Let’s Kill Another Trope

February 15th, 2013 Posted in Science, Writing
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There’s a recurring theme in fantasy and science-fiction: there is something sacred about death. Blurring the line between life and death, usurping and dethroning death, will lead to Bad Things. The hallmark of evil is the defying of death. I once read someone describe Darth Vader as a walking coma patient, and what happens when he turns back to the light? He accepts the ‘natural’ death he’s been denying for so long.

Darth Vader stares at the camera, his outstretched fist clenched

You underestimate the power of homeopathy… and overestimate the value of scientific evidence. I am truly evil.

It’s odd, really. Defying death is an obsession for our culture. Not just CAT scans and laser keyhole surgery, but even down to central heating and surgically sterile food. All to make sure we can live safe, comfortable, long lives. We cling to life with the rabid obsession of Gollum and his precious.

I’m not sure what the word is for my worldview, but I despise the notion of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. There are fundamental laws which describe how the universe works. These laws apply to every single thing in the universe. Everything, from bunny rabbits living in a woodland paradise, to smog-filled cities of broken-backed worker-slaves, obeys the same rules. The process of childbirth and genetic engineering, the movements of the tides and nuclear bombs, a mother’s love and genocide. All the same rules. If something is possible, it is natural. If something is not possible, it’s entirely academic because it’s never going to happen. And if it does happen? Then our understanding of the universe is clearly wrong and we need to change it.

A bald mouse in a petri dish, with a human ear growing on its back

Natural as fook! Of course, I’m not saying it’s not incredibly creepy…

So why should death, and the ‘cheating’ of death, be a hallmark of evil? Cheating death is possible, so it’s natural. The universe doesn’t give a shit. Karma is not going to appear from no where to deliver Terrible Consequences if you’re a walking coma patient, or if you make sure you take your vitamins every day. Poke death in the eyes–sell your soul, splice your DNA, drink the alien goo. It’s all natural.

Of course, when you accept that nuclear bombs are as natural as bunny rabbits, you’ve got to accept a few other things. Like Plant Earth really doesn’t give a crap about us. We can cover the whole planet in thick clouds of smog, boil ourselves in our skins and turn Earth into a second Venus. Mother Earth will be all like, ‘meh, it took you thousands of years to find the slight bruise the K-T ‘extinction event’ left on me’. But the human race… well, we may be given a few last moments for regret. Whether defying death will help to produce the kind of environment and society we want to live in is another matter.

I guess I’m just sick of the ‘defying death must lead to Terrible Consequences’ trope. It’s overplayed, and it’s just plain wrong. And considering the obsession we have with defying death ourselves, it’s incredibly hypocritical. Let’s have a little truth in our fiction, eh?

Picture of Vader from this Cracked article.  Creepy mouse-ear shot from here.

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Dear Professor Cox…

December 7th, 2012 Posted in Science
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The other day, I caught an episode of QI on Dave which had Professor Brian Cox on the panel. I started thinking about what question I would ask the professor, if I only got to ask one. I mean, I’ve not seen any of his shows but I know he’s a professor of space. (I’ve seen bits of his shows and, unfortunately, he’s talking about stuff I watched TV programs on fifteen years ago…)

The first question that sprang to mind, obviously, was: “Professor Cox, are you aware you bear an uncanny resemblance to Justin Bieber?”

A picture of Justin Bieber next to a photo of Professor Brian Cox

It’s the hair. I identify people by their hair. If you get a new haircut, you might as well have had your entire face scraped off and replaced as far as I’m concerned.

Although that may be got a pity-laugh from the audience, it did seem like a bit of a wasted opportunity. So, I came up with another one:

“Professor Cox. As I’m sure you know, current theory states that around fifteen-billion years ago the entire universe was contained in a single, minute singularity. Since then, it’s been expanding. We can tune a normal, Argos Value radio to a dead station and pick up radiation left over from the Big Bang. The Hubble Deep Field image has revealed a night sky full of galaxies, the light from them so old our own star wasn’t even formed when the light from those galaxies, the light Hubble captured on film, started its journey to us. The laws of gravity are universal, the same equations holding true for a piece of toast falling from my plate and for the orbits of planets, of binary star systems and entire galactic systems. In just a few short years, our planet has gone from particles in a dust cloud to the astoundingly complex ecosystem all around us. In even fewer years, we as a species have gone from simple amino acids to a species capable of gazing up at the night sky not just in wonder, but with the means to start to understand it. Although the conditions necessary to create us are grotesquely improbable, the universe is so vast it’s probably not the first time they’ve arisen and born fruit. But it’s happened to us, right here, right now.

