COULD YOU LEAVE EARTH BEHIND?

When I was growing up every kid wanted to be an astronaut. I did too, and not just a ten-day-mission astronaut but a guy who worked full-time in space like the heroes of my favourite SF classics. Maybe on a five-year mission to boldly go…or even to jump on a giant colony ship to be a pioneer in a new star system. Cool! Except I always knew there was one big roadblock that stood in my way (beyond my lack of brains, brawn, courage, and training, of course).

I’d miss the natural Earth way too much. I’m kind of an outdoors guy. Not the hunting and fishing kind so much (as a scuba diver, I enjoy watching them more than catching them), but I love to camp in the bush, go canoeing or hiking, and even when I’m home I go for a daily walk outside our town in the fields and hills. I like the outdoors—I need the outdoors. I don’t think I could stand to be cooped up in a tin can, no matter what the size, or under a dome on the Moon. Or anywhere I couldn’t step outside and feel sunshine and a fresh breeze on my face. Even here on Earth we can be susceptible to “cabin fever” when we’re confined inside. Much as I envied the Star Trek gang, I always felt sorry for the ninety-nine per cent of the crew who never got to join an away team and visit the latest planet. Even if they did, it wouldn’t be Earth. No smell of green grass, trill of bird song, or rustle of the wind through trees.

I love trees. I try to surround myself with them every chance I get. Not much room for trees on a spaceship, though. And who knows what would pass for trees on some other planet? But what about Star Trek holosuites, you ask—a computer simulation of almost any environment? Impressive, but not good enough.

Scientific brain trusts try to solve space travel problems like shielding the crew from cosmic rays, reducing the harmful health effects of zero gravity, ensuring the psychological balance of crewmates to keep them from driving each other crazy. But what about the lack of trees?

I saw an article this week about how the Japanese government has been promoting nature appreciation since the early 80’s for the sake of people’s health. In Japan they call it “forest bathing”—going out in the woods for some peace and quiet for stress relief. But, more than that, a variety of natural oils from trees and other plants, collectively called phytoncide, seems to give a boost to the human immune system. That kind of thing shouldn’t really be a surprise, given our evolutionary history. There have been concerns for some time that we humans, especially children, suffer adverse health effects when they aren’t exposed to the natural world. Researcher Richard Louv coined the term “nature deficit disorder”. No, it’s not officially recognized as a medical disorder, but maybe it soon will be as we continue to keep ourselves locked up in glass towers and brick boxes, surrounded by concrete and asphalt.

So what if we were to leave our natural world entirely and confine ourselves to completely artificial environments for months or years?

There have been experiments to study what happens to humans in closed environments, but mostly, as with the Arizona research facility Biosphere 2, they included miniature ecologies—mini rainforests and savannahs, for instance—as well as people. And the results so far haven’t been all that encouraging. Even so, I do think that we’ll need to take Earth ecologies with us somehow for long-term stays in space. I just don’t think that the human animal could stand spending years at a time in a domed outpost on the Moon or Mars, say, without getting a pathological compulsion to get outside and take a breath of air (a very unhealthy impulse in those circumstances!) But if we can take along some good rich soil, fragrant wildflowers, pungent cedars and pine trees, and blossoming berry bushes, not to mention the birds and the bees…we might be all right.

Personally, I still don’t think I could ever leave the Earth for very long, but for some people, taking a piece of Earth along with them might just be enough.

ANOTHER CHANCE TO WIN!

Earlier this month lovers of audiobooks had a chance to win a free download of a compelling mystery thriller. My award-shortlisted novel Dead Air is now an audiobook, narrated by me (because I was a radio broadcaster for thirty-five years—I kind of know my way around a microphone). It’s the gripping story of a radio morning show host who’s marked for death by unknown enemies and his struggle to face an unthinkable situation. Reaction to the audiobook has been gratifying, and I’d like to spread the word to even more potential listeners—and readers too.

So I’m going to do it again. Give you a chance to win the book, that is. But this time, with some bonuses.

Here’s how it works: when you sign up for my newsletter on my homepage www.scottoverton.ca before the end of October 2016 you’ll be entered into a draw to win one of ten free downloads of the Dead Air audiobook from Audible. But if you don’t listen to audiobooks and would rather read Dead Air on your own, just let me know. I’ll contact the ten winners and give you the choice of receiving the audiobook or ebook version of Dead Air. You get it in the form you’ll enjoy the most. In fact, if your household includes an audiobook lover and a dedicated ebook fan, I’ll give you both versions!

