MAPPING YOUR BRAIN WILL BE THE LAST THING YOU DO

In my last blog post I mentioned a new company that will sell you transfusions of a young person’s blood in an effort to gain some of their youth. OK, think of it as yet another “out there” rejuvenation treatment, but nobody gets hurt (if you can afford the $8000). But now a company called Nectome is offering to preserve a perfect copy of your brain. All it will cost you is $10,000…and your life.

Actually, the ten grand is a deposit to get on the waiting list—I’m not sure what the final price tag will be because the factory won’t be up and running for a few more years. But the “life” part, that is final. You see, their process embalms the brain with a fluid that preserves it as a glass copy, perfect in microscopic detail down to the last neural synapse (which can be seen with an electron microscope—they've already done it with the brain of a pig). And it has to be done while you’re still alive—the embalming process is what kills you.

Creeped out yet?

They’re counting on getting their business in states that allow assisted suicide, because that’s basically what it is. At least twenty-five people have already forked over the money.

So why would anyone do this? Well it’s like having your brain frozen, hoping some future generation will figure out how to revive you (and want to). Except, in this case, the glassified brain itself can’t be revived—the hope is that future scientists will be able to use the “brain map” to make a perfect digitized copy, at which point (they hope) your consciousness will find new life inside a computer environment. It’s called “uploaded consciousness”: digitizing your mind on hard drive media or the cloud. You won’t have a body, but you won’t have the drawbacks of one either (like dying).

Personally, I give this plan an unequivocal two thumbs down. I’ve been reading a lot about consciousness lately because the newest novel I’m working on is all about that and, the thing is, nobody knows what consciousness is. There are dozens of theories, and in the search for that elusive answer a huge amount has been learned about how the brain works. There’s a broad assumption that there’s a link between consciousness and the complexity of a brain, but that’s all it is—an assumption. There are also many researchers who believe that chimpanzees, cats, dogs, octopuses…even plants have some level of consciousness. And there’s absolutely no definitive evidence that the exact layout of your brain cells’ network connections (called the “connectome”, hence the company’s name) will automatically produce consciousness.

We know that it’s possible to turn consciousness off through the use of anaesthetic drugs, but we don’t even know exactly how they do that. Different anaesthetics work on different parts of the brain, so it seems there are numerous ways to interrupt consciousness, but that doesn’t enable researchers to point the finger at exactly which aspects of the brain make consciousness happen. The only theory I know of that offers an actual mechanism behind consciousness involves quantum theory and proposes that consciousness is a property of the universe as much as gravity and light, and somehow our brains are able to tap into the universal “proto-consciousness”. (It’s called Orch-OR and it’s way too complicated to explain here, but I kind of like it.) However, there’s no proof that any electronic construction could ever become conscious. In fact, the only reason people talk about “uploading consciousness” at all is because of the current popular assumption that our brains are like computers, and once we can create digital computers that can perform as many computational processes as our brains at equivalent speeds, voilà: computer consciousness arises like the Lady of the Lake.

It ain’t necessarily so. People once compared the brain to a telegraph switching station because it was the information processing technology they knew.

A world-wide consortium of researchers has simulated the 302 neuron ‘brain’ of a round worm called C elegans with great precision. Unfortunately the simulated C elegans just lies there—they can’t prod it into doing anything on its own. And even they wouldn’t argue that a worm is conscious. But if, with hugely powerful computers, they can’t make a working simulation of a brain that has only 302 neurons (compared to the hundred billion in the human brain), I have to think that something’s missing. I’m convinced that consciousness requires a whole range of processes, some of which we may never understand. The connectome of the brain is just one piece.

Even if we are someday able to upload consciousness (I am a science fiction writer, after all) Nectome, and the cryo-preservation companies like it, all presuppose that future generations will want to go to the trouble of reviving dead people from 2018. Why would they, except for, perhaps, a little anthropological curiosity about our life and times? Considering the yottabytes of information we’re producing on the internet, I’m sure one or two former-humans would be enough to fill in any gaps. If you’re Elon Musk or Donald trump, they might be interested in you (for vastly different reasons), but just another average millionaire with more money than you know what to do with…? Probably not.

So if endless selfies aren’t enough for you, and you’ve always wanted your grandchildren to have a molecularly-correct glass copy of your brain as a paperweight, then go ahead and spend the money. Just don’t expect it to make you immortal.

IS YOUNG BLOOD THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH?

We can never know who was the first elder to wonder whether a dose of blood from somebody younger could make them young again, but I’ll bet it was near the dawn of the human race. In those days eating the victim was probably the preferred technique. Vampire mythology linked drinking blood with immortality and, of course, there was the infamous Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory who supposedly bathed in the blood of young girls (though those stories probably aren’t true). But this is 2018—we can get a blood transfusion instead.

