OCTOPUSES AREN'T ALIEN AFTER ALL?

Image from the H.P. Lovecraft Wiki

A number of science-related stories caught my eye this week: a competition to design Elon Musk’s Hyperloop, claims that octopus DNA is alien, and a planned clinical trial to revive people who are brain dead. How to choose? So read on about each of these.

First, the Hyperloop: You may remember back in 2013 when billionaire Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla cars fame announced his idea for an enclosed, near-vacuum, high-speed rail transportation system that would run across the continent between the largest U.S. cities in hours instead of days. Tech lovers jumped on the idea, so much so that Musk had to publish disclaimers denying any connection to the hyperloop companies that sprang up, and a year ago he announced a competition for universities and other organizations to design the ultimate hyperloop transport pod. He even had a test track built at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The response has been terrific, and so are the designs—you can take a look at them at The Verge. The plan is have the test pods compete sometime this August but no date has been confirmed.

The economic benefits of such a high-speed transportation system could be considerable, but I’m more excited about the ecological benefits of getting that many cars and buses off the highways and commuter jets out of the air. The classic science fiction stories I loved to read as a kid (like The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke) often had planet-wide transport systems, maybe running right through a planet, and while the scenery at such high speeds (or underground) might not be much of an attraction, it sounds a lot more environmentally friendly than sub-orbital rockets shooting all over the globe. That’s a win in my book.

You may have seen recent Facebook posts of articles claiming something like “Scientists Say Octopuses Are Alien!” The drift of the story is that researchers had found that “octopuses have a genome that yields an unprecedented level of complexity, composed of 33,000 protein-coding genes” which is beyond the number found in a human being. Other quotes proclaimed that they are utterly unlike any other creatures on Earth. In other words, the flamboyant octopus must be alien!

Except the original article in the journal Nature didn’t make that claim at all. The point was that octopus DNA can rearrange itself in ways that previously had only been seen in vertebrates, not invertebrates—notable, sure, but hardly alien. And the article was published almost a year ago—why did so many “news” outlets jump on it now? Snopes.com explains the whole charade more extensively. The takeaway is: don’t believe everything you read, especially online. I have to wonder whether this flap speaks to a childhood obsession with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu among web journalists.

So what about bringing the dead back to life? No, it’s not yet another zombie movie or a re-imagining of Frankenstein. A new clinical trial in India will explore the possibilities of using stem cells to repair brain damage in patients who are officially brain-dead because of accidental injuries (only remaining alive because of life-support machinery). The research, if it goes ahead, will involve the injection of stem cells and peptides, plus transcranial laser stimulation with infrared lasers. Stem cells are the body’s embryonic-type cells capable of becoming any of the specialized cells our bodies use for a huge variety of functions. Stem cells have been used in treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases. Might they be able to replace damaged brain cells and eventually enable a clinically dead person’s brain to “reboot” itself? That’s a simplified explanation, but the question of whether or not the clinical trial will go ahead is a big IF now, not only because of the question of medical ethics, but also because of concerns that the lead researcher may not be qualified to conduct that type of study.

It will be interesting to see what happens if the trial goes ahead, but if the process works, what then? The implications for healing brain injury patients are staggering, but it’s unlikely that such research would stop there. Why not revitalize aging brains? Return the next aging Einstein to his youthful mental prime? Or, yes, perhaps even bring the recently dead back to life, as long as decay hasn’t proceeded too far. It might even be a way of preserving the brains of special people beyond the life of their physical bodies.

OK, now I can’t help picturing Richard Nixon’s brain in a jar on the TV show Futurama, and that means it’s time to stop writing. But there’s always lots of juicy stuff to read in the science columns. Just be sure to keep your inner skeptic fully consulted.

WHOSE DATA IS IT ANYWAY?

You can’t use a computer or other networked device these days without hearing about “the cloud”. Cloud file storage means that your computer, phone, or tablet uploads files to some company’s computer servers via the internet. The advantages include: a) saving storage space on our own device’s hard drive or flash memory, b) you can access your files from other internet-connected devices you own without having to make copies, c) other people can access your files with your permission (like photos you want to share), and d) you can backup your files and not worry about them being lost if your computer implodes. Sounds like a good deal, right? Cloud services usually offer free storage up to a certain limit, and then let you buy more space if you need it (because who ever deletes files anyway?—well, actually some cloud services do, but we’ll get to that).

More and more software companies are moving away from selling software to you in favour of having you subscribe to their service (like Adobe’s iconic Photoshop), with all of your work-in-progress automatically stored “in the cloud”, of course.

There have been problems. Business servers can be damaged or hacked or shut down if the company goes out of business. Internet services can have outages. But it’s some more insidious features that have kept me away from cloud storage.

