Fiction Writing - Merrily Dancing Ape

Fermi Paradox Solved by a Special Guest

Computer / Info Technology, Fiction Writing, Science & Technology, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Mar 182023

Okay, here goes. I’m just going to say it.

I’m an alien.

Like, from outer space.

My name is Wiptee-poof Blipticon. Greetings from Gliggablork!

I’m revealing myself because I want to explain the Fermi Paradox to you. I can no longer stand by while you people spout nonsense and freak out over nothing. The answer will put you at ease.

Your cosmologists and theoretical physicists are baffled by a number of unresolved mysteries, e.g. dark energy, dark matter, baryonic asymmetry, quantum gravity, the blackhole information paradox, the Vacuum Catastrophe, the Problem of Time, and the Fermi Paradox, just to name a few.

Many of these are tied together such that the answer to one automatically resolves another. The Fermi Paradox and dark matter are like that.

One day in the summer of 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi had an epiphany. He realized that there’s a high probability that intelligent aliens exist, yet there’s a lack of evidence that they actually do, which is weird. When the epiphany hit him, he famously blurted to his research buddies at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, “But where is everybody?”

The answer:

We’re everywhere.

Your scientists have correctly theorized the following:

With 70 sextillion stars in the universe, and with planets orbiting most of them, life should be abundant.
Even if intelligent lifeforms only evolve on a small percentage of these planets, there should be multiple alien civilizations out there.
Some of these civilizations must have started millions of years ago. By now they must be super advanced.
And they’ve had time to spread everywhere.

If these statements are true, why don’t Earthlings see evidence for aliens, like derelict probes or gas stations on asteroids?

To explain the answer, I first need to clarify a couple of misconceptions that show up in your science fiction.

Firstly, there are (almost) no evil alien civilizations. If you think about this rationally for a minute, it’s clear why.

As you’ve guessed, life is prolific in the universe. And not all of it is very nice. There are indeed mean little beasties out there amongst the stars. Actually, there’s an unthinkably large number of them.

But it turns out that there’s an evolutionary pattern that is so reliable, we consider it a law:

Technological advancement requires cooperation.

When you contemplate your own species, what may come to your mind is the selfishness and violence. You project this onto alien species.

But we’re not like that. And you guys aren’t nearly as bad as you think, either, and you’re getting better quickly.

As your technology advances, the level of cooperation required to continue advancing grows, and the utility in conflict decreases. Selfishness reaps rewards in the short term, but it doesn’t pay off in the final measure. This holds true even in regard to the worst sort of technological advancement: weapons of mass destruction.

When you consider, for example, a missile with a nuclear warhead, you might look on it with disgust and think, “We are such warlike creatures.” But consider the supply chain required to produce that missile – the networks of people and corporations and countries that must work together to make such a thing possible. The fancier the missile, the more cooperation and interdependence is involved in producing it. This interdependence diminishes the incentives for war. If the missile is used to destroy any part of the great web of cooperation that produced it, then no more missiles can be made.

Anything imaginable is possible when you work together. But when you stop working together, advancement stops. It doesn’t only stop; it backslides. The supply chains break. The institutions that perpetuate knowledge are destroyed. Civilization wanes.

This is the Great Filter:

Evil is inherently self-destructive.

Evil species can’t advance beyond a certain point because their inability to cooperate is naturally self-limiting.

And so, the most technologically advanced alien civilizations, by this law, are also highly, intensely, passionately, religiously cooperative. I can’t overstate how much value we put on getting along with others.

Now, I admit, once every blue moon, by some perverse miracle, an advanced alien civilization that is evil does emerge.

But they’re vanishingly rare. And they don’t get very far. They’re massively outnumbered by the good guys, like my people, the Gliggablorks, and they’re much less advanced than us. So, we deal them. Non-violently.

The second misconception most Earthlings hold is that the pace of technological advancement is always linear.

Technological advancement accelerates, and it brings social advancement with it.

The reason you assume it’s linear is because roughly linear advancement is what you’ve experienced historically. But your civilization is young.

Once a civilization creates truly useful AI, as your civilization is on the brink of doing, the pace of technological advancement accelerates exponentially or even logarithmically. It explodes.

This is because AI improves the efficiency in anything people do. And one thing people do is create and improve AI systems. Successive generations of AI therefore improve faster and faster.

Every alien civilization jumps virtually overnight from Type 0, where you’re currently at, to Type III on the Kardashev scale.

That’s why most of your science fiction is so silly. You dwell on stages of technological development that no alien civilization has actually experienced – because we skip them.