“So, given the improbable, beautiful, awe-inspiring universe we’ve somehow found ourselves in by sheer chance, and given by sheer chance we’re at a time and place in our evolution as a species that we can observe, record and begin to pick apart the mechanics which make the whole thing tick… Given all that, why can I buy 43 different kinds of washing powder in my local supermarket? Why aren’t we spending our time and resources doing something… well, something more awesome?”

~ * ~

Hmm… ‘toast falls like a galaxy’… That’s a neat way to sum up the sheer awesome of the universe. I think I might keep that.

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From the Sublime to the Mundane

May 27th, 2012 Posted in Poem, Science
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We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, p. 6

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

— Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, People magazine, 8 April 1974.

 

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be,
But for such faith, with nature reconciled;
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

– Mount Blanc:  Lines written in the Vale of Chamouni, Percy Shelley, written July 1816

Mont Blanc is only a quick Google image search away. Or you can log onto Google Earth and have a wander around… Of course, nothing can replicate the experience of standing before it on your own two feet and beholding it with your own two eyes. So it’s fortunate you can now climb it in seven days, ski down it, take a guided tour or drive under it.

Nothing puts man in his place like nature.

Oh, wait. That was two hundred years ago, when places like Mont Blanc, when the exposed bones of Mother Earth, the frozen sheets of the glacial North and the endless rolling seas that lap on shores intimate and alien were strange wonders, distant glittering jewels that only the truly blessed can touch.

Now we can fly. Fucking fly. I remember flying a short hop from mainland Scotland to the Outer Hebrides. We were above the clouds and I looked out the window at the ground below. The clouds cast shadows on the ground, just like the roof of a table casting a shadow on the floor. In those shadows, I thought, it’s overcast, the sun hidden behind a thick block of white. It’s cold, the light is dim, the cloud may not pass all day and it may turn into rain. But up here… it’s just a shadow. But for most people, flying is a chore. A trail of endurance. If I flew regularly (I’ve flown about half-a-dozen times in my life, and the last time when in the mid-nineties), then I’d probably feel the same way.

The word is such a mind-rending cosmic wonder–from the grass to the clouds to the pavement to the cars–that our brains have an almost infinite capacity to take it in our stride. I mean, I can travel three hundred miles in four hours in my car. I can top one hundred miles an hour if my concentration slips, a speed so vast that for long time people believed it was fatal. We have speed limits on our roads. Explain that to someone who’s only ever known a horse-and-cart. And yet, making that three-hundred mile trip to see my parents is a chore, not a wonder. No… it is a wonder. My brain just sees it as a chore.

So, seeing our tiny blue-green marble drifting in the void… Isn’t going to change humanity. Standing on the surface of the Moon and staring at our cosmic cradle will do nothing more than raise grumbles about check-in times and foot room and the awful in-flight meals when Earth to the Moon is as easy as New York to London.

Space is full of wonders and miracles to make humanity appreciate their insignificant place is the universe, to really drive home the fact we’re all alone in the night and all we really have is each other. But then, so is every home in the Western world. So is the shelf of every supermarket, the congested lanes of every road, every drop of rain and flake of snow that falls.

Let’s go into space. It’s the only way we’re going to find out what’s out there, and it may even help us stay alive. But let’s not kid ourselves: it’s not our spiritual and intellectual savour, not the humbling equalizer, nothing more than a new frontier to be laboriously exploited. At least, it will be until we change ourselves. And by then we won’t need infinity to humble us, the light shower of rain against the windows of our home will be more than enough.

~*~

P.S. Telephones are fucking awesome. I can pick one up, talk to any other telephone, any where in the world, in real time. Imagine being able to not do that. Imagine having to wait three weeks for any news from someone you can’t meet with face-to-face. See? Fucking telephones, man!

But I still hate talking on one. Text me. Don’t ever call me. (Unless you’re my parents, obviously. Parents get special rules.)

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Why You Shouldn’t Try To Write Truly Alien Aliens

November 26th, 2011 Posted in Science, Writing
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I came home from shopping today, put on the TV and saw this:

(The fireworks start around 4:55.)

So it made me want to post this, what I write last week…

So, why shouldn’t you try to write truly alien aliens?  Because humanity builds rocket ships, and so will you.

You see, I like rocket ships. As far as I’m concerned, rocket ships are the epitome of human thinking.