If you’ve ever had an Apple iCloud account and wanted to cancel it, change to a new one, or just sign out, you’ll have seen a warning that documents stored in your iCloud account will be deleted from your local computer.

What?? Why? Whose files are they anyway?

Something similar can happen if you subscribe to the music streaming service, Apple Music. In fact, people who weren’t careful have apparently lost thousands of tunes they purchased, created, or got elsewhere, because of the strange way Apple does these things. In the case of iCloud, I’ve read that you can’t actually delete an account—your files all remain on Apple’s servers in case you ever want to sign back in. And Apple isn’t unique—a number of services had to backpedal because their terms of agreement seemed to suggest they would own the data they stored. So the biggest players now expressly state that they do not claim ownership…except they still act like they do.

Again, whose files are they? You thought they were yours, but once you’ve uploaded them to the cloud, a company can delete them from your own computer and then hang onto them for as long as they like.

No thanks. Extra hard-drives aren’t that expensive.

So where will all this lead? Well, it will take some determined lobbying to stop this trend, and I don’t see anything like that happening. People blindly accept the situation because of the convenience it offers, just like they willingly give companies access to huge amounts of private personal information for “reward points” or other paltry incentives. I don’t understand that either. But since hardly anyone objects, we have to assume it will only get worse, and soon all of the electronic documents, photos, music, and other forms of creativity and entertainment you produce or consume will be under the control of others.

Don’t expect it to stop there.

Eventually our phones and tablets will be replaced by devices that directly interface with our brains. Our minds will have internet connectivity, with the ability to access all of that information and entertainment by the power of thought. Now we upload our photos to the cloud. Maybe by then we’ll depend on it to store our actual memories. And when we do, who will have control over them? I think you know the answer. We’re willing to hand over custody of personal documents and pictures for the sake of a few gigabytes of free storage, so it’s not realistic to expect we’ll balk at such things when we’re offered the ability to practically relive that Bruce Springsteen farewell concert we loved so much, note by note, anytime we feel like it.

Just as long as we don’t opt out of the storage company’s service, or do anything else to cross them, and as long as they don’t go out of business or succumb to a malware attack. Then it’s ‘bye bye memories’.

The two Total Recall movies were based on a Philip K. Dick story called “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”, but that was about implanting fictional memories for fun. What about when a company makes you subscribe to their service to be able to access your own memories? Or when you’re able to learn specialized job skills using direct information downloads to your brain, but the training company can take those skills back if you stop paying for them? Or if you’re a creative type and you want to keep working on that epic fantasy novel you’re writing but the cloud server is offline, or there’s been a glitch that erased a couple of chapters, or the service wants half the royalties if the novel ever sells…or…or…? Are you getting the picture?

Whose data is it anyway? Unless you’re keeping it totally under your own control, that’s just not so easy to answer anymore.

This blog post doesn’t even touch on the other risks of cloud computing, like cyberattacks and weak security among users. If you want to read more, here are some starters from InfoWorld, Business News, and Information Week.

CAN WE PROGRAM ROBOTS TO MAKE ETHICAL DECISIONS?

Self-driving cars are being tested by Google, Tesla, and other companies around the world. So far their safety record is good, but then they’re programmed to be much more conservative than the average human driver. Such cars are among the first of many robots that could potentially populate our everyday life, and as they do, many of them will be required to make what we’d consider ethical choices—deciding right from wrong, and choosing the path that will provide the most benefit with the least potential for harm. Autonomous cars come with some unavoidable risk—after all, they’re a couple of tons of metal and plastic traveling at serious speed. But the thought of military forces testing robot drones is a lot more frightening. A drone with devastating firepower given the task of deciding which humans to kill? What could possibly go wrong?

Most discussions of robot ethics begin with science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

It should be remembered that Asimov created the three laws to provide fodder for a series of stories and novels about scenarios in which the three laws failed. First and foremost, he was looking to tell interesting stories. As good as the laws are for fictional purposes, the reality will be vastly more complicated.

The core value of the three laws is to prevent harm to human beings above all. But how do we define harm? Is it harmful to lie to a human being to spare his or her feelings (one of Asimov’s own scenarios)? And there’s the question of quantifying harm. Harm to whom and how many? Some recent publications have pointed out that self-driving cars may have to be programmed to kill, in the sense of taking actions that will result in the loss of someone’s life in order to save others. Picture a situation in which the car is unavoidably faced with the sudden appearance of a bus full of children in front of it and cannot brake in time. If it veers to the left it will hit an oncoming family in a van, or it could choose to steer right, into a wall, and kill the car’s own occupants. Other factors might enter in: there’s a chance the van driver would veer away in time, or maybe the bus has advanced passenger-protection devices. Granted, humans would struggle with such choices, too, and different people would choose differently. But the only reason to hand over such control to autonomous robot brains is in the expectation that they’ll do a better job than humans do.

