Random SF Links

[DShomshak]

On 8/4/2023 at 10:29 PM, dmjalund said:

what accent is that?

Wikipedia says Isaac Arthur was born in Sebastopol, California.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

[DShomshak]

18 hours ago, tkdguy said:

Floating cities are notoriously underrepresented in science fiction nowadays. They would make an interesting setting on Earth or an alien water world like GJ1214b

 

 

Here's a brief animation of a 3D rendering of a floating arcology imagined by Paolo Soleri:

 

 

Soleri's visions of floating cities are big enough simply to defy wave and weather. Though there are, hm, other problems with Soleri's idiosyncratic vision of arcologies. (I see by link-following that Mr. Arthur has discussed some of them on his channel.)

 

Dean Shomshak

 

Dean Shomshak

[Duke Bushido]

5 hours ago, DShomshak said:

Here's a brief animation of a 3D rendering of a floating arcology imagined by Paolo Soleri:

 

 

That was pretty cool for an animation that I am pretty sure qas rendered with a Sega Genesis.   

 

 

as cool as it was, though, I suspect our long-standing history as land animals has a lot to do with underrepresentation.  Even a space habit, we think "well, at least it be quick" when we consider catastrophic failure.

 

swimming to exhaustion and drowning awake....   That's a lot harder to get behind, I am afraid....

 

 

[tkdguy]

 

[tkdguy]

 

[Scott Ruggels]

Star Trek in the 1920s

 

 

[DShomshak]

Isaac Arthur's videos are, hm, uneven; some are just incoherent. But this one's pretty good: part of his "Megastructures" series, this time about building artificial planets, why one might wish to do so, and ending with the largest possible artificial habitat -- something that makes a Dyson sphere look puny.

 

 

Dean Shomshak

[L. Marcus]

All I ask is for a Bishop's Ring of my own.

[DShomshak]

I feel like I ought to make a joke about the Roman Catholic Church here, but I can't think of anything actually funny.

 

Dean Shomshak

[L. Marcus]

Something something paying the Fisher (Ring) Price.

[DShomshak]

This one of Mr Arthur's could be more coherent, but it's an introduction to one of the less familiar SF tropes: That humans are not the first intelligences to live on Earth. (Best known from Lovecraft, but other writers have used it too.) Could we now detect the presence of such a past civilization? Or conversely, would traces of our civilization be detectable millions of years from now?

 

As Arthur explains, the title comes from a paper by two actual scientists. I've appended a link to that paper: It's not too technical for someone with basic science literacy.

 

 

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/silurian-hypothesis-would-it-be-possible-to-detect-an-industrial-civilization-in-the-geological-record/77818514AA6907750B8F4339F7C70EC6

 

Dean Shomshak

Edited October 23, 2023 by DShomshak

[DShomshak]

If you want a guide to Earth's past geography, the man to consult is geologist Christopher Scotese. Even more so if you want a guide to Earth's future geography -- AFAIK he's the first to try running plate tectonics forward, though after about 50 million years the continents might follow different courses. If you want to send characters back to the Permian (c'mon, everybody does Age of Dinosaurs, stretch yourself) or forward 100 million years, Scotese has made maps for you. Here's his website's Earth History section:

 

http://scotese.com/earth.htm

 

And here's that map of the Permian:

 

Scotese also has a Youtube channel with plate tectonic animations.

 

And here's a PDF atlas of the future, with maps at 25-million year increments, with brief explanations of what the continents are doing and what the climate is probably like.

 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323511465_Atlas_of_Future_Plate_Tectonic_Reconstructions_Modern_World_to_Pangea_Proxima_250_Ma

 

Dean Shomshak

Edited October 26, 2023 by DShomshak

[tkdguy]

 

[DShomshak]

Oh -- speaking of Earth history, the science program NOVA just finished a four-part series called "Ancinet Earth" that follow the Earth's development from coalescing from cosmic dust to the present. Earth has been very different planets throughout its history, which would make excellent models for alien worlds.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Cancer]

On 10/23/2023 at 11:01 AM, DShomshak said:

This one of Mr Arthur's could be more coherent, but it's an introduction to one of the less familiar SF tropes: That humans are not the first intelligences to live on Earth. (Best known from Lovecraft, but other writers have used it too.) Could we now detect the presence of such a past civilization? Or conversely, would traces of our civilization be detectable millions of years from now?

