CHRISTMAS IN SPACE

The winter solstice is a time of celebration for many faiths and traditions. It has a scientific basis, of course, because humans couldn’t fail to notice that it was the shortest day of the year and the longest night. That in itself isn’t anything to be happy about (especially in the days before reliable fire-making) but at least it was the bottom of the cycle and meant that days would begin to grow longer. In our family we celebrate Christmas, but whatever holiday you celebrate there’s a good chance the focus is on time spent together with family and friends. Christmas can be hard if you’re far from home. Some of us have to travel for business, or stay abroad because of work, or face a military assignment in another country. But picture what it’s like for those who aren’t even on the planet!

Quite a few space missions have been carried out during Christmastime, especially on the International Space Station where astronauts might hang stockings over one of the hatchways arched like a fireplace, eat turkey and cranberry sauce from a plastic pouch or a can, join a Christmas sing-along with Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and his guitar, and have video chats with their loved ones. Upside-down Christmas trees are a thing aboard the ISS because in zero gravity it keeps them out of the way. Creativity helps if you’re celebrating Christmas in space—the fourth crew of the American Skylab made a Christmas tree out of empty food cans—but a little preparation helps too. The crew of Space Shuttle mission STS-103 in 1999 took Santa hats with them into space, and so have many crews since—not a big deal until you consider that every gram of weight launched into space has a cost in fuel. Obviously someone has decided that fuzzy red hats with pom poms are important to morale.

Physically, astronauts in orbit around the Earth might be only 200 – 400 kilometers from the ground, but their orbits carry them to the far side of the planet and back again. And they must feel far away from their loved ones because of the circumstances. The hazards of re-entry are a barrier that count more than actual distance, and being surrounded by a frozen vacuum while trapped inside a big tin can must seem as isolating as being on a desert island. Live video chats probably help a lot, especially at Christmas. Earlier space crews had to make do with stilted radio conversations, although the time lag from orbit isn’t too bad.

Pity the crew of Apollo 8 who spent Christmas Eve 1968 farther from home than any other humans: 377,000 kilometers away in orbit around the Moon. Talk about isolated. And cramped! Christmas on the far side of the Moon in a floating minivan is not a recipe for a wild party, though definitely historic. They were asked to broadcast a Christmas message back to Earth for the listening public and chose to share a reading from the beginning of the Book of Genesis about the creation of the universe. During that mission they also took the iconic photo of Earthrise over the Moon.

Much as it sounds like a Christmas in space is the last duty any astronaut would want to draw, two things might make it uniquely appropriate. For one, the International Space Station is a terrific example of people from various nations coming together in cooperation and camaraderie, putting aside differences and working toward a brighter future. And secondly, they have the whole universe at their feet, an incomparable view of stars, galaxies, and nebulae, but also the view that moves even the most stoic: seeing our beautiful blue planet with all its inhabitants for the single entity it is. Those two things together are perfect models for the essence of the Christmas season.

Peace on Earth. Good will toward all.

 P.S.,

Considering the bizarre realities of Christmas in space, it’s not surprising that Christmas-themed science fiction can be unusual, too, from various quasi-scientific imaginings of Santa’s flight on Christmas Eve (including at the end of time in a story by Greg van Eekhout), to trying to make contact with aliens (“All Seated On The Ground” by Connie Willis), to a classic but sad Arthur C. Clarke story called “The Star” about how a priest on a space mission discovers that the supernova that destroyed a thriving alien civilization was the Star of Bethlehem. (That one always disturbed me, which was probably Clarke’s intent.)

Just Google “Christmas Science Fiction” and you’ll find lots of suggestions. Happy Reading!

OPEN AI

I’ve written before about the need for caution when it comes to creating artificial intelligence. Strangely, a news item this week helped me clarify my thinking on the subject and even ease my concerns a little—for now, at least.

A new research company called OpenAI has just been created by heavy hitters like Elon Musk (of Tesla Motors and SpaceX fame) and his former PayPal pal investor Peter Thiel, who claim to have rounded up a billion dollars worth of funding to research artificial intelligence. If that strikes a strange chord with you, you might be remembering that Musk was one of a number of famous people (including Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates) who issued a warning this past summer about the risk of a truly successful artificial machine intelligence becoming a threat to the human race. They weren’t the first to say it by a long shot, but they are among the most famous to say it. So is the creation of OpenAI a case of Musk deciding that “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”?

Not quite. The declared purpose of OpenAI is to support fully open research into artificial intelligence that isn’t driven by financial interests, thereby making sure that AI will only benefit humankind. So Musk and friends obviously feel that, if greed and secrecy are taken out of the equation, scientists can produce AI systems that won’t suddenly run amok, make themselves exponentially smarter and smarter, and decide that we puny humans are only worth keeping around as biological batteries (if you’re a fan of the Matrix movies).

I commend them for it, mainly because I think greed and secrecy are the evils behind most of the ways our technological progress lets us down. But not because I think Skynet is lurking around the corner.

Right now research into artificial intelligence is focused on creating better and better digital decision-makers, looking to produce improved search engines, self-driving cars, and various kinds of prediction software related to financial fields—the drive isn’t to create broadly capable all-purpose thinkers like human beings. We can drive a car, do our taxes, write a poem, cook supper, and sing Raffi songs to our kids (if you have the stomach for it). There’s no incentive to create computer intelligence that can do all that—acute specialization makes much more sense, both economically and from a design point of view. So even if an artificially-created intelligence could somehow find a way to combine its own specialized abilities with other AI’s with different talents into one super general intelligence capable of ruling the world, why would it? By their nature, these programs will “want” to do one thing and do it well. Unless a military threat-assessment AI can help a Wall St. stock analysis AI to do a better job analyzing stock, there’s no reason for the two to decide to interact at all, let alone join with a whole bunch of movie-selection algorithms, consumer purchasing trackers, budget optimizers, and trash tabloid article-writing programs.

