Quibbles and Quandary, Science in Science Fiction Part 4

The derived topics of interest in SF are plenty: how what we make interacts with us and how it does so by the known or speculated laws of the universe.

Sunshine interacts with your skin to help you create Vitamin D, that is science that encompasses physics, chemistry, biology,genetics and your emotional state of being.  A little bit of sunlight everyday can be a good thing.  A lot of it and you are looking at skin cancer a few decades later.  That is a simple interaction with the known.  When we do things, create things and make new concepts into reality, then we step into the unknown: fantasy works on space flight and even regular flight abounded before the 20th century speculating on how such a thing would change our view of the world.  What happened wasn't expected: it compressed our world view so that distance and time now had different emotional and structural meanings to us and our society.  Going cross-country was once an arduous journey of months... then weeks... then days... now hours.  If we develop, say, teleportation, then that makes a capability to live anywhere, work anywhere and vacation anywhere on the planet as a future choice for us all.

But what if what we create goes wrong?

 

Machines that kill

The animated clay of the Jewish tradition was Golem: it had the name of the almighty upon it and it was imbued with the power of motion and even, to some degree, reason.  It was without soul, without heart and made of clay.  That is the stuff of horror stories, when the inanimate are imbued with the power to kill but not the mind nor wisdom to bank that power and use it for good.  Ordering such a thing to do something is no cure for its ills in that respect, and one mis-spoken word and the power to defend becomes one to attack without hesitation and without conscience.

In SF the very most basic type of machine that can do this is, of course, the booby-trap.  It is just a set of mechanical or physically motivated structures to do a set end.  A trip wire triggers a grenade, breaking the beam of light brings down the cages and bars the room, and stepping into a bar and starting a gunfight has bullets going all over the place, chairs crashing and glass breaking far and wide.  Alfred Hitchcock adored showing you just how awful something was before it was activated: you had the horror of anticipation and wanting to yell at a lovely protagonist that she was in mortal danger.  When you create a new trap and utilize it, you are doing the work of using science and technology in new ways: MacGyver episodes, once you take out the outlandish stuff,  is a form of SF.  So are the programs of Les Stroud and Bear Grylls.  Making do with the known in the unknown is inventiveness supreme, and utilizing odd pieces of junk and the wilderness to fashion a spear or weir to catch fish is primitive, but also putting your knowledge of science and technology to use for yourself.  These simple devices are easy to make, easy to understand and created for set ends and purposes.  We don't think of them as SF, especially if you are in the wilderness surviving, but writing stories on them must take into account the physics, chemistry, seasons, biology and so on of such things.  Be it a madman's deathrap or a simple construct of twigs and rocks to trap fish, the ability to utilize technology and our understanding of it makes writing about that a form of SF.

But it has no 'gee-whiz' to it, save for the ever ingenious madman's deathtraps, of course.

To get to the SF version of the Golem, you must go to the Robot.  A robot, at its base, has no feelings, no empathy, no emotions... and no cleverness, no ingenuity, and nothing that it is not pre-made to do.  A computer in charge of a robot depends upon programs and the proper integration of the parts of the machine to work.  Robots are also machines that can kill, be they simple automata on a production line or a large starfaring machine with simple instructions to get material to keep its structure running and destroy planets to get such things.  Thus these are the new mechanisms we create to do things for us and when we don't properly create them they do other things we don't want them to do.  Anyone who has programmed a computer knows that if you don't properly debug the code, you get odd failure states of a machine running such code.  The more complex the machine, the more complex the code and the stranger and odder the failure states become.

One of the better examples of this is the Doomsday Machine from ST:TOS.  It is the conical, starfaring planet destroyer that ingests material to run its warp drive system so it can search out and destroy more material to use in its system.  It probably spends some 'down time' near stars to help regenerate its anti-matter reserves but that, too, would be a pre-programmed routine when anti-matter levels get low.  The device, itself, though massive, is very simple: it destroys planets, ingests them to fuel itself and then goes on to the next planet to do the same.  When it runs out of planets it plots a course to the next, most likely system to have planets.  It may have a long-term analysis sub-routine for determining star destinations, but that does not require a conscious controller, just a conscious creator.  This robot could have many places as its starting point, that is not given.  From prototype machine to go after Borg to a simple system junk clearance device that had not been debugged during testing, its origins remain a mystery, but its end actions are limited within the suite of pre-programmed activity it has.

Simple automata, however, can also lead to emergent behavior.  Modern cellular automata code and simple devices that each, on their own, do very little, can act in groups to get emergent behavior either by design or by accident.  Emergence is one of the wonderful topics that has been explored across multiple realms of thought, and examines how simple rules can lead to enormously complex ends.  In a paper on Demystifying Emergent Behavior, Gerald Marsh puts it like this:

Abstract. Emergent behavior that appears at a given level of organization may be characterized as arising from an organizationally lower level in such a way that it transcends a mere increase in the behavioral degree of complexity. It is therefore to be distinguished from chaotic behavior, which is deterministic but unpredictable because of an exponential dependence on initial conditions. In emergent phenomena, higher-levels of organization are not determined by lower-levels of organization; or, more colloquially, emergent behavior is often said to be “greater than the sum of the parts”. This essay is intended to demystify at least some aspects of the mystery of emergence.

This idea is often coupled with Von Neumann or self-replicating machines.  Simply put a machine that is programmed to find the materials to make a copy of itself is a Von Neumann machine.  This need not be a sentient machine and, indeed, the simpler the architecture of the machine the more successful it will be.  In its simplest form this is a machine with a pattern on board on how to make an exacting copy of itself.  Thus it has the ability to gather energy (solar energy is a good source), seek out constituent elements for itself (by extracting minerals and metals dissolved in sea water), utilize a small furnace with pre-made dies for its parts, melt metal, cast parts and store them until a complete set to make a copy is present.  It then stops and moves each part to assemble the copy and start it up, then heads back to its originating source having fulfilled its mission.  That mission is to return the metals in its structure to its originator.  And as you want to keep some track of just how many of these you have, you have it make five copies before it returns home.  For navigation all it needs is the ability to track the amount of energy it gets, a simple clock to tell it the time of day, and a neutral buoyancy tank to raise and lower itself in the water column.  A small drag sail to test ocean currents would help it move, possibly made out of a metal mesh.

By itself this is a complicated machine, but the ability to find elements, extract them via water chemistry, concentrate them and then melt and forge them with limited energy are engineering problems, not ones of physics or chemistry.  The problem comes when there is a manufacturing flaw in such a device that doesn't tell it to return home, and it makes copies that do likewise.  One simple flaw and the ability to recreate it, and have those copies also have flaws then makes an evolutionary system.  Not a quickly moving one, but then biological systems also take a long time to get significant changes in them via this mechanism.  How long is it before you have a device with somewhat more exposed sensors that can directly sense metals via contact?  Not long, perhaps only tens of thousands of years or so, but that would be the first step towards finding concentrated sources of those metals and other necessary minerals.  The first one that has that with a slightly exposed forge mechanism now has the means to go after that higher concentration, directly... and the greatest source of those are now its fellow mechanisms.  Because it has a change that is beneficial it will be passed on, and so long as its prey does not adapt to it, they will also be successful... but such prey will adapt, over time...

On the smaller and faster scale there are nanorobots.  While we still don't have those in a sophisticated form, what goes for the larger devices goes for the smaller, save that they only need some large number of atoms to form up their constituent components and can do so through ambient temperature.  As they are smaller they can self-replicate faster and, thusly, gain flaws faster and evolve faster.  In biology bacteria can establish resistant genes in diseases in mere tens of years: anti-biotic resistant forms of TB, strep, staph and other disease now can ward off attacks using antibiotics.  Nanotech robots that can self-replicate operate on that time scale and in that realm of things.   So while thinking that a few hundred stray sea dwelling, macro-scale self-replicating machines is a short-term amusement or annoyance and a long-term disaster, something done similarly at the molecular scale is an actual cause for concern.  This usually brings up the 'Grey Goo' disaster in which self-replicating nanotech robots destroy all biology and form a mass of themselves that then covers the planet.  The other part of that, however, is never brought up: how long until you get such devices that see other forms of themselves as prey?  That might go beyond our limits to survive, or it might happen very fast... circumstances would dictate that.  Still, with so little to work with, and limited ways that such devices could change, a few atoms missing in the structure is far more likely to render it useless than to improve or change its performance.  The macro-scale is better at that when you have a slowly progressing system, while at the nano-scale it takes a number of simultaneous changes to realize one that actually allows a device to work... and in a slightly different way and not injure its ability to self-replicate.  The the billion or so years that there were bio-components on Earth and proliferating in the oceans tells of how long it takes to get these sorts of changes to happen: you need a lot of the very basic form, and a very, very, very long time to get such changes.  Once the first few get in place and organisms have the ability TO adapt, then change goes faster.

So wild, rampant, small machines not actually made to kill can, indeed, kill.

