Thursday, March 17, 2011

De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum


Meta raised its head again, in a big way, in discussion of the last couple of posts on FTL. This should not be a surprise, because the rather problematic physics of FTL brings us very close to the boundary line between science fiction and science fantasy. (Including the question of whether it is valid to distinguish them at all.)

The perspective of this blog from its beginning has been that SF is a subgenre of Romance, a term now narrowed down by marketers to a different subgenre of itself. Romance in all its subgenres is distinct from 'realistic' fiction, which is largely why academic literary criticism has been rather nonplussed by it. Realism, in this context, is mostly about psychological realism in characterization, not Realism [TM] in technology, physics, or other aspects of the setting.

Yet that latter kind of Realism [TM] is itself a very relative thing, and arguably amounts largely to a stylistic flourish. Take for example the question of space warfare, a subject that probably drew many of you to this blog.

There is, to be blunt, precious little 'realistic' about clashes of armadas in deep space. Half a century of space travel combined with enormous military budgets has shown mainly that the world's major militaries have zero interest in space armadas. The US never deployed any manned space warcraft, unless you count 'Blue Shuttle' (which the USAF never wanted). The Soviet-era Russians dabbled a bit, but soon lost interest.

For that matter, from a genuinely realistic perspective there is not much basis for any of the familiar space tropes that we know and mostly love here. The exploration and exploitation of space, as of the ocean floor, is much better suited to robotic or remote-controlled vehicles and systems. Deep space does add the complication of light lag: Teleoperators at JPL in Pasadena can't guide machines on Mars in real time. But this is only a limited constraint, and - let's be honest - there are cheaper and more convenient workarounds than sending hundred-ton human habs to Mars, at enormous cost, plus the even more enormous cost of bringing them and their crews back safely.

Any number of unforeseen circumstances might change all this, and provide some McGuffinite that justifies extensive human space travel. We have discussed such possibilities before on this blog, and you can safely guess that we will discuss them again.


Stories about space travel, on the other hand, require no such hypothetical McGuffinite. It is sufficient that space travel is Cool. But even fictional space travel is subject to the willing suspension of disbelief.

How disbelief gets suspended, and in what ways, is in fact arbitrary and genre-dependent. Practically all fiction, including realistic fiction in the conventional sense, expects us to take its characters as people, not figments of the author's imagination. Even traditional literary criticism joins in this pretense, talking about Achilles or Elizabeth Bennet as if they were actual people. Experimental fiction that overtly admits to being fictional is arguably 'metafiction,' while time-honored framing devices for fantastic fiction, such as the old lost manuscript, have long fallen out of active use, and would be evoked today only for retro flavor.

I have an aesthetic bias in favor of the trappings of Realism [TM], both in the technical details of spaceships and the social details of why someone is paying to have them built, which is why Rocketpunk Manifesto belabors all of those questions about why people might actually go into space in large numbers.

It is important to emphasize that this is precisely an aesthetic bias, and my biases can be amazingly idiosyncratic and narrow. For example, spaceships that look like the Navajo missile of the 1950s are both coolific and Realistic [TM] in my eye, while spaceships that look like a V-2 with wings look corny, dated, and implausible. Never mind that they are both equally genuine design concepts, little more than a decade apart and both more than half a century old - or even that one evolved directly from the other. One looks right to me, while the other doesn't.

Many of my SF biases are reflected by the Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy, from my old static website. Even though it is largely a snark at convention space-fiction tropes, fundamentally that is still how my tastes run. I neither apologize for those tastes nor defend them. These tropes are a perfectly legitimate branch of SF as it has developed over the past century or so, but by no means the only perfectly legitimate branch.

From one perspective, science fiction itself is obsolete - a creation of the industrial revolution, an inherently transitional phase when visions the pre-industrial world could scarcely have imagined became possible to think about, even if some may never be possible to achieve. It is really, really hard today to come up with SF ideas that have never been written before.

On the other hand, SF has permanently expanded the frontiers of Romance - including the revitalization of its bookstore neighbor and rival, fantasy, along with a host of spinoff subgenres. None of it is realistic, but much of it thrives on the artful faking of realism.


Discuss.



The launch images of the SM-64 Navajo come from an aerospace history blog. Compare to the ramjet shuttle at the lower right of the RM logo image above.

220 comments:

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Anonymous said...