One of the articles I’ve linked to below uses the example of a robot charged with the care of a senior citizen. Grandpa has to take medications for his health but he refuses. Is it better to let him skip the occasional dose or to force him to take his meds? To expect a robot to make such a decision means asking it to predict all possible outcomes of the various actions and rank the benefits vs. the harm of each. Computers act based on chains of logic: if this, then that. And the reason they can take effective actions at all is because they can process unthinkably long chains of such links with great speed, BUT those links have to be programmed into them in the first place (or, in very advanced models, developed by processes like the search algorithms used by Google and Amazon that simulate self-learning).

A human caregiver would (almost unconsciously) analyze the current state of Grandpa’s health and whether the medicine is critical; whether the medication is cumulative and requires complete consistency; whether Grandpa will back down from a forceful approach or stubbornly resist; if he has a quick temper and tends to get violent; if his bones are fragile or he tends to bruise dangerously with rough handling; if giving in now will provoke greater compliance from him later, and so on. Is it possible to program a robot processor with all of the necessary elements of every possible scenario it will face? Likely not—humans spend a lifetime learning such things from the example of others and our own experience, and still have to make judgments on all-new situations based on past precedents that a computer would probably never recognize as being relevant. And we disagree endlessly amongst ourselves about such choices!

So what’s the answer? Certainly for the near term we should significantly limit the decisions we expect such a technology to make. Some of the self-driving cars in Europe have a very basic response when faced with a troublesome scenario: they put on the brakes. The fallback is human intervention. And that may have to be the case for the majority of robot applications, with the proviso that each different scenario (and its resolution) be added to an ever-growing database to inform future robotic decision-making. Yes, the process might be very slow, especially in the beginning, and we’re not a patient species.

But getting it right will be a matter of life and death.

There are some interesting articles on the subject here, here, and here, and lots of other reading available with any Google search (as Google’s computer algorithms decide what you’re really asking!)

A VIRTUAL VACATION?

The May holiday weekends in Canada and the United States serve as unofficial kickoffs to summer. We camp in the outdoors, open up our summer vacation properties, or just kick back with cool beverages in the backyard, all to celebrate not being cooped up in the house by Winter’s nastiness. Soon it will be full-on summer vacation time: wilderness excursions for the adventurous, campground stays for those with kids, and long road trips for those who have kids and are very brave, optimistic, or just forgetful.

But there are lots of reasons to believe that the ‘vacation trip’ might soon become a thing of the past. Let’s face it, the concept of the individual family car is unsustainable over the long term because of climate change and the dwindling supply of oil. And even with a robust infrastructure of charging stations for electric cars, with power supplied by solar and wind farms, I think the tradition of the road trip will fade.

Other forms of vacation transportation face the same challenges. Aircraft burn huge amounts of fuel and are shameful polluters. Cruise ships too. Passenger trains might enjoy a resurgence of popularity, but the track infrastructure in North America has been neglected for years and I’d be surprised to see any appetite to rebuild it (unless rail interests here suddenly become willing to learn from Europe and Japan). Even highly-efficient transit systems like Elon Musk’s proposed Hyperloop (a super-high-speed magnetically-levitated train traveling in an enclosed tunnel at near-vacuum) would be useful for reaching a destination but hardly a means to enjoy the journey.

Wait—as a science fiction writer, shouldn’t I be touting the dream of space tourism? Second honeymoon jaunts to luxury hotels on the Moon or Mars?

With current technology, and any improvements of it that we can reliably predict, that’s not going to be possible for any but the ultra-ultra-wealthy. Far too wasteful of energy. But also too slow to appeal to many people anyway. Being cooped up for days, weeks, or months with nothing to look at but black space would make the worst road trip to Disney World look like heaven (space crews will have to keep busy or they’ll go nuts).

But, you say, we all need a change of scenery, so what’s the alternative?

Maybe the reality is…we should look to virtual reality. After all, is it really necessary for our body to sit around on a beach in Jamaica as long as our mind thinks we are? The experience is what’s important, and we experience the world through our senses. Those can be fooled. The makers of the VR headset Oculus Rift have finally released their consumer version, bringing a whole new realism to gaming and, potentially, many other forms of entertainment. Oculus features extremely high definition screens with extra peripheral detail for each eye and awesome refresh rates to trick our brains into seeing a seamless visual environment. Of course, the audio component—precision surround sound—has been available for years. As for the sense of touch, the network of nerves throughout our skin isn’t the same all over our bodies—it’s highly concentrated in our hands and face, and much less sensitive elsewhere. Gamers already experience sensory feedback systems that use vibrating pads in gloves and pedals to simulate touch, and there’s lots of room for refinement there. The rest of the body could probably be tricked by systems of heating and cooling pads, plus air-driven pressure points inflated and deflated like a fighter pilot’s flight suit (used to regulate blood circulation during high-g manoeuvres, but certainly adaptable to other uses). Something as crude as a motion chair or platform wouldn’t be needed except for more active pursuits like waterskiing or hang-gliding.

