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Blueprint for a Dying Earth: what would happen if the world stopped spinning?

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I’m not sure whether I’m a sucker for outlandish “what if?” speculation because I’ve always read science fiction, or whether I read sf because I have some innate speculative itch that I need to scratch. Whichever it may be, this is the sort of thing that pushes a whole lot of my buttons: using modelling software to determine what Planet Earth would look like were it to – for some reason – stop spinning [via BoingBoing].

The lack of the centrifugal effect would result in the gravity of the earth being the only significant force controlling the extent of the oceans. Prominent celestial bodies such as the moon and sun would also play a role, but because of their distance from the earth, their impact on the extent of global oceans would be negligible.

If the earth’s gravity alone was responsible for creating a new geography, the huge bulge of oceanic water—which is now about 8 km high at the equator—would migrate to where a stationary earth’s gravity would be the strongest. This bulge is attributed to the centrifugal effect of earth’s spinning with a linear speed of 1,667 km/hour at the equator. The existing equatorial water bulge also inflates the ellipsoidal shape of the globe itself.

[…]

Today, all three world oceans are connected. This creates a global ocean with basically one sea level. As a consequence of rotational slowdown, the outline of the global ocean would continuously undergo dramatic changes. Equatorial waters would move toward polar areas, initially causing a significant reduction in depth while filling the polar basins that have much less capacity. As regions at high latitude in the northern hemisphere become submerged, the areal extent of the northern circumpolar ocean would rapidly expand, covering the vast lowlands of Siberia and northern portions of North America. The global ocean would remain one unit until the rotation of the earth decreased to the speed at which ocean separation would occur. The interaction between the inertia of huge water bodies and decreasing centrifugal force would be very complicated. As the consequence of steady slowdown of earth’s rotation, the global ocean would be gradually separated into two oceans…

Sure, so it’s pretty unlikely to ever happen… and if it did, speculating about topography would be the last of our concerns, I imagine.

But what if…?

[ As a side note, that’s a great way to virally advertise a piece of software that would otherwise only be of interest to 0.001% of the world’s population. Kudos! ]

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Booker Prize longlist snubs genre fiction (again); should we give a damn?

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It’s that time of year once again where Britain’s booklovers (and others around the world) get to see and discuss the longlist of nominations for the prestigious Booker Prize. And, as is traditional, there’s a complete lack of genre fiction on it; cue much kvetching from the genre fiction scene. (Like we need an excuse, right?)

At the risk of sounding contrarian, I really don’t think it matters. Sure, there’s the argument that genre titles and authors would benefit from the prestige and exposure, but in response I’d say you can’t miss what you’ve never had, and Dan Brown’s certainly not suffering from lack of acclaim by juried prizes (more’s the pity).

What we love to read just isn’t widely appreciated; perhaps it could be (if we assume that the sort of person who consciously chooses “literary” fiction over any other sort is no more picky or prejudiced than someone who consciously expresses a preference for “genre” fiction, and that they would be influenced toward something they previously turned their noses up at because of an award nomination, which are pretty big assumptions, not to mention ones that probably wouldn’t wash if you reversed the polarity of the preferences in question), but it’s not. And while I’d love for the authors I most enjoy to be rich, successful and still cranking out great books, I really struggle to care that they’re not on that list.

As a cautionary parable, I’d point out that this reminds me of the way I and my fellow thrash metal fans at college used to bemoan the lack of mainstream exposure and appreciation for our chosen genres. If only people had the opportunity and encouragement give this stuff a chance, they’d be able to appreciate the musicianship, give the imagery and symbolism a chance to sink in properly, understand that there’s more to it than studs, leather and album covers with demons on them. Wind forward a decade an a half, and we got our wish: MTV and daytime radio is full of watered-down imitations and knock-offs of authentic and innovative rock and metal music, enthusiastically and uncritically consumed by people to whom it’s nothing more than three minute chunks of momentary audio diversion. And so the subgenres move on and progress, continuing to develop new ideas (or new takes on old ideas, perhaps), pushing at the boundaries of expectation and possibility, and selling their work to a handful of thousand people worldwide; meanwhile, mass-market cookie-cutter product makes millions for middlemen and elevates talentless hacks to superstar status, simultaneously providing a whole new bunch of tired cliches for everyone outside your fandom to assume must apply to everything within it.

Be careful what you wish for, in other words; an explosion of public recognition for the obscure cultural product you love rarely works out the way you want it to. And every time we moan that prizes like the Booker don’t recognise the genius that resides within our ghetto, we confirm the opinion we assume that they hold of us: provincial geeks with marginal interests and a persecution complex. We wear the bruised vanity of the snubbed underdog like sackcloth and ashes, and it does us a disservice far greater than being passed over by a prize that – by its own implications and history, if not outright admission – is just as focussed on a small (if ill-defined) set of aesthetic criteria as our own in-ghetto awards.

Let it go, people. Let it go.

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Close conversation really is a meeting of minds

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Behind the inevitable allusions to Star Trek, this is an interesting story: scientific evidence that the brain waves of someone listening closely to another person’s speech can synchronise with them.

The evidence comes from fMRI scans of 11 people’s brains as they listened to a woman recounting a story.

The scans showed that the listeners’ brain patterns tracked those of the storyteller almost exactly, though trailed 1 to 3 seconds behind. But in some listeners, brain patterns even preceded those of the storyteller.

“We found that the participants’ brains became intimately coupled during the course of the ‘conversation’, with the responses in the listener’s brain mirroring those in the speaker’s,” says Uri Hasson of Princeton University.

Hasson’s team monitored the strength of this coupling by measuring the extent of the pattern overlap. Listeners with the best overlap were also judged to be the best at retelling the tale. “The more similar our brain patterns during a conversation, the better we understand each other,” Hasson concludes.

