Voice from the Sky

In Episode 3 of the Contact television series Ellie returns to space. At the end of Episode 2 (Good to Go) Ellie wants to re-establish contact with Hadden.

Palmer is being over-protective and does not want Ellie rushing back into space because he knows that Earth's newly built spaceship, the Inspiration, is being sent on a secret, long-duration mission deep into space in an effort to make contact with aliens. Ellie has been sick (diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder) and at the end of Episode 2 Palmer also started having flashbacks and memory problems.

Palmer tells Ellie that it would not be fair for her to impose herself on the crew of the Inspiration since they are preparing for a potentially dangerous month-long trip to Mars. NASA scientists and engineers are trying to make use of the "alien" rotating rings technology of the Machine to devise a way to protect space travelers from the dangerous radiation that they will be exposed to during interplanetary travel. Palmer tells Ellie that women have not been cleared by NASA to be members of the crew for the mission to Mars.

Ellie's immediate concern is not going to Mars, but she is despirate to get back into space so that she can contact Hadden. However, she decides to spend some more time at Area 51 working with the research team that is trying to understand the advanced non-electromagnetic communications equipment that was part of the Machine instructions. In the kind of hyper-accelerated wiz-bang research that Hollywood is famous for, Ellie and the research team quickly discover how to make an "alien" communications device that will function on Earth. Ellie uses the new device to contact Hadden who reminds her that she has nanites in her brain. However, Dr. Zelter is now using the nanites inside Ellie to prevent her from trusting anything that Hadden says. Hadden notices this and tells Ellie that he will not be able to help her any more because "Overseers" are using her like fly paper. Ellie accuses Hadden of being an incompetent alien mastermind and all Hadden says is that he is neither actually a "he" nor an alien. Hadden breaks of the communication.

This is the first Ellie has heard the term "Overseer" in the context of her effort to re-establish contact with aliens. She discusses what she learned from Hadden with Palmer and Director Schwartz. Ellie is surprised that Schwartz does not seem concerned about who the "Overseers" are. Ellie is eager to return to her research team at the VLA and start performing SETI using the new communications technology from the Machine, but she suggest that the crew of the Inspiration should be warned about the mysterious "Overseers". Ellie is surprised again when both Schwartz and Palmer do not agree. They argue that it is best not to raise fears and doubts in the minds of the Inspiration's crew.

Ellie contacts Captain (Reggie) Banning of the Inspiration....

Ellie: Captain Banning, this is Dr. Arroway.
Banning: Ellie! I've been expecting you to call.
Ellie (surprised): Really? Why is that?
Banning: The President told me that he expects you will want to go...to Mars.
Ellie (surprised): Well, I'd love to go, but I'm busy now with this new communications technology. We figured out how to use it on Earth and I want to start fitting-out our SETI software routines at the VLA to start processing the new data.
Banning (surprised): Well, it is your decision to make. Why did you call?
Ellie: I need to warn you. I've been in contact with Hadden again.
Banning (skeptical): Ellie, this really freaks me out everytime you say that you are talking to Hadden...I mean, he's dead.
Ellie (laughs nervously): There is a Hadden cult now, people who say that Hadden faked his death and that he is still alive...in space.
Banning: Pure crap. One of these days I'll go out and scoop up his coffin. We have an excellent radar track of the trajectory out of Earth orbit.
Ellie: Listen, Reggie, I'll tell you what I know, then it will be up to you to ignore me or take heed. Hadden warned me that there are "Overseers" watching over Earth.
Banning (laughs): What does that mean? Overseers? This sounds like some kind of space opera plot.
Ellie: Well, what do you make of all these alien communications signals going to and from Earth?
Banning: Aliens? Sorry, Ellie, we've been over this before. I'm still in the skeptic's camp. Like you scientists always say, where is the evidence?
Ellie: Then what do you think all those mysterious com signals are that we cannot decode and that the NSA has been unable to trace to a transmitter?
Banning: I've been around long enough to know that when the NSA tells me that they can't explain something it means that I should stop asking about it. There are black projects that you and I will never have clearance to hear about.
Ellie (tired): Okay, I warned you. I'm not your mother.
Banning: Thanks for looking out for me. And I'll do the same for you. I'll let you know what we find as soon as we reach....Mars.

At that point, Ellie finally realizes that the Inspiration is not actually going to Mars. Knowing that Banning is avoiding the name of his true destination, Ellie ends the call. Rather than fly back to Texas, Ellie confronts Palmer and demands to know the true destination of the Inspiration. As soon as she learns that the next mission of the Inspiration is a SETI mission to an asteroid, she goes to Vandenberg AFB and starts training for the mission.

Ellie and Palmer know that something mysterious is happening to them: they both continue to have strange flashbacks and memory problems. Ellie is irked that she almost missed the chance to go on the SETI mission to the asteroid, but she cannot be very upset wih Palmer given her continuing mental health problems.

Ellie talks to Palmer (who is back in Washington) and tells him that she is happy to be going in search of the "voice from the sky". Palmer tells Ellie that the shuttle Atlantis is being fitted out with technology from the Machine and will probably go to the Moon before Inspiration completes its mission. NASA suspects that there is a hidden alien base under the surface of the Moon; it seems to be the nexus for all of the mysterious communications signals going between the Earth and the Moon.

Near the end of Episode 3 the Inspiration launches and, as a cliff hanger, arrives at the asteroid destination just as the show ends....to be continued in Episode 4.

Good to Go

In my last blog post I suggested a way to start a fan fiction sequel to Carl Sagan's science fiction story, Contact. In the first episode (Pull the Plug), Ellie learns that she has "alien" devices (nanorobotic probes) inside her brain.