 

As Arthur explains, the title comes from a paper by two actual scientists. I've appended a link to that paper: It's not too technical for someone with basic science literacy.

 

 

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/silurian-hypothesis-would-it-be-possible-to-detect-an-industrial-civilization-in-the-geological-record/77818514AA6907750B8F4339F7C70EC6

 

Dean Shomshak

 

I think they have missed something important: systematic plundering of very specific mineral resources from really old geologic provinces.  As a specific example: modern era iron-ore mining focuses on the banded iron formations laid down as Earth's atmosphere was becoming oxygen-rich, 2 +/- 0.5 Gyr ago.  Those formations cannot be regenerated by the planet (unless we humans succeed in deoxygenating the atmosphere, which the fossil fuel companies seem bent upon doing).  There are big holes in the crust now where those formations have been mined out.  I think those will be apparent to any successors of ours. 

 

On a smaller scale because it dates to pre-industrial times, Europe has been more or less completely mined out of precious metal deposits (gold and silver).  You can tell where they were because of the tracking of current sediments into much older geologic deposits, stuff left behind by the miners as they dug out the metals.  That kind of selective pocket intrusion from above is hard to understand via natural processes.  (Generating gold deposits is not well understood, but probably involves fractional crystallization out of magma intruding from below.)

 

Continental crust is not being generated now, except very slowly at the leading edges of continental plates.  (Oceanic crust is being continuously recycled at impressive rates; I think all the oceanic crust is no older than 100 million years, as it is subducted under the continents.)  So the small but highly selective scars we have left in the continental crust seem likely to last for as long Earth remains habitable, which is estimated to be about another billion years.

[DShomshak]

23 minutes in, Arthur mentions filled-in mineshafts as giveaways of pre-human civilizations. Others too, which would require fairly baroque scenarios to remove from geological evidence.

 

I too thought of banded iron deposits; also fossil fuels, which we are ripping through at a tremendous rate and which are not replenished at all quickly -- or at all, since Earth is unlikely to see another Carboniferous Period. A pre-human civilization that maintained comparable-to-current technology for very long should have used them up. Except... Earth's surface has seen an awful lot of erosion and deposition. It might be interesting to ask a geologist how accessible the Minnesota banded iron deposits were 50 or 100 million years ago. Or conversely, an estimate of banded iron deposits that could have been accessible long ago but were eroded away and lost. Or on the third hand, there might be deposits that are now deeply buried, but that might be easier to mine in another 50 million years (thought this total reserve must inevitably go down over time).

 

IIRC the recent NOVA series "Ancient Earth" mentioned that eroded coal deposits put a lot of carbon into sea ooze, which eventually got cooked into petroleum. The coal fields under the Soberian Traps also got cooked away by thoat series of massive eruptions, helping to bring about the Great Dying. So there might be major coal deposits that were accessible once and whose fate is now impossible to guess. Again, I think one would need to ask a geologist.

 

As Arthur says, it's still all a bit contrived. But a clever writer might be able to manage an illusion of plausibility.

 

(When I ran my Planetary Romance campaign, I went the other direction and made the extinct aliens of 40 Eridani impossible to miss. Not only did their towering cities of age-defying crystal still standing, needing only new plumbing and wiring for humans to inhabit, they knew they were doomed by a companion star's transition from red giant to white dwarf and left records of their culture in vaults filled with neon for preservation, surrounded by huge bullseyes of concrete salted with long-lived radioisotopes as "Dig Here" signs that could last a billion years, in case their attempts at submarine and subterranean cities failed. They were people who knew how to rage against the dying of the light. But humans also found a planet so mined-out that heavy industry could not flourish, which is why so many people still ride around on domesticated animals, use sailing ships, and fight with glass swords instead of heavy artillery...)

 

Dean Shomshak

Edited November 22, 2023 by DShomshak

[Rich McGee]

2 hours ago, DShomshak said:

As Arthur says, it's still all a bit contrived. But a clever writer might be able to manage an illusion of plausibility.