It’s as easy as filling out the signup form, and I give my solemn promise that I won’t give your email address to anyone else or spam you myself—you’ll only get news about my books and career when there’s some solid news to tell.

But here’s another bonus: If you also invite someone you know to enter the draw, and they do (and they tell me it was your idea), then both of you will be given two entries—a double chance to win the draw.

I think it’s a pretty sweet deal. So if you’re looking for some absorbing reading—or listening—enter the draw now on my homepage www.scottoverton.ca and tell your friends and family.

Because good reads should be shared.

MAYBE WE'RE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE AFTER ALL

Photo Credit: A. Passwaters/Rice University based on original courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech at http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1454.html

The question of whether or not life exists elsewhere in the universe has been examined in countless ways, and much of the discussion depends on knowing how rare an occurrence life is. When it does arise, how likely is it to evolve into an intelligent species? We’re now nearly certain that there are at least hundreds of other planets in our galaxy (based on our best instrumentation and scientific rationale) and assume that the number is actually higher than that by orders of magnitude, but we still don’t know the odds of life arising in any given place, let alone intelligence. And sometimes rather oblique investigations make the issue even murkier.

Although we can imagine forms of life composed of different elements, Earth life is based on the element carbon. Without carbon-based molecules, there would be no life as we know it. So is carbon a common element on extraterrestrial planets? If so, we might have high hopes that carbon-based life would have arisen elsewhere. The problem is that many scientists who investigate planet formation feel that Earth shouldn’t have large amounts of free carbon that isn’t locked into the planet’s core. So some researchers from Rice University have theorized that Earth must have been hit by a Mercury-type planet something like four billion years ago and absorbed the doomed planet’s carbon into Earth’s upper mantle and crust, where it could eventually be used for the evolution of life forms. If that’s true, and if carbon-based life couldn’t arise any other way, then the rarity of that exact type of collision means that the number of planets hospitable for our kind of life would be equally rare.

Another couple of researchers at Cornell University have approached the question of life’s scarcity in a completely different way. They’ve calculated the rate at which genetic material (like DNA) increases in complexity through natural evolution, reasoning that if you work that rate backward you can figure out how long ago the most basic life forms came into being. According to their calculations, it took far longer than we’ve previously thought for life to arise and ultimately evolve into intelligent beings—nearly ten billion years, in fact. Ten billion years ago is before the existence of the solar system, so they propose that life arose elsewhere and travelled to Earth by meteorites. But if it really does take that long for intelligent life to develop, then we shouldn’t be expecting visits from advanced aliens anytime soon. They’ll all be at about the same stage of evolution as we are—we may even be among the first intelligent species to arise.

What would it mean to us if we do turn out to be alone in the galaxy? On the bright side, we won’t go out into space and face a slew of hostile races eager to kill us off, as in Starship Troopers by Heinlein, and the John Scalzi Old Man’s War series. But it would also mean that we’ll never find companionship beyond our own kind, never get fresh perspectives on art, music, love, or the meaning of life. We’d never get a chance to learn from others with very different experiences. Even worse, if the number of planets with carbon-based life turns out to be near zero, then it will also be nearly impossible for us to find new worlds that are hospitable to us and our fellow Earth species, which means we’ll have to terraform every planet we encounter before we can colonize it, a process that could take thousands of years.

Much as I hate the thought that venturing out into galactic space would bring humanity into conflict with other races, I really hope that life isn’t a rare thing in the cosmos, and that we’re not the only intelligent beings. A universe with no inviting planets or potential friends would be hostile indeed.

WHERE'S A HANDY ROBOT CARPENTER WHEN YOU REALLY NEED ONE?

As I write this, my wife and I are in the process of building our next house. I’ve never built a house before. I think the biggest structure I’ve actually built was a doghouse, and I struggled to assemble a pre-fab shed so, yes, I’m probably crazy. We’ve needed a lot of help from incredibly generous (and knowledgeable) family and friends. But I found myself asking, “Why aren’t there robots I can rent that would do all this for me?” Doesn’t every hapless DIY-er ask this question?