Once upon a time, someone ignited some compressed gunpowder and watched a projectile shoot up into the sky. ‘Well,’ they thought, ‘all I need to do is build something like that, but really big, and I could get to the moon!’

It probably wasn’t as simple and straight forwards as that (especially as gunpowder is a Chinese invention and the first space-age rockets were German), but you get the idea. I mean, there were various attempts in-between. Like people trying to fly hot air balloons to the moon (hey, this thing floats kind of high… If I build a really big one, I can get to the moon!).

Then there’s bridges. At some point, someone dumped a plank of wood over a stream. Now we have the Golden Gate bridge, Viaduc de Millau, and plans to build a bridge over the Straits of Gibraltar.

My point is that humanity, like natural selection, isn’t really much of one for innovation. We find an idea that works, and we stick with it. And we project this attitude onto the world around us. You need only look at the explanations humanity has come up with for the world we live in to see what I mean. We have always projected the known onto the unknown.

Take Apollo. He carried the sun through the Heavens on a chariot. Makes perfect sense. Humans carry things from one place to another on chariots. So you see something moving though the sky and, obviously, it’s a really big guy carrying it on a really big chariot. A really big, invisible chariot. That explanation is just so much more believable that the one we currently believe.

Frankly, why on Earth would someone believe that the small glowing disk in the sky was a ball of gas, billions of years old fusing light elements together into heavier elements in a self-destructive process that eventually is going to lead to it blowing up and spreading the seeds of future life throughout the cosmos. There is nothing in the human experience of life on Earth which is in any way comparable. Sitting around a campfire? A campfire is something humans control. A campfire only exists because humans have decided it should exist. The sun is beyond human control, beyond humanity.

The scientific explanation of the universe has always been something many, many miles beyond our imagining. No matter what we’ve projected onto the universe, the scientific explanation has always been bizarre, shocking and difficult to credit. It’s something we never could have foreseen, something we could never have imagined without the decades, centuries, or millennia of investigation before the breakthrough. The universe will always surprise us and never be what we expect.

So, if you want to write truly alien aliens… well, the evidence so far seems to say you’re never going to be able to imagine the kind of life that really is out there. If we ever encounter extra-terrestrial life it’s going to be something so weird and shocking that it’s going to take people decades, perhaps even centuries, to accept what it is.

Play to our strengths instead. Take something we already know about life, about the world, and make it really big. Like birds that migrate using magnetic fields. Or those fish-things that never see daylight and hang around underwater volcanic vents. Or, if you’re Jeff VanderMeer, exploit the weird world that is fungi. So much of the world that we live in is outside of our normal experience that you can take some neglected part of it and expand it to fill a civilisation, and it will feel alien to the readers.

We will never be able to imagine extra-terrestrial life, probably not even after we’ve discovered it–or it’s discovered us. But so much of the world we live on is alien to us, you can take some tiny part of it and use it to build a rocket ship.

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Mathematical Proof Your Life is Awesome

November 13th, 2011 Posted in Links, Science
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I know you’ve probably all seen this by now, but I wanted to repost it anyway.  Mathematical proof that your existence is both insignificant and cosmically breath-taking at the same time.  Being insignificant frees you from any obligations what-so-ever, so do whatever you need to do to enjoy your next-to-impossible existence.

(via io9, via boingboing… both sites too cool for capital letters.)

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Hope For the Future

August 9th, 2011 Posted in news, Science
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(Before we begin, I want to point out that this came out of a pretty awesome discussion on Allegra’s Facebook page about the recent unrest in London and, now, elsewhere.)

Okay, we’re going to do an experiment. You’re going to need a pen, a piece of scrap paper, a calculator and a stopwatch.

Got them?

Right. Now, you’re going to multiply 2,504 by 872 without using anything other than your brain. No calculator, no paper, just mental arithmetic. And you’re going to time yourself. Ready..? Go! And don’t write the answer down! Remember it.

Are you done? Okay, write your time down.

Next, you’re going to multiply 5,343 by 328 and you’re going to time yourself again. This time, you’re going to use the pen and paper. Go!

Awesome. Write your time down again.

Lastly, you’re going to multiply 2,318 by 321. Use your calculator. Go!

Write your time down.

Which time is the quickest?

Mine was using the calculator and I gave up on the mental arithmetic. It’s never really been my strongest suit.

A picture showing long multiplication for the sum 5,343 by 328. Although the methodology is correct, the final answer is not.