There are no intermediary levels of advancement. The starships and spacesuits and laser battles that you guys like to imagine are completely off base. Star Wars? There are no wars in space! At least not ones that span more than a single solar system.

None.

What is actually happening out there amongst the stars is way, way cooler than that.

That brings us to the effect we call Unification.

However unique the biology of any given alien species may be, however different they may be linguistically, socially, and culturally from all other aliens, when they merge with their computers and then experience explosive growth in their intelligence and technology, they change into something else. Their biological components take on a reduced role. As the organizing principle of their lives moves away from the mere fulfillment of biological imperatives, they ascend to a state that is essentially similar to all the other advanced alien civilizations.

They unify.

This is a process that is repeating in every galaxy across the universe. Unification is similar to convergent evolution in the field of biology. And it works like a biological law, like evolution itself.

Did you know six new stars are born in the Milky Way each year?

Unification is so reliable that you can make predictions about it in the same way you can predict star births, supernovas, black holes, pulsars, quasars, and everything else that is going on up there in the night sky.

A new species will unify once every 100 Earth years. That’s when their star disappears from sight.

Now to answer the Fermi Paradox:

The reason so much of the galaxy is dark to you is because we’re using it for energy. The way we generate energy is more complicated (and efficient) than a Dyson Sphere, but like a Dyson Sphere, our process hides matter and light but not gravity.

The 27% of the universe that you cannot see, but that you’ve correctly deduced from its gravitational effects must exist, is us.

The reason you don’t see our probes is because we don’t often need probes, and when we do, we’re not amateurs. We don’t use tech you would see.

The reason we aren’t up in your grill is because we’re giving you space to figure yourselves out.

UFOs aren’t us. Sorry, but the idea that an alien spaceship would be advanced enough to travel thousands of light years across the galaxy only to hit a goose in your upper atmosphere and crash in New Mexico is phenomenally stupid. And so is the idea that we’re abducting humans to sodomize you with metallic space dildos.

We don’t need to do any of that stuff to learn about you.

We can study you from the comfort of our homes. You can’t even begin to imagine how awesome our telescopes are.

And we’re not after the natural resources on your planet, either, like your water or your pickle juice or whatever. It’s not that Earth isn’t beautiful and special. But the minerals and other elements on Earth are abundant throughout the universe. We have all the pickle juice we need, and we don’t have to enslave or eradicate living beings to get more.

The only interesting thing to us on Earth is you.

(And not because we want to eat you. That’s gross.)

When you do see us, it will be because we want you to see us. And that hasn’t happened yet. When it does, it’ll be public and you’ll definitely know.

So that’s the answer to the Fermi Paradox!

I hope you’ve enjoyed it. 🙂

The Shepherd’s Crown

Book Review, Fiction Writing, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Sep 042015

The Shepherd's Crown I’m four chapters in. And I just couldn’t wait to post about it. My early review (no spoilers):

CRIVENS! So far it’s perfect! Fun, funny, beautifully written, impactful. It’s as crisp and solid, at least thus far, as the best of Pratchett’s works. It’s stacking up to be a lovely final note on Pratchett’s career, and I can’t help but be emotional about it. Dorky, I know, to get teary-eyed over a children’s fantasy book.

How come this isn’t a top news story? How come the whole world isn’t rejoicing, publicly and loudly and all together, over the gift of this book?

I’m taking it slowly, savoring the read, stretching out my visit to Discworld.

Terry Pratchett’s Raising Steam and The Shepherd’s Crown

Book Review, Fiction Writing, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Aug 102015

I traveled cross-country on a train once and I hoped for a magical sort of experience, but I’m sorry to say—with no offense meant to railfans, whose enthusiasm I applaud—it wasn’t magical, it wasn’t romantic, it was boring.

I finished Raising Steam today. The book takes us on a trip on a train, and unfortunately it’s a boring journey. The novel is the worst I’ve yet read from Pratchett.

The sentence crafting is certainly up to snuff. But the tone is overly triumphant and self-congratulatory. The narrator lets us know at every turn how wonderful and invincible his characters are, and we’re meant to cheer and high-five him the whole way through. I’m not so sure, though, that the characters are that laudable, judging them by their actions, and even worse, the writer loves his characters too much to let them face any real challenges. It’s a given from the start that the good guys will succeed. The plot has a sense of inevitability like, well, trains, and also the monotonous plodding forward of a train. It’s almost as if Pratchett were caricaturizing his own novels or writing his own fan fiction.

So it’s not a great Pratchett novel compared to, say, Going Postal. But though it may have been a bad story, perhaps it was a good goodbye.