The sense of smell isn’t hard to fool with aerosol systems, and taste really only comes into play when we eat or drink. So we make sure there’s a supply of real margaritas on hand (or any other taste treat, provided by the staff of a VR vacation emporium, perhaps in your favourite shopping mall).

The possibilities mentioned above don’t even include the progress being made in direct brain-computer interfaces. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been focusing heavily on implantable neural interfaces in recent years. Brown University’s BrainGate project is making great progress in allowing paralyzed people to control technical devices with only their thoughts. The more precisely we can use EEGs and Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy to sense the activities of greater numbers of brain cells, the more ability we’ll have to affect a specialized environment directly with our minds, so we won’t be dependent on just witnessing some software designer’s idea of a perfect vacation, but will be able to create our own. Eventually, sending signals into precise brain centres, we’ll be able to temporarily replace the input from our senses and trick our brain into accepting something wholly fictional as reality.

At some point (in the 23rd or 24th centuries?) we might combine that direct brain interface with projection technology and produce something like Star Trek’s holosuites. But in the meantime, these true virtual reality technologies will be developed long before a fast and cost-effective means of space travel. Plan to holiday on Mars from the comfort of your own living room (you won’t even have to get shots!)

For now, after a hard blog-writing session, I’ll give my brain a vacation that fits my budget: a cool brew and a few hours in front of the Scenery Channel.

IMPLAUSIBLE SPACESHIPS COULD BE POSSIBLE

At a science fiction convention recently, I heard panellists complaining that most spaceships in science fiction, especially in movies and on TV, just aren’t realistic. And it’s true. But there are some creative concepts that might vindicate some of those fiction writers and moviemakers.

One is the thought that we could someday harness gravity to propel our ships. It’s not a new idea—in H.G. Wells’ First Men In The Moon the main character coats a sphere with an antigravity material, causing it to launch into space, and then opens parts of the coating to allow the craft to be pulled to the Moon by gravity. A slow form of travel, to be sure, but maybe we’ll one day learn to manipulate gravity the way we use light energy in lasers. (Comic strip detective Dick Tracy’s Space Coupes of the 1970’s somehow used magnetism to get to the Moon and back, but I’m not buying it.)

Speaking of lasers, last month Russian internet billionaire Yuri Milner announced plans to spend $100 million to send miniature probes pulled by light sails to Alpha Centauri. Mind you the probes would be little bigger than a computer chip with a sail about a meter wide. They’d be propelled by the light from a gigantic laser array pumping out 100 gigawatt laser pulses, which would push them fast enough to travel the four-light-year distance in about twenty years. It’s not impossible that such technology could be scaled up to propel passenger-carrying craft.

The concept of a faster-than-light “warp drive” isn’t pure fantasy, either. In the mid 1990’s mathematician Miguel Alcubierre conceived of a way to get around the light-speed barrier of Einstein’s theories. It would involve warping space: compacting space itself ahead of the spacecraft and expanding it behind, so it would be the bubble of space contained between these areas of altered space that would actually exceed the speed of light, like a surfer riding a wave. Yeah, it makes my head hurt, too. And the Alcubierre Drive would require exotic materials that might not exist. Still, we can hope.

One of the most interesting and controversial proposals of recent times would answer the problem of fictional spaceships not carrying thousands of tons of fuel. In fact, it would be a total game-changer. It’s an electromagnetic drive now often called the EM Drive (shown in the photo) designed by an English scientist named Roger Shawyer about fifteen years ago, but it’s so revolutionary, and contrary to prevailing belief, that most scientists simply won’t accept that it works. The Shawyer engine uses microwaves bounced around in a sealed chamber to produce propulsion. Established wisdom says that in order to go in one direction in space we have to throw something in the opposite direction. So scientists declare that Shawyer’s device can’t work. Except Shawyer showed that it does. And then Chinese researchers got one to work, and an American inventor showed a working model to NASA, and now a respected German professor has made one that works (though he’s still not sure why it produces thrust). The jury’s still out on the EM Drive, but acceptance is growing, and if it turns out to be workable it just might prove that many of the fictional spaceships we’ve read about in books and seen in movies are more realistic than we thought.

Not X-wing fighters, though. They’re still pure fantasy.

