Yet another answer to the Fermi Paradox

Reginald Smith from the Bouchet-Franklin Institute in Rochester, New York has written a paper which claims that every civilization in the Milky Way stops broadcasting EM after 1000 years.  Based on this assumption he shows that it is reasonable that our galaxy has multiple sentient species who never interact with each other. This assumption seems very weak to me.  Why would every single species stop communicating by radio?  He also has an implicit assumption that colonization is rare or non-existent.

The real answer to the Fermi Paradox is much simpler:  the rate of evolution of sentient species is less than 1.0 per galaxy per 13 billion years.  We are the first and only intelligent species in the Milky Way, the odds that another will evolve before we have colonized the galaxy is nearly zero.  This theory perfectly fits the observed facts.

Singularity, a free audiobook

I have started listening to a free audiobook, Singularity by Bill DeSmedt. So far it's great, it's about the real cause of the Tunguska explosion. I'll review the book when I'm done listening to it.

I listen to it as a podcast feed.  I had some trouble setting up the feed in iTunes, the response of the podiobooks website was VERY slow, but it did finally work.  You can choose to get one chapter per day, per week, or all at once.

Your own personal stereotype

This is slightly off topic for this blog, but I found this ZenHabits post to be deeply profound.  To sum it up, virtually everyone fits into a pidgeonhole:  the smart guy, the cold physician, the golf hack, the office gossip, the troubleshooter, the troublemaker.  It applies to scifi writers too.  How many pidgeonholed authors have an opportunity to break out into a different genre?  If Terry Brooks tried to write a hard scifi story about alien robot colonies invading Earth would you give him the benefit of the doubt?  Many people would not. Most famous people are pidgeonholed:  George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, Brittany Spears....the list is nearly endless.

The best advice is to make sure that your pidgeonhole is a good one.  You need a positive image associated with respect and dignity.  Because you probably will be stuck in that hole for the rest of your life.

We live in one big hologram

Scientists have analyzed noise in the GEO600 gravitational wave detection system and concluded it is holographic in nature. This leads them to propose that this entire universe is a holographic projection.

That is one serious projector.  The computational power required to process the signals and send them to the projector probably outpaces an entire galaxy of Matrioshka brains.

The Jeffries Tube

For several years now I have been greeted at church by a pleasant older usher, never dreaming that his brother was a science fiction giant:   Matt Jeffries  !!  Richard Jeffries has written a book about his famous brother. http://www.mattjefferies.com/wmjb.html

The book is "Beyond the Clouds"

Matt flew a "secret reconnaissance bomber" during WWII, build airplanes, designed the Enterprise (THE Enterprise), worked on many TV shows and a few movies.

I haven't read the book yet but it sounds excellent.

Fermi Paradox - All the aliens went dark !

Suppose the cosmologists have it wrong and dark matter really is composed of baryons.  It's not like cosmologists have a great track record.  Most of their theories have been proven wrong over the past few centuries.  Comparing the track record of mathematicians with cosmologists is pretty much night and day.  When a mathematician says they have a new discovery it's right, they have cred.  A new cosmology theory and $1.50 will buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.  So why should a computation on the density of baryonic matter in the universe be one of the precious few ideas they actually got right? If dark matter is baryonic then why is it dark?  Could it be that it's dark because it's actually dominated by Matrioshka brains?  Matrioshka brains are shells which absorb all the light from a star, and all the light which radiates from that shell, and so on until the outer shell is ice cold, let's say for the sake of argument that a typical Matrioshka brain radiates at 2.73 Kelvin so it's in equilibrium with the cosmic background (or maybe the only relevant source of the cosmic background !!)

What if virtually all sentient life evolves in the far outer reaches of a galaxy and galaxies start out as 100% visible matter.  As a few Matrioshka brains are born they begin to send out ships and to convert neighboring stars.  Within a few hundred million years all stars outside of the core of a galaxy are dark.  As galaxies age they "shrink" because the number of visible stars drops, they are being absorbed by the Matrioshka civilizations.  This offers an intriguing observational program, watch for vanishing stars at the very edges of the Milky Way.

The interesting implications of this theory are:  there is no such thing as time travel, and there is no such thing as FTL travel (faster than light).   Either (or both) would mean much faster (essentially instantaneous) conversion of the entire galaxy.

Would there be any hope for us if the first survey ship arrived tomorrow to begin "Matriforming" our solar system?  It would certainly take centuries to convert our solar system, but it might only be a few decades before Earth became uninhabitable.  Could we fight back, would they absorb us into the collective before we had a chance to fight back?  Makes for an intriguing plot.

Science Fiction for Smart People

Charlie Stross writes in Accelerando about a variety of topics which challenge even the most technically savvy readers. First he mentions a Matrioshka brain, a massive extension of the Dyson Sphere. Imagine a Dyson Sphere is built which consists almost entirely of computational nodes. Each node will radiate a little waste heat so the entire sphere could be as bright as the star it contains. Orient the radiators on the external surface of the sphere and build another Dyson Sphere around the first which again is composed of computational nodes. This sphere will radiate energy but probably less than the inner one, thus it will be cooler. A series of concentric shells extends further from the stellar core, each shell absorbing and emitting radiant energy. After 10-100 of these the outer shell will be so cool that there is no efficient way to gather the emitted radiation and convert it to computational power. What would a brain do with that much computational power ? It would be the equal of roughly 6 quadrillion human brains or 10^35 petaflops.  Would it think, would it create, would it warp the spacetime continuum?  Would it create time travel? How would we detect such an entity? The object could appear cooler than a brown dwarf, rendering it almost invisible. There could be a few of these within 100 light years of us and we might never find them.