Apparently (and completely unsurprisingly) an unfamiliar language acts as a barrier to this synchronisation – if you can’t understand the person who’s speaking, you can’t “click” with them. This is probably the best argument for a single global language that I can think of… but I wonder if poor comprehension of the same language would produce similar results to a completely foreign language?

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Is manned space flight a waste of money?

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Sending humans into space is an admirable civilisational goal, but is the expense of nation-state funded projects justifiable? Britain’s Astronomer Royal Martin Rees would argue that it’s not:

“The moon landings were an important impetus to technology but you have to ask the question, what is the case for sending people back into space?” said Rees. “I think that the practical case gets weaker and weaker with every advance in robotics and miniaturisation. It’s hard to see any particular reason or purpose in going back to the moon or indeed sending people into space at all.”

[…]

Speaking to Cambridge Ideas, Rees remained enthusiastic about manned space travel, but thought it would be rather different in style from what we have seen before.

“I hope indeed that some people now living will walk on Mars, but I think they will do this with the same motive as those who climb Everest or the pioneer explorers,” he said.

“I think the future for manned space exploration will be a cut-price, high-risk programme – perhaps even partly privately funded – which would be an adventure, more than anything practical,” he said.

Not everyone agrees, of course – including the Obama administration, China, India and the European Space Agency. But I think Rees has a point, in that nation-states aren’t going to provide the main thrust of such projects in the long run, at least not in the West; they’re too risk-averse to pull it off within budget. Commerce will be the driving force, if there is one… as suggested in Jason Stoddard’s Winning Mars, perhaps.

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METAtropolis as an outsider anarchist text

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Just for a change, it’s not me projecting anarchist ideas onto contemporary science fiction. Instead, it’s one Margaret Killjoy (who may or may not be pseudonymous) writing at The Anvil Review, who takes a look at the John Scalzi-edited anthology METAtropolis and reads it as a selection of “outsider anarchist fiction” [hat-tip to William Gillis]:

The authors are not consciously political radicals, but they are clearly inspired by the possibilities of autonomy that have been opened up in the 21st century. I would guess that not a one of them has read Bakunin, Rolling Thunder, or anarchistnews.org; they’ve struck upon the idea of mutual aid economics and horizontal structuring largely in a vacuum.

To be honest, I think there’s an element of the vanity of the marginalised at play, there. Sure, Scalzi et al may not have read the sources Killjoy cites, but they’re hardly the only places that anarchist ideas crop up; anyone who reads Futurismic would have stumbled across the ideas of mutual aid economics and horizontal structuring, and – my personal politics aside – I don’t think anyone would claim this website as an explicitly anarchist text*. The ideas Killjoy is highlighting have been part of science fiction’s stock in trade for some time… that’s exactly where I discovered most of them, at any rate. I’m surprised at her surprise, in other words; sf is hardly the vacuum of ararchist ideas she seems to think it is.

However, once we get past Killjoy’s own outsider theatrics, she has some interesting readings to share, and raises an interesting point: that certain components of the traditional anarchist philosophical platform are indeed becoming more culturally acceptable (provided you define inclusion in science fiction stories as a badge of cultural acceptance, which I suspect would be contested vigorously by a large section of the populace), or at least acceptable enough to be put forward as plausible solutions to a difficult near-future in a fictional context.

I’m not just fascinated by the cultures that these stories present, I’m fascinated by their authors’ point of entry. I would suggest that technology culture in the 21st century is leaning more and more towards anarchist approaches. Centralization is being outed as the demon it is: centralization and homogeny are understood as the bane of a healthy online network, and many are beginning to realize that the same is true of offline networks. A sort of neo-tribalism is on the rise, as is simply understanding that people and cultures are more fascinating when viewed as webs, as horizontal networks, than as rigidly controlled and highly-formalized structures.

What’s more, intellectual property is increasingly out of vogue. A sort of anarcho-futurist mentality is on the rise: that we should borrow and steal freely from each other’s ideas, that copyright laws are an imposition on our aesthetic and creative freedom, that they stand in the way of moving our culture forward–or outward, or in whatever direction it feels like moving. Some are, I would argue, even beginning to understand that it is not that we steal ideas from one another, but that copyright and intellectual property actually represent theft from the public, enclosure of what by nature ought to be the commons. Knowledge knows no scarcity and there is no reason to charge for its dissemination.

Slowly, this critique of intellectual property is filtering out into meatspace, and now in the 21st century many geeks are coming to their own understandings of what Proudhon so famously stated in the 19th: property is theft.

Radicals would be fools to ignore this sudden appearance of fellow-travelers.

Radicals might also be fools for not realising that sf has had a fair few fellow-travellers for many years, too… but the underlying point is valid. Critiques of intellectual property, top-down power structures and the machinery of democracy are indeed rampant in modern culture, especially online, and especially in the sphere of science fiction. Whether that means sf is a vanguard for coming political change or merely a haven for otherwise unacceptable and marginal radical ideas (or perhaps both) remains to be seen.

[ * – Or maybe they would? For the record, I identify with anarchism but not as an anarchist; it’s always struck me that an ideology so obsessed with abandoning hierarchies can be so fussy about deciding who’s in and who’s out. Anarchism should surely be the -ism that rejects -isms, but – from my own outsider’s perspective, at least – it’s at least as obsessed with self-taxonomy and them-and-ussing as any other movement, if not more so… and much as I sympathise with many of the philosophies that inform them, my experience with radical groups has always brought to mind that well-known scene from Life Of Brian. Your mileage, of course, may vary. 🙂 ]

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