THE IMPLAUSIBLE SPACESHIPS OF SCIENCE FICTION

At the Ad Astra science fiction convention I attended recently in Toronto, a number of panels touched on the question of realistic spaceships in fiction.

Star Wars X-wing fighters? Not realistic, especially in space. With no air for wing surfaces to act on, there’s no reason to have wing-like structures, and no sensible way the ships would swoop and soar, darting in and around larger ships and into canyon-like spaces on death stars.

The mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind is gorgeous, and impressive as hell, but I can’t imagine any practical reason to make a ship with so many strange levels, and bizarre things sticking out of it.

Star Trek’s beloved Enterprise? Well the idea that a burst of plasma from a matter-antimatter reaction could push a ship forward is OK, but there’s never any indication of how it slows down again. It creates a “warp field” to allow it to surpass the speed of light and then pops out of warp drive at some unspecified speed that doesn’t seem to be related to anything. Then it goes into orbit around a planet. Real spaceships have to use just as much thrust to slow down as they use to speed up, or possibly harness the drag from a planetary atmosphere for braking (a process that involves a lot of orbits and a lot of excess heat to deal with).

Creators of space-based games like Warhammer 40000 use their imagination to design warships with bat-like wings, spidery legs, huge tail fins, tentacles etc., all to look alien and cool. Except all those frills add huge quantities of extra mass, surplus surface area (the easier to be hit by intentional fire or debris), all amounting to vast areas of waste space.

The Discovery from 2001: A Space Odyssey was realistic, and some of the ways spacecraft behaved in the recent TV series The Expanse weren’t too bad. Overall, though, an awful lot of fiction just plain ignores the realities of space travel, especially the time it would take to get places, the huge amounts of fuel required, and physical properties like inertia and momentum. Things that aren’t moving don’t want to move, and things that are moving don’t want to stop. To make them do either requires a lot of force. To expect to travel through space with the convenience and comfort of the family car, in a sleek package that looks like a futuristic jet fighter, just isn’t, well…realistic.

Of course, the plausibility of a spacecraft design has as much to do with its intended purpose as with its technology.

Gigantic spaceships, many kilometers long (Star Wars, Independence Day, the game Eve online) with vast chambers full of complex plumbing might make for exciting chase scenes and dramatic battle sequences, but large size usually means excessive mass (what on Earth we’d call weight) and the greater the mass, the more force required to get it moving, stop it from moving, or change its course. So high mass is generally not a desirable thing in a spaceship. In a space battle such a behemoth would be virtually impossible to get out of the way of an incoming missile or other weapon. And what do they need so much room for anyway? On the other hand, a colony ship intended to travel to another star could require centuries for the trip, so it would have to be enormous—you’d need to carry enough people to ensure a genetically diverse population for the colony, and maybe even an entire Earth ecosystem to transplant in the new world. Another justification for high mass (though not necessarily large size) would be if the ship required something like a big shield of water around it to protect the occupants from cosmic radiation. (FYI, here’s an amazing graphic showing size comparisons of nearly every fictional spaceship out there. Wow!)

Spaceships that are never intended to enter an atmosphere have no need for a sexy streamlined shape—they can be as ungainly as you want, as long as the structure can handle the strain of acceleration and deceleration. But a shuttle craft to and from a planet’s surface would benefit from an aerodynamic design, able to get some lift on the glide down, and with less wind resistance to contend with on the way back up.

One of the ways TV and movie spaceships most often fail in the realism department is that they don’t include enough space for the fuel the ship would use. They’ll show a craft about the size of a small bus to carry a dozen people to and from orbit (like in the movie Elysium). The American space shuttles were the size of passenger jetliners for a crew of seven, and required a mammoth liquid-fuel rocket and two solid-fuel boosters just to get them into orbit. Sure, we hope there will be significant gains in efficiency in the coming century or two, but as long as spacecraft use reaction drives (shooting something out the back to push them forward) they’ll require a significant amount of mass to eject. And gravity isn’t going away anytime soon.

What’s your biggest complaint about spaceships in fiction—the faux-pas that blow all their credibility out of the water?

There are some ideas being explored that could make “unrealistic” spacecraft into viable concepts. We’ll have some fun looking at them in my next post.

COULD ALIEN LIFE FORMS BE HIDING UNDER ANTARCTIC ICE?

Photo credit - Subglacial aquatic system. By Zina Deretsky / NSF (US National Science Foundation), via Wikimedia Commons

First let me say that the word ‘alien’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘not-of-this-planet’. Under the kilometres of ice on the Antarctic continent there could be forms of life that have a better claim to belonging on Earth than we do, having been here millions of years longer, yet are entirely foreign to our experience.