A recent episode of the CBC science program “Quirks & Quarks” included an interview with Dr. Saul Villeda, who’s been following up on earlier research into blood-swapping in mice. The process is called parabiosis and there was some promising research in the 1970’s which showed that the vital organs and brains of older mice could be rejuvenated when the mice were surgically joined to young mice and shared the same blood. After waning in popularity, the procedure has had a resurgence in the past decade with equally encouraging results and a strong focus on learning the chemical mechanisms involved. After all, if the blood of young mice can help the regrowth of muscle and liver cells, repair damaged spinal cords, enhance the growth of new brain cells, and even make the old mice’s fur shinier, think of the implications if this could work in humans. A clinical trial involving Alzheimer patients is not yet complete, but you can imagine the excitement a positive result would bring.

Various studies have attributed the benefits to the hormone oxytocin (levels in our bodies naturally decline with age), as well as a protein called growth differentiation factor 11 and, in Villeda’s research, to another protein called Tet2. There are probably others. Most of these substances seem to do their work by activating the body’s stem cells (generic cells that can become specialized cells as needed) and by making changes to cellular DNA. It’s important to note that identifying the active components removes the need to use actual blood to get the benefits. Compounds could be synthesized in laboratories. Studies have already shown that blood plasma is effective enough without using whole blood.

But science fiction writers ask, what if…?

What if it became widely confirmed that young blood was like a fountain of youth for older people? You can get a hint from a San Francisco & Tampa company called Ambrosia—they’re conducting clinical research offering patients blood transfusions from young donors for the price of $8,000 per litre or $12,000 for two litres in an outpatient treatment they say takes about two hours. Their study results haven’t been published yet, but so far they claim, “Our patients have reported improvements in areas such as energy, memory, and skin quality.”

For now, it’s just a metaphor that the ultra-wealthy of the world are “bloodsuckers, feeding on the poor”, but that could literally come true. The rich might buy perpetual youth and longer life from those who need to sell their very blood to buy food. And that’s the rosier scenario. Something tells me that a black market wouldn’t take long to develop. Criminal elements would get involved. Blood “donors” might be unwilling victims, assaulted or killed for their young blood.

SF writers before me have imagined societies where “organ-legging” is a widespread criminal activity keeping the wealthy in replacement organs when their own fail. What if the contraband is blood? Will we have a completely stratified society between a nearly immortal elite and an underclass with venous catheters installed at birth? Will Hollywood depend on a blood ghetto to keep its stars beautiful? What would the long-term effect of such things be on the human gene pool? And how long would it take before someone tried to use such methods to create a super race?

My opinion? Better to give these researchers lots of funding so they can find the chemicals involved and replicate them in factories, rather than wait until the blood of our young people becomes a hot commodity.

NANOBOTS TO THE RESCUE

Image courtesy of ASU Biodesign Institute

The invention of the microscope might not have started humankind’s interest in the study of very small things, but it certainly provided a major boost. Within the past century we’ve seen advancements like the electron scanning microscope that enables scientists to not only see atomic-sized objects but also manipulate them, and chemical technologies like CRISPR/Cas9 used to edit living genes. Nanoscience is making significant progress in medical fields, including  the prospect of some day having robotic devices too small to see programmed to circulate through our bloodstream and keep us healthy.

Maybe that idea was inspired by the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage which featured a team of scientists in a submarine shrunk down to microscopic size, racing through a bloodstream to dissolve a potentially fatal blood clot and save a man’s life. Loving that idea (but reluctant to write about shrink rays) I wrote a (so-far-unpublished) novel and published a prequel story to it called “Shakedown” that featured a nano-scale submersible piloted remotely through the bloodstream using virtual reality. You can read “Shakedown” here. While both stories are science fiction, the reality is coming closer than ever.

New work performed by Arizona State University along with China’s National Center for Nanoscience and Technology is an astonishing step forward.

Cancer tumours are like other living tissue in that they need circulation of blood to survive. They have their own blood vessels, just like our skin and organs. So what if you could cut off that blood supply to a tumour without harming healthy cells around it?

Great idea—the problem is how to do it. We know that an enzyme called thrombin is used by the body to seal wounds and keep our blood from leaking out. Thrombin binds a substance called fibrin with platelets to produce clotting at the wound. A good thing. Mind you, blood clots in the wrong places can be deadly to tissues, causing embolisms and possibly strokes. A bad thing. Unless you could find a way to cause blood clots only in the blood vessels of cancer tumours.

