Find Your Way Home

Episode 6 of the Contact television series brings Carl Sagan into the story, but then he wanders off stage again until episode 12. In episode 7 the story returns to Ellie, who was last seen at the end of Episode 5 returning to her research team at the VLA in New Mexico. Now it is Ellie's turn to "wander off stage".....and by the end of Episode 7 she has left Earth, never to return.

The SETI team in New Mexico has been trying to detect hierion-based communications signals originating from worlds beyond the Solar System. Nobody can understand why it is that hierion signals are only detected coming from Earth and the Moon unless hierion-based communication is simply a secret invention of Hadden Industries.

At this time, Ellie is not feeling good. There are Interventionist and Overseer nanites in her brain that are trying to execute conflicting instructions.

Palmer and Ellie are frequently in contact by telephone. Palmer finally convinces Ellie that she should take a vacation. They go hiking and enjoy a cabin in the mountains. The cabin has only one room, but a stunning view of a wild valley. After a week together in the wilderness they decide that they need to find a way to stay together.

When they get back to civilization Palmer is wanted at the White House and Ellie has been invited to join the crew of Atlantis on the follow-up mission to the Moon. Ellie agrees to move to Washington until the President's term is complete. Palmer repeats his request: "You find your way home."

On the Moon, the crew of Atlantis is able to enter the now-abandoned Observer Base. Mysteriously, the airlock door, previously sealed shut, is now open. The inside of the base has been seen previously: when Sagan was on the Moon there were still some Observers living at the base, but now it looks stripped down and barren. Concerned about the possible presence of alien life forms, the crew of Atlantis performs tests, but they can't even find a single microbe in the large underground base. The base has a great supply of water, energy and air, all provided by technology that is similar to what was in the "message from Vega" and used to build the Machine.

It is estimated that about 20,000 people could live and work inside Moon Base Alpha, except for the problem of keeping them fed. Most of the homes do not have kitchens or dining rooms.

Ellie is particularly fascinated by one of the residential complexes. It is a large area under a dome roof with soil. The soil has a high level of small organic molecules, but no macromolecules and nothing alive. The dome's environmental control system simulates a 24 hour day-night cycle. While exploring the dome Ellie is astounded to find that one of the houses looks exactly like the house that she grew up in. Inside, she finds all the correct furnishing, including her ham radio and her telescope.

The oldest part of the underground city is a distinctly different complex. This is the part of the base seen previously when Dr. Zelter came to the Moon to meet with the other Overseers. However, now it is just an empty shell. The environmental controls do not allow the lights to be shut off and the lighting is a strange pink color. The residences here do not even have bed rooms. Ellie is amazed to find a residence that is identical to the cabin that she and Palmer stayed in during their recent vacation. This version of the cabin has a window that provides a view of the surface of the Moon.

Ellie spends the night in her room in the copy of her childhood home and she is visited by Hadden who uses special nanites from Dr. Wye to clear the Overseer nanites from Ellie's brain. She dreams of her father: "This is just one step. In time you'll take another."

She wakes up and sees Hadden (confused): "Mr. Hadden? Where am I?"
Hadden sits by the window, looking at the display of stars on the dome/roof outside: "Your little room has one hell of a view. Let me show you something."

Hadden shows Ellie the Overseer nanites that were taken out of her body and inactivated...now just a small pile of dust. With the Overseer nanites removed from her brain, Ellie can now remember her attempts on Earth to find a way to remove the nanites from her body.

Hadden: "I've freed you from these nanites, so now you can remember, but if you go back to Earth then Dr. Zelter will simply take control of your mind again. You can keep this base free of Overseer nanites."
Ellie: How?
Hadden (places his hand on the telescope): "I'll give you a hint. Use this on every ship that comes up from Earth. This Base is yours now, use it well."
Ellie: "You are suggesting that I stay here?"
Hadden: "You will."
Hadden dissolves.