In central Canada, where I live, the landscape is dotted with thousands of lakes where ancient glaciers ground hollows in the rock, and water has accumulated in the lowest points. The land surface of Antarctica is shaped by moving ice as much as four kilometres thick. Naturally, there are bumps and hollows and, thanks to the immense pressure of all that weight, and possibly the heat of the earth beneath, there are lakes of liquid water. Nearly four hundred of them, in fact, with more still being discovered, and good evidence that water flows among many of the lakes through rivers and streams. You may have read about Lake Vostok, Antarctica’s largest such lake, which made headlines in February of 2012 when a team of Russian researchers managed to drill down to the lake’s surface and collect samples. News came this week that a new sub-glacial lake, just a little smaller than Vostok, has been found near the eastern rim of the continent. If confirmed by penetrating radar, the site is bound to draw a lot of new activity because it’s only about one hundred kilometres from an existing research station—a lot more accessible than remote Lake Vostok.

These lakes get scientists so excited because they may have been hidden away from the world for twenty-five million years. That doesn’t mean the water is that old—there’s evidence that a constant process of old water freezing while new ice melts refreshes the lakes every thirteen thousand years or so. But the lakes could contain life that old—life that’s been sheltered from all of the changes on the Earth since then, and especially sheltered from we humans. Not to mention life capable of surviving under tremendous pressure, isolation from new sources of nutrients, and serious cold (actually about -3C, but kept liquid by the pressure).

Very alien life, from our perspective.

Unfortunately the Lake Vostok samples from 2012 were contaminated when lake water rushed up the bore hole and mixed with kerosene used to keep the hole open. Scientists still checked it out and found forms of microscopic life that appeared to have DNA different from anything we’ve seen before, but those results are suspect. The Russians made a new, cleaner hole in January 2015 and collected more water, but there hasn’t been much news about the analysis of that sample (dang secretive Russians) and the funding for more research there has dried up. This new lake, if confirmed, should be easier to study, and the world at large might finally get some meaningful results. Considering that we’re still learning new things about the history of our planet by constantly-improving analysis of fossils and geologic deposits, a body of water containing life that’s been isolated for millions of years could be a real treasure trove of knowledge.

Of course, with a science fiction writer’s imagination, we can speculate about any number of sensational outcomes:

• New drilling releases a deadly organism that threatens the whole human race.
• An ancient life form is much more efficient and prolific than modern Earth life and begins to take over the planet.
• A life form is discovered that can’t have originated on Earth, proving that space aliens have visited here in the distant past.
• Live aquatic aliens from another world are hiding out until other members of their species return for them.
• Elvis is found alive and well! (OK, only if he’s become a mer-man).

And that, my friends, is how a new lake under four kilometres of dense ice has the potential to affect your world. Never let it be said that there’s nothing left to be discovered. Otherwise some of us wouldn’t have anything left to blog about.

HOW MUCH OF THE TIME ARE WE REALLY CONSCIOUS?

Photo credit: jgmarcelino via VisualHunt.com / CC BY

You land on a web page, and you watch as the page fills in piece by piece—maybe a coloured section appears before a banner image fully loads, then text re-aligns, a sidebar populates itself one article at a time. You wish it were a little faster, but it’s only mildly annoying.

Now imagine if all of the things you see, touch, hear, taste, and smell came into your awareness the same way—gradually, a bit at a time. If you moved your eyes much the constant reloading could drive you crazy. Gradually becoming aware that your hand was on a hot stove burner could have unpleasant consequences. Yet, surely the brain has to take some amount of time to process each of the sensory signals it receives: translating a light wavelength into the colour blue, or a certain vibration in the air as a musical note. So why aren’t we aware of the process—why don’t we experience the partial results? New research from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland suggests the reason is contained in a new explanation of consciousness.

For all of the things we’ve learned about our brains, there’s still no clear understanding (and a lot of controversy) about how consciousness works. We seem to experience the world in a continuous stream of sensations, but researchers have found many ways to trick our brain and those tricks provide insight into its processes. For instance, an unexpected sight, immediately replaced by an expected one (say, the sight of a clown face for a fraction of a second while looking at a landscape) can be completely edited out by the brain before it reaches the level of consciousness—the person is never even aware they saw it. Optical illusions often show that the brain makes adjustments of colours and shapes in objects according to the object’s surroundings, based on what the brain would expect from that object in the natural world. An example of that is this shadow illusion (you can have lots of fun with other optical trickery here...after you’ve finished reading!) Obviously our conscious minds aren’t witnessing everything. So what’s going on?