That’s what the Arizona  and Chinese scientists have done, and in a brilliant way.

They had to solve two problems: how to deliver thrombin through the bloodstream to the site of the tumour, and how to keep it from accidentally affecting blood vessels of healthy tissue. The delivery system they developed uses DNA—yes, the stuff in our genes that carries the information that makes our bodies the way they are. Turns out DNA can be folded in lots of ways. So these scientists have performed DNA origami, making little DNA tubes with thrombin molecules inside them. Kind of like a tube of tennis balls. Then, to make sure this special package gets delivered only to the right address, they attached a chemical called a DNA aptamer that’s attracted to a protein only found on the surface of the tumour cells, not on healthy cells.

Apparently, the system has worked well in tumours in mice, producing substantial blockages and the consequent deaths of the tumour cells.

You’ll know by now that lots of work remains to be done before the technique can be used on humans, but there’s no reason to believe it won’t happen. And that’s just one example of the progress being made. Maybe, you’ll quibble, a folded tube of DNA isn’t exactly a robot, and a chemical bonding agent can’t truly be called “programming”. Well, I think that will come too, someday. In the meantime, every new nano-medical success is something worth celebrating.

IS OUR ELECTRONIC CIVILIZATION TOO VULNERABLE?

2012 Coronal Mass Ejection (solar superstorm)

In the 2003 movie The Core Earth’s molten core stops spinning, which causes the planet’s magnetic field to fail and disaster ensues. A team of brilliant scientists (played by some good actors like Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank) uses a giant burrowing machine to drill down to the core and explode nuclear warheads to restart the circulation. It’s a plot you’d expect from a 1950’s B-movie, and that’s probably why I like it, but it’s generally considered a ‘guilty pleasure’ movie at best. Still, it got some things right. A weakening of our magnetic field could leave our electronics-based civilization frighteningly vulnerable, and threaten most life on Earth. A complete loss would be disastrous. And some scientists are raising the alarm.

Maybe you did experiments with magnets and iron filings in school, or maybe you’ve just seen drawings of a magnetic field—curved lines around the magnet that curl in and touch the positive and negative poles at each end. In Earth’s case, the north and south poles. Our planet is like a ball in the middle of a giant invisible doughnut. Without that field, we couldn’t live here, and it may be in danger of collapse.

It isn’t because the Earth’s core has shown signs of stopping. No, the concern comes from the fact that we know from geological records (indicators in ancient rock) that the magnetic field has switched poles pretty often during Earth’s history. North becomes South and the magnetic flow reverses. Though the time between such flips varies a lot, it’s averaged about every 200,000 to 300,000 years, and it’s been 780,000 years since the last one so some scientists say we’re overdue.

So what’s the big deal? Your compass reads north when you’re facing south, and some migratory birds get confused? Sure, but it’s what happens during the transition that’s the problem. You guessed it: the magnetic field is significantly weakened—possibly reduced to as little as ten percent of its usual strength at times. And the pole reversal isn’t quick, like flicking a switch. Indications from rock layers show that it might take thousands of years. The unreliability of a compass heading will be the least of our worries.

What makes the Earth’s magnetic field so critical is that it protects the planet’s surface from a bombardment of high-energy particles from space that can wreck DNA in living organisms (causing mutations and cancers, or even quicker cell deaths) and overloads electric wiring and electronic circuitry. That bombardment is happening all the time, but it gets much worse when our sun has indigestion. Solar storms send out mammoth flares of high-energy X-rays and particles plus ionized gases that can really mess up our communications and power grids. A flare in March of 1989 knocked out power all across the Canadian province of Quebec, but it was much smaller than an event recorded back in 1859 when telegraph wires were first spreading over the continents. Known as the Carrington event, that one was so powerful that the northern lights were seen as far south as Tahiti and Cuba. Not only did overloaded equipment fail under the strain, many of the telegraph cables themselves caught fire! And that was with the planet’s protective magnetic field at full strength.

As recently as 2012 a solar storm at least as powerful as the 1859 event sprayed deadly energy out into space, but we dodged that bullet—the storm was on a part of the sun facing away from Earth. A week or ten days earlier, it would have hit us. Here's a good NASA video about the near miss and what could have happened. Now imagine if it had hit us when the magnetic poles had begun a reversal and the Earth’s shielding was at only ten percent of normal.

It’s not a pretty picture. Ionized particles would fry the circuitry of satellites. Magnetic induction would produce enormous amounts of electric current throughout our power grids, blowing transformers and other equipment everywhere exposed to the blast. And since we just don’t have huge numbers of spare transformers lying around, some analysts estimate our civilization could be knocked back to Victorian times.