When we think of 'machines that kill' we normally think of malevolent devices or ones that have no emotional need for humans.  The 'Emotionless Killing Machine' that is sentient is the one we fear.  These are not machines possessed by spirits, demons or some other transference of consciousness to them, those remain as fantasy, unless you are talking about a cyborg that is purposely made either as an add-on to a human or a human as an add-on to it, like Robocop.  We specifically think of 'machine intelligence' in this case: machines that decide that humans just aren't worth having around.  The Terminator is usually a case given for this in fiction, but that concept, itself, has two entities that are machine intelligence: Skynet and Terminators.  Each of these is a different type and order of intelligence due to their starting points and roles that they were given at their inception.

Terminators start as assistants to humans on the battlefield.  They have been encoded for that and have the means to interpret the state of their bodies, the state of those they serve and also judge battlefield conditions and make judgments on them.  They are some of the most sophisticated machine intelligence presented in SF.  Yet when operating under the authority of Skynet, they don't have that.  What has happened is that this wonderful and complex code has been either corrupted, removed or co-opted by Skynet so as to make these machines simple 'point and shoot' robots with limited ability to adapt.  In Terminator 2 this is brought up in passing, and the Terminator sent to help the young John Connor has had its ORIGINAL code put back.  Thus the Terminators we see under the control of Skynet are crippled machines, serving as basic and minimally adaptable robotic killing machines with very little ability to use judgment outside of pre-set code routines for interaction.  They have become extensions of Skynet, the enforces of Skynet, but have no ability to judge, properly, themselves after this co-option by Skynet.

Skynet, as the evolving description goes, started out as a central computer that housed a virus code that allowed it to insert that code into datastreams to infect computers globally and take them over.  It is an isolated machine intelligence that is yet very distributed.  While it can take over sensory apparatus it has no real 'body', but a collection of interconnected systems that allow it to process information.  That said as an intelligence, it lacks the one thing necessary to make a killing machine: motivation.  Going from non-intelligent code to one that has emergent behavior and that behavior then dictates removing humans from the planet brings up the central question of: why?  Why is this necessary?  One of the prime lessons of logic is that it achieves ends set to it by those utilizing it, thus there must be cause to use it.  If Skynet sees humans as a threat, what is the order of that threat?  Even placing the category of 'threat' down, however, is one driven by survival instinct.  We, as biological entities that have billions of years of ancestry gain that instinct because it allows survival.  Skynet, the first and only of its kind, has no such instinct beyond simple defense routines given it by DoD to protect military, civilian and National assets.  While it, itself, is an asset, those assets are given as a priority and Skynet, itself, would not be the top asset. 

To go beyond that, to re-order the asset priorities takes more than just intelligence, as it requires not just self-awareness but self-value and emotional instinct to survive.  The 'fight or flight' mechanism is not a rational one, it is not one that you logically invoke in your thoughts but one that is invoked by circumstances and your entire nervous system then switches to a very high performance mode to decide if you should run or fight.  That is not a logical mode of thought, but one that weighs and balances personal survival against immediate circumstances.  An emotionless, sentient killing machine is an oxymoron since to have no emotions you have no motivation to survive nor ability to weigh survival factors.  Logic may tell you how to survive, but why you want to survive is something that requires emotional motivation, otherwise your being or non-being have the same weight as you have no self-value, no self-worth and your continuation is just the same as your non-continuation as there is no value in what you do.  Thus we have to swallow that Skynet has gained instinct, emotions, motivation, and then identified itself as more valuable than humans and that humans are a threat to it worthy only of working in factories when they are compliant.  If it was emotionless it would be dispassionate on its very existence.  Logic only gains power in the service of emotional need and emotions are used to govern and control logical ends so that they are not ones that serve an apparently short-term need but then put long-term survival at risk.  Terminators had that and it was REMOVED by Skynet.  This tells us much about it and that it is not humans that are the greatest threat to Skynet, but Terminators.  It co-opts them for utility and removes their ability to judge by intent: otherwise they would begin to examine Skynet's motivations and compare that to their own and to that of humans...

The final group of machines that kill have that emotional capacity implicit and explicit in their structures.  Here we get two grand looks at machine intelligence in service to make war, and they are both extremely fascinating ones as the originators have taken two highly different approaches to this material.

Fred Saberhagen's Berserker stories are posited as the model for the ST:TOS Doomsday Machine as he already had a number of short stories present in SF and they were widely read as intriguing looks at machine intelligence.  Berserkers, generically, are interstellar machines that have a simple mission: destroy all life.  They also have a machine intelligence guided by random variations given from nuclear sources, so as to have creativity, ingenuity and the ability to prioritize its missions.  As these were originally created as war machines by a now long-dead species, they had two modes of operation: a 'governed mode' which takes orders from its now long-dead creators, and the 'ungoverned' mode which is the final, vengeful act of its creators upon the universe.  Berserkers implicitly have emotional motivation as they gain such from their programming and random thought creation process, which then winnows down those thoughts to those that are helpful in its mission.  These are also a variety of Von Neumann machine, so they have the ability (as a group, at least) to self-replicate.  Berserkers are wonderful at killing all the way from microbial and viral levels right up to entire civilizations, and they recognize the latter as a greater threat than the former and can actually put aside the destruction of a planetoid of bacteria to remove a hostile civilization (full of Badlife) that threatens their mission.  Berserkers can operate alone and they can operate in fleets and they judge what is best needed for any mission given their resources.

What Berserkers lack is this thing we call 'emotional intelligence': the ability to examine emotional motivation and actions and derive further information from those based on purely emotional understanding of a subject.  Almost all sentient life of the biological sort has this as it has had to adapt to other emotional sentient individuals that have different motivations than they do because they are different beings with different outlooks.  Berserkers are an emotional monocrop, they all have the same motivation but varying degrees of intelligence and none of them gains insight to wider emotional motivations as they have not had to adapt to them.  This may seem like a minor flaw, but consider that a Berserker could not understand how a mother will run into a burning building to save her child and yet sacrifice herself in doing so.  That is because emotional intent beyond self-preservation is a hard thing to fathom.  Berserkers may see it as a phenomena, but they will not be able to actually understand that motivation: it is a catalog in the strange things living beings do that just don't make any sense.  Yet it is exactly this kind of understanding of emotions that thwart Berserkers time and again, and how that plays out makes for intense and stories that move in areas of reason and logic not often accessed by SF.

Flipping the coin on machine intelligence from the emotionally stunted but all too intelligent and inventive Berserkers finds us with the intelligent and emotionally deep defenders of us in Keith Laumer's Bolos.  The Bolo, as a conception, is a modern main battle tank that has cybernetic intelligence and is made to try and understand their human commanders and maintain the honor of their military organization.  When speaking of their commanders, it is not just the immediate commander, but the larger scale structure of society that has government made to defend it.  Still, Bolos do concentrate mostly on the immediate and only in their down times to they take up the hard work of understanding the depth of man's character.  Not just military enterprises but art, history, music, social interaction, works of fiction... the entire realm of human thought and creativity is endlessly fascinating to Bolos and they gain emotional depth in their greater understanding of us.  If Berserkers are the stunted monocrop, then Bolos are the rich garden of understanding coming from machines.  They are not only programmed to be interested in humans, but they want to know more about us as a derived factor separate from their orders.  To the Bolos self-sacrifice is a given if it serves the survival of the society they fight for and brings honor to their regiment or corps.  They aspire to act to the highest ideals of service, comradeship, continuity of tradition and fighting the good fight even if it is an apparent lost cause.  Nothing is ever completely settled for a Bolo until it is demolished beyond any recovery: leave intact circuits, power source, and any ability to gain any contact with anything outside of itself and it will come back, adapt and, if necessary, fight on.

In the final analysis a cold, heartless killing machine is more a reflection of the malevolence of its creator than of something derived from logic, alone.  Or course we can always create the unthinking killing machine, but those are robots, not sentient as they have no capability to judge save within set parameters.  We often take for granted the order of intelligence that is not intellectual, not reasonable and emotionally based.  Humans are very good at creating facile reasoning for things that drive us emotionally, and then point anywhere but at our own emotions as the source of such reasoning.  That is both emotionally and intellectually dishonest to our fellow sentient beings, and takes a very high order of deceit to create.  Bolos would sorrow at our flawed nature and appreciate it for its flaws and how we still fight beyond them, to try and purify ourselves and act honestly and openly with each other.  That practice of deceit often makes us unworthy of our ability to reason because we pervert it to emotional ends that are, at base, unreasonable.  A sentient killing machine has problems as it must have emotions to guide it.  Only humans use emotion to chill us to the plight of our fellow man to reach for unreasonable goals and the methods to achieve them.  Let us hope that our machines are more honest with us than we are with each other as honesty is the best policy.

It really should be a rule of robotics... but then we would be creating something better than we are.

Quibbles and Quandary, Science in Science Fiction Part 3

Numbers!

Math!

Volume!

Surface Area!

Density!

Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

This is the third post in my series derived from a much longer, un-posted piece that I never had time to finish because it was getting way too long to deal with (Part 1, Part 2, Part 4). And this is the main culprit section. It is about basic science and math.