So, is it better to write about humans trying to figure out how to communicate with aliens in an academic setting, or running for their lives through a surreal landscape because they inadvertantly insulted the local potentate? The answer, of course, is whether you're rivited by the intallectual challange presented by the first, or laughing your ass off at the second; the story that acheives its goal is the better story. If your story is about space battles and it only makes you yawn, then that story has failed. If the story overcomes its faults, then it succeeds, no matter what the subject or genre is. It dosen't matter if it is space opera, or a fairy tale, or 'hard' SF, so long as the reader enjoys the story; that should be the ultimate goal of any story.

Ferrell

Raymond said...

RE: psionics, hive minds, etc

What should be noted is that ant hives are not a unified "mind" of any sort. They're a loosely coupled systems with complex emergent behavior, just like any other organism's group dynamics. Reaction cycles are slow and utterly dependent on preexisting shared rules, and new patterns usually take timeframes closer to evolutionary scales than human ones to be created.

And yes, you can say that human brains are similarly emergent phenomena. To which I'd point out that the relevant feedback systems are orders of magnitude faster.

Telepathy, unless the mechanism is somehow physical (radio, pheromones, subtle facial movements, semaphore, gravitational waves, whatever), has no place in hard SF, frankly. It's magic by another name - and not even Clarkeian magic at that.

As far as the neural links in Avatar, not only do I fail to see the evolutionary advantage for a species incapable of higher-level abstract thought have such an interface, it strikes me as an extreme evolutionary disadvantage to make oneself so vulnerable to neural hacking.

The implications of Toxoplasma gondii already scare the shit out of me - it would be so much worse if it could be done by grabbing my hair the right way.

Milo said...

Raymond:

"Telepathy, unless the mechanism is somehow physical (radio, pheromones, subtle facial movements, semaphore, gravitational waves, whatever), has no place in hard SF, frankly. It's magic by another name - and not even Clarkeian magic at that."

I would be able to accept "cyborg telepathy" through radio chips deliberately planted into your brain, which would allow "telepathic" communication with other people that also willingly implanted such chips.

What I would most definitely not accept is the kind of telepathy where the telepath has an easier time reading the mind of a silicon-based lifeform than she does affecting anything that isn't a brain. This implies a priviledged treatment of sentient minds, which violates the mediocrity principle.

neutrino78x said...

Tony, I never assumed any level of knowledge/credentials on your end.

I don't think current chemical rockets have been exploited to their full potential. That would require a fully reusable SSTO rocket that can be reused more than once in a single day, just by refueling the tanks. VentureStar would be more like it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar

Having said that, there are other alternatives, such as lighter than air balloons, laser launch, coilguns, maglev catapults/assists, aircraft launch (like SpaceShipOne), a space elevator (using nanotech), etc. They all have benefits and drawbacks...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch

--Brian

neutrino78x said...

raymond wrote:

"What should be noted is that ant hives are not a unified "mind" of any sort."

Sure they are. They are not as advanced as the human brain, of course, but they are a kind of hive mind; the group has memories and intelligence that the individuals do not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/interviews/interview/1339/

"And yes, you can say that human brains are similarly emergent phenomena. To which I'd point out that the relevant feedback systems are orders of magnitude faster"

Who is to say that an alien species has not evolved faster means of communication between individuals? Key word being "alien".

"As far as the neural links in Avatar, not only do I fail to see the evolutionary advantage for a species incapable of higher-level abstract thought have such an interface"

It is no different from bees or ants being able to communicate, just faster. Do you fail to see the evolutionary advantage for ants?

"it strikes me as an extreme evolutionary disadvantage to make oneself so vulnerable to neural hacking."

There are disadvantages to our ears not being able to turn in the same way as a cat, but it seems to have been the result in humans. ;-)

--Brian

Milo said...

neutrino78x:

"They are not as advanced as the human brain, of course, but they are a kind of hive mind; the group has memories and intelligence that the individuals do not."

Human civilization as a whole knows more than any single human can. There are facts that will only be realized when several people combine their knowledge, and there is information stored in books that not a single human alive could recall without looking up.

If you consider this to qualify human civilization as a hive mind, then you have defined the meaning of "hive mind" down to the point where the term has no point anymore. This is obviously not the kind of hive mind we are talking about.


"It is no different from bees or ants being able to communicate, just faster. Do you fail to see the evolutionary advantage for ants?"

