Adding Rooms to the Bottom

I previously mentioned Richard Feynman's famous 1959 lecture "Plenty of Room at the Bottom". In the early stored-program computers of the 1950s storage of a few kilobits of data required bulky electronic devices that today make interesting museum pieces. Feynman said, "There is nothing that I can see in the physical laws that says the computer elements cannot be made enormously smaller than they are now."

How far have we come during my lifetime (1959 - 2012)? The first computer I bought (1985) came with 1,000,000 bytes of RAM in the form of microchips. I now use a USB flash drive that has 8,000,000,000 bytes of storage space.

Photolithography now allows the manufacture of microchip elements on the scale of a few tens of nanometers. Covalent bond lengths are typically just a bit less than a nanometer in length. Important biological structures such as the width of a DNA double helix, the width of a cell membrane and the width of a ribosome are in the range of 2 to 20 nanometers.

We can use a ribosome as a model of an artificial chemical nanite, a molecular machine that we might some day design and use for purposes such as repairing cells (medical nanites).

For stories set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe I often include nanites as plot elements and I can imagine McCoy sending a swarm of nanites into Chekov's brain where they quickly repair a broken blood vessel. I also like to imagine that swarms of nanites can slip into our brains and modify our mental processes. Also, I imagine that humans could be provided with nanite-based prosthetic devices (such as "facial nanites") that would allow for shape-shifting disguises and voice alterations.

Hierions and Sedrons However, I'm not satisfied to stop with a nanotechnology that allows for the design and production of molecular machines. I imagine that the Huaoshy long ago developed a sophisticated hierion physics that makes possible a form of matter where the linkages between "atoms" are 12 orders of magnitude smaller than the covalent bonds in conventional matter.

Hierions and sedrons make possible zeptoscale devices that are much smaller than ribosomes. How much smaller?

Think about a 20 nanometer ribosome that builds a protein out of amino acids and compare that to a 5 meter paving machine. The ribosome is about 9 orders of magnitude smaller than the paver.

In my exodemic stories, the most technologically advanced humans (Overseers and Interventionists) are just starting to play around with chemical nanites. The Huaoshy make use of hierion-based artificial lifeforms (femtobots) that are as complex as a human being and which can easily slip right inside a ribosome and take control of which amino acids are built into the growing protein chain. A swarm of Huaoshy femtobots could invade your body and reprogram it to become a completely different organism. The Huaoshy femtobots themselves have true shapeshifting abilities and can form human-sized colonies that take on any convenient physical form.

Sedrons. In Exode, the humans, Fru'Wu and Nereids are starting to play around with hierions and use them for faster-than-light communications. Given enough time, a clever species can fully understand hierions and attain the ability to make femtobots. However, the Huaoshy have one more trick up their sleeves that allows them to trump even advanced hierion technology. By engineering the fundamental structure of space-time, the Huaoshy established for themselves a monopoly on the production of sedronic matter. This allows the Huaoshy to control faster-than-light travel through the universe. Further, there are “array sedrons” that can form a third family of stable molecule-like structures. The bond lengths in sedronic matter are only a few orders of magnitude larger than the Planck length, allowing the Huaoshy to produce a form of artificial life that has components (zeptites) about 12 orders of magnitude smaller than femtobots.

The Huaoshy do not share the secrets of sedrondic matter with more primitive lifeforms, allowing the Huaoshy to exercise essentially god-like power over other species even if they have mastered the use of femtobots. In particular, the Huaoshy control all travel through the universe at faster-than light speeds and they can easily take control of any femtobot or lifeform composed of conventional matter. The term "Huaoshy" essentially refers to a form of sedronic matter that constitutes the form of life that the Huasoshy have become. In practice, primitive creatures such as we Earthlings might just as well refer to the Huaoshy as "god".

Rooms have been added to the bottom

In Exode, the Huaoshy sometimes find it useful to provide some sedrons to primitive species so as to make possible faster-than-light travel. When granting such gifts, the Huaoshy are guided by their ethical rules and so they do not allow primitive lifeforms to even be aware of the fact that the Huaoshy hold god-like powers. Pathney and Koch are searching for the Huaoshy, but all that they really know is that they are trying to solve the mystery of human origins....they have no information about the true nature of the Huaoshy.

