Contact 30

Contact 2: the needed sequel.

Carl Sagan's science fiction novel, Contact, was published in 1985. In his story, Sagan depicted a message from aliens that used a series of prime numbers to draw the attention of scientists to a coded set of instructions for how to build a complex piece of alien technology. Also, there was another "message", a message from "God" hidden away inside the transcendental number Pi. We still need another Contact movie to tell the story of the message inside Pi.

I'm currently writing Sagan into the Exode Trilogy and as part of my celebration of the 30th anniversary of Contact, I'm trying to think of a cute trick that would allow me to incorporate prime numbers or transcendental numbers into the story Star Dance.

Primes and Pi on my mind.....

prime spiral
God's fingerprint

The first novel by Arthur Clarke that I read (The City and the Stars) also included prime numbers (see this account).

Gersen and Alusz

Jack Vance included the Greek letter Pi in several of his stories. For example, the star Pi Cassiopeia was described as the location of a planet called Orpo, the world where Demon Prince Kokor Hekkus committed one of his kidnappings while trying to raise 10 Billion SVU as part of his effort to "buy" the inexpressibly beautiful Alusz Iphigenia Eperje Tokay.

A Star King

Beyond mere mention of Pi, in Star King, Vance states that Fourier analysis can be used to break the encryption of the recorded astrogation data for Teehalt's Planet, a world "too beautiful for degradation". However, Gersen is able to negotiate a deal with the owner of the decryption code, allowing him to visit the planet. Of relevance to the Exode Trilogy and the Ekcolir Reality,  Fourier was among the first to recognize the importance of the greenhouse effect for planets like Earth.

The Prime Radiant

Equations "projected" by the Prime Radiant

In Forward the Foundation, Isaac Asimov's character Yugo Amaryl creates the Prime Radiant, a small device that stores all of Seldon's plans for the future of the Galaxy.....or something. We are supposed to think that it is called a "radiant" because it can "project" and display the equations of Psychohistory, although it does not use ordinary projection with light waves. Then exactly what does it "radiate"? I prefer to imagine that the Prime Radiant was a mind control device used by Daneel to control Hari Seldon and the Second Foundation.

The Pi man.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a self-taught mathematician who lived from 1887 to 1920. Ramanujan reminds me of Asimov's character, Amaryl. One of the mathematical objects named after Ramanujan is the "Ramanujan prime", the first few of which are 2, 11, 17, 29 and 41.

Like Ramanujan, Amaryl first labored in obscurity then he was "discovered" by a famous mathematician. However, not only was Amaryl a mysteriously good mathematician, but he was also "good with his hands", which means, of course, he was able to make the Prime Radiant. Sure. I suspect Daneel or one of his robotic helpers was involved.

Daneel the telepath

Also like Ramanujan, Amaryl died at a young age before he could fully develop and exploit his quirky mathematical insights. Amaryl coined the term "achaotic equations", which supposedly made possible the prediction of future events by the mathematics of Psychohistory.

Most importantly, Amaryl was able to use the Prime Radiant as a "detector" for identifying the existence of Wanda's telepathic powers. Asimov told readers that it was her uncanny "sense of symmetry" that led Wanda (with the help of the Prime Radiant) to recognize the critical roles that Terminus and Trantor would play in the future because of their positions at the "opposite ends of the Galaxy". Sure.

I prefer to believe that the Prime Radiant was an elaborate joke played by Daneel. Daneel needed to hide from humans the existence of time travel (see Foundations of Eternity) , so he created the pseudoscience of Psychohistory and used it to trick a few key people into believing that mathematics could predict the future. With Daneels "mentalic" abilities, tricking the bumbling humans was as easy as pie.

Alien telepathy. Alien 1: I sense he is not the real Captain of the Enterprise.
Alien 2: Yes. He's able to resist the urge too ravish the slave girl.

