

The timing of the NASA announcement happens to coincide with the release this week of the movie The Martianstarring Matt Damon and based on the novel by Andy Weir. The story is about an astronaut accidentally left behind on a Mars mission who has to survive using only what he has on hand and a vast amount of ingenuity. The book was great—I hope the movie will be too. Once you go see it you’ll no doubt want to read about the nine real NASA technologies featured in the film.

Perhaps to capitalize on all this interest (and why shouldn’t they?) NASA has also begun a series of articles about NASA technologies that have been spun off for useful purposes here on Earth, and I’m not talking about Tang or Space Food Sticks. The developments include sensors that attach to plants and help farmers give their crops the optimal amount of water without wasting it, a radar water-detection system that was used to locate a huge reservoir in one of the world’s driest inhabited areas in northern Kenya, and an oxygen recovery system that’s used in refuge shelters for miners in the event they’re trapped underground.

A research paper from a NASA-led team published last month also got some attention by making a thorough scientific case for the use of cyanobacteria in efforts to colonize Mars. Different varieties of the bacteria could be used to pull nitrogen out of the air and into the soil where it would help plants to grow, mine desirable minerals from rocks, produce oxygen for us to breathe, create hydrogen fuels or biofuels, provide the basis for synthetic manufacturing compounds, and even feed the colonists. Terraforming Mars with bacteria might take a very long time, but it would be a whole lot easier and cheaper to transport there than the end products we’d use it to make.

To fully answer why we care about all of this, you’d have to answer why Mars has fascinated humans for thousands of years. It has, and will continue to do so.

Let’s be honest: we’re messing up Earth in a big hurry. We need somewhere else to go, for the sake of our home planet and for the sake of our descendants. Mars is relatively close and available. The Mars Express has begun to gather steam. Let’s hope it really gets rolling soon.

TO STAND ON OTHER WORLDS

Since its beginning, science fiction has taken readers to other worlds through flights of the imagination (manifested as rockets, giant hollow cannon shells, weightless spheres, wormholes through space/time, strange creatures, balloons, flying saucers, transporter beams and more means than I can remember). The challenge has always been to make readers and viewers feel like they’ve actually been there.

We know that being present on the surface of another planet would be very different from standing on Earth, but we will never know just how different until we actually do it, no matter how much scientific research we do. For a long time we only knew of our solar system’s nine planets (back before Pluto got demoted) and imagination sketched Mars as a dry planet criss-crossed with ancient canals, while Venus was a torrid swampy jungle. New information corrected those visions, and now space telescopes like Kepler have discovered planets around other suns as strange as anything we could have imagined.

Still, the key to making those planets come alive to readers of science fiction depends on tapping into how those environments will be perceived by our senses. It’s a daunting task.

Take a so-called super-Earth planet, for example—considered similar to ours in atmosphere and temperature range perhaps, but with stronger gravity. Of course, we’ll feel that extra weight (and immediately look for a quick and easy diet plan) and complain about the extra effort required by every movement. We’ll breathe harder, especially at first, and with the extra gravity will come a denser atmosphere—a higher concentration of oxygen if we’re lucky, but possibly more of the lighter gases that would have escaped from smaller planets. The content of water vapour in the air will be different, and you must have noticed how smells are amplified on hot, humid days. Smells will be much more pungent on planets with denser, wetter air, and since so much of our sense of taste depends on smell, foods will taste different too—possibly more flavourful, which is good, but subtle elements could be much more noticeable as well. If you cook like I do, there won’t be any hiding that burnt taste from the bottom of the pan. Astronauts in space crave spicier food, perhaps because their air is dry, but also because their nasal passages tend to clog a bit in zero gravity. High gravity might mean leaving the sriracha sauce behind on Earth!

Popular Science had a cool article recently about how food would taste on other worlds. Have a look.

I suspect that the diversity of smells will probably be the most pronounced reminder that we’re not on Earth anymore. Close your eyes and recall the very different odours of a pine forest, a muddy marsh, a rose garden, an ocean beach, a field of clover, a city street after a summer rain. There are countless environments on Earth that your nose would immediately identify, and each of those unique scent signatures is made up of hundreds, possibly thousands, of elements, such as the breed of grass (freshly cut or not), the composition of the soil (rich humus or salty sand), flower fragrances (in bloom or not), the temperature of pine needles or mud (in sun or shade). Imagine how utterly different the odour of another world will be where every single living thing is a species never before encountered.

How does a writer even describe that? We usually have to fall back on comparisons to familiar fragrances and proclaim that the new smell is something like them.