Ellie wonders if she is dreaming. She hears sounds coming from the ham radio. She sits down at the radio and it morphs into a fancy version of the hierion communications equipment that they have been using previously. The holographic interface engulfs her and now she realizes that she can select additional "bands" and she can finally detect other sources of hierion signals besides just the Earth and the Moon. Suddenly she is in contact with Dr. Wye.
Wye: "These are my gifts to you, Dr. Arroway. Use them wisely."
Ellie: "What are all these signals?"
Wye: "You're the astronomer, you'll figure it out."
Ellie: "This haze, it looks like the milky way."
Wye (gestures to one source in a cluster of signals): "Yes. Here in the galactic core is my home world."
Ellie: "You're an alien?"
Wye: "Yes, but I'm not allowed to tell you that. And you won't be allowed to tell anyone else."
Ellie: "But others need to know-"
Wye: "This is just one step. In time you'll take another."
The communication from Wye ends.

The crew of Atlantis cannot find the source of hierions at the Base. It seems to be a transmitter that is built into the wall/roof of the Base with no human access.

When Atlantis departs, Ellie refuses to go back to Earth. She establishes an observatory at Moon Base Alpha. She works aligning the signals from the new hierion detector with known astronomical data. Some of the signals seem to come from our galaxy, but most of the signals come from other galaxies. She starts trying to decode the signals.

After a period of time during which Ellie is alone on the Moon, the Inspiration arrives, newly fitted out with a V3 antimatter propulsion system. The mini rotating rings system now supplies hierion fuel that can be used as propulsion mass, being generated as needed by the rings and heated by a stored supply of antimatter. The old shuttle fuel tanks are no longer needed and have been replaced. Inspiration arrives carrying a large amount of dehydrated food and seeds.

Ellie and Palmer on the Moon
Palmer also arrives on board the Inspiration. He explains to Ellie that the President wanted a member of his advising staff on the Moon. Ellie shows him the "cabin".
Palmer says: "You found your way home."

Ellie's telescope contains Dr. Wye's magnetic pulse generator for inactivating nanites. She uses it on everything and everyone that comes into Moon Base Alpha. When the nanites inside Palmer are inactivated, he can also remember Ellie's previous attempts to remove nanites from her body. They find that they can discuss nanites together, but cannot tell other people about nanites. They suspect (correctly) that they might still be infected by additional nanites that cannot be inactivated by a powerful magnetic field.

Ellie tries to contact Dr. Wye, but Hadden appears. He explains that for now Ellie and Palmer need to take advantage of the fact that they have been liberated from Overseer nanites, but there would be negative repercussions if they tried to share what they know with others. Hadden calls Ellie and Palmer "Genesaunts".

By the end of Episode 7, Ellie and Palmer are living happily on the Moon, now free of Overseer nanites. Ellie still needs to find objective evidence to support her belief that she has made contact with aliens.



Contact television series: Pilot Episode
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
Contact Episode 6: For Carl

The video. The video in this blog post was made possible by the fact that the entire Contact movie is available on YouTube. My video has some images that were captured as screen shots from existing YouTube videos and remixed with new audio. I think the video falls into the domain of "fair use". The video explores the question: What if Ellie's journey to the center of the galaxy, in fact, never happened?

The first time I ever tried re-using content from YouTube was for this video. I found the music on YouTube and I tried to find out if the owners of the song cared about people using it as a sound track for additional videos. My inquires went unanswered so I went ahead and posted the video and this one, too.

For the video on this page, I made a MIDI audio track that was inspired by a famous song using Apple's GarageBand software. The "famous song" is present in multiple copies on YouTube so my guess was that the owners of the song are open to having people mix it into YouTube videos. However, after I uploaded my video (and credited the artist who wrote the song), YouTube said that since the song is owned by a company, YouTube would be running ads on the video.

Since my SciFi videos tend to average a few dozen views it is hard to see how YouTube would harvest much $$$$ from those ads. However, since my MIDI version of the "famous song" seemed to offend the copyright gods, I used YouTube's audio swap system and changed the audio track of my video to one of YouTube's available-for-swap songs. YouTube kept running ads on the video. After seeing the ads that were plastered across the video, I'm tempted to write a pest control company into the Contact television series. Maybe that is how Dr. Wye and Ellie are keeping Overseer nanites out of Moon Base Alpha!

