Monthly Archives: June 2010

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The Galactic Area Network

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The wonderfully named John Learned of the University of Hawaii theorises that alien intelligences could use Cepheid variable stars as nodes on a sort of intragalactic communications network [via @spacearcheology, who retweeted @swadeshine]:

Jolting the star with a kick of energy – possibly by shooting it with a beam of high-energy particles called neutrinos – could advance the pulsation by causing its core to heat up and expand, they say.

That could shorten its brightness cycle – just as an electric stimulus to a human heart at the right time can advance a heartbeat. The normal and shortened cycles could be used to encode binary “0”s and “1”s.

The team says information could thus be shuttled around our galaxy’s network of 500 or so Cepheids – and out as far as the Virgo cluster of galaxies.

Because a civilisation capable of such engineering feats would be sure to turn them to the task of… er, using stars as Morse keys. This guy has made exactly the mistake that Sam Vaknin was on about.

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From punk rock to politics: new Icelandic career arcs

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This story’s all over the place, for obvious reasons: not only has Iceland put same-sex marriages on equal footing with the more old-fashioned kind (and seen its prime minister marry her partner under said law) and signed in a raft of free speech protections to its legislature, but the capital city Reykjavik has elected a former anarcho-punk musician and stand-up comic and his lighthearted Best Party to the mayorship…

While his career may have given him visibility, few here doubt what actually propelled him into office. “It’s a protest vote,” said Gunnar Helgi Kristinsson, a political science professor at the University of Iceland.

[…]

“People know Jon Gnarr is a good comedian, but they don’t know anything about his politics,” he said. “And even as a comedian, you never know if he’s serious or if he’s joking.”

But as Mr. Gnarr settles into the mayor’s office, he does not seem to be kidding at all.

[…]

“Just because something is funny doesn’t mean it isn’t serious,” said Mr. Gnarr, whose foreign relations experience includes a radio show in which he regularly crank-called the White House, the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and police stations in the Bronx to see if they had found his lost wallet.

A vote based in protest and dissatisfaction it may be, but I find myself wondering if the Best Party will turn out to be any worse than the more traditional alternatives. There seems to be a growing discontent with party politics all over the world at the moment, and certainly here in the UK… personally, I’d be happy to trade comedians for the jokers we’ve got in Westminster right now.

More seriously, and as I suggested before, Iceland will be worth watching in the years to come because it’s a test case for mass rejection of traditional politics. To say that it’s a kneejerk reaction to the recent troubles the country has experienced is to miss seeing the wood for the trees: perhaps it’ll turn out that a polity needs to be screwed really badly by its corrupt political processes before they’ll wake up enough to start changing the system. Catastrophe has always given radicalism a boost, but now we have the tools to mobilise nationally (and globally) outside of the mechanics of electoral processes, radical change might pick up a little more momentum than it ever has before.

That cuts two ways, of course; it’d be just as easy for a fascist or fundamentalist party to take advantage of a power vacuum as it has been for Iceland’s cuddly comedian lefties. Perhaps the real lesson to take away is that it’s time we all started thinking for ourselves while we still can, instead of outsourcing our opinions to men in suits with false smiles and hidden agendas.

For now, though, I wish to restate my interest in purchasing a share in the Icelandic national identity; it sure reads like there’s more chance of change over there than here at home.

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The Ten Errors of Science Fiction

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Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines – nothing tends to rile science fiction folk so much as folk from outside the ghetto loudly pronouncing that OMFG UR DOIN IT RONG, and this piece by Dr Sam Vaknin should provide great fodder for some hard sf advocacy and righteous ire. So fetch your popcorn, kids, as we find out the ten hidden and fallacious assumptions about extraterrestrials in science fiction!

In all works of science fiction, there are ten hidden assumptions regarding alien races. None of these assumptions is a necessity. None of them makes immanent or inevitable sense. Yet, when we read a sci-fi novel or watch a sci-fi movie we tend to accept all of them as inescapable. They amount to a frame of reference and to a language without which we seem to be unable to relate to all manner of exobiology. We evidently believe that life on Earth is a representative sample and that we can extrapolate its properties and mechanisms of action wide and far across the Universe. The principles of symmetry, isotropy, and homogeneity apply to the physical cosmos: Hydrogen behaves identically in our local galactic neighbourhood as it does in the furthest reaches of the Cosmos. Why shouldn’t life be the same?