The sun will feel different, too. You’ve noticed how, on a hazy summer day you can practically feel the sun crisping your skin, but on a bright spring afternoon you can easily get a sunburn without realizing it at all. Other planets will have suns that are smaller or larger, closer or farther away, redder or bluer, fiercely energetic or calmer than our own sun, with huge differences in their output of  ultraviolet and other radiation. What reaches the surface of the planet will also depend on the composition of the atmosphere, the water vapour (especially clouds), any ozone layer, reflection and refraction from water droplets or dust particles or ice crystals in the air, and the day/night cycle.

Then we come to the realm of sounds. The density, temperature, and moisture content of air all affect the speed that sound travels, to a degree. But remember how hard it is to locate the direction a sound is coming from when you’re in a fog? Snowfall mutes sounds. Rainfall masks sounds. Pressure changes on your ear drum can affect the pitch of a sound you hear (I especially notice this when I’m scuba diving and haven’t equalized the pressure in my ears often enough). And all of that is just how sounds we know are affected by conditions. What about sounds that are all new to us, because they’ve been created by unique environmental factors or bizarre forms of life? Again, we have to fall back on similes (“it made a sound like…”) to give the reader a reference for understanding. Quite a challenge to express something truly alien.

The most common fallback in portraying alien words is to use visual description: a violet sky smeared with golden cloud that sometimes obscures the giant red sun and smaller white sun that glide at different speeds from horizon to horizon. Yet, as authors, we can’t afford to describe anything too far from normal human experience—readers’ minds would rebel or, at the very least, would be badly distracted by trying to imagine the picture we’re painting (like when we’re having to explain how the green-skinned villain disappears into green shadows cast by the red sun but not the black shadows cast by the white sun).

All of this goes to explain why written and filmed depictions of alien worlds probably err on the conservative side. The scene-setting can’t get in the way of the story, and it will always fall short of reality anyway—the universe is a strange and exotic place. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth taking the journey with us.

We’re a whole lot cheaper than a ride with NASA.

30% OFF MY NOVEL DEAD AIR

I've had great response with special sales of my ebooks at Kobo, so they're doing it again.

September 18 - 21, 2015 the 30% off sale at Kobo includes my mystery-thriller novel Dead Air. It's a suspenseful but sensitive story of a morning radio guy who's landed in deep trouble. You can see a whole lot more about it, including a sample and the video trailer here.

To buy the epub version of Dead Air at 30% off, here's what you need:

Promo Code: SEPT30

Sale page: https://store.kobobooks.com/p/sept30

You'll need to create a Kobo account to buy (very easy) and then use the promo code during the checkout process.

The 30% off sale includes a lot of other terrific books too, so it's a great chance to stock up on reading for the cold winter months.

Grab Dead Air, save 30% off the list price, and enjoy staying up until the middle of the night reading (sorry about that--sort of).

WE DON'T KNOW EVERYTHING YET

Photo from National Geographic Society

A new discovery published this week in eLife and National Geographic has extended the human family tree. Anthropologists have found a new species of hominid that could be a stage in human evolution on the way to modern day Homo sapiens, or might just be a kind of cousin to our family line. The species has been named Homo naledi after the bones of about fifteen individuals were found in a nearly-inaccessible cave in South Africa called Rising Star (the word naledi means star in a local dialect). The story of their discovery is well worth reading. These pre-humans were small—about five feet tall and 100 pounds or so—and with skulls less than half the size of ours (including brains the size of an orange). Exactly where H. naledi fits into our history no one knows because scientists haven’t found a reliable way to date the bones. Their bodies have some features that are very much like modern humans, and others that are quite primitive, so they could be a kind of ‘missing link’ between Australopithecus afarensis and the much more humanlike Homo erectus that lived a million years later. Or they could be a relatively recent sideline species not directly our ancestors at all.

Just when we think we’ve got things figured out, some new discovery shakes it all up again.

Another example comes from 1977 when hydrothermal vents on the seafloor—often called black smokers—were first found to support thriving communities of living organisms. Huge colonies of crabs, lobsters, mussels, tubeworms and other species exist where no sunlight has ever reached thanks to chemosynthesis (as opposed to photosynthesis in plants) using the chemical energy of sulphide compounds released from within the Earth. Until then the accepted idea of how life began on our planet involved a mix of chemicals in the so-called “primordial soup” of the early oceans somehow combining into organic molecules. But now many scientists feel that the chemosynthetic bacteria of the black smokers—and especially single-celled organisms known as archaea—are not only the most ancient form of life on Earth, but also the most abundant.

Taking a science fiction writer’s perspective on such pivotal discoveries made me think of Mars.

Why?