Pi Day to Pie Day

Diagram of hierions and sedrons

Albert Einstein was born on March 14th, Pi Day. Pie = 8.53973422267..... (e is Euler's number), so August 5th is Pie Day. I'm currently writing Chapter 5 of Star Dance in which Bet tries to explain to Ghyl her continuing interest in Einstein. She is establishing the needed conditions that will result in the ability of Earthlings to have a basic understanding of hierion physics in the Buld Reality, the universe as we know it. Central to that goal, is that Einstein must move to the United States and provide critical information (the so called 10D Einstein Equation) to the U.S. government.

However, in the Ekcolir Reality, Einstein dies on August 5th, 1922, murdered by a right wing assassin. Paradoxically, as a kind of temporal inversion due to Einstein's death, foreign minister Walter Rathenau does not die in 1922 and he goes on to lead a democratic Germany in the 1930s.....Hitler never comes to power and there is no World War II in the Ekcolir Reality, only the "post-war boom" which drives global industrialization and produces terribly high levels of greenhouse gases.

Source

In the Ekcolir Reality, in 1920, at the age of 41, Einstein travels around the world, visiting both the United States and India.

The hierion mass equation

While he is in India, Einstein meets Ramanujan who, while on his death bed, provides Einstein with an astonishing equation (in the Ekcolir Reality, Einstein calls it the Ramanujan Equation) that predicts the masses of the hierions.

Contact, 1997. The Contact television show.
Background art work: "Ellie's Vision" by Zane Bien.

In Contact, Ellie takes a loooong trip across the galaxy, but by the magic of Hollywood time contraction, it all happens in an instant. I prefer an alternate interpretation: her memories of the journey are artificial, having been implanted in her mind by a nanorobotic endosymbiont.

Hard fantasy adventure

A second Contact movie could reveal that the machine was a device for bringing nanoscopic aliens to Earth. 2017 would be a good year for the release of Contact 2.

Next blog post: April Fools' Day 2015.

Related Reading: Contact the television program

visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers

Worlds in Collision

1958

During the past month I've been exploring the history of the Ekcolir Reality and how Carl Sagan was brought into existence. Here, I want to continue reflecting on the importance of Sagan in the Exode Trilogy, particular the role that he plays in allowing Humanity to learn from the past experience of the Fru'wu. Also, I want to continue placing Exode in its proper cosmological context.

During the past few years, data from the Kepler exoplanet discovery mission has shown that many star systems have "super Earths" in orbits that are close to stars. If that pattern is the default for planet formation, then why is our Solar System different, with 4 relatively small "terrestrial" planets located close to the sun and all the larger planets far away from the sun? Are the 'near super Earth' star systems being detected in high abundance now simply because of the observational method used by the Kepler observations?

Collisions: Velikovsky, Einstein and Sagan 

Etruscan art

The story Star Dance involves a time travel mission back to the start of the 20th century when Carl Sagan's grandparents and Immanuel Velikovsky were living in what would become the Soviet Union. From about 1945 to 1991 the world was locked in a balance of terror while the cold war rivals (USSR and USA) built up their stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

In the Ekcolir Reality, the Etruscan's formed a civilization that came to dominate Europe. There was no Roman Empire and Christianity never became a major influence in Europe. The rate of technological advance was slightly faster in the Ekcolir Reality than in the universe as we know it. Nuclear weapons became available during World War I, but chemical and nuclear weapons were not ever used on Earth. However, rising levels of greenhouse gases, ice cap melting and sea level rise became serious problems during the 20th century in the Ekcolir Reality (see this blog post).

1953

Carl Sagan and other planetary scientists applied the concept of atmospheric gases acting to hold heat next to planets such as Venus. Accounting for the high surface temperature of Venus with the "greenhouse effect" put Sagan in conflict with fans of Velikovsky who imagined that Venus had been careening about the Solar System during historical times.

During the 20th century, scientists including Sagan developed the idea of "nuclear winter" and Isaac Asimov imagined a future in which the surface of Earth became too radioactive to support life. Growing up during the cold war, one of my most chilling science fiction reading experiences was Level 7. In the Exode Trilogy, Earth is caught in a strange temporal attractor that threatens to terminate Humanity either by nuclear catastrophe or by a runaway greenhouse effect.