That’s a worst case scenario raised in the recently published The Spinning Magnet by journalist Alanna Mitchell, and mentioned elsewhere. Others strenuously downplay the danger, although even they admit that we would do well to prepare for fluctuations in the strength of the magnetic field by fortifying our power grids and technological infrastructure.

Whether such a crisis is imminent or not, it sure provides fodder for some juicy disaster fiction! (But solid SF writers, please. Not Hollywood—they just don’t seem to know the difference between meaty and cheesy.)

DOES PSEUDO-SCIENCE HAVE A PLACE IN SCIENCE FICTION?

Blogging about the writing of science fiction, I’ve mentioned how tough it is to stay up-to-date on real science and make plausible forecasts about the future. Sometimes scientific theories rejected by the establishment of the time are vindicated by later research, so where do you draw the line between “real” science and ideas labelled “pseudo-science” when it comes to storytelling? After all, we writers take “artistic license” with history and other facts all the time for the sake of a good story (don’t get me started about Hollywood). If you check Wikipedia for a list of topics considered pseudo-science, it’s a long list that includes many established religious beliefs as well as the methods used by your favourite chiropractor or acupuncturist! So how many currently-unprovable concepts are OK to use in science fiction before you’ve blundered across the skeptical divide into fantasy?

Physicists laugh about an esoteric energy called orgone first proposed in the 1930’s by Wilhelm Reich as a kind of universal life force (and still supported by some fringe medical practitioners and others). Yet, what would Star Wars be without The Force? (Mind you it also has ships “making the jump to light speed”, which would have Einstein rolling in his grave so, OK, maybe Star Wars is fantasy.) But Star Trek is science fiction, right? Well, I personally have doubts we’ll ever see transporter technology but it sure makes the stories work better. And think of all of the iconic galactic-empire/federation-type novels that depend on some form of faster-than-light travel because otherwise space is just too damn big. So what if Relativity theory forbids it! The same can be said of time travel, but it’s another of the major tropes of SF and underpins a whole lot of my favourite stories.

Pseudoscience? Or just wishful thinking?

The related concepts of scalar waves, zero point field/energy, and the EM drive are really popular with the fringe crowd, with claims of free energy, propulsion, and healing applications. Even so, zero point energy is used in the ambitious novel Encounter With Tiber co-written by John Barnes and none other than Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin. And Arthur C. Clarke gave the book a glowing blurb. Our current understanding of physics insists that, although the vacuum of space has huge energy potential, its equilibrium precludes us making any use of that energy. But who knows what work-arounds could be discovered someday? So is it nonsense to make use of such an idea in purportedly credible SF?

The idea that advanced aliens visited the earth in the past and a) created humans, b) set us on the course toward intelligence (eg. 2001: A Space Odyssey), c) formed the basis for the pantheon of ancient gods and demi-gods, or d) all of the above and more…well it may be mocked as a scientific theory, but has sure proved its potential for some terrific tales.

What about body memory—the thought that memories can reside in body cells other than the brain? I wrote a noir story about a dying man who gets a new body only to discover it isn’t a cloned model but was “previously enjoyed”, because it remembers dying under suspicious circumstances. It’s the title story of a small collection called Body Of Opinion and other stories which you can pick up at my bookstore page. Creepy, but a lot of fun.

One of my very favourite pseudo-scientific concepts in fiction is ESP. I’m a huge fan of John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids with its telepathic communication—I’d love to have that ability, and have used a number of variations on it in my own writing. I think it’s very likely that, when we do encounter an advanced non-human race, communication will also be non-verbal and maybe non-physical. We should prepare by practicing up our mind-melds, don’t you think?

There are a lot more: the concept that our bodies have their own energy field (the qi, for instance), torsion fields for faster-than-light communication, collective memory, various forms of life after death. Heck even the very idea of extraterrestrial aliens is unproven so far.

Pseudoscience?

Only for now, my friend. Only for now.

CAN SF OFFER BETTER WAYS TO GET FROM HERE TO THERE?

Over the recent holiday season my wife and I visited family in a large city, including lots of experience with public and private transportation. Subways, streetcars, buses, and hours in a private car over snow-and-traffic-clogged highways moving little or not at all. It made me wonder again why we still don’t have better ways of getting from place to place—faster and more convenient ways. Sure, there are lots of good things to be said about newer mass transit vehicles, given the challenges. But individual self-driving pods would be a lot nicer, and when I consider the four-hour and six-hour drives that separate us from some family members, a Star Trek transporter or Larry Niven’s stepping disks would be a godsend!