Have you read Terry Pratchett's Strata?  Less science and more fiction, but hardly a major reading time investment and even his early writing is generally enjoyable.

 

2 hours ago, DShomshak said:

But humans also found a planet so mined-out that heavy industry could not flourish, which is why so many people still ride around on domesticated animals, use sailing ships, and fight with glass swords instead of heavy artillery...)

Shades of Tekumel, sans the convenient chlen-beast whose constantly-shedding skin can be chemically treated to produce swords and armor roughly as durable as fiberglass but somewhat lighter.

 

A pox on Barker and his feet of clay for tainting such a interesting world.

[Scott Ruggels]

Turns out there are a lot of anti-Semitic college professors than I would have guessed. 
 

Star metal would be something searched after, in mined out areas. After doing a YouTube rabbit hole on the model T, it seems that if one’s goals are modest, you can make a reasonably useful ground vehicle from only a few moving parts. A Model A would be a bit more work. Considering that and Industrial Revolution almost occurred in Ancient Rome, if there is enough economic incentive, and minimal government interference, it would happen again. 

[Rich McGee]

In the (ahem) vein of both worlds without accessible metal and floating cities, Jack Vance's Blue World was built around that problem, coupled with a giant sea monster and conservative priesthood that were further stunting technological recovery of a struggling shipwreck colony.  The solution turns out to be harvesting iron from red blood, both donated from humans and from some of the planet's extensive aquatic ecology.  The science involved is pretty handwavy (according to wiki Stanislaw Lem complained about it, of all people) but as with all things Vancian it's well-written and an enjoyable read.  One of his more-overlooked works for some reason, despite being a nice short one-and-done.

 

Not quite the same situation as a mined-out or resource-poor planet would be, since there must be enough iron for native life to have evolved to use it in their blood.  Just a matter of developing sea floor mining to get at whatever else is down there.  An easy task for people living on pseudo-reed rafts and mostly communicating via semaphore towers.       

[DShomshak]

Isaac Arther devotes an episode to "Dumbest Alien Invasions," on why the standard excuses for heroic Earthlings battling nasty conquering aliens don't hold up to even cursory scrutiny. (I'm surprised that in the "Steal Our Water" segment he doesn't mention V. Ye gods, more than one writer thought this made sense?)

 

I enjoyed the running joke of how the rules of warfare are numbered.

 

(Incidentally, some earlier episodes explain Mr Arthur's voice. It's a speech impediment, not an accent. As he says once in onscreen text, if you've never heard of rhotacism  -- difficulty pronouncing the letter R -- it's because people who have it can't say it.)

 

 

Dean Shomshak

Edited December 14, 2023 by DShomshak

[Rich McGee]

42 minutes ago, DShomshak said:

(I'm surprised that in the "Steal Our Water" segment he doesn't mention V. Ye gods, more than one writer thought this made sense?)

I thought the Visitors were here to eat us, not steal our water.  We were supposed to be livestock, weren't we?

 

Which might actually be a viable explanation for an invasion if a race had the tech for it and were decadent enough to get their jollies from eating sophonts, or keeping them as pets, or as prey for ritual hunts, etc.  There are just no planetary resources that matter enough to be worth invading for beyond whatever the biome has created, and even then it needs to be something that insane level of tech can't recreate more easily - so no farming the locals to render them down into pharmaceuticals unless you're just using that as an excuse for sadism (looking at you, Emperor's Children and Dark Eldar). 

 

Preserving life itself might be worth sort-of invading for if the locals are, say, mistreating the environment so badly thousands or millions of species are at risk of extinction and you want them saved for posterity.  Wouldn't be a proper conquest and occupation mission, just get down there, collect samples or whole viable populations of as many species as possible for preservation and possible resettlement, then leave the world-abusers to lie in the bed they made for themselves.  Not expecting any saucer fleets to show up and save my sorry ass, but they might come for the whales and lichen and as many of our plethora of beetles as possible.