In the Exodemic Fictional Universe I usually depict the use of nanites as a kind of emergency strategy for erasing memories from Earthlings who have seen too much (often by interacting with Observers). However, it might also be the case that the Observers would more routinely maintain collections of nanite probes inside the brains of key people on Earth (such as S. R. Hadden). If Observers were routinely using nanoscopic devices to monitor and control the behavior of Earthlings, have we now reached a level of technological advancement that is needed to stumble upon those nanites? My guess is that the answer is "no", but what if someone like Dr. Arroway was tipped off? Could we Earthlings devise a way to show that there are hidden nanites inside some human brains?

That is the key challenge facing Ellie in the second episode of the Contact television series. She wakes up in David Grant USAF Medical Center, having collapsed while on her first space flight. Her personal physician, Dr. Zelter has already performed a high resolution scan of Ellie's brain, but nothing unusual was found.

Ellie impatiently dismisses the brain scanning methods used by Dr. Zelter as "too primitive" and tells Palmer and Karen that she has alien nanoscopic probes inside her brain. Ellie has a hunch (apparently inserted into her brain by Hadden) that the nanites use a type of atomic scale magnetic memory. They devise a plan for how to remove the nanites from her body, or at least inactivate them. They return to Area 51 where there is a large underground set of rotating rings such as those in the Machine.

The Star Trek solution: handy antimatter containment bottle.
The Area 51 "ring facility" is about to go online and start producing large amounts of antimatter that will then be used to produce energy, but the engineers are trying to devise a magnetic confinement system that will allow storage of antimatter. Ellie, Karen and Palmer plan to use the high strength magnetic field of the antimatter containment system to inactivate the nanites that are inside Ellie, but first they test the antimatter containment equipment on the video recorder that Ellie used inside the Machine.

About this time, Ellie wakes up from a bad dream in which she was talking to the President. The President agrees that Ellie has earned the right to participate in all attempts to contact aliens. She thanks the President then watches in horror while he decays into a statue-like collection of dust that then crumbles into a heap on the floor. Tiny bug-like machines scurry away, leaving nothing but the President's clothing in heap on the floor. Palmer tries to calm her down, but Ellie demands to know how well Palmer knows the President. Unable to satisfy her paranoid demands for information, Palmer later calls Dr. Zelter and tells her that Ellie is continuing to have flashbacks and is displaying paranoid behavior.


After exposing the video camera to the high strength magnetic field, they take it to the Area 51 electron microscopy facility. The microscopy technician dips the camera in a cleaning solution bath then images the residue that is washed out of the camera. They find some strange globular objects. Upon switching the microscope to its highest magnification they can begin to see that the globules are composed of an intricate three dimensional structure, a kind of complex atomic circuitry at the low nanometer scale. Palmer and Karen are worried about possibly damaging Ellie's brain if they try to inactivate the nanites that are in her body, but Ellie insists that the nanites in her brain be inactivated.

After looking into past research on the biological effects of powerful magnetic fields, Dr. Zelter strongly objects to the idea of exposing Ellie to the same strength magnetic field as was used on the video recording device. After a loud argument, Ellie agrees to wait until an experiment is performed on a lab rat. However, Ellie has developed a deep distrust of Karen and she tries to talk Palmer into helping her use the magnetic confinement system without Karen's knowledge. Palmer refuses and insists that they do the rat experiment.

The rat is put into to the magnetic confinement system and it dies 12 hours after being exposed to the powerful magnetic field. It is not clear what killed the rat. On a hunch, Ellie secretly has the electron microscopy technician examine the rat's brain tissue. They find nanites. After Ellie leaves the EM lab, having asked the technician to keep their discovery secret, Palmer sneaks into the lab and discovers the rat brain images on the lab computer.

Also around this time, Palmer is in communication with the White House. The President asks Palmer to find out if Ellie wants to go to Mars. [Not explained at this point, but the trip to Mars is the public cover story for a planned expedition to what deep space radar indicates is a large asteroid at the position that radio triangulation has identified as the origin of the "message from Vega".] Palmer explains that Ellie is trying to get treatment for her PTDS and that a long space flight might not be a good idea.

Ellie asks the Area 51 security chief, Director (Theodor) Schwartz about Dr. Zelter's background. He tells Ellie that he was amazed to find that Karen was born in 1953, but "she looks like she's only 25". Ellie suggests to Schwartz that large numbers of people might be infected by alien nanites. Schwartz recognizes that nanites might be a serious security risk so he agrees to help Ellie expose herself to the high magnetic field that is generated by the antimatter containment system. Palmer has been keeping an eye on Ellie and he catches her in the act of trying to free herself from the nanites.

Palmer arrives just in time to hear Ellie telling Schwartz that she is, "good to go." When the electric field starts to increase some of the nanites inside Ellie jump out of her body and invade Schwartz and Palmer. At the controls of the antimatter containment system, Schwartz never raised the magnetic field strength above 0.1 of what was used to inactivate the nanites. Ellie falls unconscious and Dr. Zelter arrives, having somehow become aware that Ellie was being exposed to the magnetic field. She demands to know what is going on and Schwartz robotically reports the level of magnetic field strength that Ellie was exposed to. Palmer, also speaking robotically, tells Dr. Zelter that Ellie has "found nanites", but his voice trails off before he can say, "in the dead lab rat". Dr. Zelter tells Schwartz and Palmer to forget everything that they know about nanites. Schwartz and Palmer collapse and then Dr. Zelter, demonstrating superhuman strength, picks up Ellie and carries her back to the guest quarters where she has been staying.

The next day, Ellie wakes up. Dr. Zelter is there sitting at her bedside while Schwartz and Palmer are standing to the side like zombies. Dr. Zelter tells Ellie that she has been suffering from "space sickness", but she just needs some rest. Dr. Zelter tells Ellie that she must return to her practice in Texas. Zelter and Schwartz leave the room.

Ellie looks at Palmer and has a brief flashback of the dead rat and the electron microscope images of the nanites. Confused, she asks Palmer, "What about the rat?"