It’s often pointed out that, after nearly a century of imagining them, we still don’t have flying cars. Actually, some do exist but they’re hideously expensive prototypes that would still be revoltingly expensive in production, and none are really practical for the workday commute. More like a quirky toy for the private pilot who likes to keep his aircraft in his own garage.

At the other end of the cost scale are a lot of wacky personal street devices that mostly look like variations on a powered skateboard. Fun, maybe, but not terribly useful on a crowded sidewalk or a roadway with cars. Not to mention stairs! Check out this video.

A cool site called Technovelgy has collected transportation concepts proposed in dozens of works of science fiction. It’s revealing that almost all of them fall into a small number of basic categories: cars, flying belts, maglev transports, moving roadways, and teleportation.

Since the invention of the automobile we’ve been obsessed with personal vehicles—might as well call them cars—fast, often self-driving, sometimes self-levitating for a smoother and faster drive, very often able to fly, and once in a while even able to travel in time (who can ever forget Back to the Future’s DeLorean?) The self driving car is enticingly close to becoming practical, and could make a huge difference to urban commuting, if only by eliminating torrents of rage over every other driver’s utter incompetence! I enjoy driving, but I’d gladly give up the privilege in urban environments in exchange for knowing that none of the other vehicles was controlled by idiots. Again, flying cars would be great for long-distance travel but not worth sky-high prices to most people. And amphibious cars would be a treat for those of us who live on islands, but of no value to almost anyone else.

Of course, the terrific versatility of a flying belt (or rocket pack, or maybe the turbofan-powered Martin jetpack) is very appealing. Who doesn’t wish they could fly like a bird? Zip anywhere without waiting in line-ups or hunting for a parking space. But so far its physical manifestations have been lacking, with serious safety and distance limitations. Bad weather would be a pain, too. Given the impressive advances in drone technology due to improvements in battery tech, I can’t say that we’ll never get to a practical personal lifting device. Solving antigravity would do it, but I don’t think I’ll hold my breath for that just yet.

Magnetically-levitating trains, monorails, and personal transport pods already exist, providing much greater speeds than normal tracks. New proposals, like Elon Musk’s Hyperloop (in a vacuum tunnel to further enhance speed) and Tel Aviv’s SkyTran have promise. But development costs are terribly high, which means that governments rarely move ahead with them until conditions get truly desperate. And high-speed maglev transports are really only an advantage over longer distances, not for downtown urban traffic.

For the city dweller, moving sidewalks and roadways might be the answer if we could solve issues of inertia and momentum. We already have “human conveyor belts” in places like airports, but more than one speed is rarely offered. Even in the 1940’s Robert Heinlein described side-by-side “slideways” with velocities up to 100 miles per hour, but did he really think through what it would be like to step from the 60 mph belt to the 80 mph belt beside it? Without some kind of inertia-dampening field, spectacular face-plants would be the norm. And don’t suggest the pneumatic tube variation used in Futurama—an air lift tube might work as a strictly vertical elevator, but otherwise no thanks!

What about teleportation—the most versatile and convenient of all? As big a fan as I am of Star Trek, I have a hard time believing that its transporter technology will ever be possible. That a computing device could accurately locate and reproduce billions of atoms constantly in motion, including electrons in their shells of probability, seems unlikely. I actually consider it more likely (though admittedly not by much!) that a means might be found to warp and pierce space/time in such a way as to produce personal wormholes that would allow us to slip instantly from place to place. I like the idea, until I start to imagine the universe as Swiss cheese.

There is a fringe concept in cosmology proposing that at the quantum level of the zero point field lies an ultimate blueprint underlying the entire cosmos, describing the nature and location of everything. If it's true, and if we could ever decode that information and manipulate it, theoretically we could transform any kind of matter into any other kind. But, more to the point of this blog, we could change our own location coordinates and thereby reappear anywhere we wanted to be. We wouldn’t be travelling in any sense, we’d be altering the condition of the very universe, with ourselves in a different place and time than before. Instantaneous. Painless. Worry-free. (Although you’d have to know your destination with perfect precision and be able to harmlessly remove any matter already existing in that space, or trade places with it.)

Interesting refinements of the regular transportation modes crop up all the time (check out super-cavitating boats and city-wide zip lines in this Listverse article, plus solar-powered and magnetically-charged buses). But it would be cool to come up with something truly new—beyond the main categories—and be able to implement it within our lifetime. My saddle sore backside would thank you.

WHY GO BACK TO THE MOON?