Whatever happened to those predictions that we’d have robot servants to perform all the menial tasks of life for us? Were futurists and science fiction writers just way too optimistic about the timeline required to develop such technology? Or were they flat out wrong, and there are too many hurdles to overcome to be worth it?

Let’s look at the processes involved in building my house. A properly programmed human-size robot should be able to select the correct lumber for a given wall and transport it to the site. With an extra accessory or two, it ought to be able to measure any cuts necessary and chop the wood into the required lengths. It might need to be a little bigger to include the laser measure and saw blade, though. Then it could probably place each piece in the proper configuration and pop a few nails in to hold it in place. Hmmm, I guess we’d better give the robot a built-in level and nailer, too. Gee, suddenly the robot’s getting a bit heavy for that plywood floor and kind of bulky to squeeze under those temporary braces keeping the newly-framed wall from falling over. Maybe there’s a reason cars built by automation require gigantic factories.

OK, let’s try again. We’ll give the robot hands like humans have, to let it just grasp the tools it needs each time, like we do. Never mind that our hands require nearly thirty different bones and 2500 nerve endings per square centimeter to provide the dexterity and bio-feedback needed to handle tools and other things. Let’s say we’ve solved that, and now we tell the robot to hammer a nail into something. For our new house my wife and I chose an exterior cladding that’s a kind of thick panelling with a dense outer coating to do the job of ten-test and siding all in one. A clever idea in theory but Boy, does it like to repel nails! You see, it takes a bit of extra effort to pierce the coating and the stuff bounces like crazy—try driving a nail into that. No, wait—that’s not difficult enough—make it a fancy round-headed nail. Got the picture yet? Every time the hammer hits the nail, the position of the nail changes a little and the angle of attack of the hammer stroke has to adjust to compensate, perhaps with a slight turn of the hammer face and a stroke that’s more of a push than a swing. Or a bit more left force than right, with just a touch of body English. Get it wrong and the nail goes Ping! and flies off into the fourth dimension, never to be seen again.

There are countless tasks in house-building that require mental and physical versatility like that, from compensating for warped boards, to judging how far you can tolerate something that’s just slightly off-level or off-square (OK, ‘slightly’ might be an understatement). Not to mention adaptation to the on-site environment—windy or wet, flat or rough, and full of sawdust. Robotics experts will tell you that there are huge numbers of micro-decisions involved in some of the most routine tasks, and we completely take for granted the extraordinary abilities of our brains and bodies to handle them.

I can’t really predict if we’ll ever produce robots with that kind of sophistication, but I do know that jobs like house construction will be out of the question until we change the arcane conventions of the field. Like language that includes studs, cripples, and scabs (oh my!). The fact that “dressed lumber” means a 2 x 4 is actually 1 ½ inches x 3 ½ inches, and an 8-foot stud is only 92 5/8 inches long instead of 96. And speaking of inches, the imperial system of measurement has got to go. Have you ever tried to use a calculator for an equation involving measurements like 27 13/16ths?

Any logic-based robot brain could be forgiven for quickly going insane.

WIN THE AUDIOBOOK OF MY NOVEL DEAD AIR

Although I consider myself a science fiction author, my first published novel was a mystery/thriller called Dead Air, the story of a radio morning man who discovers that someone is out to kill him. Well, I’ve now published it as a complete audiobook and you can win a free copy! See the details below.

I was a radio broadcaster myself for more than thirty years, most of them as a morning show host like my character Lee Garrett in Dead Air (except I’m a nicer person with a much happier life!) So I was drawn to create a story about the vulnerability of radio personalities, while giving readers an insider’s look at the broadcasting business. Most of us listen to the radio every day—how much do we know about what really goes on behind that microphone? Dead Air answers that, as well as offering a gripping story of an ordinary man faced with an extraordinary struggle. What would you do if you learned that someone wanted you dead?

You can read more about the plot of Dead Air here.

Though the novel has been available in print and e-book formats for a few years, I decided to help it find a new audience among book listeners. As a career broadcaster, it made sense for me to narrate the book myself, so I produced it first as a free podcast which is still available through iTunes and directly from my web page. Now the unabridged Dead Air audiobook is available through Audible, Amazon, and iTunes (under Audiobooks/Mystery/Scott Overton). Even before launching it, I’ve been getting great comments from those who’ve found the audiobook by accident.