Pratchett passed away earlier this year. Raising Steam was his last book published while he lived and the last time Pratchett as an author and we his readers got to romp with Moist and the rest of the crew. So perhaps the celebratory tone is fitting. The good guys kick ass, the bad guys are defeated, and in the end we get to see the characters we love happy and thriving.

But if you’re not yet ready to say bid adieu to Pratchett, you’re in luck. There’s one more chance.

One final Pratchett book will be published posthumously in just a couple of weeks. And then the lights will go down on Discworld permanently. But that book won’t visit Ankh-Morpork. Pratchett’s last book, titled The Shepherd’s Crown, will be a Tiffany Aching book! A children’s book! A book featuring the wee free men!

That’s incredibly exciting.

It will be a children’s book written by a man acutely aware of the cloaked fellow with a scythe standing just there behind him, peering over his shoulder, drumming his bony fingers. I love the Tiffany Aching books, and I yearn to know what sort of Tiffany Aching book Mr. Pratchett would’ve written while staring his own mortality straight in the face.

This is a literary event rivaling (and in my little world far surpassing) Go Set a Watchman in importance.

The UK release date is August 26. We in the USA must wait until September 1. I’ve marked my calendar.

Random Thoughts on Science Fiction & Future Predictions

Fiction Writing, Science & Technology, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Feb 212013

Most of modern science fiction is chock full of violence and war. I like a good lightsaber duel, a showdown with laser riffles, or an epic battle between fleets of space ships, just as much as the next sci-fi fan. But I’ve realized that most of our science fiction today is merely a reflection of our current age and our current values, and therefore fails to provide any insights into what the future might really be like.

The science fiction of Jules Verne was different. Verne was able to think outside the box of his age, and so he was able to produce sci-fi with actual predictive power. Gene Roddenberry, too. Star Trek predicted cell phones, microwave ovens, tablet PCs, various medical devices, and racial equality.

What do you think the future will be like? I’ll make a few guesses:

1. Space Battles

There will never be space battles. By the time interplanetary space voyages become commonplace, the idea that you ought to put shields or weapons on your space ship will seem laughable.

Space battles are a pretty silly concept, actually. No amount of shielding would prevent a high-powered laser from penetrating a hull. The laser battles would not only make no noise, they’d be invisible. And computer-guided laser turrets would never miss.

But my bet is that humans in the future will be less warlike, not more.

2. Similarity to Now

For the next couple hundred years, Earth will look pretty much the same as it does today. Skyscrapers will look the same. Roads will look the same. Cars will look the same, although they’ll use different fuel sources. People won’t suddenly start wearing shiny silver jumpsuits. And people will act basically the same way.

There will be a few noticeable differences, though. Solar panels will be ubiquitous. Rooftops in dense urban areas will be covered with vegetable gardens. And flat screens will be everywhere as the technology evolves to allow them to be painted onto unexpected surfaces.

For example, maybe you’ll press a button on your refrigerator and see a full-size image of what’s inside without having to open the door. (And then you’ll be able to live-stream the contents of your fridge to your cell phone, so you can see what you need to buy while strolling around Safeway.)

3. End of the Common Cold

We shouldn’t assume that viral infections will always be commonplace. In our age it’s a given that you’ll contract a cold or flu a couple times a year. Modern medical science doesn’t seem on track to change that. But there is much we could do right now, even without any advance in medical technology, to reduce viral infections simply by preventing their spread. It is normal these days for sick people to ignore their illnesses or to take a single sick-day and then rush back to work/school while they’re still contagious. If we changed our culture so infected people quarantined themselves better we’d see an immediate drop in infection rates.

And with a small advance in medicine we could do even better:

Imagine a drug – let’s call it Virulex – that you can take when you’re sick, and all it does it prevent you from spreading your virus to others. It has no major side effects. It doesn’t do anything else. It doesn’t stop fever or immunize you from future infections. But it can be added to other drugs, like NyQuil. It can even be added to food. Perhaps the FDA mandates that all over-the-counter medicines that target cold or flu must include Virulex.

Virulex isn’t far-fetched. All it must do is neutralize viruses in our mucus. It’s basically just a surgical mask in pill form: It prevents coughing fits and sneezes from spreading infection. Simple!

And yet the effects would be profound. Within a year or so, most common infections would simply vanish from the planet.

Give humankind 100 more years, and I bet we’ll have something like Virulex.