According to the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne studies, the processing of sensory input happens in a state of unconsciousness, with no perception of time, and when the steps are complete we become conscious of every aspect of the stimulus all at once—the “final picture”. This seems to suggest that we’re not actually conscious all of the time we think we are. The EPFL researchers claim these intervals can last up to 400 milliseconds, or four-tenths of a second for visual stimulus (they haven’t tested the other senses). That’s a fair bit of time when you consider how quickly things happen in the real world. It doesn’t mean our brains can’t react to partial data—we just might not be conscious of it yet, which could explain how you hit the brake pedal without thinking when the brake lights of the car in front of you light up. Or how your eyelid flicks closed just in time to protect your eye from that badminton bird you didn’t even see coming.

Yes, they’re saying that we experience consciousness in chunks, sometimes only every 400 milliseconds (though the intervals can be shorter if less processing is involved). If it helps, think of how we watch movies and appear to witness a continuous stream of action though we’re really seeing 24 still frames per second.

Where can we take this new understanding?

• If we could assist our brains to process stimuli faster, would we experience a kind of hyperconsciousness? (Maybe that’s what certain mind-altering drugs do.)
• If we could discover what brain signal triggers the unconscious and conscious states, we might be able to use that for everything from anaesthesiology to refreshing ourselves with micro-naps during the day.
• The more we learn about this process the more ways we might discover to trick the brain. And if we can trick the brain, we can control what a person sees, hears, and feels. Perfect virtual reality, for good and for bad. (Cue the SF scenarios where some evil force—alien or government—enslaves the population by creating a perfect illusion for them to live in! Like The Matrix.)
• This concept of consciousness also has ramifications for the idea of “uploading” our minds into computers. Would we need to build in digital delays equivalent to these unconscious intervals to keep our minds from going insane?

It’s early days when it comes to this research, and I’m sure there won’t be consensus about the mechanisms of consciousness anytime soon. But every thing we learn is useful, and if it creates more questions than it answers…isn’t that the real fun part of science? I know it’s the fun part of science fiction, so bring on the brain teasers—I have stories to write.

WHO'S REALLY PROTECTING US?

The most recent battle over government access to personal information vs. the individual’s right to privacy didn’t have a clear winner.

In order to learn the contact information of one of the shooters in the San Bernardino, California terror attack of December 2015, the FBI wanted Apple to create a way for the security features of an iPhone to be defeated (including a way to input the unlock code electronically instead of only manually, to allow computers to speed things up). Apple refused and the case went to court, with the FBI claiming they were only interested in one phone, but of course a backdoor method to unlock one iPhone would make all of them vulnerable. Apple stood its ground. Then the FBI withdrew their case, announcing that a third party had helped them crack the phone.

Did they both win? Apple stuck to its principles and the FBI got the information it wanted.

No, I would suggest that we all lost. Again.

Governments now seem to have an insatiable appetite for the personal information of their citizens. They claim it’s all about keeping us safe from criminals and terrorists, despite the fact that terrorists and their victims number in the thousands while law-abiding technology-users number in the billions. Do criminals take advantage of secure devices to commit crimes? Certainly. They also meet in private places and dark corners, but I wouldn’t want surveillance cameras in every room. The principle of the court-approved property search or phone wiretap by law-enforcement agencies is a long-established one, yet we know that personal surveillance by government agencies like the American NSA goes so far beyond such practices as to be like spraying acres of farmland with herbicide to kill a dozen dandelions. Is it really about protection, or about control?

When did the citizens of democratic countries become OK with this? When did we forget that government is supposed to serve us, not the other way around?

Believe me, I’m a pretty boring guy with no juicy secrets to hide, not an anti-government radical, and the last person to cry “conspiracy”, but it alarms me to see how far we’ve come down this path since the terror attacks of 9/11, and how the politics of fear have begun to win out over our concerns for individual rights.

There are good reasons that so much science fiction has portrayed totalitarian governments, from 1984, to Fahrenheit 451, to The Hunger Games, and dozens of other novels and movies. The loss of individual identity and rights is a huge fear, and therefore ripe for drama. An already-slippery slope is made even more slippery by the progress of information-sharing technologies. Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. The stories write themselves. Unfortunately, it isn’t just fiction—the process happens in the real world all the time, and SF writers feel compelled again and again to warn us about what we’re getting ourselves into.

For more of us every day, our lives play out online through our computers, tablets, and smartphones. There will come a time when our devices will interact directly with our brains, and the potential privacy issues are the stuff of nightmares.

I’m not trying to paint governments as the bad guys and tech corporations as white knights either. It would be disingenuous of Apple and other tech giants to portray themselves as the guardians of our privacy when corporations’ appetite for our personal information is at least as voracious as governments’, creating the most invasive marketing practices society has ever seen. What I am saying is that access to personal and private information is getting out of hand and will only get worse as technology progresses. Who should have access to our individual information, and how much? That’s a choice we can’t leave to others to make for us.