No, but ants communicate with other ants, and maybe occasionally with something they've evolved a symbiotic relationship with. I do fail to see the evolutionary advantage for ants to learn to talk to anteaters, let alone to give anteaters a means to mind-control them. I also fail to see the evolutionary advantage of ants dropping everything they're doing to help humans fight a war for whatever cause they have decided is important.

Also note that even when talking to others of the same species, they still need to go through the different-species network. (Right?)

An ecosystem where every species in the environment is symbiotic with each other is absurd.



(Also, note a couple of earlier posts of mine that were rescued from the spam filter - as this one will almost certainly need to be too.)

Thucydides said...

Here is a totally bizarre trope, which should (might?) have all kinds of second and third order implications. Talk about a really SFnal backdrop:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/dark-matter-could-make-some-planets.html#more

Dark Matter could make some planets habitable even without a host star
13Share
Arxiv -Dark Matter And The Habitability of Planets

In many models, dark matter particles can elastically scatter with nuclei in planets, causing those particles to become gravitationally bound. While the energy expected to be released through the subsequent annihilations of dark matter particles in the interior of the Earth is negligibly small (a few megawatts in the most optimistic models), larger planets that reside in regions with higher densities of slow moving dark matter could plausibly capture and annihilate dark matter at a rate high enough to maintain liquid water on their surfaces, even in the absence of additional energy from starlight or other sources. On these rare planets, it may be dark matter rather than light from a host star that makes it possible for life to emerge, evolve, and survive.

In this paper, we have calculated the capture rate of dark matter particles in Earth-like and super-Earth planets, and determined the resulting surface temperature of those planets that would result from dark matter annihilations. While planets in the local region of our galaxy receive only a negligible quantity of energy from dark matter annihilations, we fi nd that planets in dwarf spheroidal galaxies and in the innermost volume of the Milky Way could plausibly accumulate and annihilate enough dark matter to heat their surfaces to temperatures capable of sustaining liquid water, even in the absence of energy from starlight or other standard sources.

Although we expect ecologically relevant quantities of energy to be released through dark matter annihilations only within the interiors of planets that reside in very special environments (such as near the Galactic Center, or near the center of a dwarf spheroidal galaxy), and only in the case of dark matter models which feature large elastic scattering cross sections with nuclei (near the current upper limits), we expect that within such models planets will exist which derive enough heat from dark matter to almost indefinitely sustain surface temperatures sufficient to yield liquid water. Even in the absence of starlight, such planets could plausibly contain life. And, given their extremely long lifetimes, such planets may prove to be the ultimate bastion of life in our universe.

Anonymous said...

Thucydides, the article about Dark Matter warmed orphen planets is cool...a story set on such a world would be really cool!

Ferrell

Thucydides said...

So many interesting implications:

1. An orphan planet is most likely to occur in a place like a globular cluster or close to the galactic core where there are lots of chances for planets to be kicked out of orbit by a passing star/body

2. Since the density of dark matter would be somewhat random, there may be ages where the planet passes through thicker or thinner filaments of dark matter, corresponding to events like the Holocene Climate Optimum or "snowball Earth". Should life evolve, it will encounter climactic variation that drives evolution.

3. Near the Galactic core or a globular cluster, it will be bright out due to the high density of stars in the region. Illumination could be brighter than a full moon on Earth. Eyes can evolve and become useful.

4. Since these planets are so far away from Earth, the only way humans or near humans will get there will be via wormholes or something even more exotic. (I doubt we would be able to understand, much less write about the motives of post humans). What does physics say about potential interactions between wormholes and dark matter?

Rick said...

These planets would also probably be much more massive than Earth, with correspondingly higher surface gravitation.

I'd speculate that they would have deep hydrospheres (much deeper than terrestrial oceans) and no dry land, with corresponding evolutionary effects. But if complex life can develop under those conditions, perhaps extensive 'sargasso' mats could develop, providing floating islands of a sort.

Space travel (or space visitation) would be challenging, due to high escape velocity.

Milo said...

Wait, we're postulating things that could happen with dark matter now? Have we even figured out what dark matter is?



Thucydides:

"Since the density of dark matter would be somewhat random, there may be ages where the planet passes through thicker or thinner filaments of dark matter, corresponding to events like the Holocene Climate Optimum or "snowball Earth"."

The thing is, it would have to be very slight variations in density in order to "merely" cause climate shifts like ice ageas, rather than wild temperature swings on the order of Mercury-to-Pluto.