Worlds in Collision by
Carlos Valenzuela

In order to kick Earth out of that strange attractor and save Humanity, Grean and Trysta must negotiate an end to the Time War.

Velikovsky had a medical education and then he went on to have a rather odd career. In the 1920s he supposedly became involved in a project that was related to the establishment of the Hebrew University. It is fun to imagine that Velikovsky became known to Albert Einstein at this time.

Velikovsky is interesting because of the way he tried to relate events during human history to cosmological events. Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov were also intrigued by the puzzle of how Humanity fits into the grand structure of the cosmos, an intellectual project that provides a foundation for speculative fiction.

In the Exode Trilogy, I have fun imagining that a few Earthlings have occasionally become aware of some of the secret history of Earth (see this blog post).

"Super Earths" close to Gliese 581

What if Velikovsky was told by an Interventionist agent that Venus is a base of operations for the Fru'wu and Jupiter helped form Venus as a planet that is too hot for humans, but a suitable hiding place in the Solar System for a Fru'wu base of operations? Not understanding what he had been told, Velikovsky went on to concoct his own theories.

In "Jupiter’s decisive role in the inner Solar System’s early evolution", Batygin and Laughlin report on their simulations of star system development which suggest that our Solar System might be unusual and particularly suitable for life because of the presence of Jupiter. They suggest that gravitational effects of Jupiter caused the early inner Solar System to become depleted of most of the planetary mass that otherwise might have formed Super Earths close to the Sun.

1954 - original cover art by Ed Emshwiller

But our Solar System does not have any "Super Earth" planets close to the Sun. Instead, we got our relatively small planet Earth and -us, Homo sapiens, a biological species that is able to contemplate and explore the universe.

For the Exode Trilogy, I imagine that Carl Sagan learns the troubled history of the Fru'wu, an alien species with a long history of dealing with carbon dioxide-rich atmospheres.

Fruthwa
source

The modified "Future Science Fiction" magazine cover shown here is a whimsical imagining of Fru'wu explorers in the process of claiming some distant planet for their species.

Sagan visits Tar'tron in the Galactic Core and brings back to Earth a potential solution to our global warming crisis, but will the bumbling Earthlings be able to successfully deploy the alien technology that could save our planet?

Next: observing the 30th anniversary of Carl Sagan's science fiction novel Contact.

visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers

Space Dance

Stardance: The Movie

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." -Friedrich Nietzche

Back in the previous millennium, I would occasionally take a break from studying, ride my bike to the local bookstore and see if any interesting science fiction novels had arrived. During most of the 1980s Stardance graced the shelves, but I've never read bought anything that was written by Spider Robinson.

cover art by Larry Kresek

The cover for Stardance by Larry Kresek was eye-catching, but I'd learned not to judge a book by its cover. I'd stand in bookstores and read novels until I decided that I had to buy them. So, there were some books that I would repeatedly scan through while trying to figure out if they contained a real science fiction plot or if they were just fluff with a hot babe spaceship on the cover.

I had a theory: you can't judge a book by its cover, but you can judge a book by its last few pages.

source

I love stories about First Contact and I like the idea of space aliens who have been visiting Earth for billions of years, but there are some "science fiction" writers who really are not interested in science and that can ruin a story for me. Or vastly annoy me. In general, I prefer the work of science fiction writers who have a background in science or engineering rather than the work of some random dude with a B.A. in English. Here is a review that gives some of the reasons why a hard SciFi fan won't enjoy Stardance.

Star Worms

I'm not particularly interested in dance. In contrast, Jeanne Robinson was a dancer and she made Stardance into a technically sound depiction of low gravity dancing. Make it a rule: if a SciFi author makes dancing a major part of a story, there should be a paragraph on the book cover explaining why. I'm not able to feel much enthusiasm for the idea that human enjoyment of dancing is inhibited by gravity so, wouldn't it be cool to dance in outer space? The whole idea of adapting animals to live in outer space has just never appealed to me.