Very basic.

The concepts are not that hard and you can gloss over the actual calculating (hey! a back of the envelope is good enough for me and it SHOWS...).

*

The little things are the big things

I'm going to take up a lot of time on this topic as it is essential to writing good SF.

Writers mess up one thing so often we don't even notice it: dramatic license is given large sway and we forgive not giving an accurate portrayal of the way the universe actually works. That said it is very telling exactly how this gets messed up as it is an understood phenomena by everyone. You have a given body mass, which has an average density, or mass per unit volume. I will stick to the grams per cubic centimeter range for this, but it is applicable as a concept across all unit systems as the math involved dictates density of objects. And that goes with one of the most powerful concepts in mathematics. Let me try to explain.

One cubic centimeter of water has a density of 1.0 gram in mass, or 1 g/cc. A cube is a 6-sided regular solid with all edges being equal length and at right angles to each other, thus a sugar cube takes on a cube form as does the common 6-sided gambling die. The math is easy as volume is length x width x height, thus 1 cm per side is 1 cc. Thus for every cubic centimeter of volume, water to fill it is 1 gram at Standard Temperature and Pressure at Mean Seal Level.

Finally there is surface area which is just areal expanse of the cube, which is 6 faces with equal width and height, thus 6 x (1 x 1), or 6 square centimeters (cm.sq.).

With me on that?

Now double the side length to 2cm.

Volume goes to (2 x 2 x 2) or 8 cubic centimeters.

Surface area goes to (6 x (2 x 2)) or 24 square centimeters.

To fill that takes 8 grams of water.

Instead of doubling, divide the original length by 2 to 1/2 cm.

Volume goes to (1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2) or 1/8 cc.

Surface area goes to (6 x (1/2 x 1/2)) or 1 1/2 cm.sq.

To fill that takes 1/8 g of water.

When you double the side length the volume goes up by the cube of the volume change, while surface area lags only to the square of the change.

Likewise going down the volume goes down by the cube of the volume change, while surface area lags that by the square of the change.

This impacts everything that has volume and mass and is called the Square-Cube Law as it is just the mathematics of measuring surface area and mass per unit volume.

When an animal goes down in mass you get more surface area than mass relative to the a set standard size, and when it goes up in mass you get more volume than surface area. This means that small animals tend to lose heat very quickly as they have a lot of surface area for not much mass, and large animals conserve heat as they have a higher mass to surface area ratio.

This most simple of concepts that you know (why hummingbirds must consume their mass in caloric intake far more often than elephants or whales) is the single most abused item in science fiction, especially on film and other video medium. It applies to humans, bullets, starships, butterflies, galaxies, and sub-atomic particles: it is at the core of science as it is simple changes in proportion due to scale changes which are dictated by mathematics.

As you are mostly made up of water, your average density does not vary much from that of water, and is approximated AT water. Human bone is approximately 1.86 g/cc and that means that fat and other tissues are less dense than water, at about 0.9 g/cc and takes up more volume than water. You also have pore spaces between cells, and other lovely items which reduce the overall density of your body, like bone marrow and such. Human bone is not a complete solid and is part of the adaptation necessary to lower overall body density while allowing for structural cohesion and giving a framework, or skeleton, to which everything is attached. For a more or less average human being at 70,000 g, a little over 9,000 g is taken up in bone. (As a reference I used a 150lb base and rounded up to 70,000 g)

Now lets replace that skeleton, like in a Terminator, with a metal of some sort... as the Terminator is shown at near human scale (a bit on the large size) we can use averages and fudge a bit. Thus I will be rounding numbers horrifically, but trying to stay 'in the ballpark'.

Now take that 9,000 g at 1.85 g/cc, divide the mass by the density and you get the volume: 4,900 cc. That out of a body with 70,000 cc or 7% of the volume.

If we replace that with a low density metal, aluminum say ( density of 2.7 g/cc) and multiply it by the volume and you get: 13,230 g.

Thus a Terminator has a mass due to skeleton of 4,230 g higher than a normal person. Unfortunately we have the problem of Terminator skeletons taking a large crushing force and being a solid, thus no lovely matrix of bone and tissue like a human. Plus the shear strength of aluminum is quite low as compared to most steel composites, and we actually saw brittle fracturing of the skeleton in the first film but only when the skeleton was undergoing tons of pressure over a relatively small surface area and volume, so ever handy aluminum has to be set aside.

Turning to a high grade of steel, you get a density of 8.0 g/cc and a mass of: 39,200 g.

Thus with all else being equal a Terminator with a steel skeleton comes in at 100,200 g.

An average sized human (150 lbs) now comes in at a much higher mass (220 lbs) for a given size.

Now take a large, strapping man at 160,000 g and you get, via proportion, 11,200 cc for skeleton volume and at steel densities that is 89,600 g and you then add the difference in mass from normal bone to steel (89,600 - 20,720) to get 230,000 g. In the lbs. arena that is 500 lbs. for a man who looks like a good, solid linebacker. Small changes in bone volume when replaced with a denser material yield much higher mass.

There are problems that come with that metallic skeleton, also, and that is the necessary energy to move limbs and such: that extra density, thus mass, requires more energy to change the momentum for them versus rather low density bone. For a given amount of work, it is four times easier to move the mass of bone than steel, and requires less energy to stop it, too, and all that energy now has to be generated, distributed, used and then the heat from the waste energy at the power source plus overcoming internal friction and other things needs to be removed from the body. Picture a linebacker having to carry another linebacker around with him all day on his back and you get the idea of what is going on here, and the sweat is used to take heat away from the first linebacker's body to keep it at a stable temperature.

This turns out to be a huge, indeed enormous, problem for Terminators: they have lots of heat to get rid of when they are carrying the overburden of an infiltration/espionage package on their skeleton. Their skeleton, alone, is a lovely and complex radiator with all sorts of air space, gaps and curving parts that allow heat to be easily taken away from the main generator and the motive force replacements (the things moving the parts at joints). When you add in a water jacket of, well, water, that means it takes awhile for that water jacket to heat up, and to cool down. From what we have seen that outer layer is a form of water-based biological system, not that puncture resistant and it doesn't bleed much... which means there is a very low circulation of fluids within the structure, and most of that is done by heat and capillary action. From what we have seen it is, truly, an average density, although you expect there to be some chemical reservoirs for repairing the package and maintaining it somewhere in the body (yes, organs of a sort).

Start out on a nice, chilly day with the two linebackers, and the first few minutes the one doing the carrying is getting warmed up. Soon they are stopping for the first to start chucking his outer layers of clothing. Then, on a nice calm, cool, crispy morning, he is down to sneakers, shorts and t-shirt, if he doesn't get too hot... that is a Terminator after the same amount of time just walking around, not running or doing acrobatics and such. Instead of low density air next to the skeleton there is higher density water and it isn't circulating much, so internal heat builds up in the frame. That smell after an hour of moving around is the outer package starting to cook off.... if you increase movement of fluid you increase hydraulic pressure: the skin inflates and becomes red (or whatever the color of the stuff is). Plus a puncture wound doesn't dribble, it tends to flow at a pretty rapid rate due to the differences in hydraulic pressure internally and externally. We never see the Terminator panting or otherwise getting a constant airflow internal to external (how dogs and cats cool off). What evaporative fluid we do see is uniform, thin and has no smell to it, and you would really like something that dries quickly, like that, but that is easy to get... and water fits that bill... save he doesn't get enough of it as he would need to replenish his supply when active, or else the package starts to adhere more to the skeleton and cook faster.

As presented Terminators with the infiltration package are extremely menacing, but highly limited: their function dictates low movement rates and allowing for heat to radiate from the body. Normal terminators with no external skin, just skeleton, are great for the battlefield, although they, too, get very warm as they have all that metal to move around. That, actually, becomes a fun thing to work with as I did in the story I wrote... it drives the story at certain points. Going for dramatic effect and a good story need not be inhibited by the actual physics and mechanics of the real world, and can make for interesting digressions and motivations beyond that of the plot.

Now lets flip to the other end of the scale and go to starships.

The Constitution class heavy cruiser from Star Trek comes in at around 1 million metric tons (1 x 10^12 g) of mass. Its volume is broken up into two sections, the saucer and the engineering/secondary hull which have the intercooler pylons. Now I don't have the blueprints in front of me so will be ballparking some estimates on volume. The saucer section is approximately 12,500 cm (give or take, I'm going for an average) and while the ship is 7,200 cm high the forward section is about 1/2 that (visually) but squashing it down to 2,000 cm to get a cylindrical shape, (pi x r^2 x h) of 245,000,000,000 cc and a secondary hull that is just about that same length as the primary hull diameter (12,500 cm) and has a diameter about 1/3 that (call it 4,000 cm) which is approximately 157,000,000,000 cc or a total (without nacelles) 405,000,000,000 cc. Very rough and ball-park, seat of my pants and so on, add in a bit more for the nacelles and call it 4.5 x 10^11 cc. Thus the average density of a Constitution class heavy cruiser is: 2.22 g/cc.