Next Stross mentions the Kardashev civilizations. A Dyson sphere is a Type II Kardashev civilization. A Type I group will harness all the energy present on their planet (solar, nuclear, wind, and geothermal). But the most impressive idea of all is the Type III civilization which gathers and uses the sum total energy output of an entire galaxy, roughly 10^37 watts. I wonder if the final stages of absorbing all the galactic energy would produce a visible redshift? Older galaxies would have higher redshifts as their inhabitants have had more time to absorb all the energy. Wouldn't it be cool to see the Hubble recession theory discredited because most galactic redshifts result from sentient races using all the energy from their galaxies!!

And what about dark matter?  Could it be that most stars and most galaxies are dark Kardashev communities?  Perhaps the calculations on the baryon density of the universe are wrong, and dark matter can really be baryons.  Or perhaps even more interesting, could advanced technology convert unstable baryons to something which is not a baryon?  Is dark matter the end product of an advanced Type II Kardashev civilization?

Accelerando is a good novel but it could do with a little more editing.  Many pages have sentences and paragraphs which spew jargon and techno-babble in a stream of conciousness mode that doesn't contribute to the essence of the story.  Here's an example:  "The whole ubicomp environment, dust-sized chips, and utility fog and hazy clouds of diamond-bright optical processors in the soil and the air and her skin, which is growing blotchy andy sluggish, thrashing under load of whatever Amber....."

The story teases about uncovering what a group of really old Matrioshka brains are doing, but doesn't really answer the question.  Stross is probably fertilizing the soil for a sequel.

Thirteen

I just finished listening to Richard Morgan's Thirteen from Audible. This new novel is an involving story about a genetically engineered mutant, such people carry the nickname Thirteen. Reminds me of Rome. The 13th Legion warriors were aggressive and invincible. So are the mutants. They are fierce male warriors recruited for dirty work such as military ops, assassinations, and tracking down people who don't want to be found. I would disagree with anyone who claimed this book is not science fiction. However I would understand their claim. This book starts with the crash of a spaceship from Mars, the sole survivor is a mutant human, another Thirteen is recruited to hunt him down, this hunter was on Mars, and returned to Earth enhanced with military implants.

But this is another of Morgan's detective story with cops and guns and government agents and conspiracies, and murder scenes and drug dealers.

I'm glad I read it and would recommend it to anyone interested in scifi, but I was disappointed that the science fiction elements played such a minor role. This story would be essentially identical if it had been written without any of them. The Kovacs trilogy was a lot more dependent on the scifi devices.

Time Travel Websites

There are a lot of other websites out there which offer a great sample of scifi. The most popular according to Google are SF Site, Scifi.com. An useful one is at www.magicdragon.com with the Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide. The interesting thing is that this site has not been updated in 4 years yet it's still #9 on a Google search for "science fiction". Gawker Media has the 800 pound gorilla with io9. The sheer quantity of searches and material on this site is overwhelming. Yet I must wonder why they won't let me post a comment.

For help with writing Science Fiction try Jeffrey Carver at www.starrigger.net or try his blog.

I'm most interested in time travel at sites like crystalinks, or time-travel.com, and there's even a site for time-travelling investors!

Review of Vinge's 'Rainbows End'

I just finished listening to Verner Vinge's book "Rainbows End". There were some things about this book which were very difficult to follow in audio, perhaps reading it would be easier. Overall it was an interesting portrayal of life in the near future when personal technology has become as useful as shoes and eyeglasses. But I have to say the ending of this book was a tremendous disappointment. It's not a spoiler to say that The Rabbit is one of the most intriguing and important characters of any book I've recently read. Vinge showed his genius in creating Rabbit as one of the heroes, or was it an anti-hero? It's hard to classify.

So why after all this effort and success would Vinge leave the character unresolved at the end of the book? We learn nothing about Rabbit. He is simply not there. We don't know if he is dead or alive, a winner or a loser. Vinge may intend on writing a sequel, but he still should give some hints. In the end we are left to guess as to the core of Rabbit's essence. Saying more would perhaps give away a spoiler.

Vinge's vision of a technological life is encouraging. HIs vision of secret personal messaging is excellent and shows that the next evolutionary step after IM is still just a conversation. And his ideas of what would happen to old people whose diseases were suddently cured is inspiring.

But I can't get past the question "What happened to the Rabbit ??"

Interesting note,  SF Reviews did not even mention the Rabbit.

Are aliens watching us?

The Fermi Paradox allows for many explanations. One is that the human race encountered aliens in the past, we just don't know about it. This anti-anthropocentric view does not offer an answer to the question "are they still here?" If they came a long time ago then they probably went away bored. If they came recently they probably went away laughing. But perhaps they or their machines are still here, watching and waiting. Can we speculate for what are they waiting, and what would trigger a change in their posture?

They could be waiting for us to all kill each other so they can have the planet, or they could be waiting for us to dig up an artifact on the moon or Mars. They could be waiting for reinforcements, or for Sol to explode. They could be waiting for us to invent something they desperately need, or for us to answer an important question such as "What is the meaning of life?". Perhaps they are waiting for us to arrive at THE question for which they already know the answer (101010).

I believe the answer is much simpler, natural evolution produces one sentient species per galaxy once every 10 billion years. We are alone in the Milky Way and will be for a very long time. In fact we will probably colonize this galaxy so extensively that we prevent the evolution of the 2nd ones.

But it's fun to think aliens are listening to us and laughing at the method used in the USA for choosing leaders.