Rick:

"I'd speculate that they would have deep hydrospheres (much deeper than terrestrial oceans) and no dry land, with corresponding evolutionary effects."

A hydrosphere that deep would make life quite difficult, though I won't hazard claiming that it's impossible.

But I'm not convinced a heavy planet would necessarily have oceans that deep. Far more than just gravity can affect water cover (as evidenced by Venus being nearly the same size as Earth yet lacking oceans), and it doesn't seem to me that having a planet "merely" 10 times as heavy as us (which means only just over twice our gravity, or even less if the planet is less dense than Earth, which may well be the case since higher gravity makes it easier to hold on to light materials) would suffice to create orders of magnitude difference in ocean depth. Anyway, we're talking about planets formed under entirely different conditions from the ones we're familiar, so who's even to say what they're made of?

And an ocean can be considerably deeper than ours without flooding the planet. Consider Lyr, which certainly looks drenched, and has oceans averaging 7 km and peaking (trenching?) 19 km deep, and its "land" is just a series of archipelagos covering only 4.5% of its surface. But once you adjust for scale, that's still around three-quarters of Earth's land area! Not bad.


"Space travel (or space visitation) would be challenging, due to high escape velocity."

Well, visitation could use aerobraking. It's getting back off that's the problem, but then anybody that could make an interstellar journey should have (or else not need) the technology for easily lifting off a planet. It's only early Apollo-type space exploration that's hampered.

Rick said...

Wait, we're postulating things that could happen with dark matter now? Have we even figured out what dark matter is?

Thread drift happens! 'Next Big Future' usually pegs my skept-O-meter, but the link seems to be a real if highly speculative scholarly journal paper.

Thucydides said...

Which is the point of this thread (if I am not mistaken); taking speculative ideas and bending them into stories.

The paper referenced is indeed very speculative, but then again so are wormholes, strong AI, Immortality, nanotechnology or time travel, all of which have been featured in many SF novels, movies, webcomics etc. without too many people shouting from the sidelines.

You can already see the process happening; throw out one SFnal assumption (Dark Matter can interact with normal matter and release heat energy) and we are already talking about what sort of planets could form, what implications that would have for geology, the hydrosphere, evolution, space exploration etc.

Tony said...

neutrino78x:

"I don't think current chemical rockets have been exploited to their full potential..."

All of the things you mention are the result of wildly optimistic wishfull thinking, if not outright fraud. Chemical rockets reached their theoretical maximum Isp decades ago, with little subsequent improvement in hardware mass. It just turns out that two stages is about optimum to get into orbit, with a third stage necessary for propel anything useful up to GEO or into an lunar or interplanetary transfer orbit.

Thucydides said...

One more mind blowing idea. Sending energy through superconducting vacuum?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028073.800-how-to-turn-the-vacuum-into-a-superconductor.html

How to turn the vacuum into a superconductor

* 08 April 2011 by Maggie McKee
* Magazine issue 2807. Subscribe and save

TURNING a vacuum into a superconductor could be as simple as zapping it with a super-powerful magnet.

That's according to Maxim Chernodub of the University of Tours in France, who believes powerful magnetic fields could pluck charged particles out of the vacuum of space and set them flowing as a current that never encounters any resistance.

This seemingly bizarre proposal is a consequence of the uncertainty principle of quantum theory, which says we can never be sure that a vacuum is truly empty. Instead, space is fizzing with "virtual" particles, which tend to disappear almost as soon as they form. In principle, however, they could stick around long enough to become real, if they could avoid adding energy to the universe's current tally - in accordance with the law of conservation of energy.

That's exactly what happens when charged particles that behave like tiny bar magnets pop out of the vacuum in a strong magnetic field. The particles rotate so their internal magnetic field aligns with the external one, which decreases the total energy. If the field is strong enough, the virtual particles can become real. "You can add many particles with no cost of energy," says Chernodub. Such particles all share the same quantum state and form what is known as a condensate, in which they flow together as one and carry current without resistance.

Previous research had focused on relatively heavy particles, called W bosons, that pop out of the vacuum in this way. But Chernodub modelled the scenario with lighter particles called rho mesons, which require less powerful magnetic fields to become real.

Chernodub calculates that when the magnetic field reaches 1016 Tesla, condensates of rho mesons should appear from the vacuum.