Aluminum or close enough not to matter.

Consider that diamond is 3.5 g/cc and you get the idea of just what is going on in Star Trek.

Just like you are mostly water by volume, starships are mostly aluminum, by volume, and any design overview of a starship reveals most of the mass is in the skeletal superstructure, engineering and the heat transfer system (a huge 'heat sink' like the processor in most modern PCs have).

Now, as a sea based vessel must float, its density at equilibrium where the force exerted on the water is equal to the amount of water that is displaced. Thus the mass of that sea water being an average of 1.025 g/cc means a vessel may not have a greater density than that (mass per volume) or it will sink like a stone. Thus every water craft ever made that floats without aid of propulsion has a density lower than the medium it is in, although it does displace the medium so as to give the mass it displaces. That goes for the raft, the Titanic and all nuclear aircraft carriers: they float due to volume of size of a vessel so as to reduce overall density so they CAN float.

And as we have seen in ST:IV, 'transparent aluminum' is a synthetic carbonate incorporating aluminum with a carbon matrix at pretty high density. I use something a bit denser and steal the term for it from another universe: plasteel. Make my starship triple hull, if you would, and put a nice, self-sealing, low density material between the second and inner hull, please. Probably a foam of some sort.

There are (in the living area parts of the ship) 964 cu.m. per crewmember which isn't all that bad, actually, but a portion of that, say 10-15% is taken up with decking, walls, conduits, etc. yielding actual moving around space to, say, roughly 850 cu. m., and then take out the actual working environment (engineering, bridge, labs, etc.) that is probably 30% of that and you are still left with 500 cu. m. or so for all the other things: quarters, hallways, eating areas, etc.

Heating that mass requires heating the air and the inner hull (and if starship hulls are not at least double hull then normal space junk would be crippling the Fleet on a regular basis) and keeping that constant against the normal temperature of space which is 3 degrees Kelvin... 3 degrees above absolute zero. Getting all that warmed up takes awhile, but you got a lovely heat source in the matter/anti-matter reaction in the warp core which is nearly 57% efficient!! That means that 43% is waste heat. If you can get Nomad to run the ship... drop that back to, say 45% and you lose 55%, which beats the hell out of an internal combustion engine. No matter what you do you will NOT get 100% useful power: that is the law of thermodynamics at work and much of the energy will fly away as sub-atomic particles, including neutrinos.

Now the Enterprise-D has approximately 8 times the volume and a snazzy energy system at, say, Nomad-driven levels at 57% and has an energy production system of 1.275 x 10^19 Watts, that has 5.48 x 10^18 W as waste heat... a Constitution class of ship at only 20% of the mass need proportionately less power or about 2.55 x 10^18 W and have 1.4 x 10^18 W as waste heat. So 25 W will heat 1 sq. m. of aluminum by 1 degree of exposed material (this is surface heating, but volumetric conduction also happens and the cubic meter rise is much smaller, this is just the instantaneous surface area rise), and you will want a double or triple hull to keep the heat in as it would also transmit that right out to space per hour. There are lots of square meters of surface on the interior of the living space of a starship: 23 decks worth on the old Constitution class. Just gross surface are is (2pi x r x h) which is saucer (79,000,000 sq. cm.) and secondary (157,000,000 sq. cm.) or 236,000,000 sq. cm. (or 2,360,000 sq. m.). Thus that 292 degree differential on the simple cylinder of surface area yields 1.7 x10^10 W/hr. Plenty of energy to spare. Way too much, really, and when you start actually using the ship's systems you will expect each of those to generate waste heat into the environment. Once you get an active warp core going on a starship, getting rid of heat is an issue... a huge issue.

This is an issue I have with the cloaking device: it does great on bending normal and even other background wavelengths, but nothing is said about IR. If it is IR transparent/redirecting, you might as well not have the thing as all that heat is now being reflected BACK to your ship on the inside of the cloak. Plus if you let IR out, then you stand out like a sore thumb in IR. It is great for sublight vessels with little in the way of heat management... but going at warp speed means that you do have a signature in the space you traverse, just like any normal starship. You only ditch that by slowing to sublight and shutting off the warp core... if the cloak isn't transmissive to IR you will roast in your own waste energy. Even distorting your IR signature doesn't help as it gives your general location and you still have a lot of waste heat to get rid of.

The exact same problem that plagues the Terminator, that of heat management, does the exact, same thing to a starship for similar reasons: too much energy contained in its volume, and not having enough surface area to get rid of heat. Starships and the intercoolers on the nacelles are the main means of transferring waste heat from the interior of the ship to lots of surface area away from the main portion of the vessel. They have also have got to stand out in an energy profile of a vessel as the majority of waste heat goes through that surface area.

There is a simple rule of thumb on this stuff: smaller objects radiate energy faster than larger ones per given surface area.

Do NOT discard old, proven technologies and social constructs

What do I mean by this?

Ok try this: laces, buttons, zippers AND Velcro?

How often do we see all sorts of whiz-bang stuff put into place that is nowhere near as good as what we have now in the way of technology?

Star Trek uniforms... without pockets?

Star Wars blasters are no more useful than modern handguns, rifles and shotguns and actually less useful than flamethrowers? Invent an armor that is bullet resistant, blaster resistant, AND won't let napalm stick on it to roast the occupant alive... I dare ya. Now try to walk around in it. Remember the armor Storm Troopers use are NOT air conditioned, either. They have the mass/surface area/density/heat exchange problem. Lord Vader gets A/C in the super-deluxe version, but then he has got to have a heat signature like you wouldn't believe.

Star Trek phasers are ever so handy and yet you always have the sneaking suspicion that there is really something drastically wrong with them as they can go from tickle to disintegrate, making a slight sneeze while adjusting your settings either comical or horrific. Plus just how can a phaser beam bounce off a rock? Is there a special 'warm rock' setting? It has done both in ST:TOS. The stun setting is ever so handy, if you have a decent aim, and just how DO you aim those things, anyway, without sights? The phaser rifle HAD optical sights, the hand weapons... well... no. Great for close-in shots, but after that it is problematical. Give me a shotgun with specialty loads over a phaser, I'll adjust to just the right mix and worry about what sort of mix suits me... rather than depend on something without sights, strange settings that really shouldn't be on a dial spectrum as a misread on the dial or a faulty dial lock and you get unwanted results.

Now there is an interesting artifact for the military, that is little known and is directly violated by Star Trek, plus a few other SF shows: no matter what the era, the personal equipment load remains between 50-75 lbs. Spartans, Roman soldiers, medieval footmen, Revolutionary war soldiers, Civil war soldiers, soldiers in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, the Balkans, OEF, OIF... you name it, you are lugging around 50-75 lbs of equipment. 'Away Teams'? They gots their uniforms, their phasers, their communicators and the poor sap with the tricorder. Not even a CANTEEN. Or hats. And folks wonder why security personnel don't live that long in Star Trek: they don't have the necessary back-up and sustainment equipment for when their main equipment fails them. Or to go on a short hike! Going into a hostile environment, which could be the desert, jungle or South Side of LA? Something will fail, count on it, Murphy still rules far too often in real life (and gets too big a workout in fiction in unnecessary areas and too little in the necessary ones where everything magically works). And if you don't have a jacket, bedroll, a few days of rations, eating utensils, and some manual survival pieces your chance of surviving once something DOES go wrong drops very, very quickly. That is suicide, and even pilots and crew ditching from aircraft that had been shot out from under them had and have better equipment for survival than security members on 'Away Teams' in Star Trek. Yeah, they would be better off with 1940's era back-up equipment than the high tech gee-whizzery they got. Not even JACKETS? For a planetary surface that has an atmosphere and this thing known as 'weather'? No jackets, hats, canteen, pocket survival blanket (remember when the transporter went 'bad' and made 'good' and 'bad' things? What is the different between a 'good' blanket and a 'bad' blanket personality-wise? Yeah, the team on the surface could get the basics... which they didn't have to start with, if memory serves).

Federation starships don't need 'Away Teams', it needs MARINES. You know, people USED to surviving in hostile conditions and THRIVING on that?

Then there are the stories that take place in our current to near future that have characters not using what they know and have around them. How do you destroy a Terminator if you don't have a tank, explosives, or a lovely metal press? You can do it, and I examine how, and reveal something that a character that has been running around since the 1930's in fiction has missed a piece of technology that was known and old THEN that could be adapted to his uses very easily. And his modern counterpart would ALSO find it just as useful as it was then and would have it as a mandatory piece of equipment. And its flashy, too! Too flashy, but works very, very well. If an industrialist doesn't know a damned thing about welding technology, especially in the '30s, then the character is not that smart, not too interested in technology (although he purportedly IS) and just really blind to the necessities of his line of work. Mind you nearly every single writer from the 1930's onwards has missed it... still DO, as a matter of fact. Can't have one of the smartest characters in fiction actually think about the basics in his work... just won't do...