Palmer looks puzzled and says, "Sorry, I followed you to the lab." He has a flashback of Dr. Zelter giving Palmer and Schwartz an order at the antimatter confinement facility, but he only sees her and can't hear what the order was. Palmer jokingly asks Ellie if her flashbacks might be contagious.

Ellie remembers Hadden and she tell Palmer that they have to get back into space aboard the Inspiration. He asks why, but Ellie does not want to say anything more. She asks Palmer to keep having faith in her.

Backstory (spoiler alert).
Dr. Zelter is an Overseer who is tasked with keeping an eye on Ellie. Viewers of the Contact series will not be explicitly told that Karen is a Genesaunt.

After the first two episodes, the viewers have a vague idea that there are "aliens" within the solar system, but the struggle between the Overseers (such as Zelter) and the Interventionists (such as Hadden) will not start to come into view until Episode #3.

In the Exodemic Fictional Universe I typically do not have Overseers introducing nanites into Earthlings, but for Contact I'm imagining that a strategic decision has been made by the Overseers: something had to be done in order to save we Earthlings from ourselves. This is Ellie's #1 question for aliens when she is being inteviewed as a candidate for the Machine seat: "How did you survive your technological adolescence?" Tee Interventionists are continually stimulating the pace of technological developments on Earth and the Overseers are constantly trying to follow along behind and prevent the bumbling Earthlings from doing too much damage to themselves and the planet.

Pull the Plug

In my last blog post I described some ideas for a television series that would continue the story of Eleanor Arroway from the end of the movie Contact.

In the movie there is a scene where Ellie no longer has funding from the NSF to support her SETI work in Puerto Rico. The NSF director "pulls the plug" on her project, calling it a sure path to professional suicide for Ellie.


At the end of the movie we last see Ellie at the VLA continuing her SETI work, once again with government support, but I imagine that the first episode of the Contact television series will be called "Pull the Plug" and will put an end to her attempts to make further radio contact with alien civilizations.

I'm picturing a funny scene that would contine right where the movie ended. Ellie falls asleep under the stars and dreams of S. R. Hadden. The dream is guided by the nanites in her brain.

Backstory: Hadden was actually another host for nanites (as Ellie now is). He lived a very long life on Earth (many hundreds of years) and was a tool by which Interventionists provided technological advances to Earth. When Hadden gave the secret of the "primer" to Ellie, the Observers realized that he was a tool of Interventionists and they extracted the nanites from his body. For centuries the nanites had been repairing Hadden's body. Without the nanites he soon dies (on the Mir space station, as shown in the movie). Through their long integration in Hadden's brain, the extracted nanites are able to carry a fairly good "copy" of Hadden's mind and those "Hadden nanites" continue to function within the Genesaunt civilization that exists at a collection of space stations in outer space and extends outward to many nearby star systems.

Using the nanites that are now in Ellie's brain as a receiver, the "Hadden nanites" make contact with Ellie and warn her that she is in danger of sharing Hadden's fate. He tells her that continuing to work with radio telescopes is a waste of time and that only primitives like Earthlings try to use radio waves for interstellar communication.

Dr. Zelter.
Ellie experiences the contact with "Hadden" in much the same way that she had the experience of meeting her dead father in the movie. When she wakes up, Ellie goes to see her doctor (Karen Zelter). She is undergoing long-term treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder and has been having frequent "flashbacks" of her "trip to the center of the galaxy". This most recent dream-like "contact" with Hadden is something new, quite different from the previous flashbacks. Ellie suggests that more tests need to be done to find out if there was damage to her brain when she was inside the Machine. Dr. Zelter agrees to look into new fMRI techniques for checking on the health of Ellie's brain.

Ellie abandons her research team the VLA and tries to find a way to make new contact with aliens. She tells Palmer that she is returning to Japan in order to try to understand exactly what happened to her when she was inside the Machine. Palmer joins Ellie in Japan and they set up a new test run of the machine that is designed to explore Ellie's claim that the super strong material of the transport pod can become translucent when the machine is powered up. They look at the video recording she made when she was previously in the machine, but each time she tried to point the camera at the translucent walls of the pod, only static was recorded.

Palmer Joss
During the new test of the Machine, Palmer joins Ellie inside the pod, but they do not see the translucent effect that Ellie remembers having seen previously. Ellie realizes that the "signal from Vega" is no longer being received, and that gives her the idea that when the alien signal was being transmitted the Machine and the transport pod behaved differently; in particular, the powered Machine no longer generates an antigravity effect. Ellie and Plamer start to think of the Machine as being a receiver for alien signals.

Ellie remembers part of the instructions for the Machine that nobody had been able to understand. She assumes that those instructions concerned communications equipment that was built into the transport pod.

Palmer tells Ellie about a secret project inside Area 51 that aims to develop new applications for the Machine's technology. After getting the required security clearance for Ellie, Palmer and Ellie visit Area 51. They see a modified space shuttle (named Inspiration) that has been equipped with a small version of the Machine's rotating ring system which functions as an energy source to power the shuttle's engines. The new engines are called "FL engines", meaning "free lunch engines". The rotating ring system can be powered by a hydrogen/oxygen fuel cell and produces antimatter that can then be reacted with a small amount of hydrogen to produce vast amounts of energy for heating some hydrogen and generating engine thrust. Nobody understands how the antimatter is produced, but using the ring system the fuel supply of Inspiration is expected to allow for a one month round trip journey to Mars.

Area 51.
Another research project at Area 51 is centered on the enigmatic Machine instructions that Ellie suspects might describe how to make advanced communications equipment. The Area 51 team that has been working on this project is unable to make any progress. What Ellie suspects is communications circuitry seems to do absolutely nothing. Ellie is again contacted by the "Hadden nanites" and she is given a hint about the importance of gravity. She realizes that when the machine was running and producing an artificial gravity field, the suspected communications circuitry in the transport pod was no longer being exposed to normal earth gravity.