4. Immortality

We also shouldn’t assume that mortality is a necessary part of the human condition. The last half of the 20th century saw a revolution in pharmaceuticals. The next revolution in medicine, a revolution already begun, is in regenerative medicine. We now have hope that damage to nerves and organs, once thought irreparable, will one day be quite curable. And when it becomes clear that any one organ can be saved, the next obvious step is to save all of them, forever.

For all practical purposes, humans will stop aging at around 40. There will still be accidents and fluke illnesses, so given enough time everyone will die, but a lifespan of 1,000 years will be commonplace.

In our current age, we’re hampered by this awful notion that death is natural and that when old people die it shouldn’t be too upsetting – they more-or-less have it coming. I think that’s a horrible, mean-spirited, evil belief, and if you hold it you should be horse-whipped until you beg for mercy. Old people are a treasure, and it is a sin of the young to fail to value them, and a terrible sin at that. Let them live. Let them thrive. Let them live forever if they can.

5. Religion and Science

Within two hundred years, the majority of Americans will identify themselves as irreligious. Americans will become more scientifically literate. However, pseudo-science (superstition disguised as science) will continue to plague our species for a long time to come, probably forever.

6. Sex and marriage

Traditional marriage will continue to break down until it is seen as merely one option in a menu of options, as society adopts a consequentialist approach toward sexual morality: Arrangements between consenting adults are their own business as long as nobody is harmed.

7. Animal Rights

Animal welfare will finally become a mainstream issue. People won’t stop eating animals but they’ll treat farm animals much more humanely than we do today.

8. Off-world Exploration

It is very likely that we’ll colonize both the moon and Mars within a few hundred years.

It is unlikely that FTL travel is possible. Most of our space exploration will be confined to our own solar system. But as human lifespans increase in length and as our spaceships reach speeds at least a bit closer to the speed of light, humans will eventually visit other solar systems.

We will find microbial alien life forms multiple times. We will probably find life within our own solar system – if not existing lifeforms, then signs that they existed in the past.

But we will not mingle with other complex alien lifeforms, particularly not intelligent ones, for tens of thousands of years, if ever.

Earth is our one best home, and our off-world colonies will always pale in comparison.

The great struggle for our species is learning to forge a sustainable lifestyle for our kind on Earth, striking a balance between preserving the natural world and suiting the world to our wants and needs.

I expect we’ll succeed, but this struggle will continue to generate conflicts for some time to come. If there are major wars in the far future, they’ll be over diminishing resources firstly, and secondly over who gets to live on Earth and who doesn’t.

9. Lives Out of Sync

An interesting side-effect of enhanced longevity combined with close-to-light-speed-travel is that it will probably become normal for our lives to get out of sync with each other.

For example, suppose you go on a scientific mission to an exo-planet in a solar system a few light years away, and then you return to Earth. Only six months have passed from your point of view, but twenty years have passed for your mom and dad. Because of special relativity, any trip away from Earth at near light speed is also a trip into the future relative to people who remain on Earth. So when you get home from your trip your parents don’t necessarily look any different, but they’ve lived through a couple decades of stuff you know nothing about.

It will be interesting to see how people cope with massive gaps in their shared histories.

10. AI

Human-like AI is definitely possible, and as soon as we’ve attained it, it won’t be long until engineered minds surpass natural brains. I can’t imagine it will take humans longer than 500 years to accomplish this feat.

We’ve been looking at AI the wrong way. Computer scientists working individually or in small teams have tried to tackle the entire problem in isolation. Their focus has been to assemble software that can pass the Turing Test.

Cracking the problem will take more people and more resources than that – teams of scientists from multiple fields and from around the world, working in concert, backed by huge sums of money. Like with the Large Hadron Collider.

And the Turing Test is a bad test. It’s not how we measure human intelligence, or chimp intelligence, or raven intelligence, so why do we consider it a valid test of machine intelligence?

Machine intelligence, I suspect, will be comprised of several separate modules. It probably can’t fit in one program, but will require hundreds or thousands of programs working together. And perhaps it cannot be programmed at all, but must be evolved within a virtual world where large populations of machine intelligences compete for resources.

AI is the big wild card. The potential game changer.

If we eventually engineer beings who are superior to us in every regard – more intelligent, more durable, more efficient – faster, prettier, funnier, kinder, and happier – more curious, more empathetic, more compassionate, more charming – then what will become of us?

One possibility is that we’ll merge with our creations. We’ll opt to augment our organic brains with inorganic modules. And then eventually we’ll realize the human soul is really just a pile of information. The nature of the container is unimportant. The organic bits will disappear.