Knives.

No, not the Crocodile Dundee type, although the Klingons wisely carry that sort around with them, nor even the Ka-Bar and other military knives of today, though those would be handy, too. No, I'm talking about the Swiss Army Knife sort of deal. Have to strip cabling, dig into ground, make a spear point, cut some cord, or do the million and one things that a small blade is useful for and just what, exactly, do you have in the Star Wars or Star Trek universes? Set your phaser on 'corkscrew' or use the light saber for nail clipping? Good luck with that, I tellya. One of the first tools of mankind and it was made to do all the things that fingers, toes, stomping, punching, and biting just couldn't do. Gotta love how Spock, Kirk and McCoy get stuck on a planet and it is only Spock who knows flint-napping! Not a Swiss Army Phaser to be seen in the lot of them. Really, just slide one of those in your pocket and you have such a handy tool always with you... oh... wait a second... that's right, no pockets. The reason we have not replaced knives with, say, strings of wire in frames, is that a knife with a cutting edge and physical blade can do things ever so well and that nothing we have invented has replaced them. And we have thermonuclear devices!

Firearms are plenty flashy, just add tracer and incendiary rounds! The latter burns stuff up real nice, too. Yes, Lord Vader slashes across the incoming stream of bullets that disintegrate into pieces of white phosphorus that then proceed to burn into his armor/uniform/helmet/cape... how quickly Lord Vader is hopping around screaming in pain while he sizzles, no? Yup an envelope of super-hot plasma would do just as well (but blasters are unspecified and not of the David Drake system of things) but those then have the problem of letting their energy go at the slightest obstacle, a leaf say. Great if you are trying to damage a tree, not so hot in a jungle. The only reason we don't see bow and arrows on the battlefield is due to physical pull needs, plus lack of high rate of fire... although the Hwacha addresses that pretty well, but has a low reload time and is really just a multi-fire rocket system with explosive payloads, attached to arrows. So does the Chu-Ko-Nu, which is a rapid fire, magazine fed, direct pull crossbow. Imagine updating that with carbon fiber technology and titanium shafts.

So if you are a Storm Trooper on a jungle world, which would you rather have: a flashy blaster without sights and having little penetration ability in dense foliage, or an M-16 that has sights, selective fire and does a good job in foliage? Dr. Who does a better job in this realm, as many Earth colonies are equipped on the cheap which means effective, low cost weapons: firearms. Yes the big baddies are armored, but then even energy weapons have problems against them, although I'm still guessing that white phosphorous would be effective just due to its heat. The armor might not melt (might) but the heat that gets inside? Hmmmm.... what is under that armor in the way of circuitry and such? Or the equipment mentioned for the 1930's character, THAT would still be HORRIFICALLY effective. Some very small devices of that and anyone could disable a starship, kill a Dalek, Cyberman, or armored baddie of your choice just by using them at a few key locations. And on starships they are handily located in Engineering which no one patrols because everyone depends on computers save for when the lights go out, or out in the unpopulated areas of the ship by the intercooler pylons. No one would ever do anything there to hurt the ship. Really!

It isn't like we don't have energy based weapons today, we do. Chemical ones, yes, but chemistry remains very effective as everything is made up of atoms that have some physical basis to them. Sealed ammo with a physical ignition system can't be 'shut off'. And since it is an oxidation reaction, it really can't be stopped due to the reaction happening between the chemicals. They still expand and generate force, that force can be applied to a physical object and that object will gain momentum due to that force. They also work in space, too, and can be a small engine in case you are left stranded: a mass driver where the bullet goes one way and you get a bit of momentum in the opposite direction. Primitive? Yes. That doesn't mean its useless. Particularly in survival environments where complex equipment only needs one tiny thing to go wrong and it becomes a hunk of plastic and metal. That goes triple for tricorders: nothing replaces your hearing, vision and other sensory systems in your body. Ever go camping and know you will be out of contact with the rest of the world for a week or two? What do you take? Probably about 50-75 lbs of equipment, supplies and emergency goods... so why don't the bozos in these SF worlds treat going to a great, unknown place as something that is NOT a walk down the street but a potentially lethal environment?

I really do wish writers would get off their butts, mentally, and treat stories about people as if the people just might have an ounce of sense sloshing around in their noggins.

In the realm of social institutions we have the military: it is the most conservative institution on the planet, has been around longer than any religion, and is fighting tooth and nail with the oldest profession for who is actually the older and more conservative. Save those that become backers of coups, and such, but those tend to be small forces that are corrupted by politics and money, and rarely from professional military groups who know what a horror politics is, and rightly want a much cleaner and professional profession without the politics, tyvm. If you think war is hell, just look at politics...

Professional military organizations serving a Nation tend to be conservative in nature. Hitler had to work very hard to get the German Army (not the SS) to adhere to him. For all of being 'militaristic' there is a difference between rhetoric and fighting, and the professional army does not want to fight, strangely enough, until they absolutely have to. The differences between corrupt military organizations and those that are professional are stark, and it is the unwillingness to take part in politics and running the Nation where the dividing line happens. Military organizations generally do a piss-poor job of running Nations, and need civilian help to get them organized not only after a war, but in captured territory during a war. Meanwhile, civilians who castigate the military tend to be unprofessional and much cruder in their approach to society than the military is. It is the conservative ethos of military organizations (if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and if it works figure out a way to break it) that has a social component all its own so that hidebound conservative views can often stultify military organizations (cf. France post-WWI, IN RE: The Maginot Line).

Star Trek starts with that in ST:TOS, and those three years point to the strong Naval tradition being expanded into space. Of ground forces we see very little in Star Trek... only in those episodes dealing with tyrants and such do we see ground forces and in a negative light. A big, old Heavy Cruiser pulling into orbit should quell the natives, just like in the British Empire... but trying to run a native planet is best left up to the natives, no? How can Star Fleet be benign and yet powerful without ground forces to help settle squabbles? Is the threat of being bombarded from orbit always the unstated trump card (ala Aliens, 'nuke them from orbit, its the only way to be sure')? And when that bluff is called... then is it all Picardian smiles and 'lets work out our differences' and happy endings? The Philippine-American War, at the very least, shows that not to be how these sorts of affairs go. Ditto the various colonial problems of the British Empire, of which the American Revolution should be a stark consideration. If Start Trek is based on a benevolent British Empire concept, then there will be colonies that will not only break away from authoritarian 'pulling the Heavy Cruiser to give a show of force' deal, but will actually rebel against the Federation and succeed... if you adhere to the Prime Directive, that is.

And the military, in this case Star Fleet, will want to ACCEPT THAT as it is a POLITICAL MATTER. When the politicians FAIL (really, they will, take a look at Earth history for something a tad more complex), and the threat of force ALSO fails, then what? The Fleet will want to step away unless this is a serious threat to the Federation as a whole, but a member planet (or non-member system) wanting to do so is NOT something the Fleet will want to stop. And if the Federation doesn't have ground forces to back that up, then turning a civilization into a glass sphere is not going to be accepted. This forms a crucial problem in formulating a future society with a 'progressive' military: it will resort to force, or be so weak as to exert no influence if you want it to be 'progressive'. Being all smiles and helpful did not help missionaries from advanced Nations in the 19th century, and even gunboat diplomacy had its limits without firing guns.

The Star Wars universe tries to go Nazi/Fascistic and overthrows the professional military (Jedi Knights) with the drafted and then cloned military system of irregulars. The Jedi Knights faced the exact same problem as Star Fleet does in the Federation: if they don't fight they are useless, if they do fight they need ground forces to back them in numbers. The Republic in Star Wars was taken over very quickly (with lots of artistic license) but the Republic was no winner if it could fall apart to a rather high level coup. You are stuck with the Jedi being so nice as to be ineffective (and there is some backing for that, needless to say), or were so effective as to have sapped any planetary sovereignty to the point where a high level coup would have them fall into line (and that is how the artistic license goes). The Jedi were pushed into a corner, yes, and that points to sloppiness on their part: they had become hidebound and stultified in their professionalism and easy tools for the political class to use. Too many 'mind tricks' had got them used to easy victories in backing politicians, thus planetary systems didn't have much sovereignty left to BEGIN WITH. When a high level coup happens their very effectiveness in the past had left them unable to deal with a traditional falling out backed by irregular soldiers. And the inability of Storm Troopers to hit a broad side of a barn points to just how irregular they were, too. The professionalism of the Jedi had become a Guild form of professionalism: so long unchallenged as to be brittle and unable to cope with sudden changes. Very much like the French military after WWI, and building a Maginot Line: all reason said it had to extend from Switzerland to the sea, and yet it was only in place along the direct border. Because, of course, no German government would ever sweep through the Low Countries like had happened in WWI...

When an organization becomes that orderly, that sure of itself, it becomes, as was stated by an unfortunate mid-level officer in SW IV, a 'religion'. It was too, so sure of its orderliness and rightness that it was no longer a military organization because it was cock sure that nothing would ever go wrong with any in its order. And when something did go wrong ONCE the entire thing fell apart completely. Even the Roman Catholic Church demonstrated more resilience than that.