Inspiration
Ellie argues that the mysterious circuitry should be installed in the Inspiration shuttle and tested in outer space under microgravity conditions. The President asks Palmer to go along with Ellie on the shuttle flight. The Inspiration is flown to the Vandenberg AFB Shuttle Launch facility and then the crew, including Ellie and Palmer, is launched into space.

The captain of the Inspiration takes the shuttle on a quick trip around the Moon. In microgravity and powered by electricity from the fuel cells, the mysterious communications system activates and starts detecting a blizzard of messages (mostly reflecting information being collect by Observers on Earth and sent to the Observer Base on the Moon. The messages are all coded, but the communications equipment can pinpoint the origins of the mysterious signals (not electromagnetic waves). Ellie and Palmer come to the conclusion that aliens are much close to home than Vega.

"Hadden" again contacts Ellie and explains to her how she can use the new communications system to contact him so that he no longer needs to make use of the nanites in her head. For the first time she becomes aware of the fact that she has "alien" nanites in her brain. Suddenly she seems to have a seizure and loses consciousness. Episode 1 of the Contact television series ends with the Inspiration returning to Earth and Palmer making plans to remove the nanites from Ellie's brain.

Contact: Coda

I mentioned in a recent blog post that I've never been able to get very interested in vampires, but I do feel a bit like a vampire when I can't stop myself from making fan fiction stories set in the fictional universes that were invented by science fiction authors like Asimov, Vance and Sagan. Sorry, Carl!

Background reading about Contact, the book and the movie.

I've long thought about a sequel to the film Contact. When I think "fan fiction" I can't resist pulling stories that were conceived by others into the Exodemic Fictional Universe.

Exodemic Plot Elements
That means that I find it very hard to resist the idea of having aliens visit Earth far back in the past. Also, once aliens reach Earth, they don't just wander off and ignore our little blue dot. Do these plot elements from the Exodemic Fictional Universe mesh with Sagan's fictional universe?

The Machine

Golly, gee wiz!
One part of Contact that for many years made me nervous is travel by "worm hole". In "The Search for Kalid" I imagined a type of future science that would allow for technology that could function like a kind of matter transporter. However, why did Sagan include the idea that the transport capsule is gone from Earth for only a very short time? More problematical is the idea that after Ellie experiences her journey to the center of the galaxy, there is no way to repeat the trip and even the radio message from Vega suddenly shuts off.

There are two key elements that I'd like to include in a sequel to Contact, the movie:
1) finding some way to resolve the puzzles that are described in the paragraph, above (Golly, gee wiz!).
2) I feel like the movie version of Contact was leading up to a sequel in which Ellie would search for objective evidence to support her experience of having met the aliens. In the original novel, Contact, Sagan included the idea that humans should look for evidence inside mathematical objects such as trnscendental numbers.

So, how do I propose to mix together my favorite Exodemic plot elements and items 1 & 2, above? I'm willing to try to follow Sagan's suggestion that the only way to travel through space at faster-than-light speeds is by making use of technology that can transport matter as depicted in the movie with the "Machine".

However, I don't think Ellie was transported by the Machine. What was transported were nanites. The artificial gravity and light show at the center of the Machine's rotating rings was all just a show to distract humans from the truth, to sucker people into imagining that the transport pod went through a "worm hole".

"How long was I gone?"
If so, what really did happen inside the Machine? The transport actually takes place when Ellie starts having trouble communicating with the control ship and noticing that the transport pod is becoming transparent. Nanoscopic devices are transported into to the pod and they enter into Ellie's brain (and the electronic video recorder).

When Ellie, riding in the pod, passes through the center of the Machine, artificial gravity rips apart the restraint system (that was not included as part of the construction instructions) and she is knocked unconscious. When she wakes up she starts to "remember" a set of false memories that are constructed in her brain by the nanites. She "remembers" her trop to Vega and on to the center of the galaxy, but she actually never left Earth. The 18 hours of static found in the video recorder is a false trail, also created by the nanites. It makes everyone on Earth imagine that the Machine actually transported Ellie off our planet. Nobody, not even Ellie, suspects that Ellie's story about contact with alien beings is a story built upon a set of false memories planted in her brain.

So how can the alien radio signal from Vega shut off right when humans finally use the Machine? Here I assume that the aliens do have technology that allows faster-than-light communication. There are Observers near Earth and when the Machine countdown starts, they send a FTL "shutdown" message to the space base that has been transmitting the "alien message" to Earth. The Observers were careful to keep that message-transmitting space base lined up with the position of Vega so as to trick people into thinking that the aliens are far away. However, the message is sent from a space station that is only a few light minutes from Earth.

Normally my Exodemic stories depict the Observers as avoiding contact with Earthlings. So why do they make Ellie imagine a trip to the center of the galaxy? In his novel, Sagan imagined that scientists such as Ellie could be induced to search for evidence that the universe had been intelligently designed. Sagan's plot device was that a message is encoded in the value of pi.
3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510......

In the Exodemic Fictional Universe, the Huaoshy develop a technologically advanced civilization long before there are animals on Earth. I congratulate Sagan for writing a science fiction novel about scientists who search for -and find- objective evidence supporting the idea that the universe was created. However, that part of the novel was not included in the movie, so we are free to decide what to include in the sequel to the movie.

Another movie or a television series or what?
The movie Contact was easy on the eye. For a long time I imagined that there could be a second Contact movie, but it might be better if there were a television series.

In the movie, the aliens tell Ellie that humans have only taken one small step into the cosmos, but in time there will be another. At the end of the movie there are indications that she will get a large research grant from the government. How might Ellie set about trying to obtain more information about the aliens? I assume that there will be nothing further gained from the Machine or from listening for radio signals.