Meta-genie

Being the first species to explore sedronic physics allowed the Huaoshy to become masters of the universe. Through long experience of interacting with more primitive species, the Huaoshy learned that is is for the best if primitives like we humans are not aware of the fact that the Huaoshy are responsible for the evolution of our species and our development of a technological civilization.

Although the Huaoshy are all around us (the Huaoshy have become a state of matter that is co-existent with our familiar space-time), they prefer that we entertain ourselves by inventing our own ideas about who -or what- is responsible for our existence. This state of affairs assures that when humanity does make contact with space aliens, the other lifeforms that we come into contact with, even if they are vastly more technologically advanced than we are, will also be mystified by their strangely inexplicable origins.

In his story Little Harmonic Labyrinth, Hofstadter wrote about the idea of a meta-genie, a genie who can be called upon by an ordinary genie to grant "meta-wishes". From the perspective of primitive creatures like we humans, other lifeforms who have mastered the use of hierions seem god-like in their powers, and will be mistakenly thought to have been our creators. For example, in Exode, humans learn that the Nereids have been influencing the course of development of human civilization on Earth. However, those technologically-advance Nerieds know that their own abilities arise from their advanced science and technology and that some other even more advanced force was responsible for their own biological origins. The Nereids have to expend significant effort trying to convince humans that they, the Nereids, are not the god-like creators of humanity.

Yin Yang and Wim Bang

I had plans to blog about more alien technology today, and when I got up I found the two tweets, shown above, together in my tweet roll....like yin yang. Those two tweets got me thinking about a blog post from two years ago about "Passion for Writing". In that post I commented on the agony of not having time for fiction writing and that has been my usual state of mind during most of my life.

Forbidden Daughter
The one time that I can recall being close to feeling regret over having defiled a virgin piece of paper was when I was 14 years old and I started trying to write about an alien life form that had maintained a technological civilization for millions of years. I had seen Forbidden Planet and I was upset by the idea that the Krell had become extinct. How unfair that a civilization with power plants that were many miles across should become extinct!

David Bowman Theorem
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, David Bowman is magically ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic") transformed into an intermediate between humanity and aliens who are otherwise only represented by featureless "black monoliths". The David Bowman Theorem is: in Hollywood, first contact between two cultures separated by millions of years of cultural evolution needs a David Bowman plot device. Dr. Morbius was the "David Bowman" device in Forbidden Planet, providing a viewer-friendly account of Krell civilization. The Genesaunts provide a kind of David Bowman plot device for stories set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe. It would be nice to have the Contact sequel be a television series so that there is adequate time to explore the Huaoshy without having to rely on a magically well-informed "David Bowman"-like character. It is more fun to actually have time to show viewers the adventure of discovering the nature of the mysterious alien culture.

While I was disappointed by the demise of the Krell, I was stimulated by Forbidden Planet to imagine an interstellar civilization that would expand forever through the stars. But at the age of 14 I was unable to imagine an interesting story about how such an advanced interstellar civilization might interact with humans. At that time, I was thinking along the lines of what Ellie expressed in Contact: a civilization that was millions of years old would interact with humans on Earth in about the same way that we might interact with the residents of an ant hill. I was not happy thinking of myself as an ant. At the age of 14 my ideas for the backstory of the Huaoshy, Genesaunts and the Exodemic Fictional Universe were still coming into focus and my early attempts to write about the Huaoshy were little better than scrawling "duh" across a page...a good example of a situation where it would have been better to leave the page blank!

Size matters
I was always bothered by the idea that Dr. Morbius could use the Krell "teaching machine" and have it magically boost his intelligence. In Forbidden Planet, it was made clear that the Krell were biologically distinct from humans, so why should their "brain booster" work on humans? It would be fun to write a fan fiction sequel to Forbidden Planet in which Altaira, having gone to Earth and become a feminist, goes out in command of her own spaceship on a mission searching for other worlds that might have been colonized by the Krell.