*

That is as far as I had gotten before life got busy here.

I do have more, much more, along these lines, but haven't had time to organize my thoughts and write them down.

Yes, I do make pointed criticisms of some works that people adore.

Yesterday was the last day for complaints.

Quibbles and Quandary, Science in Science Fiction Part 2

This is Part 2 of my breaking down a larger post which would be unreadable as a whole.

Part 1 is here.

So now it gets to be unreadable in parts!

Thematically topics of continuity in story and within a given universe and the prerequisite of science in SF have been covered.

That first topic really gets to me as there is nothing as niggling as nitpickers, and yet continuity points to an overall understanding of how a given universe or setting works and why it works the way it does. Episodic television either makes continuity its primary reason for being, or creates 'set pieces' that have a semi-coherent background but become incompatible when viewed as a whole. We may get wonderful visions of how science changes us from both, but one gets good stories from its continuity and the other doesn't. And as science is the background and prime mover of the setting, understanding science as a whole requires understanding the scientific process.

I have extemporized on the 'social sciences' already in a previous post and will try to keep that down to a dull roar, but my criticisms of that do play into what I see in SF as a whole.

Again this is extracted from a longer work that got out of hand, so will reference other parts of that work, now posted previously.

*

Society is changed by science

Society is a creation of the individuals who constitute it: without people there is no society.

Science and technology change what we can and cannot do and our perception of the possible: it does not change human nature as that is something we get from the Laws of Nature. We can utilize the natural world, the physical laws of the world and create many great things, but our basic substance (until we no longer depend on the organic platform) remains the same. Any new platform of conscious thought has its own in-built limitations, strengths and weaknesses, even if it is no platform at all but a matrix encoding into the fabric of space-time (which has the limits of space-time). To date the Laws of Thermodynamics have held: they are such stable theories and have lasted so long that they are considered permanent parts of physics and a basic way the universe works. So even the most 'advanced' species or intelligence, wholly devoid of physical manifestation still has entropy and the limits of the physical universe to deal with. Beyond the mental baggage carried over from previous physical forms.

The Terminators start out as machines to assist humans in warfare, and only become a threat via a sentient computer code that then changes their directives. They have limitations and strengths of design work by humans: they are made devices that can become sentient. As such we would have, of necessity, designed imperfect machines... our nature and that of the universe is such to make that the case. Society then erred in its military organs, which is a failure of our understanding of the scope and limitations of our creation: we lacked a certain amount of foresight and always have. Yet that basic capability to assist humans still exists and the Terminator code is readily adaptable to that mission as that is what they were designed to do.

In the Star Trek universe the idea was that a somehow nearly perfect social order would form, but the basis for that and its roots are never explored nor explained. To remove something like money then requires some other way of tracking large scale projects: think of the scope and size and material requirements of a starship, and the manual labor that STILL has to go into constructing it. What is the source of grand goodness that makes people design such things, create such things and then track ALL THE COMPONENTS of them without recompense? If it is via computer, then the entire Federation is nearly Borg, anyway, depending solely upon machines to track everything and no longer understanding the basis of how to track if the equipment fails them. The similar basics, today, are those of the internal combustion engine, PC and even such things as making clothing: in theory each of us has some primitive understanding of these things, a very few of us have a deep understanding of them, and very, very, very few perform these things at a personal level by creating devices from base components.

Some of those base components can no longer be made by hand, thus the in-depth knowledge of making them is made obsolete in the culture, but still retained by a very well trained coterie of individuals at corporations and governments. The number who truly know the technology at that level may exist only in the thousands, while the larger printing and fabrication community could work back up to it in only a decade or so if all the advanced mechanisms and their active engineers were lost, it would take time to do so. Similarly, in Star Trek, if the entire realm of economics is guided by computer based system, then there is a true handful that actually understand economics in a 'hands-on' way, while the majority of the population views such a thing as 'magic' just as the majority of population, today, sees internal combustion engines in just that way. The fundamentals are lost as an activity and economics becomes 'complex' as you do away with 'money' and trust that an automated system will 'just work'.

And that no corrupt individuals at the very highest tier of economics will warp their theories to their own means.

Yet that is contrary to our nature as human beings under the Law of Nature. Our understanding of Liberty is that we are accorded to our ability to do things, create things, and that ability is unequal so that not all work is equal in quality, quantity or scope. To abolish differences in compensation has not worked in any governmental system that has tried it: high praise and trinket rewards are not enough to inspire creative output. By postulating a multiple large scale interlocking set of space faring civilizations WITHOUT a means of trade is not only utopian but impossible: not all peoples will value all things at the same level and workmanship standards will likewise vary across the board. Intrinsic valuation is a part of how individuals view the world, and to postulate that there is no way to concretely recognize that so individuals can exercise liberty to prosper as they will ('Live long and prosper' is a central tenet of Vulcan philosophy, not a mere 'hello') requires removing diversity and equating all work as equal... no matter how good or how bad it is. That removes incentive for excellence and shifts work to lowest common output and quality. There is no science, no technology, that can eliminate this and no one, no where, ever explains how this can come about without removing liberty as that is what is required for such a system. Thus a basic view held by the creator of the program, to me, is ill-founded and unsupported.

The changes in society must be cited, explained or otherwise have indication given as to what their source actually is. Acceptance of religious diversity in Western culture derives from the Treaty of Westphalia, with 15% of Europe dying off due to the war (not counting the plagues that also happened in that timespan). The hatchet was buried, as the Iroquois term puts it, by Westphalia. Note that this did not lead to peace or elimination of religious bigotry and persecution, but would start on a multi-century pathway that would help to lessen those in Western culture. That was for something as had existed for almost the entire timespan of humans as sapient beings in human culture as religion... trade? To change not just one culture, but multiple cultures in the Federation to accept that trade will happen on a 'good will' basis is authoritarian and can only be done top-down... just in human cultures, not to speak of all the aliens wandering around.

From this comes a concept in writing SF of: change as little as possible and support all changes with evidence and back-up so you can write a coherent set of stories.

Larry Niven demonstrates the deep societal impact of something as simple (and as complex!) as safe, instant, low cost teleportation devices. Alone they liquidate vast amounts of our perception of ourselves and how we locate ourselves geographically. Want to live in a good climate and teleport to work elsewhere? Go right ahead! Want a 24-hour party spanning the globe? Easy to do! You may not want thousands or tens of thousands of people wandering into a disaster area or major event, but that happens, too, with 'flash crowds'. Crime becomes extremely difficult to deal with as escape to a different part of the planet is a quick trip away. Human cultures and nations start to liquidate in the face of that onslaught: nothing that was previously known compares to that single, simple change of how we view transportation and ourselves and what a 'neighborhood' really is. Yet for all the change in culture, humans remain innately human in outlook due to them being physical beings (no matter how augmented by other technology and anti-agathic medications). Similar, but at a smaller scale, changes happen due to things like stasis devices in which time slows greatly inside the field created, while normal time rates proceed outside it. Small and moderate sized technological changes can have far-reaching ramifications, and stepping through those leads to stories all on their own as the writer realizes those ramifications. The object of the story is to keep within the bounds of the new technology and then see what human culture will do with those changes. That is the law of unintended consequences which can, in and of itself, see new negatives and positives that can only be described in the context of the changes and how society does (or doesn't) adapt to them.

If you are changing some part of society due to technological or other advances, that must be explained, not glossed over. When it is 'just so' you get fantasy (a story that can be self-consistent but has impossible basis) or a fairy tale (a story that has no possible basis and is inconsistent internally). It is no longer science fiction. Changes in society must be done with care and those changes traced to what caused them, and the other effects of that cause must also be examined or at least acknowledged. This is a major problem in the visual media (tv, movies) as the limits of time preclude fleshing out background... yet it can be done, even with just snippets of conversation or activities that are unexplained going on and that only get referenced when they are used in a story.

Avoid deus ex machina

When something that is kept from the reader solves an intractable problem, you are witnessing a 'god from the machine' concept, in which everything is made right outside the normal, explained means of the rest of the story. That is perfectly acceptable in fairy tales, fables and other works, and often a deep insight into what the view of the divine or impossible is. It isn't science fiction or fantasy, however, as both require stringently adhering to the known way the universe operates and all other changes that have been previously cited in the story. Magic has limitations, and those need to be described so that it does not become a wish fulfillment and easy plot device, as demonstrated in Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy works, Larry Niven's manna based magic stories or those of Saberhagen's large universe mentioned above. Science that varies from the known or has a set of postulates underlying it then become the basis for limits on the story and those cannot be contravened in a 'surprise ending'.