“In all works of science fiction”? Vaknin must have a whole lot of reading time on his hands…

Snark aside, Vaknin’s major FAIL here is the classic outsider’s misconception of sf, namely that it’s supposed to be taken literally rather than allegorically*. In other words, he’s quite right in that sf makes assumptions about alien life, but quite wrong in thinking that it matters to sf’s function as a form of entertainment**. Put it this way: if you read science fiction for the pleasure (rather than as a stand-in for a doctorate in exobiology, say), I’d guess there’s a 95% chance Vaknin’s article is a classic case of TL;DR. SETI geeks with time on their hands may get a kick from it, though.

Anyway, George Dvorsky takes Vaknin at something closer to face value than I have the time, expertise or motivation to pull off, and manages to do a pretty good job of popping his tyres:

Sure, I agree that ETIs may be dramatically different than what we can imagine and that they may exist outside of expected paradigms, but until our exoscience matures we should probably err on the side of the self-sampling assumption and figure that the ignition and evolution of life tends to follow a similar path to the one taken on Earth. Now, I’m not suggesting that we refrain from hypothesizing about radically different existence-states; I’m just saying that these sorts of extraordinary claims (like alternative intelligences spawning different quantum realities) require the requisite evidence. It’s far too easy to fantasize about some kind of energy-based hive-mind living in the core of asteroids, it’s another thing to prove that such a thing could come about through the laws of physics [my example, not Vaknin’s].

[…]

Nice try, Vaknin, but the Great Silence problem is more complex than what you’ve laid out.

For all my bitching above, I do actually find things like the Fermi Paradox and the Great Silence to be lots of fun to think about. If you’re looking for an accessible introduction to the idea (and some of the hypotheses presented as solutions), Dvorsky’s blog is a good place to start… but I’d also recommend the book Where Is Everybody? by Stephen Webb, which is full of great starter seeds for Baxterian space opera stories.

[ * Yeah, yeah, hard sf is driven by scientific rigour and plausibility, sure, but it’s still stories told by humans about what it’s like – or may at some point in the future be like – to be a human in a big confusing universe; even Watts’ Blindsight speaks to the human condition and the state of our understanding of life in the universe more than it does the raw facts we have regarding life in the universe, and that’s about as hard an sf novel as I’ve ever read. You can argue that rigidly hard sf (factual to the detriment of story) is the apogee of the genre if you like, but you’d be wrong. ]

[ ** An essay deconstructing the false assumptions made about gender and race in science fiction, however, would be something worth writing, because humans are the true subject of human literature, even when they’re not the subject that takes the limelight on center stage. False assumptions about people need taking apart far more urgently than false assumptions about hypothetical beings we may never meet, IMHO. ]

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Blindsight’s origins uncovered

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No, not the (excellent) Peter Watts novel… but the neurological phenomenon for which it is named. Ars Technica boils down a new paper published in Nature:

The authors worked with two macaques that have small lesions in their primary visual cortexes, which leave them unable to respond to visual cues in a subset of their visual field. A fair amount of work went in to defining precisely the areas within the visual field that were no longer effective, and confirming that stimuli in those areas could still induce activity (measured via functional MRI) in the remaining visual cortexes.

The authors then focused on a structure called the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), which acts as a relay point for signals travelling between the retina and the primary visual cortex. Other work had shown that the LGN also has projections to a number of secondary visual areas, suggesting that it may serve as a major hub in the visual system.

To test this suggestion, the authors injected the LGN with a chemical that activates the receptor for a major inhibitory signaling molecule (the chemical, THIP, is what’s termed a “GABAA-receptor agonist”). When the chemical is present, nerve cells receive a signal telling them to stop signaling, so this this injection has the effect of shutting the LGN down entirely.

The treatment was highly effective. With the LGN shut down, visual stimuli that normally induce a blindsight response didn’t elicit any response from the visual centers of the macaques.

And here’s a blindness-related bonus story with some feel-good we-can-fix-anything-eventually overtones (as well as some science-not-the-work-of-Beelzebub-after-all undertones) to set you up for the weekend: restoring sight to blinded human patients with stem cell therapy. Yay, science!