In 2007 I made a video that I posted to YouTube as "Embryos from Earth". I made the audio track using Apple's GarageBand. By using the various GarageBand voice filters I was even able to make the female voices in the video. The main purpose of the video was to give me a chance to play around with some rendering software. This (the original "Embryos from Earth") was one of several videos that had its audio destroyed after a period of time on YouTube, leaving only noise.

Recently I saw that the YouTube audio swap system has an option for reverting a video's sound track to the original audio. I was able to first apply one of YouTube's audio tracks to several of my old videos (with garbled sound tracks) and then revert to the original sound track and restore it. In the case of "Embryos from Earth", I randomly selected one of YouTube's audio tracks, after which YouTube sent me a copyright notice saying that "rumblefish" owns the audio. Apparently YouTube has songs such as "Por Una Cabeza" in its audio swap system that will trigger a copyright claim from "rumblefish". When I tried to revert to the original audio of my video, I got an error from YouTube. I finally gave up and deleted the original "Embryos from Earth" video from YouTube. The newer version of the video that I put on YouTube (after the first version had its audio destroyed) is still there. I've never understood why the audio tracks of some of my videos on YouTube were destroyed. I've seen some music videos on YouTube where the video has been scrambled. I'm left wondering if "rumblefish" or some other company makes copyright claims for YouTube videos that make use of GarageBand sound effects.

When a company like "rumblefish" claims that it owns the audio of your YouTube video, you get a link: "I believe this copyright claim is not valid." that gives the following options:

Where is the option that says: "Dear rumblefish, the audio on my video was supplied by YouTube"?

A scan of my copy of Poundstone's book
These YouTube adventures remind me of a funny part of William Poundstone's biography of Sagan called "Sagan Versus Apple Computer". As Poundstone tells the story, during development of the Macintosh 7100, Apple computer used "Carl Sagan" as the internal code name for the product. Sagan asked Apple to not use his name. Why did Sagan care? Poundstone points to page 208 of Sagan's book "The Demon-Haunted World" where Sagan denounces the idea that people might be persuaded to buy a product just because a scientist had endorsed the product. The folks at Apple complied with Sagan's request and changed the code designation to BHA, short for "butt-head astronomer". At that point Sagan initiated a libel suit (the law suit was eventually dismissed). According to Poundstone, Sagan initiated another lawsuit against Apple's use of "Carl Sagan" as their internal code name for the 7100. That second lawsuit was dismissed and the dismissal was appealed. Poundstone says that Apple eventually settled the case out of court and issued a public apology to Sagan. I wonder what would have happened if, when Sagan learned that a computer's internal code name was "Carl Sagan", he had simply chuckled and moved on with his life. According to Poundstone, at the time when the Mac 7100 was called "Carl Sagan" there were two other Macintosh models under development, code named "Piltdown Man" and "Cold Fusion". It would be interesting to know the inside story of how workers at Apple Computer decided it would be a "good idea" to use Sagan's name in that context. I suppose any public figure, and particularly one with Sagan's cultural background, religious leanings and who was adept at pushing the boundaries of scientific conventionality, is likely to generate "enemies" in the form of people who want to take the "wonder boy" down a notch. Still, it is hard to imagine a group of engineers at a computer company trying to find a way to zing an astronomer. Yet more evidence that truth is stranger than fiction.

Jack Vance included this aphorism in one of his stories: “Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow.” Copyright law allows people to protect the value of their books and movies, but there is a wide range of responses to derivative works created by fans. Some authors have given their blessing to "fan fiction" that makes use of fictional characters that are protected under copyright law. I can see how someone like J. K. Rowling (who has probably made more money than she will ever be able to spend) can afford to be generous and luxuriate in the admiration of her fans, allowing them to write and share on the internet fan fiction stories featuring the characters that she created. Of course, each copyright holder gets to decide if they will allow use of their copyrighted materials. It is interesting to watch companies like Google/YouTube trying to function in the "gray area" where enforcement of copyright protections is spotty. As a fan of authors like Sagan, Vance and Asimov and movies like Contact and television shows like Star Trek and The X-files I'm thankful for the fact that there is room on the internet for fans to discuss the stories, characters and ideas of people like Carl Sagan.