Telepathy, Teleportation, Time Travel

My original reason for putting dance into a science fiction novel was rather lame. My main motivation was that Grean needed help. Grean needed to change the historical timeline of Earth, but the dirty work (Intervention) had to be done by bumbling humans. By the Rules of Observation, the primitive Earthlings of the 20th century could not be told about telepathy, teleportation and time travel. Solution: let your Interventionist agents believe that telepathy, teleportation and time travel are made possible by magic. To cast a magic teleportation spell, you need to wave your magic wand or say the magic word. Or, if you want to involve Jack Vance, maybe you can invoke the odd religion of Halma in which use of the proper dance steps can guide people into a magical science fantasy existence. So, Grean engineered a science fantasy adventure in which one of the two main characters is a dancer (Bet Pliqua).

Space Dance. Ghyl and Bet stop at the Moon
on their way from the Galactic Core to Earth.

Having sketched out the plot for Chapter 3, I'm now more than 20,000 words into creating my science fantasy adventure story that tells how Grean used magic to bring into existence the Buld Reality, the world as we know it. I'd originally thought of this story as being called The Dancing Earth, as a tribute to Jack Vance's The Dying Earth. However, I've grown more comfortable using either the title Star Dance or, alternatively, Space Dance, a title which I can think of as being a tip of my hat to Vance's Space Opera.

Practicing Telepathy by Bethy Williams

While trying to bring into existence the Buld Reality, Grean faced the challenge of sending Interventionist agents to Earth who knew nothing about the scientific basis of nanotechnology, teleportation or the other standard "tools of the trade" for Interventionists. Grean needed to destroy Gohrlay's monopoly on telepathy, and so, why not fight fire with fire? Grean scavenges the galaxy, finding the most effective gene combinations for human telepathy, and assembles a team of telepaths that will be able to operate effectively on Earth right under the noses of the Observers.

Marie Pliqua

Star Dance has the flavor of a fantasy story because Grean never explains to Gyle the technological basis of telepathy, teleportation, robots or any of the "magic tricks" that he is able to perform after arriving 'on' Tar'tron in the Galactic Core. Ghyl naturally has some telepathic ability, but when an nanorobotic endosymbiont takes up residence in "his" brain, his telepathic powers are greatly enhanced.

Simultaneously, Grean needed to push the primitive humans of 20th century Earth slightly closer towards being able to understand hierion and sedronic physics. Killing two birds with one Intervention, Grean chose to target Albert Einstein. In the Asimov Reality, where Einstein impregnated fellow student Mileva Marić and then, because of his irresponsible actions, he was disowned by his family and badgered by the family of Mileva. Escaping his troubles, Albert became a musician for the Ballets Russe and nobody in the arts world ever noticed that he knew math and physics. In the Ekcolir Reality, Einstein and Mileva were married, but they lost their first child (Lieserl) to a childhood bacterial infection.

Star Dance tells the story of how Grean turned the daughter of Albert and Mileva into the tool that she needed to end the Time War. Genetically, Bet is the daughter of Carl Sagan and Lieserl Einstein. However, the father figure who Bet grew up knowing was the Selfie of Alexander Godunov, an artificial lifeform that originated as another Earthling who Grean rescued from the 20th century and brought to the Galactic Core.

Bet in the role of Ghyl's Night

Alexander and Obsidia raised Lieserl and changed her name to Marie Pliqua. Obsidia, the ancient helper of Grean, is a master of disguises, so she plays the role of several characters in Star Dance, taking on several different bodily forms, including Night, a chess piece (image to the left).

Bet Pliqua is the daughter of Lieserl and Alexander and she grows up as a dancer. Eventually, she meets Ghyl (the other main character of Star Dance) and they are sent off on a mission to Earth as Interventionist agents. Next - Star Dance Chapter 4: Harlem

Visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers

Temporal Amplification

In Star Dance, Grean (in her role as Hortensia) makes
use of the theory of Temporal Amplification.
The Hortensia Dance Troop (pictured above)
Two copies of Bet and two of Lieserl assembled in Time.