Here is where we can be particularly creative. We can wonder, what would Sagan, Druyan and Zemeckis have done?

Was Ellie given any useful clues by the nanites that invade her brain? "This is the way it has been done for millions of years." Here is where I diverge from the book. Ellie has to ask herself:
1) have other humans previously been in contact with the aliens?
and
2) why did the aliens make contact now, with her?

What would Ellie do with big new research grant from the government? Where would she look for clues? In the radio message from the aliens there were four "layers" of information that were previously decoded:
1) the sequence of primes,
2) the video transmission,
3) the "primer" and
4) the instructions for the Machine.
Is there even more information still hidden in the message?

Exactly what technological advances were given to Earthlings in order to allow them to build the Machine? In the movie, when the Machine is attaining full power Ellie "sees" the material of the transport pod become translucent. Later, she can "see" through the wall and look at what is outside of the pod. I put "see" in quotes because I assume that as soon as the nanites invade her brain they start sharing information and constructing false memories. I assume that the nanites can function as receivers and the aliens can use their advanced FTL communications technology (not electromagnetic) to send information into Ellie's mind.

What is the type of energy is generated by the Machine? And what role did Hadden play in allowing Earthlings to build the Machine? Exactly who was Hadden?

"A final gift to the people of Earth, from whom I have taken so much."

Is it possible that Hadden had previously been in contact with Genesaunts, possibly Interventionists? Are the "aliens" systematically providing information to select humans in an effort to guide them towards....what?

Can the technology of the Machine provide a new energy source that can be used to allow humanity to move out into the Solar System? Can Ellie study the electronic equipment that "recorded 18 hours of static" and deduce that nanites created the static as a false trail? Does that lead her to suspect that she was given false memories? Would it be possible for humans to discover the alien nanites and start to develop a useful nanotechnology? What about the FTL communications technology...is that within Ellie's reach? And if humans can use the "alien" technology to start colonizing the solar system, when will they find the Observers?

Above, I put "aliens" in quotes because it might be that there is no direct involvement of the Huaoshy or any other aliens. All of the "contact" might only be interaction between Genesaunts and Earthlings. In the Exodemic Fictional Universe the Huaoshy long ago took animals off of Earth and "cultured" them in space bases, creating a population of "Genesaunt" life forms who reside off of Earth.

Ellie asks, "Did you build the transport system?"

Reply: "No. It was built long before we got here."

It might be that the presumed "alien contact" has not taken place...maybe Ellie has only been in communication with an advanced civilization that can trace its origin back to a few animals that were once, very long ago, taken off of Earth by the Huaoshy. Maybe the Genesaunts anticipate that some day the Huaoshy might return.

There are many possibilities that can be explored, so I feel most comfortable imagining a television series in which there can be many one hour episodes for exploration of what Ellie does next and how she leads Earthlings towards additional contacts with the Genesaunts.

Contact Episode 1: Pull the Plug

Images.
Top: VAMPIRE SKULL by ~GH0STMAN75.
The "Machine" where Ellie is infected by nanites. Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan.

Aliens say: "Take us to your money"

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent and the first choice of Caleb $charf. And $tephen Hawking. And Hollywood ($tar War$). And video games like Ma$$ Effect.

In ‘Mass Effect’ Solves The Fermi Paradox?, $charf adopts a popular approach to the Femi Paradox which suggests that our fate is "a huge planet-destroying, species-wrecking, epic finale". Is utter de$truction inevitable in Hollywood and video games just because violence $ell$?

Could anyone be surprised by the violence-filled plots of games like Ma$$ Effect and big $$$ makers like $tar War$? I'm only surprised when I find science fiction that is not built on death and destruction. $charf says "you have been warned" before discussing the plot....just so that the revelation does not $urpri$e anyone?

But why are $pace alien$ "out there", patiently waiting to destroy us? $o they can "use the genetic slurry of millions, billions of individuals from a species [humans] to create new versions of themselves". Duh! Of course, why didn't I think of that? It i$ all $o $imple.

Yes, in case you did not notice, the fate of humanity is in the [hands?] of "a hyper-advanced machine race" that has spent the past 37 million years systematically destroying every advanced organic civilization in our galaxy. I guess this is why the Mayans built an end into their calendar....they got advanced warning about the Reapers.

The first alien invasion story I ever saw was the 1953 movie version of War of the Worlds. That one story was more than enough for me. How can there be an endle$$ market for $torieS about alien inva$ion$ and $lime-dripping alien$ who could de$troy the human $pe$ieS in a flash of advanced weapons technology, but who almost always are so bumbling that a tribe of naked apes (or even Earthly bacteria) can defeat them? When I was 12 I was not buying this plot. Really, why does it continue to $ell? And $ell....and $ell.....and $ell... (if Hollywood can endlessly make movies with the same science fiction plot, then John can endlessly complain about it)

So what do other people have to say about the phenomenon endless alien invasion movies?

"I hoped this movie would be a blockbuster. Something to make me believe Hollywood is generating creative, and innovative stories to take me away from reality for a couple of hours. This movie was a serious disappointment."

"I'd like my money back please. What a stinker!"

"It's as if Spielberg has sunk down under the weight of so much shoulder perching, and has been reduced to foraging for ideas in the mud."

"...the audience around me laughed derisively...."

"I hate to say just how disappointed I am in this film."

"Spielberg has made forgettable junk, cobbled together too quickly, with far too little imagination."

"Spielberg shouldn't be allowed to make science fiction films. I was more than disappointed by it. It made me angry."

"Ugh, what an awful movie!"

"Sucks. Now who do i see to get my money back."

