Category: Madness

Mars or Bust! The Theory and Practice of Travel to Mars — At Philcon tomorrow

NASA Mars Travel Poster The annual Philadelphia Science Fiction Convention (Philcon 2018) starts today & continues thru Sunday. I’m doing a fun science talk: Mars or Bust! tomorrow at 5pm

Sat 5:00 PM in Crystal Ballroom Two—Mars or Bust! The Theory and Practice of Travel to Mars

Why do we want to go? How do we get there? How do we live there? What might we find? What are the dangers: radiation, low gravity, dust, our fellow humans? Is there life on Mars now? Was there once? and did our own evolution actually start on Mars?

And I’m doing six panels besides:  Mars, Mars, Mad Scientists, Black Holes, Star Trek versus Star Wars, and Evil Tech.   Seems to be aimed generally in a pretty sinister direction!  War planets, mad scientists, all-devouring black holes, death stars versus battle-cruisers, and generally evil tech.  Curious.  I hope Philcon programming knows that I’m largely opposed to evil.

John Ashmead (mod)

    • Fri 7:00 PM in Crystal Ballroom Two—Black Holes Explained! (3073)

      What they are, what they are NOT, why it’s A Bad Idea to confuse a black hole with a wormhole, and how to use them in scientifically accurate ways in your writing.

Dr. Valerie J. Mikles (mod), Bob Hranek, John Ashmead, Jay Wile, Peter Prellwitz

    • Sat 12:00 PM in Crystal Ballroom Two—The Depictions of Technology in Star Wars and Star Trek (3108)

      How do these universes differ in the ways they depict their tech? How did the history of each world affect the invention and uses of medical devices, weaponry, methods of transportation, and robotic beings?

Jeff Warner (mod), John Ashmead, Inge Heyer, Jay Wile, Anna Kashina, Glenn Hauman

    • Sat 2:00 PM in Crystal Ballroom Two—The Moon, The Stars, and Mars: The Ethics of Colonizing Space (3121)

      How do we expect to change the galactic landscape in an ethical way, and what can we do as humans to decrease our impact on it? What does it mean to establish human settlements on worlds not our own? A discussion of space travel, space colonies, and morality.

Jazz Hiestand (mod), John Ashmead, Inge Heyer, Tom Purdom, Tobias Cabral, Joseph Haughey

    • Sat 5:00 PM in Crystal Ballroom Two—Mars or Bust! The Theory and Practice of Travel to Mars (3122)

      Why do we want to go? How do we get there? How do we live there? What might we find? What are the dangers: radiation, low gravity, dust, our fellow humans? Is there life on Mars now? Was there once? and did our own evolution actually start on Mars?

John Ashmead (mod)

    • Sat 6:00 PM in Plaza III (Three)—Our Fascination with Mars (3061)

      Since the days of H.G. Wells, Mars has figured greatly in SF. How have SF views of Mars changed as our understanding of the planet grew. Why does it still matter today?

Jazz Hiestand (mod), John Ashmead, Michael D’Ambrosio, Paul Levinson, Tobias Cabral

    • Sun 10:00 AM in Crystal Ballroom Two—The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Current Technology Trends (3107)

      What’s the hottest tech about to change our world? Join us to discuss the promise, threat, and some things people usually don’t want to talk about.

Bob Hranek (mod), John Ashmead, Earl Bennett, Charlie Robertson, John Skylar

    • Sun 1:00 PM in Plaza II (Two)—The Myth of the Mad Scientist (3078)

      Despite a long history in fiction of solo geniuses making the ultimate breakthroughs in their basement labs, collaboration is necessary for scientific advancement. So why do we glorify the loner scientist trope? Can we make collaborative science feel equally heroic? How do we portray science being done realistically while still meeting the needs of the story?

Jim Stratton (mod), John Ashmead, Aaron Feldman, Anna Kashina, Alan P. Smale, Tee Morris

Tales from the Miskatonic University Library Has Escaped into the Real World

Only by purchasing mass quantities can you ensure that its deletorious effects are not too widely felt.