The Exode Trilogy originated as a fan fiction sequel to Isaac Asimov's time travel novel The End of Eternity. Thus, I adopt the idea that Time has a momentum and for time travel technicians such as Andrew Harlan and Noÿs Lambent, the powerful influence of temporal inertia must be overcome in order to shift a timeline and make possible a Reality Change.

Asimov insisted that Harlan's exquisite Technician's Touch, his amazing skill at finding the most effective way to initiate a Reality Change, was a mysterious power that could not be replicated by even the most sophisticated computational devices.

The power of temporal loops.

In contrast, I like to imagine that Noÿs had access to advanced time travel technology that allowed her to see past the mysticism of time travel that existed within Eternity.

In Star Dance, Hortensia baffles poor Ghyl with "her" ability to look into the future and find ways to engineer complex Reality Changes. Unlike Harlan, who prized the simplicity of a Minimum Necessary Change, Hortensia is the master of the Amazingly Imaginative Outcome. The shape of Reality is putty in Hortensia's hands.

The foundation of the science of Temporal Amplification rests upon the fact that time loops contain vast amounts of temporal energy. For example, the Mallansohn time loop, in which Eternity must function as a system that allows Cooper to travel back in time and bring Eternity into existence, contains enough energy to flip the shape of Time into an entirely new conformation. When Harlan and Noÿs snap the over-burdened linkages of the Mallansohn time loop, a Reality Change occurs and the newly created Reality allows for a drastically altered pattern in the history of Earth: vast amounts of temporal momentum have suddenly been overcome.

Angela Pampuri - 1901

The energy content of time loops is not linearly related to the temporal duration of a time loop. The Mallansohn time loop was many centuries in duration and one way to build up energy in a time loop is to make it be of long duration. However, short duration and "compact" time loops can also store large amounts of temporal energy. In Star Dance, Hortensia engineers a time loop in which Bet must go to Earth and save her own mother from an early death. At the same time, Hortensia is creating a "soul mate" for Ghyl, a woman who's telepathic abilities complement those of Ghyl. The synergistic power of Ghyl and Bet is needed to make possible the creation of a special Earthling, a man born into the 20th century who will be able to provide Earth with the means to survive its technological adolescence.

Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity

Taboo
In The End of Eternity, it was almost impossible for the Eternals to even think about the possibility of traveling through time and meeting a second copy of yourself. Hortensia is forced to create a plan that depends on bringing together multiple copies of a few key humans in order to amplify their telepathic powers. The image at the top of this blog post is meant to depict a key gathering that includes two copies of Bet and two copies of her mother, Lieserl. When assembled, Hortensia's Dance Troop is able to use the telepathic powers of its members to penetrate the information stores of the Sedronic Domain, lead Grean to Gohrlay and make possible a negotiated end to the Time War.

visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers

Albert Einstein in Vienna, 1921.

On this day in 1879 Albert Einstein was born in Königreich Württemberg. Albert studied math and physics in Switzerland and he became a Swiss citizen in 1901. Starting in 1905, Einstein published a series of physics papers that demonstrated how useful it is to assume that energy exists in electromagnetic waves as discrete units, what we now call photons. He became a German citizen in 1914 after becoming the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute at the University of Berlin. The Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921 was awarded to Albert Einstein "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". In 1933 he renounced his German citizenship and emigrated to America. Einstein became an American citizen in 1940. The house where he was born in Ulm was destroyed during World War II. Working with many other refugees from Europe, Einstein wrote, "In my whole life I have never felt so Jewish as now." In 1952 Einstein was offered the position of President of Israel, which he declined. He died in 1955 at the age of 76.

Passionately Curious

"Was Einstein a Space Alien?" This idea was the basis of a throw-away-line in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when an Earthling says about the aliens, "Einstein was probably one of them."