I was interested to read about a new foray into the battle by the makers of the app WhatsApp (a company, incidentally, that chooses to charge for their app rather than mine your personal data in order to throw ads at you.) They’ve just provided their users with encryption that even WhatsApp employees can’t get around. They not only won’t give government agencies access to what you do with the app, they can’t.

It’s possible that no encryption is truly unbreakable, but for now that sounds like a door with a good solid lock.

WHAT'S THE BEST DESIGN FOR A SPACE COLONY?

One day we’ll want a place humans can live beyond Earth. Mars and a number of the moons of the gas giants are prime contenders because they offer lots of space and many of the physical resources we’ll need right there—minerals and important gases locked up in ice or rock. Still, there’s a good chance that our first colonies beyond the atmosphere won’t be anchored to anything big and solid at all. They’ll probably be air-breathing environments floating free in the space between the planets. One of the five Lagrangian points, where the gravity of the Earth and the Moon are in balance, would be a good choice because once placed there, the colony would stay put. It would also be relatively close for purposes of supply, communication and, in the worst case, escape back to Earth.

Though we’ll probably place small-scale habitats in one of those spots to continue learning all we can about space living, I have a feeling that the first real colony of any size outside the Earth will be somewhere else. Like the center of a hollowed-out asteroid.

It just makes sense. We’ll be digging out the asteroid anyway, mining it for metals and anything else we can find. Depending on which rock we pick, it will probably have many of the valuable elements we’d find on a planet without the difficulties caused by planet-scale gravity. Plus man-made hollows inside a metallic rock will have plenty of natural radiation shielding. You can’t overestimate the importance of that outside Earth’s protective magnetic field. There would be drawbacks, though, including the great distance to the asteroids, the complete lack of gravity, and the difficulty of providing good lighting inside a rock.

In his inspirational book from the early 1990’s called The Millennial Project, Marshall T. Savage suggested that the best model for a space colony would be a clear giant bubble with smaller bubbles nested inside. Nice and simple. The outer bubble wall would actually be a double membrane with five meters’ thickness of water between the layers, which would allow sunlight through but block most harmful radiation. As with a hollow asteroid, though, there wouldn’t be any gravity, and we know that human muscles, bones, and organs quickly deteriorate without it. Savage believed this could be solved through a combination of electro-stimulation and exercise in special facilities spun at high speed to simulate gravity, but I have my doubts. A rigorous exercise routine helps the astronauts on the International Space Station, yet they still have to undergo months of rehabilitation when they return to Earth. Even if future space colonists never return to Earth, there are indications that microgravity over long periods of time will cause health problems.

Several concepts for space colonies are designed to spin to produce simulated gravity on their inner surfaces thanks to centripetal force (here’s a great page showing the most popular designs). The Stanford Torus is like a giant wheel, perhaps with one or more large mirrors placed nearby to reflect sunlight into the interior. In the movie Elysium the colony of this design had no roof, so shuttle craft could easily come and go. But there was no radiation protection at all, so it would only be feasible within the Earth’s magnetic field. With the Bernal Sphere concept, areas near the equator would have the highest gravity but it would weaken toward the poles, so there’d likely be a fat stripe of inhabited area with windows near one or both ends to let sunlight in. That’s a lot of mass to spin up considering so much of the surface territory would still have insufficient gravity. The O’Neill Cylinder might be the best design of the three: a large cylinder spinning on its long axis, with lengthwise sections of land area alternating with window strips to provide sunlight (actually O’Neill suggested pairs of cylinders close to each other rotating in opposite directions for reasons of physics I won’t get into here). Unless Scotty comes back from the future to give us the formula for transparent aluminum, like in the fourth Star Trek movie, the windows in the Bernal Sphere and O’Neill Cylinder would require a lot of glass or polymer, and all three of the above designs would probably still be deficient when it comes to radiation shielding.

Here’s my thought: What about using a giant bubble full of air of the kind suggested by Marshall T. Savage, but with an O’Neill cylinder spinning inside it? You’d get the radiation protection of the water (which would let you get away with thinner walls in the cylinder), lots of light, and the extra space in the bubble could be used for zero-g manufacturing and the growing of food crops that don’t mind microgravity. I realize that a wide-open wheel or cylinder wouldn’t work because of high-wind effects from the structure’s spin, but with sharply tapered ends and baffles to break up the flow of air, it should still be possible to come and go from the cylinder habitat into the rest of the bubble. Wind effects would also be less if we settled for something lower than full Earth gravity, thus allowing a slower rate of spin.

What do you think? Problems with friction effects? Static electricity? Give me your thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

It’s by playing around with such concepts that we’ll ultimately find the best solution.