Who might play the role of Altaira in the year 2012?
What Altaira and her crew discover are worlds inhabited by artificial life forms composed of nanoscopic machines rather than cells. This gets Altaira thinking about the possibility that those artificial life forms might have visited Earth long ago.....and the story would be off and running through an Exodemic scenario. When Dr. Morbius lived on Earth he, like everyone else, already had advanced Krell nanites in his brain. Although humans and the Krell evolved on different planets, the human brain is no stranger to the Krell nanites....in fact, our minds are very much like those of the Krell because human brain evolution has been guided by the Krell nanites!

I've been thinking about imaging methods that might allow people to notice the presence of alien nanites inside the tissues of Ellie Arroway, the main character in the Contact television series. Do we have the needed technology that might allow us to detect nanoscopic devices -the advanced technological tools of aliens- inside living animals?

Seeing the Yin and Yang in Cell Biology

Image to right. Yin yang symbol: "Yin Yang: The oriental symbol of the Laws of Polarity and Synthesis." Bonewits, P.E.I. Real Magic.(Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1958) 94."

I like the version of the yin yang symbol that is shown to the right. The image hints at an infinite regress of balanced forces that reminds me of renormalization in physics. While thinking about nanites inside Ellie, I've also been thinking about the dimensional structure of the universe and Carl Sagan's idea of scientific evidence that the universe was created.

In the title of this blog post I wrote, "Wim Bang," where "wim" stands for WIM and means "weakly interacting mass". The Machine researchers at Area 51 routinely use the word "wim" when they discuss how the Machine's rotating rings generate large amounts of energy and even artificial gravity. In the big bang, there were more wim particles created than ordinary matter particles and wim engineering is the basis for faster-than-light communications and travel in the Contact television series. It is fun to imagine that with our primitive technology here on Earth we are totally unaware of how to make use of most of the mass in our universe. Other intelligent life forms such as the Huaoshy have been doing wim engineering for hundreds of millions of years.

FTL
I've been thinking about a new twist on faster-than-light space travel that would involve a transposition of the very small and the very large. If wim is important for the structure and evolution of galaxies, then what about the effects of wim on the largest scale structure of the universe?

The image to the right is a WhIMsical depiction of how ordinary matter and dark matter could mix together in a galaxy. See this web page for a more conventional discussion of the idea that galaxies can have a "dark matter halo".

After the big bang, the "dimensional structure" of the universe was in an energetically low configuration (the ground state). In the dimensional structure diagram to the right, each of the three sides of the three triangles represents one of the spatial dimensions of the universe.

Six of the spatial dimensions failed to inflate and remained as "compact dimensions". The shaded triangle represents our familiar three dimensional space of every day experience. The other lines in the diagram represent temporal and other dimensions of the universe.

There are some elementary particles that have unreasonably high energy states in our 3D space, but those particles can produce interesting physics at the Planck length scale of the compact dimensions. There are two triplets of compact spatial dimensions that provide "compact spaces" where dark matter particles can reside. There is "leak" of gravitational force between those compact spaces and the inflated universe where stars, planets and people reside. Most of the mass in the universe resides in the compact spaces, which might seem paradoxical, but there is plenty of space in the compact spaces for the kinds of particles that reside there.

Some of the matter in one of the compact spaces is subject to a repulsive force that is undetectably weak on the scale of things in our everyday experience in the inflated dimensions. During the big bang, some of the matter in the universe clumped and we now experience the result, a universe where some matter in each of the three 3D spaces is gravitationally bound. However, while the mass in our extended space tends to clump into the center of galaxies and often forms supermassive black holes, due to the repulsive force, some dark matter tends to spread out and avoids collecting at the center of galaxies.

Faster-than-light
The Huaoshy long ago learned how to alter the dimensional structure of the universe and make possible faster-than-light movement of communications signals "through" the inflated space of stars and galaxies. This is basically accomplished by a trick that makes use of "shortcuts" through one of the compact spaces. There is a family of bosons (the hierions) that make FTL communications possible. It is hierion communications signals that can be detected using Machine technology, and Ellie helps make that "alien" communications technology available to Earthlings, as introduced in Contact Episode 3: Voice from the Sky".