Related reading (Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video)

The Free Brigade

"At its core, belief in capitalism is belief in mankind." -Johan Norberg

"...capitalism is not merely the 'practical,' but the only moral system in history." -Ayn Rand

One of the great themes of speculative writing is post-scarcity. Capitalism is inherently an economic system for conditions of scarcity. Many science fiction writers have explored the idea that technology should allow us to create a future in which the necessities of life are abundant and money will become a thing of the past (Star Trek example).

In New York Times Calls Free Brigade’s Bluff by Jonathan Fields, he wrote, "Despite the ballyhoo of the Free Brigade...there is no free." Apparently "the free brigade" refers to people who have suggested that (all?) information distributed on the internet should (could?) be given away for free.

I suspect that for Fields "there is no free" means that if you want to read newspaper articles that are written by professional journalists then someone has to pay those professionals. Clearly there is some free: the internet now has large amounts of free content and ad-supported content. These days, people have choices. Do I want free internet content or do I want to pay a professional for professional content?

Jonathan Fields seems concerned that once people get a taste of free content on the internet then they expect everything to be free and they will stop paying for professionally-produced content. Speaking of free content, here is some from Wikipedia:

"Competition is important in capitalist economies because it leads to innovation and more reasonable prices as firms that charge lower prices or improve the quality of their production can take buyers away from its competitors."

The publishing industry is going through a kind of shakeout in which everyone is adapting to internet technology. In the era of print publishing, content and content distribution was expensive. In the internet era the economic landscape for "intellectual content" has shifted. Personally, I wish both the "free brigade" and the "non-free brigade" well. I suspect that there continues to be huge inefficiencies in the print publishing industry. I'd like to see an economist step forward and provide an honest estimate of the percentage of revenues in the print publishing industry that goes to content producers.

If "free market" capitalism cannot provide us with the journalists we need then why not switch over to a new model? I'd gladly take on-demand internet news from an expanded National Public Radio over "free market content producers" like The New York Times and Judith Miller.

I have similar sentiments about the print publishing industry and science fiction. Rather than being subjected to the decisions of a few companies about what constitutes "print worthy content" I hope we can devise new systems that allow a much wider selection of fiction to become available on the internet. If "free market" capitalism cannot find a way to channel payment to authors when science fiction becomes widely available on the internet then I'd be willing to try new strategies such as a government-funded system that would financially support creators of cultural works.

We just went through a century during which trillions in national treasure were funneled through taxation towards transportation infrastructure. We could do the same to support professional writers and the creation of internet content, even if that content is available for free via the internet. Let's think in new directions rather than lament the passing of obsolete modes of production and distribution.

Image. Source, World Bank Photo Collection.

Free fiction war?

This blog post was the result of me seeing "Hot, Hot In The Summertime And Hot Under The Collar!", a blog post by Rob Shelsky. I'll start by saying that I am sympathetic to the plight of professional writers. I'd be more sympathetic if a larger fraction of the money I have spent on books actually ended up in the pockets of the writers. I think we all have to ask if the print publishing industry is worth saving.

Let's face it. Printing books is technology from a past era. It was a great idea 500 years ago, but all things change. News flash: we are now in the computer age. Information was once expensive and text was once tedious to work with. However, computers increasingly make information cheap and text easy to sling...and copy. Get used to it.

Image generated by Leonardo

Rob wrote: "...those people who write 'just for the fun of it,' all the time, and who say they don't care about any monetary proceeds and just give it away consistently, in my opinion are not helping the author community as a whole."

Okay, that comment is targeted at me, so here is my reply....