The scary part of AI research has more to do with the continual improvements in processing speed and data handling—we assume that because computers will eventually outdo the human brain in processing power, they’ll become smarter than us. And somewhere about the same time, because of that superhuman computing power, they’ll become conscious—self-aware—like us. From there (our fearful imaginations insist) they’ll decide that the human race is an impediment or an outright nuisance, best pushed to the sidelines or even exterminated.

None of that really follows.

For one thing, we still don’t understand what consciousness actually is and what makes it work (no matter what anyone says). There’s no evidence that consciousness (or lack of it) is related to brain size or power. Other creatures have much bigger brains than humans (especially whales and elephants) but the state of their consciousness is anything but certain. There’s no evidence that once a brain reaches human-level processing capability it becomes conscious. Neuroscience just doesn’t have a solid explanation for what constitutes the physical difference between a conscious brain and one that isn’t—we can infer things, but we don’t know. So it’s quite possible that the fastest computer that will ever be created might not have the “spark” of consciousness.

Secondly, if a computer intelligence ever does become aware of itself and devoted to its own individual needs, it would only act against humans if we’re an obstacle to fulfilling those needs. Digital brains are built on logic. Expending resources unnecessarily is not logical. Even we illogical humans rarely seek to deliberately wipe out inferior species—we cause enormous damage, and even extinctions, because of greed, vanity, covetousness, fashion, lack of foresight, and a host of other motives that can be lumped under the general term “stupidity”. But none of those things enters into digital thinking. We should feel secure that no computer intelligence, no matter how smart, will ever do things out of a sheer lust for power. That just isn’t rational.

For a more technical description of the case for AI, here’s an open letter signed by many dozens of AI researchers.

We can imagine a form of digital intelligence that would see all biological life as unnecessary. We do so for fun, the way we imagine werewolves and vampires and bogeymen to scare ourselves, and yes, also to warn each other to be careful when playing with fire. But the rational case for such a thing is weak. If we’re afraid of a new entity arising on Earth that could supplant us, I’d say there’s much more danger of that from our genetic tinkering.

But that’s a whole other blog post.

THE BATTLE BETWEEN SPACE FACT AND SPACE FICTION

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

We live in an era when a spacecraft can send us pictures of the surface of Pluto that are nearly as good as what we’d see out the window of a jetliner flying over our own planet. Take a look at some of the newest images processed by NASA’s New Horizons team—they’re astonishing. Mountains, gulleys, long running cliffs. As a science fiction writer I could place an astronaut on the dwarf planet, maybe climbing out of his crashed utility ship and hiking toward the nearest outpost, and I could describe real ridges and crevasses he’d have to cross on the Sputnik Planum, foothills and passes between ice mountains that he’d have to traverse. No invention necessary, just a close look at some high resolution photographs. What’s more, I would do that to add authenticity. The downside? No playing fast and loose with Pluto’s geography or geology now that we actually know what it is. If I had written such a story a few years ago I’d be second-guessing myself and wondering if I’d blown it by featuring a feature that’s not really there.

Of course, that’s been the case for stories set on Mars for decades now and the Moon before that. Still, Pluto?

Oh well, at least there are other solar systems to play with, right? Sure, except now with the Kepler Space Telescope and new sensing techniques, scientists have found nearly two thousand planets around other stars (as of this writing the count according to NASA’s Exoplanet Archive is 1,916 confirmed with another nearly 5000 candidates). We know a lot about some of these planets, like roughly how big they are, whether they’re likely gas giants or rocky worlds, how close they are to their sun (giving a good idea of their surface temperature) and sometimes more. I’ve written stories and novel manuscripts that feature an expedition to another star system or even a colony there. Until they’re published I have to keep checking to see that reality hasn’t overtaken fiction—if it suddenly turns out that there are no planets where I’ve placed mine, or even that I’ve put an Earth-type world where there’s actually a Neptune-like planet, some major rewriting would be in order (once they are published I’m stuck eating crow, at least until the next edition!) The writers of the new Star Trek series will have to check the latest stats on each star system before the Enterprise warps in and sends an away team down to the surface of a planet that doesn’t exist, because you’d better believe there are viewers who will check (and probably flame them on social media if they screw up).

As if the situation weren’t tricky enough, the James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled for launch in October 2018 and will not only be able to see small planets that Kepler and the Hubble telescope can’t, it’ll be able to study the atmospheres of planets Kepler can barely detect. That’s power. It will be amazing. It could also be responsible for a sudden rash of science fiction writers with strange patches of missing hair.

You might say, no big deal, we still enjoy stories by Arthur Conan Doyle even though we know there are no hidden plateaus in South America where dinosaurs live. True, but no science fiction writer wants their work to be relegated to that category in their lifetime, believe me.

What’s to be done? I suppose we could set our stories farther and farther away from Earth, decreasing the likelihood that new facts will outdate our old fiction, but to my mind the near impossibility of reaching somewhere like the far side of the galaxy would be a more serious breach of scientific knowledge than the odd invented planet. Perhaps we could create tales of human beings placed a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but then you’re entering the realm of fantasy rather than science fiction (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Really, though, it’s no different than having to keep up with the amazing progress being made in other branches of science—all we as writers can do is embrace the excitement of new discoveries, be inspired by them, rejoice in our progress as an ever-curious race, and do our level best to get it right. And readers can forgive us our transgressions. We hope.

Here’s to new eras of scientific discovery and great science fiction.