The curved green line in the dimensional structure diagram of the "transitional universe" is what makes FTL communication possible. For millions of years the Huaoshy expanded through their home galaxy and made use of FTL hierion communications to manage their growing interstellar civilization.

Beam me!
Eventually, the Huaoshy finally were able to harness enough energy to catalyse another change in the dimensional structure of the universe. This change allowed for the faster-than-light movement of physical objects such as nanites "through" the expanded space of stars and galaxies. Again, "through" is in quotes since the process involves the "trick" of moving by way of a "shortcut" through compact space. The Machine, as depicted in Contact, does not allow for sending an object through space at FTL speeds, but it did create a target that could be used by the Huaoshy for sending nanites to Earth. Such FTL transport of fermions requires advanced sedronic engineering. Through their control of the supply of sedronic matter, the Huaoshy maintain a monopoly on the technology required for travel through space at speeds greater than light speed.

Sedronic engineering allows for two modes of FTL space travel. The first mode is what was depicted in Contact. The Machine was able to energize the IPV pod, allowing for the transport of advanced Huaoshy nanites to Earth. This is how "contact" has routinely been initiated between the Huaoshy and civilizations like our own. The transported nanites invade Ellie's brain and start manufacturing false memories that depict for Ellie the kind of experience of first contact that the Huaoshy want her to have. In particular, they want Earthlings to think that the nearest aliens are very far away and not particularly interested in Earth.

Why was David Drumlin killed in Contact? Drumlin was the Earthling selected by the Overseers to make first contact. Like Ellie, Drumlin had nanites in his brain through his entire life. However, Hadden, as an Interventionist, wanted Ellie to be the one to make first contact. Hadden built a second Machine and used the first one as "fly paper" to attract and eliminate Drumlin. As long as it appeared that Drumlin would make first contact, the Overseers relaxed and did not worry too much about the Interventionist plot that provided Earthlings with instructions for how to build the Machine.

There was a significant difference between the nanites in Drumlin's brain and those inside Ellie. Hadden made sure that the nanites inside Ellie prepared her to be able to have some resistance against the false memories forced upon her by the Huaoshy nanites. In contrast, Drumlin would have been a complete puppet for the Huaoshy. Ellie will have a fighting chance to learn that the Huaoshy first visited Earth millions of years ago.

Will it be possible for people like Ellie to understand that the Huaoshy "created our universe" by altering its dimensional structure and making FTL travel possible?

Yin Yang
The Interventionists and the Overseers are the "yin" and "yang" of how the Huaoshy interact with humans. As mentioned by Hadden in Contact Episode 4: Hail to Vega ("Even I've never met an alien.") the Huaoshy don't have direct contact with Earthlings. Where did the Interventionists and the Overseers come from? The answer to this question has to do with the second mode for FTL travel.

When there is no Machine-generated target for sending objects through space, it is still possible to travel through space at FTL speeds using the advanced sedronic technology of the Huaoshy. However, without a target it is hard to control the place in our universe where transported matter will "materialize". The Huaoshy have spent the past several hundred million years systematically sending out nanite probes in search of worlds like Earth. The probes are sent out into the universe in what is an essentially random way, although there are some poorly-understand patterns in the spatial locations where the probes materialize. Those probes are small spaceships that, having been transported over vast intergalactic distance by advanced sedronic technology, then try to find a world where a Machine can be constructed, providing a new "target" for further transport to that region of the universe. However, this is something like having an airport available nearby in case we might want to visit some random "ant hill in Africa". The Huaoshy don't bother to visit worlds like Earth unless something interesting and unusual happens. The routine work of locating planets like Earth is automated and left to the nanite probe ships.

Millions of years ago, a nanite probe ship reached Earth and established an Observer Base on the Moon. Animals have occasionally been taken off of Earth and "cultured" at various locations in our galaxy. The Overseers and the Interventionists are descendants of those "cultured" life forms from Earth.

In Contact Episode 5: "Look Closer", the Atlantis returns from the Moon after its crew explored the Observer Base that has existed, hidden, under the surface of the Moon for millions of years. The Observer Base is now abandoned, the Observers having moved to a new base of operations that is further from Earth.