The audiobook isn’t free, but it can be for you! Beginning today, and for the first two weeks of September only, I’m holding a draw to give away ten free copies of the Dead Air audiobook. All you have to do to enter is to sign up for my mailing list using the form on my home page before September 15, 2016. Don’t worry—I won’t spam you. I keep all email addresses confidential and I only use them to send out news about my writing and such when there is news. After September 15, I’ll contact winners individually with the code for your free audiobook.

If you love audiobooks, if you love mysteries with lots of action, if you love very human stories…well, you get the idea. The Dead Air audiobook is for you. Enter now and best of luck!

BIG NEWS IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

Photo Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)

There’s a new neighbour in the ’hood and it has the astronomy community buzzing. A team called the Pale Red Dot project at Queen Mary University in London has discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting our nearest stellar neighbour. Finding Earth-type planets orbiting other stars is becoming a regular thing, but when it’s orbiting the star nearest to us, that’s very big news. The Alpha Centauri binary star system is usually called our nearest neighbour, but there’s a red dwarf star called Proxima Centauri (loosely orbiting the Alpha Centauri system) that’s just a little closer at 4.25 light years. The newly-discovered planet, Proxima b, is thought to be a rocky planet with a mass similar to Earth or a little more, in an orbit closer than Mercury’s orbit around our Sun. Thanks to the much lower energy output of a red dwarf star, such a close orbit is still within a range that should allow liquid water to exist—what scientists consider the star’s “habitable zone”. So life of a kind we would recognize could possibly survive there, although it wouldn’t have an easy time of it. The planet is probably tidally locked, keeping the same face to its sun all the time—only areas near the night/day dividing line would avoid getting either too much sun for comfort, or an endless cold night. On top of that, Proxima Centauri occasionally sends out burst of x-rays and ultraviolet radiation that might kill off any life trying to gain a foothold there. We also don’t know anything about the planet’s atmosphere. All in all, for any kind of life to exist on Proxima b would be a real long shot (though some scientists consider it a better bet than Mars).

So why all the excitement?

Maybe there’s a lot of astronomy research that’s driven by pure scientific curiosity, but I’d argue that the question we most want answered is, “Are we alone in the universe?” That’s why it was such a thrill when the first planets were confirmed around other stars. Why we get an extra kick when we find planets that are similar to Earth, and especially when they’re in a star’s habitable zone. We can’t help feeling that any of those just might be home to another intelligent race, or at least some form of life that doesn’t come from Mother Earth. But all of those planets discovered so far have been unthinkably far away—there’s no way to reach them within any meaningful timeframe using foreseeable technology (dropping in on the neighbours would take thousands of years in travel time).

Now we see the possibility of a living planet practically next door in galactic terms. Yes, it would still take thousands of years to get there using current technology, but some of the most promising engine tech being developed, like nuclear pulse propulsion or fusion rocket drives might take us there in less than a century. Even more significantly, this new discovery provides the incentive to make that effort.

Humanity is at its most brilliant and daring when faced with a challenge that’s daunting, but still feels achievable. Getting to the Moon was a perfect example—enormous resources were required to make it happen, but first there had to be the will to make it happen. Now, when you combine our most compelling cosmic mystery—the search for other life in the universe—with a target that involves serious obstacles but doesn’t feel completely unachievable, you’ve suddenly got something that can light a fire under our collective backsides.

Yes, we’ll still need to wait for better information about the new planet’s atmosphere, gravity, etc., perhaps from the European Extremely Large Telescope due to enter service in 2024.

But in the meantime, we’ve got a new place to go and an eons-old reason to go there. That makes the discovery of Proxima b a game changer.

ARE ALIENS BUILDING MEGASTRUCTURES?

Are there alien races so advanced that they can turn their whole solar system into a construction project?