Saturn Apollo image courtesy of NASA

U.S. President Donald Trump signed a directive this week instructing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to once again focus on sending a human crew to the Moon. Humans haven’t been on the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in December of 1972—forty-five years ago—although there have been robotic probe landings by Russia and China. Former President Barack Obama had urged a crewed landing on an asteroid instead, as practice for a Mars voyage. So why does Trump prefer to shift the focus back to the Moon (although, notably, there haven’t yet been any announcements about funding or a timetable)? Perhaps because the Chinese space agency previously announced plans for a manned lunar landing by 2036, and appeared to confirm that intention this past June.

Other than “staying in the lead” in manned lunar exploration, as Trump puts it, why should anyone put that much money and effort into landing humans on the Moon again? It’s already been done.

Actually, I find myself in the rare position of agreeing with The Donald this time. There are lots of reasons that a focus on further Moon exploration is not misplaced. It offers many advantages over other possible destinations in the short term. One of them is that we have already been there, so we have a good idea what to expect, which means explorers can pay less attention to the process of getting and staying there, and more on learning stuff.

The Moon offers a huge surface area and the great variety of its topography can benefit a multitude of purposes. For both research and manufacturing, it provides the advantages of low gravity and a vacuum environment without the disadvantages of zero gravity: liquids can pour, air can circulate thermally, and there is an “up” and a “down” (no small point when you’re working with tools). Extremely high temperatures and extremely low temperatures are both available for a couple of weeks at a time (as compared, for example, to a spinning asteroid). Water on the Moon can be used for human consumption, but also processed to make oxygen for rocket fuel and other chemical reactions. Radio telescopes and other electromagnetic sensing technology can operate on the farside to take advantage of the Moon’s great bulk to block interference from Earth.

We badly need to learn more about the mineral composition of the Moon at large because, in spite of the Apollo missions and numerous unmanned landings, the areas sampled still comprise only a very small percentage of what’s there. Minerals and other elements found on the Moon can not only be used to produce infrastructure on site, but also hurled by mass launchers throughout the solar system much more cheaply than by using rockets and at vastly less expense than shipping objects from Earth. Along with mineral resources native to the Moon, there are certain to be metals and other valuable commodities from the many asteroid strikes on its surface.

From a purely scientific point of view, the Moon can teach us about the origins of the solar system, the accretion of planets, the formation of orbits, and more about asteroids (from those many impact craters).

But the most important advantage of the Moon is that it’s so close. Only a three day journey away. Locations on the near side are in a direct line-of-sight from Earth. Communications suffer a time lag of just over a second instead of many minutes. All of that means lower costs in fuel, time, and crew stress. Less exposure to cosmic radiation (one of the most serious obstacles that Mars-trip planners are struggling to overcome). A much greater chance of rescue in the event of a serious accident. Smaller and less complicated spacecraft (with a reduced need for shielding, extensive recycling facilities, or physical fitness equipment). Much more attractive time-frames for potential space tourists. And the list goes on.

We still have a huge amount to learn about living and working in space. Much of it will inevitably be through trial and error. Although still hazardous, to be sure, the Moon is a safer, more practical practice environment than anywhere else beyond our home planet. In our long journey toward the stars, it’s our front porch.

From a science fiction perspective, our giant natural satellite has captivated our imaginations forever, and there are far too many wonderful literary speculations about it for me to begin to list them. But I do want to touch on one. The premise of Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel”, later to form the basis of 2001: A Space Odyssey is exquisitely logical. That an extraterrestrial species which visited our planet just at the dawn of human intelligence would place a device on the Moon to alert them when humanity reaches the level of space-faring technology is not far-fetched at all. I consider it almost inevitable.

So, yes, let’s go back to the Moon. Let’s find the doorbell and ring it, and then wait to see who answers.

OUR FIRST INTERSTELLAR VISITOR

NASA JPL artist's illustration

Some of us believe that our solar system has had visitors from other stars, and others don’t. But last month there was concrete proof.

(Actually, it’s probably rock, not concrete, but it is real and it came from “way out there”.)

It’s an asteroid given the name Oumuamua (a Hawaiian word meaning “a messenger from afar arriving first”) discovered by the Pan-STARRS1 observatory in Maui on October 19, 2017. Not a spaceship full of alien invaders, thankfully, but still pretty interesting because it’s the first confirmed sighting of an object passing through our solar system that we know came from beyond its borders. Oumuamua’s regular changes in brightness lead scientists to believe that it’s probably cigar-shaped, perhaps four hundred meters long (about the size of a very large aircraft carrier) and rotating along its length. None of the asteroids in our system are that shape, which only adds to the mystery. It hurtled around the sun in a path resembling a comet’s orbit but it has no tail or accompanying gas cloud, and it entered the system from far above the plane of the ecliptic (the disk-like zone in which the planets and most other material orbit the sun). It wasn’t spotted until after it had already passed close to the sun, a swing-by that gave it much greater speed and a whole new direction. Don’t worry, it’s not going to come anywhere near Earth, although some scientists are so excited about it that they’re proposing an urgent effort to send a rocket chasing after it.