You may order from my co-editor Darrell Schweitzer ($24.99 + $4.00 shipping) or from me directly ($25.00 but I don’t ship) or from PSPublishing (£20.00).

My first book but Darrell’s N-th (see his wikipedia page!).

I’m rather pleased (& a bit relieved) to see it came out pretty well.  All thirteen stories are good, each in their own way.  And Darrell & I each did introductions.  His is light-hearted & not to be taken seriously while mine is in deadly earnest.

So if you want to find out why not to use a spell-checker on the Necronomicon, or wonder what the gastronomic possibilities of Cthulhu are, look no further.

And remember, every copy you purchase saves another hapless human from an otherwise dire & unavoidable fate!

PS.  And if you would like to see snippets of Darrell & myself opining on matters Lovecraftian, we were on PBS recently, in a segment from Articulate TV.

New Hope for Space War

 

I’m on the Space War panel at Balticon, how & why.  Fun topic though in all candor, a bit implausible.

The main problem is that travel in space is likely to be slow, expensive, & a bit dangerous.  Given this, it is likely that space travel itself will be reserved for moving stuff that is light weight & of very high value:  information, pharmaceuticals, experts, embryos, the “unobtainium” that features in Avatar, and so on.  Bullets satisfy neither test & even nukes have a hard time.

And if it takes a century to get over to the enemy’s star, why bother having the war?  And what are you fighting about anyway?  To have a war you have to be close enough to do some damage in a reasonable time frame & similar enough to have common — if opposed — objectives.

I owe the initial observation about the high costs of space travel to Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning economist.  In the spirit of not pointing out problems without also pointing out a solution, he has found an economically viable use for space war:  as a way to generating a badly-needed stimulus, a kind of weaponized Keynesianism.

Given that there is now new hope for space war, and to get me in the right frame of mind for the panel, I list ten of my favorite space war novels:

  1. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.  The number one space war novel.  The evil octopi are defeated by our germs. Great idea; two problems:  1) germs have to co-evolve to be effective against a host; ours probably would have no effect on the Martians and 2) real octopi are fun:  they play pranks on their experimenters & are great communicators as well.  With their ability to change skin color at will, octopi are practically eight-tentacled color television sets.
  2. The Lensman series by E. E. “Doc” Smith.  Six deathless volumes, each with at least two space-shaking interstellar battles. Chlorine breathers beware!  The oxygen breathers of the galaxy have found your secret base & are going to reduce it to a glowing pile of molten rock.
  3. Which is pretty much what happens to the lunar military base in Arthur Clarke‘s Earthlight.  Three Federation cruisers duel it out to a jointly fatal draw with a lunar fortress.  The war is about mineral rights & induced by attacks of mutually assured dementia, making the physics (this is Arthur C. Clarke!), the war, & the politics pretty realistic.
  4. Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein.  Heinlein wrote about space suits in his pre-WWII SF, then used ideas from his stories when helping to design pressure suits for our fighter pilots in WWII, then used ideas from those pressure suits for his Have Spacesuit, Will Travel juvenile and for Starship Troopers: a beautiful example of the inter-relationship of reality & SF.  The space combats are a bit less stupid than most; Heinlein understands something of the difficulty of taking a space war to an underground enemy.
  5. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.  This is partly a reaction to the Vietnam War & partly a reaction against Starship Troopers.  The forever war starts by accident, proceeds by error, and lasts for over a thousand years:  both humans & aliens are restricted to sub-light travel, so the war plays out in slow motion.  One of the few successful space war stories that works with existing physics.
  6. Keith Laumer’s Bolo Series.  Laumer wrote a long series of stories about Bolos, giant sentient tanks that are every adolescent male’s dream weapon.  In practice, they would likely be an economic & military disaster:  witness some of the late stage Nazi vehicles:  mechanically problematic, too heavy for bridges, & absorbing a disproportionate share of the military budget.  See Arthur Clarke’s delightful story Superiority.
  7. Dan Simmon‘s Hyperion series, especially the 2nd volume, The Fall of Hyperion, which concludes with a beautifully realized space battle between two fleets for control of a planetary system.  The inevitable confusion & long delays of such a battle are foregrounded.
  8. Catherine Asaro‘s Skolian Empire series.  Asaro has a physics background, gets existing physics right, & invents as much as she needs to keep the action fast-moving & interstellar.  The space combats are realistic:  long periods of nothing, brief high velocity exchanges of fire & then more long pauses while the surviving opponents regroup & turn around.  They remind me of the lance combats in White’s The Once & Future King.
  9. David Weber’s Honorverse series, starting with Manticore Station.  Weber is another author who tries to “get it right”.  The politics are modeled on the dueling ship combats of the Napoleonic wars, with wormholes to get realtime star to star travel without invoking faster-than-light mechanics (which would imply time-travel & a lot of confusion:  it is very rough on a space navy to first have triumphantly triumphed & then never to have been in the first place!).  He sets up the physics & weapons so that the ships even have broadsides, includes relativistic time dilation, and so on.  Weber’s Honor Harrington owes her “H’s” and general command style to C. S. Forester‘s Horatio Hornblower.  In a video game version of the Honorverse, it turned out that realistic implementing the physics/combat implied a near-planet maneuver (wish I could remember what it was) that invalided much of the combat in the novels.  With the infinite authority of the auteur, Weber passed a treaty that banned the disastrous trick.
  10. And I’ll finish with John G. Henry‘s Lost Fleet series.  The first six volumes reset Xenophon’s Anabasis in a medium-future space-faring context, again with wormholes connecting selected star systems.  A nearly destroyed fleet has to work its way back home in the face of enemy attack, mutiny, and sheer running out of resources.  Henry’s focuses on the many conflicting pressures on his commander, Jack Geary, as Geary balances military requirements, the demands of honor, & the imperatives of law, democracy, and a forbidden love.  The space combat — Henry used to be a ship driver in the US Navy – takes place in four dimensions and with admirable clarity about the command difficulties created by the finite speed of light:  if the enemy is on the far side of a solar system, he will see your maneuver only hours after you make it — and you will see his response hours after that.  You have to factor his response — and the responses of your detached units — into every move you make.  It is like blindfolded chess where you don’t find out the enemy’s move until after you have made three more moves of your own.  And your pieces are moving on their own.

And a couple of titles to avoid:

  • Anything by C. J. Cherryh, as least as far as space combat goes.  I remember reading one of her novels where the defenders had an advantage because they were at rest. In space, both sides are at rest with respect to themselves; the comment & resulting tactics were just nonsense.  Nonsense on stilts.
  • Gordon Dickson’s Dorsai series.  Omni-competent genetically enhanced uber soldiers trash lots of stooges.  The “ho” meets the “hum”.

So, my minimal requirement for space war in science fiction(not counting the golden classics of one’s youth of course) is that the humans, the physics, & the space war should make at least a bit of sense.

Dissertation complete

I’ve finished re-checking the dissertation:  629 equations, 188 references, 110 pages, 83 input files, 48 lists, 36 footnotes, 28 quotes, 17 figures, 6 chapters (counting the appendix), 5 requirements, 1 idea.  It should be up on the physics archive in a day or two.

The Block Universe

fmany of

‘Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real

existence?’
Filby became pensive. ‘Clearly,’ the Time Traveller proceeded, ‘any
real body must have extension in _four_ directions: it must have
Length, Breadth, Thickness, and–Duration. But through a natural
infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we
incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions,
three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.
There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between
the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that
our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the
latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.’Clearest.

‘Clearly,’ the Time Traveller proceeded, ‘any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and–Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.’

– H. G. Well’s The Time Machine


This is still the best single explanation of the idea of the  “block universe”, though Well’s Time Traveller does not use that term. As Julian Barbour puts it his The End of Time: “The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.”
Read more »

WordPress Themes