"I think it was one of the worst movies ever, which would have passed unnoticed have not been directed by Spielberg, and played by Cruise, of course, that's the whole point of the Hollywood industry, to raise the expectations as high as you can, no matter what the cost, and then produce a really crappy product. From the economic point of view i understand it perfectly, is like putting your label on some crappy product and then making out a fortune, because of people's ignorance."

"Horrible, awful, embarrassing"

"This had to be one of the most GOD AWFUL PIECES OF CRAP I HAVE EVER SEEN!"

$pielberg and Crui$e laugh all the way to the bank and science fiction fans wait for something worth watching. The entertainment industry reminds me of R. J. Reynolds. As long as ca$h keeps flowing in, who cares about the product and what it does to people?

Related Reading: Protests over ending of Mass Effect 3 show fan investment in story control

One of the comments after the ars technica article: "you wouldn't try to protest the ending of a major work of film or literature if you didn't enjoy how it played out."

Why not? This is not 1912. Here in 2012 we are now in the era of global communications where consumers can come together on the internet and complain about a product that they paid money for.

"Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

I'd love to see 2012 be the start of a time of protest during which consumers refused to buy video games, see SciFi movies and buy science fiction novels that have the same tired plots. We can do better (is participatory cinema a path to a brighter and more creative SciFi future or just more of the same dreck?).

Plato's Cave

I previously mentioned that Isaac Asimov was heavily influenced by the science fiction stories he read in his youth (the "pulps", like the one shown above....gee, I wonder why so many people give similar reports of alien abductions?).
Similarly, I enjoyed watching Star Trek re-runs when I was young. The Star Trek episode "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" reminds me of the image to the right. During the past couple of centuries, it has been possible for humans to generate a detailed understanding of our place in the universe, but a persistent science fiction theme explores the possibility that reality as we know it is just an illusion.

Might you be in some kind of computer simulation that tricks you into thinking that you are more than just software in a computer? Probably the most hyped version of this sort of "simulated reality" fantasy is The Matrix. A modern philosophical version of this topic is the "brain in a vat", but this is an age old idea. In our "Western" philosophical tradition, some Platonists long ago imagined that reality as we experience it is an illusion while the only things that are truly real are the imaginary "ideal forms" invented by philosophers. In Cellular Civilization, Thomas is a haunted host for alien nanites and his thought processes are so muddled that he has trouble recognizing what is real. There are endless ways to explore and question the nature of reality in science fiction stories.

I've previously imagined a disease called "reality assignment disorder" that would involve confusion in the brain about which experiences are due to an external reality revealed to us by our senses and which are imagined fantasies. In Capgras syndrome, patients have the feeling that an acquaintance has been replaced by an imposter. In alien hand syndrome, patients feel like someone else is in control of a limb. All kinds of strange perceptions can be caused by brain damage. We need a healthy brain in order to have a normal sense of what constitutes reality.

I've never been plagued by doubts about the reality of the world that my sensory organs and my brain allow me to experience: I can't take seriously the idea that we should not trust our brains.....hundreds of millions of years of evolution went into making the (healthy) human nervous system a reliable way to experience the world around us. However, I do like science fiction stories that explore the possibility that conventional beliefs about the nature of reality might be wrong because those beliefs are built upon imperfect knowledge of the universe. I love the idea that a simple scientific discovery can "change everything" and radically reshape human beliefs about the universe.

Newton did not literally "penetrate the sky" and so perceive reality in a new way, but he was able to imagine that a single force, gravity, both makes apples fall off of trees and holds the Moon in the sky. That conceptual leap once-and-for-all allows us to stop wondering what holds the Moon and planets in their positions in the sky. There need be no aetherial "celestial spheres" or other fantasy explanations for the motions of celestial objects.....gravitation does the work of a thousand imagined epicycles.

Here is another example of how a scientific discovery can suddenly change our understanding of the universe: during most of human existence on Earth, people wondered about the composition of celestial objects. Even after the science of astronomy had begun it was tempting to believe that people might never know what stars are made of because of their great distance from us. However, spectroscopy revealed that stars are made of the same types of atoms that we find in our own bodies. For centuries it was possible for philosophers to imagine that celestial objects might be composed of some mystical and ethereal substance not found on Earth. I love that science can overturn such beliefs and allow us to realize that the material of our bodies was formed inside stars that long ago exploded and scattered our atoms through space...only to be formed into new planets and stars.....and us.

I suspect that we are the one remaining member of the Homo genus because of our special cognitive abilities. Humans have the ability to play with ideas and create stories that meander back and forth between the objective reality that we all experience using our structurally similar brains and imagined variations of reality that we can each invent as extensions of what we see in the world.

I've never been very good at pushing my imagination towards the more hardcore domains of fantasy, but it is easy for me to play around with imagined science.

What distinction am I making between "hardcore domains of fantasy" and "imagined science"? The boundary that is of interest to me was discussed by Veronica Hollinger in "The Vampire and the Alien: Variations on the Outsider". Dr. Hollinger discussed "domestication of the fantastic" in the context of vampires. There have been many science fiction stories about aliens who could suck vital essences from humans, so why not imagine that horror story vampires might be space aliens? For me, the main reason is that there are so many vampire stories where no attempt is made to give a rationalization for the existence of vampires...they are simply presented as a magical element of a fantasy story.

I've never been intrigued by the idea of vampires, but I can imagine how it might be possible to portray Overseers as vampire-like "aliens". I enjoy having some deep-rooted antagonism between humans and Overseers, but I've never tried to portray Overseers as evil creatures. I've never read "The Space Vampires" and, as a biologist, I have little patience for plots that involve beings with magical "life force"-sucking powers. I can imagine an Overseer using nanite probes to take away memories from Franny (rather than give up her memories, Franny leaves Earth) or those nanites taking away the ability of Judy's motor neurons to control her muscles (this happens in Exodemic), but I've never taken seriously stories like "Day of the Dove" in which alien creatures feed off of humans (or humanoids).
In the image to the right, the boys defeat such an alien (it has an appetite for fear) with laughter. I like to think that I have a good imagination, but I can't imagine how anyone would think that it makes sense for a life form to feed off of fear....or think that people would enjoy science fiction stories about such imagined life forms. Yet, Star Trek had several episodes based on this premise including "Wolf in the Fold".