That probably won’t happen, firstly because such projects can’t be put together overnight, and secondly, because the chase rocket would have to go faster than any man-made object yet created. Still, you can understand their interest. Oumuamua is already changing thinking about the composition of solar systems, and who knows what else we could learn with a good close look? Think of how long it must have been wandering through the void; an orphan; a leftover from the formation of another star, flung away from its home by a Neptune-like planet. Even if it isn’t occupied by anything living, it could provide a lot of physical evidence about conditions long ago in a [star system] far, far away.

A science fiction reader learning of Oumuamua will inevitably be reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s landmark 1973 novel Rendezvous With Rama, which won just about every SFF award that ever existed. In the novel, a 50-kilometer-long cylindrical object is discovered passing through the solar system and is found to be a mammoth spacecraft—pretty much an artificial world in a big can (reminiscent of a space colony design that’s known as an O’Neill cylinder). Coincidentally, in the story Rama is discovered by a (then fictional) program called Spaceguard tasked with finding and tracking space objects that might threaten Earth—exactly the same job the Pan-STARRS1 observatory was doing when it found Oumuamua!

Could the roving asteroid actually be an alien spacecraft? Well, there haven’t been any signs of that, but we don’t know nearly enough about it to give a definitive No either. And I’m certain that such a possibility has crossed the minds of those scientists so eager to send a reconnaissance mission after it. How could they help but wonder? Unfortunately, Clarke’s book is set in 2131 when spacecraft technology is capable of chasing and catching up with Rama. Our century has seen the Rosetta space probe rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko—an outstanding feat—but we’re just not up to sending a team of explorers after Oumuamua.

There are similar SF stories, including an excellent novel by Greg Bear called Eon and its sequels, which tell of a giant hollowed-out asteroid that appears in orbit around Earth and includes a long corridor that may lead beyond this universe. Don’t be surprised to see more such tales to come, inspired by the discovery of Oumuamua. Especially since the asteroid approached from a direction called the solar apex, a point in the sky toward which the solar system moves in its orbit through the galaxy.

Which means that wherever Oumuamua came from, we’re headed that way!

GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT PRESERVING SPECIES

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I’ve mentioned more than once that Earth is a fragile place. Precarious would be an appropriate description of life here. Scientists believe there have been five mass extinctions of life forms over Earth’s history. The worst one took 96% of marine species and about 70% of land creatures. But species are going extinct all the time, and that sad state has only grown worse as humanity has grown more powerful. We also lose great numbers of crop species as plant breeding and genetic modification, along with the trend to giant corporate farms, drastically decreases the variety of our food crops being planted.

We could do a lot to prevent this just by cleaning up our act—producing less pollution and curtailing our ravenous appetite for the environments other species call home. It’s bad enough that living entities face danger from droughts and other weather fluctuations, predators, pests, and disease, without humans adding to the toll. There’s always the chance, too, that some large disaster will wipe out species on a vast scale. It could be a nuclear war, nanotechnology run amok, an asteroid strike, or even malicious action by an alien force from beyond our atmosphere, whether sentient or microscopic. Earth is still the only place in the universe that we know is home to living things, and that’s a heritage too precious to leave at risk.

There are many efforts to protect life forms here on Earth, including wildlife preserves and parks, but also many seed vaults and gene banks around the world. A reader of this blog named Mike reminded me of them, and has written on his own website about what is probably the most famous: the Svalbard International Seed Vault, a so-called "doomsday vault" on the island of Spitsbergen, Norway. There are upwards of 1400 seed vaults around the world, but other facilities preserve genetic material from both plants and animals, and sometimes actual specimens. Some of the very largest are in the UK, US, Russia, and India. All of these efforts are to be commended, yet since they’re all on Earth they still face risk from earthquakes, storms, floods, human conflict, and even rampant industrial development.

Isn’t it time we took a longer view and made efforts to preserve species from Earthbound hazards by creating real “offsite” storage sites—meaning off-planet? Whether on the frozen spaces of the Moon, in a hallowed-out asteroid, or even in the far reaches of the solar system like Pluto, there’d be no worries about weather, oxidation, or corruption by germs. With any luck, it’ll be a while before human conflicts get that far out, too. Yes, we’d have to protect the samples from cosmic radiation and possibly extremes of temperature, but that would mainly be a matter of picking the right sites. Of course, it will be even better when we can take actual living creatures beyond the Earth, but genetic samples are better than nothing.