 

James C. White wrote several short stories about "invasions" that were misunderstood rescue missions, where galactic civilization shows up with a mega-armada of a planetary evacuation fleet to save populations from fatal stellar events and some shooting starts before they can explain themselves.  Even once the situation is made clear and the local governments accept it (which some never do) there are always paranoid holdouts, and the Galactics do their best to stun them and get them off planet whether they want it or not - risking death themselves in the process.  He revisited the concept at least three times, each from different POVs so you get to see the "invasion" from a paranoid survivalist POV, different ones from an "invader" POV that really highlights the difficulties of explaining yourself to aliens when you're the BEM to them, with humans on both sides of the equation in different stories.  A big part of the purpose for galactic civilization existing is to pull off these kind of emergency rescues, in part because they feel guilty - their FTL system can cause stars to destabilize if some fool accidentally navigates through one in hyperspace, and they caused a few planetwide extinctions in the past so now they keep a watch on natural events too.  They even seed primitive systems with "fire alarm" sensors that call in the fleet if something happens.  It's a pleasantly optimistic vision of a better future.  

 

IIRC at least one other author did an homage where some pre-interstellar Terran explorers go poking at an alien artifact on some Jovian (or Saturnian?) moon and manage to set off the system's alarm, thinking it's a rescue beacon for (star)shipwrecked survivors to get help.  They planned to hijack the rescue ship to get an FTL drive for Earth, and found themselves in the middle of several million evacuation ships asking where the nova was.  End result was the would-be hijackers got a good scolding, the alarm got moved to a new hidden location, and the one person on the mission who opposed the hijack plan gets told there'll be a proper first contact mission coming from the galactics soon since the secret's out anyway.    

[tkdguy]

Here's a topic we don't often discuss when designing our future societies:

 

 

[DShomshak]

10 hours ago, Rich McGee said:

I thought the Visitors were here to eat us, not steal our water.  We were supposed to be livestock, weren't we?

 

It's been quite a while, so I checked Wikipedia.

 

Quote

A resistance movement is formed, determined to expose and oppose the Visitors. The Los Angeles cell leader is Julie Parrish, a biologist. Donovan later joins the group, and again sneaking aboard a mothership in search of Tony, who was captured, he learns from a Visitor named Martin that the story about the Visitors needing waste chemicals is a cover for a darker mission. The true purpose of the Visitors' arrival on Earth was to conquer and subdue the planet, steal all of the Earth's water, and harvest the human race as food, leaving only a few as slaves and cannon fodder for the Visitors' wars with other alien races.

Steal water, eat us, and use us as slave soldiers -- a trifecta of idiocy! And all on Arthur's list. Well, maybe he thought it was so bad that nobody would remember it... or he suppressed the memory as too traumatic. Hey, I hadn't thought of this excrementitious piece of sci-fi in decades.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Rich McGee]

6 hours ago, DShomshak said:

Steal water, eat us, and use us as slave soldiers -- a trifecta of idiocy! And all on Arthur's list. Well, maybe he thought it was so bad that nobody would remember it... or he suppressed the memory as too traumatic. Hey, I hadn't thought of this excrementitious piece of sci-fi in decades.

Now I'm honestly glad I never really paid attention to it way back when.  That is some serious idiotic writing there.

 

The "use us as enslaved soldiers" thing is a moderately popular trope in scifi, and not always terminally stupid unto itself.  David Drake and some of his fellow military scifi peers wrote a pretty enjoyable set of stories about shady aliens coming to Earth throughout history and "acquiring" low-tech military formations (eg a defeated Roman Legion) for use as corporate slave troops on other primitive planets.  Their galactic civilization wouldn't let starfarers use superior tech to bully or outright conquer natives they wanted to trade with, and after some debacles with trying to train troops to fight without their usual tech the megacorps discovered it was cheaper to buy slaves, kidnap shiploads of people or "hire" mercs who became de facto slaves from other primitive cultures and use them to overthrow non-cooperative local rulers and install their own picked candidates.  If nothing else it was pleasantly cynical about how well the main government's well-intentioned anti-exploitation laws worked in practice.

 

Of course, humans being human those Romans (and in later stories others from different periods) wind up freeing themselves eventually and (in some of the expanded stuff by other authors) effectively conquering the galaxy and making Earth a stellar superpower, which is very silly but typical.  Turns the whole thing into Poul Anderson's High Crusade with an extra step in the process.

[tkdguy]

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-STZOhY2B2Q