If you follow astronomy news, you’ll know that there’s been a lot of interest since last year in a star designated KIC 8462852, also informally called Tabby’s Star after astronomer Tabetha Boyajian at Yale, who’s devoted a huge amount of her time to studying the star after it was first flagged by some amateur stargazers. According to data from the Kepler Space telescope, Tabby’s Star has been getting dimmer over recent decades, but not consistently, and not because of any known kind of star behaviour. It undergoes strange “dimming events” that might see it lose 2% - 3% of its brightness over a period of time. New research shows that it’s not just occasional flickering, but an overall steady decline in the star’s output as well. Scientists have no solid explanation—some have suggested a cloud of dust or other material getting in the way, or possible a swarm of comets, but none of these ideas explains every aspect of the data.

So could it be that Tabby’s Star is home to an alien race so powerful it has built mammoth structures in space that are blocking or even capturing their star’s light?

No one will commit to that scenario, but Boyajian herself plans to study the star for a full year, and others will explore a wide range of evidence to learn whether the star’s fluctuation is natural or…alien-made.

Mega-sized artificial space structures aren’t a new idea to scientists, and especially not to science fiction writers. Writer Olaf Stapledon mentioned the possibility of a race harnessing the entire energy of its home star back in 1937 but it got widespread attention when physicist Freeman Dyson published a paper about the concept in 1960. It came to be known as a Dyson sphere or Dyson shell—although Dyson himself proposed a large number of vast power stations orbiting a star, the popularized form of the concept became a shell of material, drawn from asteroids and moons, that would totally enclose a sun, capturing every bit of its output, and consequently making it disappear from view to any other solar system (except for heat and other energy radiating from the back of the shell, presumably). Writer Larry Niven invented the Ringworld, a wide band of solid stuff kept in orbit around its star, its inner surface providing a huge amount of living space and lots of energy for the race that engineered it. Dan Alderson came up with the idea for the Alderson disk, like a giant vinyl LP record perhaps extending to the orbit of Mars or even Jupiter with the sun as the spindle in the center. The disk could also be given an up-and-down motion that would make the sun ‘bob’ above and below it, making both surfaces habitable. Later, Larry Niven and fellow writer Gregory Benford invented the Bowl of Heaven—basically half of a Dyson sphere for living space and energy capture, but with a hole in it through which to blast a stream of highly-energized particles forced out of the sun, like a rocket engine, making the whole star system into one stellar-scale movable spaceship. Now that’s what I call big concept.

Could Tabby’s Star be dimming because beings there are constructing a ringworld, or a Dyson sphere, or some other mammoth object we can’t even imagine?

Maybe, but there have been lots of other times when hopeful scientists have suggested alien intervention as the explanation for phenomena that turned out to be natural, from the too-regular-to-be-natural radio emissions of pulsars, all the way back to the canals on Mars, ‘discovered’ by Percival Lowell (not to mention an embarrassing finding by a radio observatory in Australia that turned out to be caused by the scientists’ microwave oven as they reheated their coffee!)

Still, if we ever do discover other intelligent life “out there”, this is probably how it will be done. So I shouldn’t discourage the wishful thinkers too much. And what effect will it have on us, if such a thing is ever proven? Will it send us into a panic, or inspire us to perform unimaginable feats ourselves?

You know which one I’m hoping for.

OUR FUTURE IN THE OCEANS

I’ve had a lifetime love affair with the underwater world. Influenced by everything from Jacques Cousteau films and TV specials to the ancient Sea Hunt TV show with Lloyd Bridges, I’ve spent a lot of my swimming time under the surface—on purpose! As a pre-teen I made my own “underwater habitats”, anchoring plastic garbage pails to the bottom of our backyard swimming pool, and submerging overturned canoes in lakes. Naturally, I became a scuba diver as an adult, fascinated by shipwrecks and coral reefs—if you visit a tropical vacation spot and don’t spend time underwater on the reefs, you’re missing some jaw-dropping beauty that the above-water environment just can’t match.

I loved to read science fiction stories about the undersea world, too. There have never been that many. Except for the iconic Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, The Deep Range by Arthur C. Clarke stands as the earliest major undersea SF work I can remember. Peter Watts’ Rifter series and Michael Crichton’s Sphere are standouts too. And yet, I’m convinced that our oceans will play an even bigger role in human life of the future than they do now.

From ancient times, oceans have provided essential transportation routes, and today the shipping and shipbuilding industries comprise nearly ten percent of the economic value added from the oceans worldwide, and about five percent of the employment, according to recent reports. Fishing (wild) and fish processing are the largest economic sectors (employing 36% of the workforce) but maritime and coastal tourism comes an impressive second (23% of employment). In terms of economic value, offshore gas and oil is extremely important. But I expect that this whole picture will be very different a hundred years from now.