Since I like to tie my science in with science fiction, I have to admit the scenario sparks my imagination too. Imagine the story potential of sending Earth life out into the void.

Survivors of a planet-wide holocaust could, of course, use the contents of the gene vaults to reproduce Earth life on a new colony world, or maybe even time travel to a prehistoric Earth and seed it with familiar species they know can survive there. Alternatively, they could try to rehabilitate the Earth in their present-day or at a key moment in the apocalypse that would prevent complete destruction.

By happenstance, the contents of one or more gene vaults might end up on another hospitable planet far away and eons in the future, and become exposed to the local environment in such a way that Earth life spontaneously regenerates.

A powerful being or beings might create a duplicate Earth for reasons of their own with a variety not seen in human history.

There are also endless “B” movie possibilities. Radiation, alien microbial life, or tampering by extraterrestrials could mutate our animals, insects, or plants into monstrous forms we wouldn’t recognize (until they suddenly appear in some remote outpost and start eating the crew!)

Invading aliens might use the genetic material to disguise themselves and infiltrate Earth without us ever being the wiser. At the very least, they could learn the most efficient ways of attacking us long before getting close enough to Earth to be detected.

Oops, those examples may have undermined my argument a little (especially the “B” movie ones), but the truth is that every life form is precious and deserving of preservation (OK, mosquitoes are on the borderline) and as the only species on Earth capable of doing anything about it, that task is up to us. Let’s not put it off until it’s too late.

IMAGINE YOUR NEXT HOME HERE...

In my last blog post I suggested that overcrowding on Earth isn’t sufficient reason to colonize other planets because there are still lots of alternative places we could inhabit right here on Mother Earth, like the deserts, the oceans, or even Antarctica. But getting a little more creative, there are still more interesting options to look at.

Underground: There aren’t a lot of practical reasons we can’t live underground, more or less in giant skyscrapers that go down instead of up, at least in places amenable to digging deep holes (not in flood plains or coastal areas). A lot of SF books, including the hugely popular Wool series by Hugh Howey, have suggested that we might have to live that way in the event that some catastrophe makes the surface unliveable. We can get water, air, and energy down there, and the temperature is consistently warm. We just don’t like living where we can’t see the sun. But it’s conceivable that we might be able to manufacture sun lamps whose rays are very close to the real thing. Or even develop ways to channel real sunlight deep into the ground without much loss. Colonies on our Moon or the moons of the gas giant planets would likely be underground too. Even surface habitats beyond Mars would get very little sun.

Up in the Air: One of the most exciting visuals in SFF movies is the floating city, which would probably require the discovery of antigravity. But there are other ways to live the high life. Airship technology using Kevlar fabric and recent energy and motor developments enables the creation of some truly gigantic platforms that can ply the stratosphere up above all that inconvenient weather, where solar power is abundant. The first commercial applications will probably be the stratellites being built by Sanswire and Tao Technologies for wireless communications, but who’s to say we won’t see stratospheric luxury condos sometime soon? It might not be feasible to house large populations that way, and access to staples other than energy (like food and water) might be problematic, but the available space is there.

Mountains: There’s a lot of territory that’s unpopulated because flat floor space is at a premium. That said, we have lots of experience with construction on slopes (as opposed to, say, in a vacuum), and the main difficulty, as with airships, would be delivering food, water, and other goods to the homestead. But perhaps some improvement of the old pneumatic tube mail delivery system used in early office buildings could serve. Or maybe a variation based on magnetism. I’m not an engineer, but transportation and delivery of commodities is something we also have a lot of experience with, and the invention of new technologies might not be necessary.

And finally…

Digital space? Maybe Ray Kurzweil and others who herald the coming Singularity are right, and humanity will at some point dispense with physical bodies and merge with artificially intelligent machines or otherwise upload our consciousness into digital (i.e. virtual) real estate. Our physical space requirements would certainly drop (though no one really knows how much hard drive space a human would take up!) Especially if quantum computing becomes reliable, including storage media. You may say that’s much farther off in the future than Martian colonies but I’m not so sure. Information technologies have been developing at a faster rate than space tech lately, and its impossible to predict what sudden breakthroughs could arrive in either field and change the picture overnight.

Even if you’re someone who’s intent on seeing humans colonize other worlds, futurists like Marshall T. Savage, author of the book The Millennial Project—Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps suggest that creating self-sustaining colonies in Earth environments like our oceans is important practice before we take the big step beyond our friendly ocean of air. Let’s make sure we can get it right here before we put lives at risk “out there”.

From the perspective of a science fiction writer, I’ll still write about space colonies. It’s fun! But I just might direct a little more imaginative focus toward the creative ways we could use to keep calling Mother Earth home.