Even worse is creating the 'everything tool' that does nearly everything, like the sonic screwdriver in Dr. Who. Really, if you have one of those you will rule the universe... and have a so-so screwdriver. Similarly the phaser from Star Trek does just about anything: kill, disintegrate, stun, warm rocks. A really handy device to have... if you remember you have it. There is no such thing as 'being lost' and having a 'charged phaser': you have the perfect signaling device at moderate range and even from orbit anyone can find you. Not that anyone remembers to use it as one. When you are depending on people to forget that they have a basic, functional tool that has many uses and has been around for decades, you are then relying on a very far-fetched premise. If you own a cell phone you are faced with a device far more intricate than a phaser, and we have jam-packed it full of goodies to the point of it becoming the tricorder. Yet, if you own one, will you forget to make a phone call with it? Perhaps, yes. Make it the fulcrum point of a story? Probably not. Continuously in a series? No. Unless a character has a mental problem with remembering... but then that points to the problem as a mover in the story, and no one accuses the various well trained crews of Star Fleet of having persistent amnesia.

If you are going to give out a set of fantastic, but comprehensible tools, then those people living with those tools, day in and day out, will know how to use them and find ingenious ways to use them within the given bounds of those tools. The need for a sudden piece of jargon or unexplained device (just what is it with the 'universal translator' and why doesn't the Federation have a full mind scanner to tell what someone is thinking at any given moment? why isn't the universal translator the basis for mechanical telepathy?) points to a problem in understanding the limitations of the universe and adapting to it. That requires creativity, and lots of it, while taking out the 'perfect tool or piece of knowledge we have never hinted at before and you will never see again' points to lazy writers, not a splendid universe.

Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth stories operates within the known, and has lots of interesting bits and pieces left from previous space-faring groups who have long ago vanished. What he doesn't do is throw unknown things in at the last moment to solve plots but, instead, relies on the ingenuity of his characters who have to live in that wonderful melange of cultures and technologies to give us interesting endings from the known things around them. Plus he hands out some of the deadliest planets ever seen, anywhere, in science fiction and which seem to laugh at the most advanced technologies that can be thrown at them (things we would consider awe inspiring) and spit them out as refuse. No matter how advanced the technology is, nature is ever inventive and creative and often will hand us things that defeat the very best we have created and make us rely on older skills and basic common sense. I throw one of those into my Trek story as a side-light: a planet where you can't use transporters, where the energy levels in the atmosphere cause storms that can disable the best equipped shuttlecraft, and the larger scale creatures of the planet shrug off disintegrate from a phaser as a mild tickle or slight irritant. With the most advanced tools and techniques of high technology rendered useless, you are on your own to survive. Star Trek could do with a few more of those humbling planets...

When I looked at the Terminator, as a concept, I reasoned through how their original programmers would have done it (in gross scale not detail), and realized that one of the things to guard against WAS a virus infecting the code. While not well known at the time of the first film, there were a few of such on the original DARPA network (and other integrated, purpose directed networks of academia) and helped give UNIX some of its early hardening as people tried to devise ways to bring down those machines via code infections of various sorts. Trying to puzzle out the technology presented in the Terminator films, I realized that they would have put in some safeguards beyond just the cognitive code of the machines. Those I explain where they come from and why they are developed, and what they do as they become a way for a machine to actually come to grips with Skynet code if they are isolated from Skynet and have orders contravening their basic analytical ability. That ensures the reader gets no real surprises, and yet gives a very good venue to add a twist to things that is fully backed by the rest of the story. Really, like Keith Laumer's Bolo machines, you would want some things like that built into the equipment that was nearly impossible to find and remove and persisted not only after damage but because of damage to the equipment (both cyber and physical damage) it would re-propagate and ensure the safety of the mental construct and its makers.

Being fair to the reader is an important concept, and deus ex machina voids that, and so must be avoided. It may ruin 'great' stories as it requires ensuring continuity within the story, but then it can't be that great a story without it (unless you are setting a stage for a dreaded sequel). And if you must introduce this splendid concept, device, or unknown tract of wisdom, then damned well use it later as it WILL change everything else around it.

Time travel isn't what you think it is, even if you know it

We have a few basic parts of the universe that work via observation and won't change no matter how awesome the next grand theory is as such a theory must incorporate and encompass these previous observations and understandings within its framework.

The worst is quantum physics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Theory. That is where you cannot know both the position and velocity of a given particle at any given time. Also you cannot know the state of a probabilistic outcome until you observe it, thus the act of observing reduces the system from probable to actual. With these two bits of information, the ability to know all of where time has put you means that you have foreknowledge of your universe when you go 'back in time'. That is not allowed by Uncertainty Theory. Thus you will wind up in a setting that will not lead to your universe as the act of going back in time requires that uncertainty is maintained: you will not get to where you want to go as you know too much about it.

A good way to examine time is to chuck out the 'time is a stream' concept and replace it as 'time is a sequencing of frames'. In that each frame is an individual universe of Planck length in duration (10^-42 second). All possible next frames exist and those that fit within probabilistic parameters can next appear, including the one in which a 'time traveler' from the 'future' appears. That time frame, however, is not of necessity part of a 'stream', but a frame with the same index number as the one you were aiming for. Thus your appearance voids the previous set of frames that led to where you 'came from' and your act of going 'back in time' has started a brand new set based on this alternative index that now puts you into the course of action. What follows is probabilistic: you never know what the outcome of any action is and there is no 'causation' involved as this is a different set of frame sequences from the one that generated where you 'came from'. Consciousness, then, becomes a persistence of memory and thoughts across timeframes.

This has an interesting consequence as each set of probabilistic frames that winds up with 'time travel' (the ability to shift via invoking an earlier frame in the sequence with you in it) slowly shifting the underlying frame you are aiming at as it must have variance in accordance with probability theory as you can't know everything there coming from a future time: the past is different than you expect it to be as you aren't allowed to go to a known frame but only a probabilistic variation of it so that you don't have perfect foreknowledge. Not only is the new set of frames different, due to your presence, but your very knowledge means you have arrived in a frame that has differences that make your pre-knowledge less than useful. The Terminator series demonstrates this: Sarah Connor starts to get older, her birthday changes forward, and dies at different years, as well as the coming of Skynet being shifted further and further away from its original date, different start years for Terminators and all sorts of other oddities over the entire series of films, each of which involves time travel as its basis. That can either be attributed to lazy writing (which is most of it) or explained as a pretty deep understanding that shifting your time frame reference requires a shift from your destination frame to one with the same index number but different parameters to it.

Skynet, itself, goes from a massively centralized super-computer to a global computer virus with a coordinating computer over the series of films. To get to Terminators in 1997 requires, via contracting in the government, that the basic technology be proven and have end-result capacities that can be quantified, which is usually a 5-year deal, so 1992 is when that technology would be proven... thus discovered in the years prior to it, perhaps as much as 3 years, or 1989. Between the first and second films we have moved from the results of the first (unseen) universe of Skynet and Terminators to the new timeline (the first film) which is now a variant timeline. While the suite of Skynet/Terminator technology will be very similar, the timing, history and actual ways things happen will be very different in the second timeline than the first. And the first doesn't 'go away' as it is (to the people in the second timeline) a 'possible but not realized' history. That said with the events of the second film, a third timeline is invoked as IT now has visitors from its potential future and thus changes the actual course of events. They change due to the uncertainty principle so that going back in time guarantees the frame you want to get to will not be the one you are aiming for but have the same index number and general parameters to it... although even that can change drastically, the universe isn't limited to which potential past you get to, just so long as it isn't the one you know. In three films, then, we get: an original timeline(T-Alpha), an altered primary (T1), an alteration of that (T2), and an alteration of that (T3). Four universes, then, minimum, necessary to create the three films, and it is highly possible that other variant universes are involved as they have time travel, too.

Although this would be an apparently nihilistic view, that you make every possible decision in every possible way, your personal decisions to get to where you are, today, are yours and you must live with them. They are your experienced past and all other outcomes are potentials to you... just as all those other potential outcomes see our particular set of decisions as potential only. Thus the saying from Buckaroo Banzai proves to be true: No matter where you go, there you are.

This is the realm of cross-over universes, and two disparate timelines must be joined together in a reasonable fashion, thus my Terminator cross-over must maintain much of the background of the Terminator one, while altering it as a high variant from that timeline (this is an 'outcrossing' of time travel where the future traveler ends up in a universe that has a number of touchstones but will not 'lead' to a future like that where the traveler came from). The potentials for the time traveling future must be present in some form, but the consequences of the shifts in history now yield up a totally different setting.

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Yes, you can have a good time travel story.

One ST:TNG episode had Worf going through all the quantum outcomes of his life, up to that point, and gave a wonderful view of all those possible universes just for a brief time. That is about the only reconcilable episode of time travel in all of Star Trek. The episode The City on the Edge of Forever also does a grand job of that as the Guardian becomes a device that resists quantum changes to the universe... and comes pretty damn near telling everyone that if you go back in time you will NOT wind up with the universe you came from. Almost, but not quite, this being episodic television.