Chernodub likens the resulting condensate to that formed by ordinary superconductors. Below a certain critical temperature, electrons in these materials bind together in so-called Cooper pairs, which all share the same quantum state and so flow without friction. However, Paul Olesen of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark says the similarity is not exact because ordinary superconductors repel magnetic fields.

Could the vacuum of space be harnessed to create ultra-efficient electricity? Nice idea, says Dmitri Kharzeev of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, but it won't be happening any time soon. The required magnetic field dwarfs even the most magnetic things in the universe today - neutron stars called magnetars, which boast fields of up to 1011 Tesla.

"If Earth's magnetic field were 17 orders of magnitude stronger than it is now, and you could generate energy on a space station in some way, then you would be able to transport current from space to Earth along the lines of magnetic field," says Kharzeev. "We would not need power supply lines, we could transfer current over empty space."

Magnetic fields of the required strength might have existed in the early universe. If that led to superconductivity, then the currents produced might have had some effect on cosmic structure, says Kharzeev. But he adds that the high temperatures at the time may have destroyed the effect.

Today, such magnetic fields might appear fleetingly in Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider or at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. Researchers now plan to search their data for hints of the phenomenon.

Journal reference: Physical Review Letters, DOI:

Thucydides said...

And a totally outrageous setting:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26626/?ref=rss

Planets Could Orbit Singularities Inside Black Holes

The discovery of stable orbits inside certain kinds of black hole implies that planets and perhaps even life could survive inside these weird objects, says one cosmologist

kfc 04/11/2011

* 1 Comment

It's easy to imagine that black holes gobble up everything they encounter, consigning this stuff to eternal oblivion. Right?

Well, not quite. Today, Vyacheslav Dokuchaev at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow points out that certain black holes can have a complex internal structure. And that this structure ought to allow photons, particles and perhaps even planets to orbit the central singularity without ever getting sucked all the way in.

A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. However, cosmologists have known for some time that there are regions inside charged, rotating black holes where objects such as photons can survive in stable periodic orbits.

Dokuchaev's contribution is to study these orbits in detail and to explore their dynamics. One of the problems that would at first seem to scupper any chance of planetary orbits inside a black hole is the way that the dimensions of space and time behave.

It's well known that a traveller passing through a black hole's event horizon arrives in a region in which the radial dimension becomes time-like, rather than space-like. Conventional orbits are clearly impossible here.

But travel further in and there is another horizon where the dimensions switch back again (at least, inside charged and rotating black holes). This is the inner Cauchy horizon and it's beyond here that Dokuchaev says the interesting orbits for massive planets exist.

He calculates that the stable orbits are nonequatorial and have a rich structure (see picture above). They would also be brightly illuminated by the central singularity and by photons trapped in the same orbit.

That raises an interesting question: whether a planet in such an orbit could support a complex chemistry that is rich enough to allow life to evolve.

Dokuchaev clearly thinks so. "Advanced civilizations may live safely inside the supermassive BHs in the galactic nuclei without being visible from the outside," he says, somewhat speculatively.

Of course, such a civilisation would have to cope with extraordinary conditions such as huge tidal forces and the huge energy density that builds up in these stable orbits as photons become trapped. There's also the small problem of causality violations, which some cosmologists predict would plague this kind of tortured space-time.

Dokuchaev has taken an interesting idea and pushed it as far as he can. It's one I suspect readers can have a lot of fun with too.

Rick said...

'Somewhat speculatively' may qualify as the understatement of the millennium, so far (admitting that the millenium is young).

Whether these planets could be reached by a GR-compliant form of FTL is an interesting question but far above my physics pay grade.

Anonymous said...

Planets Could Orbit Singularities Inside Black Holes

Talk about Wonderland!

Ferrell

Thucydides said...

The only thing I can see going wrong in this setting is the number of photons trapped by the event horizon is constantly increasing, so the "sky" will become brighter and brighter without limit.

Of course, this is also "somewhat speculative"....;)

Tony said...

Thucydides:

"The only thing I can see going wrong in this setting is the number of photons trapped by the event horizon is constantly increasing, so the 'sky' will become brighter and brighter without limit.

Of course, this is also 'somewhat speculative'....;)"


That close to a gravitational point source, photons would exhibit ballistic motion and orbit around the singularity until they ran into something. The sky might get "brighter" over time, but by how much would be a function of how much light had fallen past the event horizon over the course of its history. The inside of spinning black holes near large stars or inside galactic nuclei...now those might really be exciting, until your eyeballs fried.

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