Author: photog

Refocusing Science Fiction – Part 2

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What if you wanted to write a science fiction story about genetic engineering?  Now a good example of that is Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park.”  Here we have geneticists mining dinosaur DNA from mosquitos trapped in amber from the Cretaceous period.  And presto-change-o we’ve got tyrannosaurs and ceratopsians running around after Jeff Goldblum while he’s running around after Laura Dern.  Isn’t that marvelous.  And sure, it is if you’re selling books or movie tickets.  But there are a few hitches.

As far as I know there has never been any DNA that has lasted tens of millions of years.  Ever.  So, no Jurassic Park.  But suppose you wanted to write a story about genetic engineering.  And suppose you wanted to write it about genetic manipulation of humans.  Now you’re talking about science that’s completely possible.

With the advent of techniques like CRISPR (acronym for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) it has become relatively easy to delete and replace DNA sequences in living cells including germ cells (sperm or egg cells or in the zygote following fertilization).  This is reality not science fiction.  But what could happen if this technology became widely used is still science fiction, so far.  A Chinese scientist named He Jiankui in November 2018 announced that he had created the first human germline genetically edited babies.  I think he was sent to prison for the act.

But the point is this is not Jurassic Park.  This is technology that exists.  And therefore, science fiction can be written about the kinds of worlds that would result if we used this technology.  It could be utopian or dystopian or it could be very complicated and involve people’s lives being changed in ways that are neither of the extremes.  What if these edited babies live much longer than normal humans?  That would create certain problems.  Or what if they’re all super geniuses and can’t relate to normal people and their normal hopes and dreams?  Either of these scenarios can have consequences that would make interesting stories.  Because fundamentally, the interesting thing about science fiction stories isn’t the science but rather its effect on human beings.  If scientists bring back dinosaurs but they don’t run amok trying to eat Jeff Goldblum (which really would be fun to watch) no one would care.  If the sun explodes but humanity has been extinct for a billion years then no one reading the story would care.  The stories are about us and that’s the thing that the writer has to make you understand.

So, I’d really like to read some stories about things that could really happen and maybe even will happen.  Maybe a good story would be about someone trying to figure out how to use artificial intelligence to eliminate violent crime or find a way to make democracy work to most people’s satisfaction.  There are an endless supply of technological problems and scenarios that already are possible and just need someone to expend a little brain power to make entertaining.  And I’m guessing in the not-too-distant future a writer with a bit of skill and a little imagination will write at least one good one.

Refocusing Science Fiction – Part 1

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I guess strictly speaking, science fiction starts with Jules Verne and evolved into H G Wells and then expanded into a plethora of subgenres that include every imaginable kind of story that involves “science” in some aspect of the story.  And the types are endless and the mixing of the types with each other make the number of different subtypes equal to the cardinality of the continuum (a very big number they say).  You have space travel, time travel, dimensional travel, multi-verse reality.  There’s solar system colonization (with and without terraforming), interstellar exploration with and without colonization), there’s first contact with different alien species, there’s interplanetary war, interstellar war, there’s the human galactic empire, there are galactic civilizations made up of many species.  There are stories about the origins of the human race that involve older races either creating it or influencing it (with or without monoliths and xenomorphs).  We have futures that include artificial intelligence as our servant or as our master or locked in a mortal combat with us.  There are stories about our future that involve evolution either natural or induced that change us in any number of ways; physically, mentally or supernaturally where we develop abilities that give us almost godlike powers.  There are comic stories, love stories, war stories, literary stories that concentrate on the psychological effects of technology and stories that try to extrapolate what the future of technology and science will do to humans in the future.  There are even stories about our extinction.

But almost all of these stories have been terribly far from reality.  Even the “hard” science fiction writers who have tried to base their stories on science fact have for the sake of making an interesting story, diverged very far from what the future will really look like.  For instance, interplanetary space travel.  What has been imagined about exploration of the solar system for the last hundred years or so has been mostly wrong in several aspects of the science.  The only exception has been manned travel to the Moon.  Looking at Heinlein’s Moon landing in the movie “Destination: Moon” it really wasn’t that terribly different from the reality of the Apollo missions.  Now granted he used a single vehicle and not the orbiter plus lander arrangement, but the overall effect was pretty close.  Three or four Americans rocketed to the Moon and came back just as quickly as they could to avoid the difficulties of carrying enough rocket fuel for the return trip and air to breath for a few days.  But every other space flight in science fiction history has ignored things like micro-gravity health hazards and cosmic and solar radiation damage to the human body.

And as for interstellar flight they’ve hand waved themselves past the realities of just how insanely far away even the closest stars are in terms of travel time.  I won’t even begin to talk about anything like time travel.  There just isn’t any scientific evidence that it can even possibly exist.  As for Skynet deciding to kill off humanity using a cadre of cyborgs that look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, well I won’t say it can’t happen but I think maybe liberties have been taken with the likelihood.

So, what should science fiction be about?  Let’s talk about that in Part 2.

It’s Just a Thought

photog Current Events, Science

Asteroid 2024 YR4 is not going to hit Earth.  Yay?  It’s also not going to hit the Moon either.  Yay?  Apparently, this celestial rock which is 200 ft in length and weighs about 310,000 tons will be sliding by our orbit in a few years and will miss the moon by a couple of thousand miles.  Apparently, there are now safeguards in place to check if any known asteroids have the potential to hit Earth and also evaluate what potential damage they could do.

A2024 YR4 is considered a city killer.  It has been estimated that its impact would be the equivalent of 7.7 megatons of trinitrotoluene (TNT) detonating, which is a pretty big explosion.  Once they refined their calculations, they became convinced that it would miss Earth by a good large margin.  When a lunar impact looked more likely they began fussing because they speculated that an explosion on the Moon would throw up a lot of debris and it might destroy many satellites around Earth.  But when they used the James Webb telescope and measured the orbit more carefully even this scenario was ruled out.  It’s not going to hit anything.

The YouTube video author concluded that the investigation and analysis of the asteroid’s trajectory was a major victory for science and global cooperation.  Well, maybe.  But up until someone started checking the paths of asteroids, haven’t we been at this risk basically forever?  I guess the last sizable asteroid (or maybe comet) that collided with Earth was the Tunguska blast in 1908.  That was more than a hundred years ago.  And it took forever for anyone to even figure out what the hell happened.  Based on this track record something like this will happen less frequently than once a century.  And no one will be killed but a lot of trees will be flattened.  But something like once in 66 million years an asteroid 8 miles long will hit Earth causing a mass extinction event.  That rock was 200 times bigger than A2024 YR4.  How about if we stop worrying about anything less than 1% of the extinction rock.  So that would be twice as big as the recent rock.  So, if a 400 ft asteroid is crowding Earth, then maybe I’ll start getting nervous.  Or maybe I won’t.  We already have nuclear war, earthquakes, tsunamis, super-volcanoes, “global warming,” plagues (like COVID) and transgender mass murderers to worry about.  I don’t think I have the bandwidth to start worrying about rogue asteroids rolling into Earth or now into the Moon and destroying my wi-fi reception.

You know, maybe I’d be happy if an asteroid hit the Moon and sent a million meteors raining into the various satellites we have clogging up the sky over our heads.  Maybe that’s exactly what we need.  If cell phones stopped working and once we walk away from our desks we couldn’t be reached by every idiot on the planet maybe we’d actually be happier.  It’s just a thought.