Wild fish stocks have been devastated by overfishing, pollution, ocean acidification, and climate change. As the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere increases, ocean waters will become even more acidic (affecting the entire oceanic food chain), currents will shift, and fish populations will struggle to recover. If we want to continue to eat seafood, it will have to come from aquaculture. There are serious problems with fish farming that must be overcome, especially related to the spread of disease, and genetic threats from interbreeding. But it’s reasonable to expect that a century from now we’ll see giant aquaculture installations patrolled by submersibles (like Clarke imagined in The Deep Range). We might not raise whales for their meat, but certainly fish and crustaceans, and some years farther into the future we’ll have mammoth production facilities for edible forms of algae, like spirulina, drawing nutrient-rich water up from the ocean depths for the crops, while being self-sufficient in energy thanks to the water temperature differences (like geothermal sources we use today). The algae farming business will explode as soon as we develop food processing technologies that will turn the raw algae into more palatable forms of protein. Drop into a vegan food store sometime and see what can be done with vegetable-based fake meat.

I expect oil and gas production in the oceans to increase over the coming decades, but the environmental risks will eventually be more than we’re willing to stomach. Instead, energy production from offshore wind farms, ocean tide-powered turbines, and possibly the raw energy of ocean floor volcanic vents will all be developed into significant industries, as long as we’re careful to avoid degradation of the environment. I hope (and believe) that we’ll be wise enough to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, which will reduce some of the most hazardous ocean shipping. We also need to become less obsessed with consumer goods, or at least opt for more locally-produced foods and goods, out of concern for the environment (and plain good sense). So ocean shipping will decrease in the coming century or two, but it may be replaced by increased tourism, as populations in developed countries age (and flock to cruise ships and beach resorts) and the middle classes of developing countries become able to afford such luxuries.

Even if we do cut back on oil and gas extraction in the oceans, there’s every likelihood that we’ll go after other resources in the ocean floor as they become harder to get on land. But the environmental impact could be a nightmare, so my personal hope is that we’ll turn to the asteroids for our minerals and chemicals, and not to the seabed. A better alternative would be to develop more efficient ways of extracting minerals from seawater itself, especially since that could tie in with desalinization machinery, producing much-needed fresh water in an increasingly hot climate. After all, the water created by such efforts will return to the ocean as rain and river runoff, replenishing what is taken.

Will we ever have undersea colonies under vast transparent domes, like some pulp stories and comic books have portrayed? I hate to say it (because the geek in me will be heartbroken) but probably not. To live under the ocean full-time we will have to genetically alter our own bodies, either to cope with the side-effects of breathing high pressure air for long periods of time, or to actually enable us to ‘breathe’ water ourselves, like fish. I think genetic science will eventually be capable of both, but there will be no reason to do either on a large scale. Robotic machinery will be much more efficient at doing any task we need done in the underwater environment, and living underwater will never be a practical remedy for overcrowding the land surfaces of our planet. Giant floating islands, maybe, but not vast domed cities on the ocean floor.

Still, if you’re an underwater junkie, don’t despair. Where underwater cities may never be practical, a premium hotel industry on the seafloor might do just fine.

DIY FUTURE

My wife and I spent a few days assembling a tool shed last week. Yes, I said a few days…of our vacation…assembling (not building from scratch) a pre-made metal tool shed. Admittedly, do-it-yourself isn’t our strong suit, but we can read instructions. Well, OK, the instructions were translated from some other language and “clarity-challenged”, the metal panels were poorly stamped and dented more easily than the average pizza box, and the approximately one million tiny screws and bolts were clearly intended to be handled by the fingers of a five-year-old rather than an adult male. But other than that….

It got me thinking about the future of DIY.

Will there even be a future for do-it-yourself projects? There was a time when every suburban home had a fully-equipped workshop with table saws and drill presses and who-knows-what-else, to crank out lawn furniture, gazebos, rowboats, and even larger workshops. But then, in those days, people also repaired things that broke. When’s the last time you actually fixed something rather than just replacing it? Consumer goods these days aren’t meant to be repaired by the homeowner (just like they’re not meant to last past the end of the warranty period). Even the ones that aren’t filled with computer chips just aren’t designed for the home handywoman to take apart and put back together with no parts left over. So will we actually make things for ourselves?