Because data from modern Mars rovers and other spacecraft could easily lead us to believe that we’ve got the Red Planet and its history figured out. Sure, astronomer Percival Lowell was wrong when he thought he saw artificial canals on Mars in the early 1900’s. But that doesn’t mean there was never life there, or even advanced life. The generally accepted view is that there was abundant water on Mars in its early history, but the planet has been drying out for the past 3.5 billion years. Since the wetter period coincided with the time that the very first primitive single-celled life developed on Earth (archaea), it’s thought that any life that once existed on Mars must have been very basic. Never sophisticated, never intelligent, never conscious. (Here’s a good comparison of the geological timelines on the two planets.) But if scientists are still making discoveries on Earth that shake up our understanding of our own planet’s history, how much more could remain undiscovered on Mars? We’ve literally only scratched the surface.

Maybe intelligent life took three billion years to evolve on Earth, but that doesn’t mean it has to take that long everywhere. We still have a poor understanding of what consciousness really is and how it works, let alone how it develops. We assume that sentient life didn’t develop on Mars because we know how long it took on Earth and our photographs and rovers haven’t found any evidence of artificial constructs there. Since the surface of Mars is about equivalent to the entire land mass of Earth, it’s a little early to assume anything.

Maybe a Martian civilization did arise long ago and all obvious traces have been erased by erosion. Maybe they moved out into space and we’ll eventually discover their trail as we explore that territory ourselves. Or maybe they invented digital computing way back when and uploaded themselves into massive databanks powered by tapping into the planetary core. Perhaps millions upon millions of Martians still live within computer simulations like the characters in the Matrixmovies, except with no physical bodies at all. Sure, it might be a far-fetched science fiction scenario, but if there’s one thing science should teach us, it’s never to let ourselves get complacent.

New discoveries still happen all the time.

BRING ON THE WONDER

Close Encounters of the Third Kind from Columbia Pictures

Sales figures for books show that sales of science fiction and fantasy novels have been on the decline, and especially science fiction. It’s possible that the numbers are misleading because, in fact, genre novels like SFF do well in e-book form and e-book sales aren’t always tracked well. But why any decline at all? Aren’t we living in an age when science fiction is coming true?

Maybe that’s the problem. Could it be that some of the wonder has been lost?

I’m not pointing any fingers. Scientific knowledge has made great advances since the early days of SF. The effect of all that discovery on the fiction we love is mixed. Good stories sometimes get bogged down in scientific explanation. I suspect the SF readership has become more divided than ever between those who revel in details gleaned from articles in the latest Nature or Annals of Botany or Journal of Neuroscience, and the fans who start yawning when they run into a dense paragraph of technical terminology or math. Then too, there’s no question that the more we know about the universe, the more our imagination must be constrained by the facts. We do call it science fiction, after all. Good luck selling a new story that features beautiful Martian princesses who ride flying yachts (although if you change it to a fictional place and call it fantasy, you’ll have better odds). If your characters get around in a faster-than-light spacecraft, you’ll need a good explanation for why you’re right and Einstein was wrong. I suspect it’s easier to let magic explain everything (and less of a strain on readers who don’t have a PhD in physics).

Or maybe it’s that we see so many technological marvels everywhere we turn, we’re getting hard to impress. Our cell phones may not have the range of Captain Kirk’s communicator, but they can do a lot more. Prototype test cars can drive themselves—heck, yours might park itself already. Our fridges will soon be able to keep themselves stocked as nanotechnology and computer networking transform our household products. The space industry is populated by private companies instead of just governments, and almost ready for tourists.

Our sources of entertainment are advancing all the time, too. In the 1950’s and ‘60’s Arthur C. Clarke could take us to a lunar city in Earthlight or the moons of Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey and we’d be filled with awe. Ray Bradbury could describe a tourist expedition to the distant past and we would hear the “Sound of Thunder” from dinosaur feet. But now computer graphics have shown us hundreds of movie space scenes in perfect, eye-grabbing detail. There have been four Jurassic Parkmovies and even dinosaur-era time-travel series on TV (remember Terra Nova?) Film-making has changed a lot, too, from the long, slow pan across the mind-boggling starship of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the quick cuts and frenetic action of the Battlestar Galactica and Star Trekremakes. I was totally captivated when I first explored Rama with Clarke and the Ringworld with Larry Niven. But now you can experience some pretty amazing stuff at Disney World.

Does that mean that written SF is in a slump because it’s not possible to wow people anymore? I don’t think so.

It should be more fruitful than ever to feature stories on alien planets now that we actually know they exist, and have data on some really strange ones. Space flight will be more accessible to everyone in the not-too-distant future now that private industry is involved. Computer technology is advancing in ways almost no one foresaw, along with miniaturization and robotics. Not to mention genetic engineering and its stunning potential for good and for bad. All of these fields and more should provide fodder for incredible stories with a recognizable basis in current reality. The “wow” factor must be in making the reader immerse themselves in the world of the story, experiencing what the characters do and enjoying the thrill of potent new technology, bizarre worlds, exotic social structures and more without having to go back to university first.

After all, even every day life has moments of wonder and awe. How many more await us in the extraordinary realm that lies just beyond our view?