Imagine this comment from 1850: "...those people who try to make machines for picking cotton are not helping the institution of slavery." I'm sure that people who made a living from selling slaves were "hot under the collar" when the Southern Slave Economy collapsed, but should anyone have shed a tear for them? Now, in this analogy, Rob is more like a slave than a slave master. His plight reminds me of former slaves who were made uncomfortable by the need to become self-autonomous when the Civil War ended and they were no longer a slave.

Image generated by Grok.

I think what we need is a unified internet-based system for making fiction accessible to readers. Some fiction content inside that system will be free and some will be available for a fee at download. Some writers will likely only make teasers available electronically and will continue to force readers to purchase "hard copy". I'd like to see a system where authors get the vast majority of what readers pay for fictional works. Editors and publicists should work for authors and come to authors looking for work...."I'd be thrilled to edit your next novel for a small fee".

We need to explore new ways to channel money to authors. I'd like to see a culture "tax" that allows people to check a box on their Form 1040 and donate to a fund for creators of free culture. We need to get busy creating an electronic system that will allow the creators of free cultural works to be compensated according to the value of their contributions to society.

Systolina in the sleep lab.
Image generated by Leonardo

 Note: free culture does not have to mean "free as in beer"...free culture is mainly about the freedom to share and use intellectual property...there are still ways to profit within an information economy that rewards sharing. I think such a system for rewarding intellectual creativity would require that each person in the information economy have a unique personal electronic identifier. If I download and read a work of fiction, my unique personal signature would be credited towards the author of that work. The author would be paid a share of society's free culture fund.

Rob wrote: "...we may end up with so many rank amateurs who want to give away their poor quality work free, that the discerning reader simply can't find what's good anymore, can't wade through the dross to find the gem, because it is buried in an ever-growing mass of what's bad". 

Image generated by Grok.

Yes, a fundamental problem of the information age is finding "the good stuff". This is nothing new. I've suffered my entire life with the problem of sorting through the ocean of "what's bad" and published. Within Science Fiction Publishing there is a pattern: ignore all authors until they start to sell. Then publish everything that author ever writes, including all the crap they ever write.

I think the internet has the potential to host great oceans of "what's bad", but it also has the potential to provide us with tools for searching and finding "what I like", which for me seldom matches what the publishing industry likes to publish. So I say, rather than bitch about all the crap on the internet, let's all pitch in an make the tools that are needed to sort what we like from what we want to ignore. 

Image generated by Leonardo

Let the internet flower, let the fiction flow...the more the merrier. Let's find new ways to help creative people receive monetary compensation for their work. Let's not mourn for the fact that the old print publishers have new competition.

Related blog post at Book Oven.

Will authors of the future need publishers? by Nathan Bransford

Future of self-publishing by thinkfeel

Top of page image. Source. GFDL.

Next: setting the tone in fiction.

Sleep lab images generated by Leonardo. Visit the Gallery of Movies, Book and Magazine Covers

Intellectual property rights

I fully support people who are trying to earn a living from their writing and other creative endeavors. In my case, I write as a hobby and I think it is neat that I automatically have copyright for my stories. However, I make my work available to the world under a copyleft license which formally surrenders most of my intellectual property rights.

Copyleft. The copyleft license used at Novelas is the GFDL. When participants make their stories available at Novelas, they are giving others the right to copy and modify their work. One "right" that is not surrendered by the GFDL is the need for attribution. You can use my work, but if you take my idea and words then you need to give me attribution for my intellectual contribution to any new work that you build upon my work.

When writers make their work available under a copyleft license they are sharing their creativity and intellectual property with the world. Note that you are free to market and sell GFDL-licensed works, just be aware that others can also sell your work and they only need to give you attribution. There are other copyleft licenses that specify only noncommercial use by others.

Related video. I made this video specifically for making the point that YouTube videos can be uploaded and made available under a copyleft license, but the same idea applies to fiction.


Image. The image (above, top of this post) is the "cover image" from a science fiction story called Cellular Civilization. This image is licensed under the GFDL.