Those on Earth who remain skeptical about the existence of aliens are not impressed by the newly--discovered Moon Base. As for the artifacts found on the Nesr asteroid by Ellie and the crew of the Inspiration, no artifacts are found on the Moon that seem very different from what is possible on Earth using conventional Earthly technology. The skeptics again suggest that Hadden must have secretly had the Moon Base constructed as a "gift for humanity". Going into Contact Episode 5: "Look Closer", the search for difinitive evidence of alien life forms continues.

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. (of course, there can be other ways to achieve communication besides the types of primitive technological tools available to Earthly primates in the year 2000)

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 (or other collections of nanites that have been in communication with the nanites inside Hadden's brain) 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 from her "dream of Hadden", 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 so efficiently by the rotating rings, but by making use of 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 closer 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. Ellie tells Palmer about the nanites, but 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.

Episode 2: Good to Go

Images. Top; Ellie Arroway searching for little green men...and all she got was Matthew McConaughey. The 4th image is "Thirteen" from "House". It would be fun to have Olivia Wilde as Dr. Zelter in the Contact television series.

Collaborative fiction. If you would like to help write the scipts for some episodes of the Contact television series, let me know!

Singular Technological Advances

In my previous blog post I mentioned the idea that there might only ever be one technological civilization that invents faster-than-light (FTL) space travel.

Frankly, I know of no reason to think that faster-than-light travel is possible. I'm willing to read and write science fiction stories that include faster-than-light travel because such stories are fun. Faster-than-light space travel can be a useful plot device just to speed along a story. However, even if we assume that at some future time humans learn how to move at faster-than-light speeds, what if it takes us a million years before we figure out how to do it?

It has become popular in science fiction to explore singularianism, but I suspect that most enthusiasm for the idea that we are quickly approaching a technological singularity comes from physical scientists who mistakenly assume that Moore's Law ensures that "superintelligent" artificial life forms are inevitable, and will soon be among us. For those who have been sucked into believing that a technological singularity is near, it must be a shock to see the suggestion that some technological advances might take millions of years to accomplish.

In "Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel", Natalie Wolchover discusses evidence that is consistent with the idea that wheeled vehicles were only invented once.
Several serious challenges probably had to be solved by one talented ancient engineer including: 1) limiting friction at the axel-wheel interface and 2) having strong materials for wheels and axels and 3) having a way to efficiently power a wheeled vehicle. As soon as one genious produced a useful wheeled vehicle, the needed technological tricks probably spread so rapidly that nobody else ever had the chance to achieve a second independent invention of a wheeled vehicle.

Similarly, it might be the case that there was one technologically advanced civiliztion that long ago develped on a distant Earth-like planet and that civilization might have discovered how to travel through outer space at faster-than-light speeds. That civilization might now be spreading from star to star (and galaxy to galaxy) and spreading its cultural influence to other less technologically advanced species.

If faster-than-light travel is possible, what might cause development of FTL travel to be such a difficult technological advance? Isaac Asimov had some fun with this topic in his fiction. In his time travel novel, The End of Eternity, Asimov imagined that human cicilization developed time travel and the mere existence of time travel technology made it impossible to invent faster-than-light travel. The basic idea was that humans used time travel to prevent technological risks such as use of nuclear power. In the absence of risky technologies like nuclear power, faster-than-light travel was never invented.

In his robot stories, Asimov played around with the idea that humans might first need to create artificial life forms, then the A.L. might be smart enough to invent faster-than-light space travel. Might the human mind be "cognitively closed" to certain types of technological advances?

In The Start of Eternity, I play around with the idea that time travel technology depends on development of "positronics" as an alternative to electronics.

Altering the dimensional structure of the universe.

I also have played around with the idea that the Huaoshy had to alter the physical laws of the universe in order to make it possible to have faster-than-light space travel. In the figure above, the diagram illustrates how the dimensional structure of the universe can be engineered so as to make FTL space travel possible. I imagined that faster-than-light space travel requires a non-natural type of matter, sedrons. By altering the physical laws of the universe, the Huaoshy are able to obtain a supply of sedrons. They can then change the physical laws of the universe one more time so as to prevent any other civilization from obtaining sedrons. Thus, the Huaoshy have a monopoly on sedrons and faster-than-light space travel.

