Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
[ Be sure to check out the Does Not Equal Cafepress store for webcomic merchandise featuring Canadians with geometrically-shaped heads! ]
A rich seam of technological and science-fictional ideas seem ready to be mined with the development of the first light trap that can simultaneously store different numbers of photons:
“These superposition states are a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics, but this is the first time they have been controllably created with light,” Cleland said. Martinis added, “This experiment can be thought of as a quantum digital-to-analog converter.” As digital-to-analog converters are key components in classical communication devices (for example, producing the sound waveforms in cell phones), this experiment might enable more advanced communication protocols for the transmission of quantum information.
The research is funded by IARPA. Intelligence services are understandably keen to learn more about the potential for quantum computers to break conventionally encrypted communications.
It’s nearly June, my band played a show last night, and I’ve had a long and busy day. So I hope you’ll forgive me skipping the banter and getting straight into this week’s batch of free science fiction stories from the intertubes – onwards!
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A bunch from ManyBooks:
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And a bunch more from FeedBooks:
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Subterranean Online presents:
And also from Subterranean:
Those of you interested in a peak at the world of Kage Baker’s The Women of Nell Gwynne’s will be very interested in her novelette, “Speed, Speed the Cable” (pdf file), which explores the Gentleman’s Speculative Society, the Company Precursor that plays an important role in her new novella, as well as her next novel, Not Less Than Gods.
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Strange Horizons presents “If Wishes Were Horses” by Tiffani Angus-Bodie
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The New Yorker presents “The Slows” by Gail Hareven [via World SF News]
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Revolution SF presents “The Four Jerks of the Apocalypse” by Camille Alexa
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The latest Shadow Unit DVD Extra is “Misadventure”
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Via Futurismic‘s own Tom Marcinko (who has apparently sold them a couple of stories, the saucy devil) comes the news that Circlet Press is publishing some free-to-read erotic sf/f stories on their website at the moment.
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If you’re following along with Jason Stoddard‘s Eternal Franchise, we’re up to chapter 8.2
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Once again the SF Signal gang make a lazy man’s life a little easier with not one, not two but three free fiction round-up posts. There’s a smattering of extras as well
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And last but not least, here’s a handful of Friday Flash Fiction:
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And that’s your lot! You know the drill about getting in touch with plugs and tip-offs for free fiction, right? Awesome – so have a good weekend!
Fusion power is just around the corner, it’s often said… but my father told me they told him the same thing when he was an apprentice back in the early sixties. It seems to be fusion’s destiny to have its reality date rolled back perpetually – the latest example being the announcement that the France-based ITER international experimental fusion project is being scaled down, with the prospective date for its first actual power-generating experiments delayed by a whole five years from the original schedule:
Faced with ballooning costs and growing delays, ITER’s seven partners are likely to build only a skeletal version of the device at first. The project’s governing council said last June that the machine should turn on in 2018; the stripped-down version could allow that to happen. But the first experiments capable of validating fusion for power would not come until the end of 2025, five years later than the date set when the ITER agreement was signed in 2006.
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Indeed, the plan is perhaps the only way forward. Construction costs are likely to double from the €5-billion (US$7-billion) estimate provided by the project in 2006, as a result of rises in the price of raw materials, gaps in the original design, and an unanticipated increase in staffing to manage procurement. The cost of ITER’s operations phase, another €5 billion over 20 years, may also rise.
Bit of a bummer – but then maybe we’d be better off investing in energy technologies that we already have working versions of. €10 billion could probably make a huge difference to the current state of play in solar, geothermal and other sustainable energy sources , I’d have thought. [via SlashDot]
But don’t despair, fusion fans – the wonderfully-named National Ignition Facility in California is working on a laser-fusion method that comes with all the too-cheap-to-meter promise of those thast have come before. I’d love to see fusion arrive in my lifetime, and perhaps I will – but in the meantime I think I’ll stick to pragmatism. The Chinese seem to be on a similar wavelength, as they’re suddenly ploughing a whole lot of cash into developing renewable energy sources like solar power. Place your bets, ladies and gents, place your bets…
Centauri Dreams discusses a DNA-based self-replicating interstellar probe:
Think of a probe that gets around the payload mass problem by using molecular processes to create cameras and imaging systems not by mechanical nanotech but by inherently biological methods.
A Von Neumann self-replicating probe comes to mind, but we may not have to go to that level in our earliest iterations. The biggest challenge to our interstellar ambitions is propulsion, with the need to push a payload sufficient to conduct a science mission to speeds up to an appreciable percentage of lightspeed. The more we reduce payload size, the more feasible some missions become
This is similar to Robert L. Forward‘s starwisp concept (popularised by Charlie Stross in Accelerando).
I suspect that if and when we do get round to interstellar exploration it will involve sending small-mass packages that are capable of bootstrapping themselves to a broadcast/exploration mode using local materials on arrival in the target system.
It remains to be seen what kind of space-based molecular replicating systems become viable. Will we be able to create space-hardened bioware, or good ol’ fashioned machine phase fullerene nanotech?