A large part of my problem with stories like Day of the Dove and Wolf in the Fold is that they strike me as horror stories or murder mysteries dressed up to be passed off as science fiction. These stories try to "domesticate the fantastic" and ask us to say, "Gee wiz, an alien like that could explain so much of the evil from human history," but even as a 12-year-old I was not buying it, or the idea that dinosaurs died in the biblical flood.

What I like most about science fiction and Star Trek is adventure...going to new places and seeing wonderful things. Expanding our mental horizons. For the past 100 years it has been popular to imagine space aliens suddenly showing up and turning our view of the universe up-side-down. Of course, after a while, that can grow old. For me, the Fermi Paradox is a like a big wet blanket draped over SciFi First Contact stories.

Aliens should not show up on Earth next week, they should have been here millions of years ago. Maybe Earth was so boring that the aliens came and then left, but that does not make for a good science fiction story. Maybe we are looking at shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. Maybe we all do see the shadows of aliens who long ago came to Earth, but we just do not recognize the meaning of those shadows.

It took the genius of Newton to start with something that many other people had seen (a falling object and the Moon in the sky) and conceptualize it in a new way (universal gravity). What if evidence for space aliens is right here in front of our eyes every day?

One of my favorite parts of the Exodemic Fictional Universe is that it is escapist literature depicting the human condition as being such that we are all just one small step away from a kind of personal First Contact that would win us a ticket off this rock and set us on a grand adventure among the stars. We don't need to be the brilliant (or lucky) scientist who can build a space ship in the garage. We don't need to depend on a slime dripping alien to show up looking for a planet to plunder. We don't need to imagine a government conspiracy with aliens hidden at Area 51.

In Exodemic, Franny lives her whole life never even giving a thought to space aliens or travel between the stars, but suddenly she finds herself seated across a table from someone who can take her away from Earth and open up for her a new life of adventure. All she has to do is say, "Take me away". If we are chained up in Plato's Cave, wouldn't we all say "Take me away"? Appolgies to Martie Maguire and Marcus Hummon.....

touch the earth
break it in my hands
take me away
fly as high as you can
wrap me in a blanket of stars
take me away


Images. Top: Edgar Rice Burroughs on the pulps, "people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines.....I could write stories just as rotten." colored modification of the Flammarion Woodcut. Genus Homo chart.

Music. In Exodemic, the Overseer who takes Franny away speaks with an accent...people in England think she is from Eastern Europe.....something like in the music video below: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYMk6ifkHiY) You can mouse over the Dixie Chicks above to get at the play controls and silence the instrumental version of "Cowboy take me away" that is on autoplay.

Vaccinia Virus

In my last blog post I mentioned that the Exodemic novel uses smallpox as a plot element. It is possible that the smallpox virus originated from an African rodent virus that attained the ability to infect humans (see this article). As discussed by Hughes et al, the origin of Vaccinia Virus (the virus that was used to immunize people against lethal smallpox virus infection) remains a mystery. The mysterious origin of Vaccinia Virus is why I selected it as a plot device for inclusion in the science fiction novel Exodemic.

DNA viruses like Vaccinia are also good examples of nanoscale molecular devices and nanotechnology plays an important role in Exodemic. I imagine that Genesaunt technology allows for efficient introduction of DNA into human cells. Pox viruses are interesting in that they typically have a very limited host range. I imagined that the Genesaunts were able to engineer a pox virus for use in immunizing residents of the Moon against common infectious diseases on Earth. This was important so that Genesaunt agents (Observers) could work on Earth and not be killed or injured by diseases like smallpox.

Vaccinia virus has become a popular subject of research, both as a viral agent for vaccination and for other engineered uses such as targetted destruction of cancer cells. When I was writing Exodemic it was not hard to imagine that Genesaunts would make use of Vaccinia virus as a nanoscale device. Further, I could imagine that Vaccinia virus might have had some earlier human-like ape as its natural host. The Exodemic plot includes the idea that the Huaoshy have been taking apes off of Earth for millions of years.

Pox viruses have DNA coding for many proteins, and in Vaccinia about half the coded proteins seem important for the ability of the virus to replicate. Many of the other proteins might modulate the virulence of the virus and could be important for allowing Vaccinia to replicate inside human cells without causing human disease. This is the subject of on-going research (example). If we pretend that Vaccinia virus was genetically engineered by Genesaunts to safely infect humans, then we have to ask if there might be clues in the Vaccinia DNA sequence that can suggest evidence of that genetic engineering.

An important part of the Exodemic plot revolves around the need for the Genesaunts to eventually abandon their base on the Moon. When I wrote Exodemic I imagined that there would be a point in the technological development of human civilization on Earth at which it would become very difficult to hide the existence of a Genesaunt base under the surface of the Moon. We might be at that point now with the GRAIL mission searching for "masses hidden beneath the lunar surface".

It would make more sense for the Genesaunts to use their nanite technology for observations of Earth, but it is more fun to have human Observers on Earth. While Genesaunts do not have access to the Huaoshy technology for faster-than-light travel, they do use an advanced technology for faster-than-light communication. There is no way for we Earthlings with our primitive technology to intercept or detect Genesaunt communications. Our SETI attempts to detect radio signals from distant worlds are doomed to failure because it is only primitives who try to use electromagnetic waves for interstellar communication.