Wait, that’s wrong, isn’t it? Fuck a donkey... That’s the problem, isn’t it? If we don’t use a skill, we lose it. But I have a calculator or, failing that, easy access to information on how to do the sum correctly. So really, I don’t need to remember how to do it. If I Google ‘multiplication tables’, I’m doing the exact same data retrieval I would be if I tried to remember my school maths lessons. The information just happens to be stored outside my brain, not inside it. Just the same as writing the answer to 8 x 3 on a piece of paper while working out the whole sum--external data storage with a pen and paper instead of an Internet.

If you were taught the same way I was, when you were working things out on paper you broke the problem down into smaller problems, and wrote the answer to each smaller problem down before moving on to the next one (8 x 3, write the answer, 8 x 4, write the answer etc etc…).

When you were using the calculator, the task was even simpler–one of remembering what each of the buttons did and pressing them in the right order.

You see, human brains aren’t very good a complex problems. We don’t have much free space in our brains and, generally, can only use them to solve one simple problem at a time. What we do is use tools to break complex problems down into simpler ones. We can do 2 x 4 in our heads, but maybe not 2,504 x 872. By using our pen and paper tools, we can do 5,343 x 328, breaking the problem up and recording the stages so we only have one simple problem in our brain at a time. And by using a calculator, 2,318 x 321 can become the simplest part of a far, far more complex problem.

Now I want you to do another experiment. It’s multiplication again, I’m afraid. 7,882 by 711. But here’s the catch: You’re not allowed to mentally articulate the names of any of the numbers. Oh, and also? You’re not allowed to remember your multiplication tables.

Route learning, specific memory recall and language are all tools. They aren’t tools we’re born to use, either. Babies have to be taught how to use structured language. They have to be taught to recall specific memories on command (which they do by using language, of course). Hell, babies have to be taught how to use their own arms and legs and fingers. We have our automatic nervous system which we get for free, and everything else we have we need to learn. Nearly every other animal gets everything they’re ever going to use for free. Deer are walking after a few moments of life and no one needs to teach a fish to swim. Sure, hunting needs to be taught but nature’s a sliding scale, remember. It’s a gradual line between us and them. And you may need to teach a lion to hunt but you don’t need to teach it to roar.

Counter-intuitively, it’s because we’re born as a blank slate that we’re so successful as a species. A empty book, after all, can be filled with anything you want. Over the last one-hundred-thousand years, we’ve been developing more and more complex tools which have allowed us to tackle more and more complex problems. Language allowed us to share half-formed ideas and use the intelligence of others to finish them for us. Writing allowed us to use the intelligence of others without being limited by being in the same place at the same time as the other person. Philosophy allowed us to think about thinking, to work out ways of doing it better and guiding it. Art allowed us to talk about and develop entirely abstract ideas.

Although Neanderthals were more intelligent, stronger, had better tools and were better suited to the environment than us, we survived and they didn’t. Recent studies suggest that we beat them because we had a shared culture. They may have had better axes but we had art and mythology. Those are some awesome tools.

How could you explain to one of those primitive human beings were their species would be in one-hundred-thousand years? They simply lacked the cognitive ability to understand sky-scrapers and moon landings and the Internet.

In one-hundred-thousand years time, maybe future humans will dig up the vaults of an old bank and find the minted, metallic relics of our money-obsessed species. They’ll marvel that such a primitive example of humanity had mastered such advanced techniques as metal refinery and mass-distribution. And maybe they’ll begin to wonder if these primitives, who they’d always thought of as nascent humans, were in fact closer to themselves than they realised. We can’t imagine what they’ll be like any more than those humans painting on cave walls in France could imagine us. We simply lack the cognitive tools.

My point in all this is that it’s very popular–and easy–these days to look at our species and despair. We’re cruel, selfish, obsessed with hoarding wealth, short-sighted and stupid. But right here, right now… well, that’s not the end of anything. Our society is just a wave on the river of our evolution, a white-crested ripple that appears for a moment and then is swept away. The more we use tools, the more they adapt to suit us and the better we become at using them to solve complex problems. After one-hundred-thousand years of using language we literally can’t think like human being without it, and we’ve used it for Jung to Beethoven to computer code to mapping our own genes. In another one-hundred-thousand years the problems of today are going to seem like less-than child’s play.

I’m just saying there’s hope for the future. The last few thousand years are nothing more than the blink of humanity’s eye, so don’t look around at today and decide there’s no tomorrow. It may seem like we’re getting there slowly, but we’re getting there. And hey, we’ve still got five billion years before the sun explodes, so what’s another one-hundred-thousand?

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