It’s very difficult to predict how all of this will impact our civilization, our culture, our psychology, and so on.

11. Art

How will art work in the future? I think it will change in major ways.

We see ourselves as so evolved, but civilization is still relatively young. Infantile, even. Modern civilization began with advent of agriculture in the Neolithic Revolution, only about 10,000 years ago. Written language is only half as old as that. And during that time the population of humans on the planet has been small compared to the population today.

With billions of people on the planet, after ten or twenty thousand years won’t everything that can possibly be said have already been said by somebody else? Won’t every poem have been written? Every melody? Won’t every dance have been danced?

We are buoyed and inspired by our history, but perhaps in the future our descendants will be drowned by theirs. History will overwhelm them, outshine them, undercut them, leave them no room for invention or originality.

The solution is a complete revamp of the way we think about intellectual property, and the end of copyright as we know it.

Ok, those are all my predictions for now.

The Zombies Would Lose

Fiction Writing, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Aug 162012

I’d like to submit for your consideration the fact that the M-4 Carbine, an assault rifle in heavy use throughout the US military, can fire up to 950 rounds per minute. Just keep that in mind and I’ll come back to it at the end.

Now, are you the sort who daydreams frequently about the zombie apocalypse?

Me too!

While eating a butterscotch Dairy Queen dip cone and strolling about a mall, I’ll find myself searching out the best routes to escape a zombie onslaught.

I especially tend to think about zombies whenever I’m in a parking garage. Escaping a parking garage infested with lumbering undead foes is not impossible, but it’s damn tricky. You’ll definitely have to hide under a van at one point and distract a zombie-business-man by throwing coins. Later you’ll be forced to slam a zombie-janitor’s head in a car door. Then you’ll hot wire a Honda Civic while a zombie-grandma pounds your window. You’ll start the engine just in the nick of time, accidentally reverse into a zombie-cheerleader, crush the zombie-cheerleader against a pillar to force her to release your fender, and smack into a few more zombies as you zoom out the exit.

There’s just something fascinating about zombies. They tap into our deep-rooted feelings of alienation.

There is one big problem, though, with the zombie apocalypse, at least as I’ve seen it depicted in just about every zombie movie or television show I’ve ever watched:

The zombies would so totally lose!

There are slow zombies, fast zombies, VooDoo zombies, and science zombies. (Science zombies are the product of either a rabies-like viral disease or radioactive chemicals, and they emerge when either the military–industrial–congressional complex or an evil corporation stops respecting mother nature and puts power/greed above common interests. Those stupid rat bastards.) But all zombies have a few things in common:

They cannot be killed except by decimating their brains. A bullet to the head always seems to suffice.
They are super strong.
Their only real weapons are their nails and teeth.
They desire human flesh.
They carry the zombie plague in their blood or their saliva. You can touch a zombie without being contaminated, but scratches are dangerous, and if you’re bitten you’re definitely screwed.

If you think about it, other than the fact that they spread contagion, zombies are no more dangerous than most wild animals. They have no ranged weapons. Their only melee weapons are teeth and nails. Their teeth and nails are no more powerful, and are probably less powerful, than the jaws and claws of bears or wolves. Plus zombies have a host of other disadvantages:

They are unintelligent, which means they should be easy to trick, to outmaneuver, and to lure into traps.
They don’t communicate with each other.
They feel no pain, which means they’re unable to avoid most kinds of injuries.
They do not heal from wounds, they just ignore them. So they walk around with broken ankles and untreated burns and missing eyeballs.
Most zombies are slow and uncoordinated.

The slow-moving, uncoordinated, unintelligent zombies in the AMC television series “The Walking Dead” have somehow completely defeated the American military, and I just can’t buy that. How do brainless beasts with no weapons more dangerous than bear jaws and claws somehow defeat the American military?

The answer is that they wouldn’t. They couldn’t. The military would win. The zombies would lose.

Now, back to the M-4 Carbine. Just think about 950 rounds per minute of hot lead spraying out of that gun! The M61 Vulcan, a pneumatically powered Gatling-style rotary canon, can fire up to 6,000 rounds per minute. With weapons like these, you don’t even have to aim. Our soldiers would splat zombie brains without even trying.

Also, it would be relatively easy to produce armor that could withstand the bites and scratches of the zombies. Soldiers with such armor, with weapons like the M61 Vulcan, with state-of-the-art surveillance equipment like flying drones, and with armored vehicles to transport them to hot spots, would eradicate the zombie menace within a week. The zombies wouldn’t stand a chance.

I am unaware of any decent solution to this problem for fiction writers…