Besides fun, there is another reason for having Human Observers on Earth. Although the Rules of Observation forbid interference by Observers in the natural course of development of human civilization on Earth, the Huaoshy really only care that Earthlings not become aware of how Genesaunts alter the course of human affairs on Earth. Having a few Observers on Earth is part of the system by which the Huaoshy influence the course of human civilization. The Overseers are allowed to believe that the Interventionists lack the ability to visit Earth without being detected by Observers. As long as the Interventionists are not too bold, the Overseers never catch on to their tricks (such as finding a way to provide the benefits of vaccination to Earthlings).

The intervention depicted in the prelude to Exodemic is designed to come after the Genesaunts have already decided to phase out their use of the secret base under the surface of the Moon. The preludes takes place in ancient Greece when it looks like Earthlings are on the path towards science and technology. But the crafty Interventionists allow the Overseers to notice that Greek science is leaping ahead because of Interventionist meddling. The Overseers put an end to Greek science and humanity needs another 2,000 years to reach the Industrial Age. During those 2,000 years the process of phasing out Moon Base slowly continues, and by the time that Kate Renshaw is taken off of Earth, Moon Base can no longer fully staff the Earth Observation Program. This helps the Interventionists make changes to Earthly civilization that go undetected (by Overseers) for several decades.

In other stories that I have written after Exodemic, particularly Cellular Civilization, I imagine that the Observers have automated nanotechnology for detecting unusual DNA sequences on Earth and the Overseers routinely use that technology to detect genetic monkey business perpetrated by Interventionists. In Exodemic, the Interventionists are given advanced technology that allows them to elude most of the Earth Observation tools that the Overseers rely upon. For 2,000 years the Interventionists do not do much on Earth and the Overseers become lulled into a false sense of security: they let their guard down.

Overseers are part biological and partially nanorobotic artificial life forms. A typical tour of duty for an Overseer is about 1,000 years. By the time that Interventionists use Kate Renshaw as their agent, there are no active Overseers with experience intercepting Interventionist missions on Earth. The Overseers are something like the Keystone Kops of Exodemic: they remind me of the Kzin or the Klingons, always taking themselves too seriously and always being defeated. In essence, the Overseers function to prevent bumbling alterations of human civilization by soft-hearted Observers who might grow too attached to their Earthling friends. The Overseers are told that their main function is to thwart Genesaunt Interventionists, but in reality the Interventionists are always given (by the Huaoshy) slightly more advanced nanotechnology and space ships that allow them to run circles around the poor Overseers.

The image to the right is a cover from a Dean Ing novel set in the context of Niven's Man-Kzin wars. Niven imagined that Kzin females were little more than baby factories. In Exodemic, all the Observers are male and all the Overseers are female. The excuse provided for this is that the Rules of Observation call for no chance that Genesaunts on Earth might exchange genes with humans on Earth. The sperm of Observer males cannot fertilize the eggs of women on Earth. Before humans became the Observers on Earth, the humanoid ancestors of the Overseers functioned as Observers. When modern humans took over the job of on-Earth Observation, the Overseers depicted in Exodemic were already present as part of Genesaunt civilization: they were humanoid/nanobot hybrids that cannot interbreed with humans, although when they interact with humans they morph so as to take on human body form. The Overseers sometimes have to bully and intimidate Observers, so they routinely take on the form of human females and revel in the process of humiliating any Observers who get out of line and violate the Rules of Observation. Sometimes Overseers can impersonate an Earthling and trick an Observer into revealing the fact that he is a violator of the Rules of Observation.

The Overseers view themselves as vastly superior to humans and have a chronic problem of being bored with the mundane tasks that they typically perform on a daily basis. The Overseers have long ago abandoned sexual reproduction. They reproduce synthetically by a sophisticated engineering process that involves cleansing chromosomes of genetic defects and updating their nanorobotic components to the latest software versions. The biological core of an Overseer develops into little more than a nervous system, a minimal digestive system and a kidney. The rest of an Overseer body is composed of nanites. The Overseer nervous system does have an advanced chemosensory system and an artificially engineered chemosynthetic organ. Overseers can manufacture a large number of potent pheromones which they use as a major foundation for the complex dynamics of Overseer social interactions. Humans stationed at the Observer Base under the surface of the Moon know nothing about Overseer sociology, but there is considerable speculation.

For some stories set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe I have fun imagining that humans have receptors that respond to some of the Overseer pheromones. Usually the Overseers manipulate the behavior of humans by invading their bodies with nanorobotic probes. However, in some cases it is fun to depict Overseers as having the ability to manipulate human emotions with the help of pheromones. In Exodemic there is a funny scene during which an Overseer is trying to obtain important information from Judy Renshaw. They end up in bed together on a cold English night and Judy, confused by the effects of unseen nanites and pheromones later feels that she was unfairly taken advantage of. Overseers find humans repulsive, but they are willing to take on human form in order to do their police work.

The ability of Overseers to take emotional and physical control over humans reminds me of The Man Trap (see image to the right), although Overseers have no telepathic abilities. In this Star Trek episode, an alien was able to appear to Dr. McCoy in the form a woman who he had previously know and the alien was able to make McCoy believe that the alien was a human woman. Similarly, Overseers can use their nanorobotic components to morph into the form of a human and they could probably do a fairly good job of impersonating a specific human.

In Exodemic, an Overseer meets Franny and suddenly realizes that Franny is probably the daughter of an Observer (Howard Miller). The Overseer needs a sample of Franny's DNA. It takes little more than a moment of physical contact to obtain the DNA sample and within a few minutes the nanorobotic components of the Overseer's body completely sequence Franny's genome. Within the hour Franny is in outer space and starting her new life as a Genesaunt.

Collaboration: I wrote a "first draf" Exodemic several years ago. If you would like to dust the story off for some collaborative development and re-writing, let me know.

Images. Top: image from this article; pox viruses have surface proteins that are similar to those of icosahedral capsids. GRAIL image from NASA.