The first science fiction story I ever read about the discovery of faster-than-light travel was The Skylark of Space. Ed Smith was a chemist who, like many physical scientists, had no trouble imagining the existence of "superintelligent" beings. While I've suggested the possibility that it might take a million years of effort for humans to discover how to travel at faster-than-light speeds, Smith imagined that, with a little luck, one chemist could crack the problem in an afternoon and soon be off cruising through the galaxies as easily as we now cruise through the oceans of Earth.

In his Lensman series, Smith imagined a 2,000,000,000 year-long process by which superintelligent beings would craft a new form of life that would have even greater super abilties than themselves. Happiliy for us, humans are these super-super beings. I've long been baffled by Smith's fictional universe in which faster-than-light space travel can be invented by a single chemist in an afternoon but superintelligent beings (Arisians) require a 2,000,000,000 year-long breeding program to evolve a form of life that can improve upon their inferior grade of superintelligence, defeat the evil Eddorians and save the universe for GOOD (hurray!).

In the Lensman series, it is deceptively easy for Earthlings to "invent" faster-than-light space travel because the ancient Arisians (secretly) give the needed technology to humanity. Besides the 2,000,000,000 year-long breeding program, the other key "ingredient" needed to transform humans into super-super beings is the "Lens". The "Lens" is a kind of "telepathy amplifier" that gives those who wear it almost magical communications abilities. The only woman to ever recieve a "Lens" from the Arisians (she is the end product of the 2,000,000,000 year-long breeding program) gives birth to children who spontaneously have telepathic ability, without needing a "Lens". These "children of the lens" defeat the evil Eddorians and take over from the Arisians the task of protecting all that is GOOD in the universe (Ta-Da!).

Smith wrote down the plot for his Lensman saga in 1936. In 1936, people like Alan Turing were just starting towards the development of what would become electronic digital computers. By 1941 Isaac Asimov was writing stories about telepathic robots and it had become possible for science fiction authors to imagine how a artificial life forms might be created and (quickly) lead to a "technological sigularity" when artificial brains attained "superintelligence". Rather than having to wait patiently through a 2,000,000,000 year-long breeding program, "artificial intelligence" provides a plot device that can rapidly yield superintelligence. Before the end of the 20th century, the idea of a "technological sigularity" lept from the pages of science fiction stories into works of purported non-fiction that predicted that the "technological sigularity" will be here really soon, now.

Science Fiction has been dominated by people with a background in physical science. I don't ever want fussy science facts to get in the way of a good science fiction story, but I think we can make better science fiction stories by paying more attention to the facts of biology. If most science fiction fans beleive that by the middle of this century we will be uploading our minds into computers as easily as we now upload blog posts to Google's servers, who am I to argue with such beliefs? However, I will take pleasure in those all-too-rare science fiction stories that pull the science fiction genre in new directions by incorporating realistic views of living organisms and, particularly, the nature of human minds.

Ever since 1818 the science fiction genre has been trapped under the spell that was cast by Mary Shelley. When I started writing my Exodemic stories I made the life and work of Mary Wollstonecraft an important element of the first story. The name "Exodemic" came from the idea that effective Smallpox vaccination only became possible because of a happy biological accident involving a visiting Observer from the Moon. A lucky genetic recombination event sets in motion a chain of events that significantly alters the development of human civilization.....leading to an alternative history of Earth with profound implications for how our species experiences First Contact and becomes integrated into the vast interstellar civilization of the Huaoshy.

Because of the "exodemic", Mary Wollstonecraft lives a long and productive life and the influence of Mary Shelley is greatly reduced. In the alternative history of Earth, there is a profound shift of power from physical science towards biological science and we humans manage to better control the technological excesses arising from physical science. I'll say more about Exodemic in my next blog post.

Images. Top: from NASA. Egyptian chariot art. Lensman book cover. The end is near! Below: Cover of Exodemic.