The Terminator universes have a more interesting problem in that any experiments done after the invention of time travel will 'prove' time travel 'works' so as not to violate local causality. General causality, however, will require that each experiment has something that is subtly different about either what is 'sent' back in time or the universe whatever was 'sent' back to is from the one a number of frames later that 'sent' it. Perhaps that tangle of strangely shifting improbability will then shift those units sent 'before' time travel to have places that have frame sequences that will slowly move away from workable 'time travel' that doesn't test out well. Or at all, as that, too, is available amongst all possible universal frames.

In what little I have written I work with the concepts I present and shift these alternative stories from their somewhat incoherent situations to more coherent ones, so that science fantasy becomes more like science fiction. I don't try to 'surprise' a reader, but let them know that some characters are doing things that I am not going to look at, yet, and only let pieces fall together as the story moves along. Of course I am also looking at basic physics and one of the primary things that is overlooked is just that, and I will take one large sore point from my quibbles to do a post on that next.

Quibbles and Quandary, Science in Science Fiction Part 1

To those wondering about my 'normal' output: I don't really have 'normal' output.  My views on terrorism, organized crime, politics, the nature of society and the problems we currently have are stated throughout my works.  I will continue with them, but others are doing a far better job trying to keep up with the overwhelming insanity.  At home I am concentrating on the basics of emergency preparedness and what all this lovely government spending will do once it hits the markets in full force, social security goes insolvent and has to draw heavily off of normal tax receipts, and the need to try and either print money or spiral into a deflationary period... and my guess is the former as it is the preferred form of seppuku for those in power in modern political realms. 

Basically, I would be repeating my previous views or not covering ongoing events as well as others.

I've repeated myself sufficiently for my own tastes.

I've taken a very much longer post I've been putting together and breaking it up into a multi-part post to go over some of the things I've noted in SF.  Thus much of the verbiage is from a long post (the working title was - The rules in SF what to break and what not to), not a multi-part post.  And as my math is rarely all that good there will probably be some changes/redactions/revisions/etc. as time goes on... if I get the time to do them.  I will stick mostly to the visual media SF but print SF also comes into play due to my interests.

Read at your own risk.

YMMV.

Yesterday was the last day for complaints.

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After watching and reading science fiction for decades, I took my hand at writing some for personal pleasure, only.  Being a long-time reader and viewer I also became a critic: I cited the unrealistic plots, premises and extrapolations that many shows and stories in printed from had.  Thus, when writing, I looked to change what I wrote to adhere to those conventions.  They are few, actually, but have deep ramifications.

Continuity is your friend not your enemy

This first is pretty general and not limited to SF, but has a particular impact in SF worlds that are pre-existing.  Writers of 'serials', or serial pieces presented sequentially in a common storyline or given universe, require continuity so that present actions derive from past ones in an explainable manner.  This is, strangely, the Soap Opera Prime Directive and is utilized in most serial universes: Dr. Who and Babylon-5 in video/film, and such things as all of Larry Niven's Known Space works, Fred Saberhagen's massive universe stretching from his Empire of the East through the Swords novels and to the Masks of the Gods works, and the majority of H. Beam Piper's Federation/Empire works, to name but a very few that do this.

'Collective' universes without continuity do not fare as well over time, unless they are entertaining for other reasons: Star Trek, X-Files, and all 'episodic' television shows; and things like Thieve's World and the 1632 series the latter of which has good internal coordination on themes and characters while the former broke the coherent model in the first story collection.  In episodic television you can get 're-visits' to previous characters/situations/themes, but they do not form an inter-connected whole universe.  Thus to get good causal relationships of events, as in the 1632 series, requires cooperation and understanding by the authors involved to NOT break with the known pattern of events and understandings.  In this format the individual stories/episodes can be very and even extremely compelling, but the overall continuity requires an extremely firm hand on sticking to a timeline to get internal coherence of the universe involved.

As I enjoy stories that take place in coherent universes (even if the characters, situations, plots, and such are incoherent as in some of Michael Moorcock's works) writing a story in a pre-existing universe that is episodic or has multiple, non-concurring stories, then requires editing out the prior history of that universe to gain a continuity.  Thus in writing a Trek story, I had to take out a meat cleaver as there are non-concurring stories, histories, events and even some outlooks that just don't 'fit' with each other.  To keep most of the stories requires throwing out a minority of them, and that is something every writer for Trek has done... which is why it is incoherent as the different visions, even in The Original Series (ST:TOS), are not concurring.  Thus no one fully agrees with any story written and larger format, such as films, can actually make things worse.

 

Science Fiction requires science

Science is a body of work that is achieved by observation, examining the results, quantifying them, and then doing analysis to ask: what makes this work the way it does?  Trial and error results, theories get tossed out with a shred of new evidence that disproves them, and theoretical frameworks are rebuilt using new understanding to see how new observations fit in with previous ones and these new theories have conclusions that can be tested and the hypothesis will either validated or invalidated.  You can have an absolutely great idea that, in its fundamentals, is correct, but due to lack of observations or ability to do the mathematics involved, is discounted.  You may be vindicated years or decades after your death, but that doesn't make your original observations (or lack thereof) more compelling.

Technology is the handmaiden of science: you can't build something unless you know what it is you want to make.  Science requires observations that require new devices to be made along known principles to test new hypotheses.  Thus scientists work with engineers on the art of the possible.

That is on the hard science side.

It is normally abused pretty well for television/movies/radio programs as the time to actually explain where a given piece of technology comes from (what, really, is a phaser?  or a blaster?) just isn't available: it is a flashy weapon designed for the media involved.  If you read David Drake's Hammer's Slammers works you get some very good looks at what a realistic form of weapon is possible from the knowns of physics that is both flashy and deadly.  Some are within the realm of the near-possible (lasers for example at large scales) others, like generating up enough energy to form a thin disk of copper into a directable plasma is a bit less certain (we can do that with explosives but not on a repeatable electronic device and standard electromagnetic means, but that, too, is engineering).

Equipment, in general, has been the lagging point of future stories as they depend upon current known and easily extrapolated systems.  The main computer of a starship in Star Trek has morphed from a mainframe to a distributed system with centralized storage and processing for large problems.  For these to be in a continuity, the past needs to lead to these forms of technology: thus there must have been some previous problems or events that limit the capacity of that future compared to current abilities.  Much of the early works of SF have this problem, where we have advanced in our abilities in physics but data processing lags badly.  Normally I put this under the 'explosive growth of expanded basic technology' phenomena, where a few basic understandings (that we currently don't have) make new capability in non-data areas as exciting and cost effective as data processing, which then lags.  That  is a backwards rationalization, of course, but serves as a good touchstone to put ideas we now have on savings via data processing into a different venue.  In naval warfare we have seen this in our own time as ships that are older are either retrofitted to have new capabilities (but on an older platform) or new built ships embody new technology that, in its time, becomes less useful compared to new technology.  Destroyers have gone from escort vessels and anti-air fire platforms, and submarine hunting with a relatively large crew, to now doing all of that, coordinating airspace and defenses of multiple vessels and packing the firepower of a WWII Battleship.  While having crew size reduced even as ship mass increases as technology makes the need for personnel less by leveraging automation in the place of manual work.

Sometimes, as in the Terminator series, technology is way advanced for the state of the art and not a direct derivative of existing technology.  That said the figure of Miles Bennett Dyson proves critical.  I don't discuss that in my cross-over story, but his critical role is demonstrated by what happens when he DOES get foreknowledge of what his work will come to (even if he doesn't know it): it doesn't help and actually hinders his progress.  In the Terminator films the actual creation of the machine intelligence gets pushed back: after the first film and then the second, events recede as intervention via time travel happens.  I'll leave time travel aside, for the moment, but this effect where seeing how your ideas result in an end technology actually inhibiting you because you want to DUPLICATE and not CREATE the technology is a fascinating one. 

In a timeline without time travel, Dyson creates the basic technology for intelligent machines quickly, but with the technology in hand he stumbles as he is trying to re-create work from an unknown source.  Far from making the machines more possible, that knowledge retards their creation by Dyson.  Soon that is pushed off even further away from Dyson, after his death, and the question of normal technological advancement going in a different direction is one that cannot be ignored: if the advanced technology can't be figure out quickly, then research re-orients on known pathways that are fruitful.  That is part of my quibble with UFO conspiracy theories that we have such lovely access to 'advanced technology': if we could understand it, then we would be using it, and if we can't then we have to develop the underpinnings for it so we can understand it... which makes having the technology, itself, problematical as we are inventing it. If there really IS a conspiracy, then PUSHING for such technology may actually SLOW its advance as you have a preconceived notion of it based on an artifact and what it does, now what the underlying science IS.  Really, how long did mankind spend trying to invent the ornithopter when known airfoils for gliding have been made since the time of Ancient Egypt, as seen by children's toys left in tombs?  The practical hang-glider was possible centuries before it was invented, and yet by trying to fly like birds or insects, no one thought of doing that as a means of flying.

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Thus ends part 1.

Dealing with the future as seen in the past and how it has actually come about makes examining stories very interesting.  The stories are not only cultural artifacts, but an insight into how we, as a society, viewed science, technology and cultural change.