For stories that are set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe it is fun to imagine that some folks who pass as Earthlings might actually be visitors to this world. If Einstein had been a tool for space aliens, a conduit for providing humanity with a few scientific ideas, how would we know? What if a few ideas were given to Einstein without him even knowing the source of those ideas? In the story Cellular Civilization, a "junior Einstein" is recruited into a secret technology development project by visitors from another world.

Isaac Asimov used a similar plot device in his novel The End of Eternity. A central plot element in Asimov's time travel novel is a hidden message in old copies of a printed journal (possibly Time magazine). In the story, we see "ancient" print media from the perspective of a future time when most people have never seen words printed on paper. Asimov imagined that the course of human civilization could be completely altered by having a time traveler from the future "give" the idea of nuclear power to a primitive Earthling at a time far before nuclear power would otherwise have become possible.

There are countless science fiction stories that involve taking advanced technology back in time, resulting in a new "Reality", a new timeline for Earthly history. In The End of Eternity Asimov also plays around with ways to prevent specific technologies from being developed. Near the start of the novel a time traveler prevents the development of a new spaceship propulsion method.

One of the first science fiction novels I ever read was The Last Starship from Earth by John Boyd. I've long imagined a prequel to this novel that tells the story of the first time travel mission. I assume that in the original timeline of Earth, the Roman Empire dominated the world. A time traveler is sent back to Roman times with the knowledge of how to make small, cheap, light-weight and powerful crossbows. This time traveler goes to Crete and trains an army of crossbowmen who fight against the Roman army in early imperial times. This creates the world depicted by Boyd in The Last Starship from Earth. Of course, I'd give the plot of the prequel an "exodemic twist"

Google Books: Ngram Viewer

In the graph, above, the green line at the bottom is the frequency of the term "space alien" in books as a function of time. In the graph shown below, "space alien" (red) is compared to "endosymbiont".

For stories that are set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe I like to imagine that there might be nanoscopic artificial lifeforms that can reside in human bodies as endosymbionts. Maybe we all have an alien visitor inside our body, but we do not have the required tools to detect this alien influence.

In the graph above, it can be seen that "extraterrestrial" is a more popular term than "space alien". For stories that are set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe, "extraterrestrial" and "space alien" are NOT synonymous. I had to create a new term, "Genesaunt", to refer to lifeforms that originated on Earth, but now reside off of Earth. A "real space alien" can trace its origin back to life that arose on some planet other than Earth. The classification system can get messy if there are alien lifeforms living as endosymbionts inside human brains.

So maybe Einstein was not a space alien, but how do we know that space aliens did not have nanoscopic devices inside his brain, guiding his thought patterns in odd directions, towards new ideas that humanity might otherwise only have stumbled upon ten, twenty or a hundred years later? If Einstein was unusually curious about the nature of physical reality, we can ask what motivated him to ask questions and think in new directions that most people could not even imagine. In the Contact television series, I imagine that an alien visitor to Earth (Dr. Wye) makes use of Earthlings such as Kate Robinson as convenient targets for the transfer of knowledge about advanced technologies. Dr. Wye works closely with Kate Robinson and helps guide her thinking in the right direction, allowing Kate to make new discoveries about "Machine" technology, the advanced technology from the "message from Vega".

In the Contact movie, Ellie Arroway is made to imagine that she traveled to the center of the galaxy. In the Contact television series, Earthlings are given scientific and technological assistance by Dr. Wye, allowing Ellie to actually start traveling through space. The alien civilization that gave rise to Dr. Wye is located near the center of the galaxy. Dr. Wye eventually arranges for Ellie to visit the planet where Dr. Wye came into existence. Dr. Wye is an artificial lifeform composed of nanoscopic components rather than cells. Dr. Wye makes use of "nanites" to alter human brain function and lead people like Kate and Ellie towards understanding of advanced alien technology.

Contact television video teaser

Contact television series.....
Contact Episode 1: Pull the Plug
Contact Episode 2: Good to Go
Contact Episode 3: Voice from the Sky
Contact Episode 4: Hail to Vega
Contact Episode 5: Look Closer