On the one hand, the growing availability of 3D printing suggests we will. The price of 3D printers for home use has begun to fall, and will continue to do so as more competitors enter the scene. You can already get access to one at many libraries. In the coming century they’ll become much more flexible in the types of materials they use and the variety of objects they can produce. For now, anything large or complicated still requires that the parts be made individually and then assembled (hopefully with edges and holes that line up!) But that may not always be the case. Still, can it properly be called do-it-yourself if you’re just feeding plans into a machine that does all of the work?

There are lots of reasons that on-site 3D printing DIY might grow in popularity, and even become mandatory. As we become more and more concerned about dwindling resources and the impact of fossil fuel use on the climate, transportation of goods will become increasingly undesirable. Better to have things manufactured where they’re needed and from local materials. In fact, when the printing materials eventually come from the disassembly of other objects, it will be the ultimate form of recycling. Provided that the energy needs aren’t too extravagant, it could be a big step toward protecting our planet from further degradation, and that will especially be true as we become ever more mobile, moving our families around in pursuit of employment. Instead of bringing our things with us, we might recreate them at the new home each time, and perhaps even produce a whole new dwelling in each new location, as needed.

These days, when we need some new knowledge for a DIY project, we turn to YouTube. But in coming years we’ll be able to have interactive holographic mentor/coaches, possibly beginning with humans for hire, but eventually provided by sophisticated computer simulations. Virtual reality real-time teaching could be the best thing ever for do-it-yourself fans.

Needless to say, the ultimate expression of home manufacturing technology will be like the replicators in Star Trek, able to produce just about anything, durable or consumable, from energy or a supply of basic matter. Pretty dang cool, and whole lot better than fiddling with miniscule nuts and bolts.

Not really DIY, though, in the sense of actually making something ourselves.

I expect that, in spite of advancing technology, DIY projects will trend toward smaller things within the coming century, as shrinking energy supplies make individual transportation, and consequently suburban living, untenable. Most of us probably won’t have single-family houses—more likely condominiums in tall buildings—so the DIY workshop will become a rare indulgence. But there are other forces that might strangle DIY into oblivion.

Pressure continues to grow in an effort to make each of us into “consuming machines”, with advertising urging us to buy everything we can. That pressure comes from corporations (whose profit managers probably hate DIY) but also governments as they try to boost their national economies with domestic consumption and international trade. It isn’t likely to go away. A cynical forecaster might predict a thoroughly globalized world effectively run by multi-nationals greedy for sales and definitely not in favour of recycling DIY-style. Or authoritarian regimes that ban DIY because it takes jobs away from workers (and eats away at sales taxes, too).

It’s probably impossible to predict the future of do-it-yourself pursuits beyond the next century because the technology is changing too quickly. So my advice is to enjoy it while you can, and especially the amazing new capabilities provided by 3D printing.

Oh, and if you’re tempted to get one of those DIY metal sheds in a box…at least invest in some good earplugs so you don’t have to hear each other curse.

FREE SUMMER READING

My collection of disaster stories is now FREE. Let’s admit it, there’s a guilty pleasure in imagining how civilization could end!

An invasion from beneath our feet. A hammer blow from the sky. A genetic crop modification that could bring about humanity’s extinction.

Not only will it cost you nothing at my bookstore here and here and all other major ebook outlets, but the ebook also contains a link to another collection of my short fiction.

Tartarus Rising: The most critical business centres of the world are suddenly swallowed into the ground, a chemical explosion devastates New Jersey, and survivors flee the rumours of invaders from beneath the Earth. (First published in the anthology "Doomology" from Library of Science Fiction & Fantasy Press, 2010).
Saviour: A killer asteroid is headed for the Earth and the defence against it depends on one man. But what if he’s the wrong choice?
The Cleansing: The people of a far-future pastoral Earth discover that their forbears genetically modified their crops to be protected from mutations by occasional die-offs. Except no-one has a plan when all of the crops start to die at the same time.

Three short stories with a total word count of about 16,000.

So I hope you'll enjoy my gift of some great summer reading!