Fermi Paradox (The Great Silence)

The Great Mysteries:
Fermi Paradox
Consciousness

Humans have always looked up at the sky and wondered at what might be up there. In the millennia we have been around, we have come to find that the sun is a star, and we live on one of the planets revolving around that star. In recent years, we have found thousands of planets orbiting other stars, and estimated that the total number of planets in the galaxy vastly outweighs the number of stars.

60 years ago, a bunch of physicists were having lunch and talking about the possibility of intelligent aliens, when one of the physicists, Enrico Fermi, burst out “Where are they?” If there are so many stars and so many planets in the universe, why have we not seen any sign of life from another world? No visits, no messages, nothing. This question became known as the Fermi Paradox.

The first question you might have is, why should we think we should have seen alien life? Space is really, really big, after all. Another physicist, Frank Drake, proposed an equation to calculate the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. This became known famously as the Drake equation. It gives us the probable number of civilizations in the galaxy, given the rate of star formation, the fraction of those stars with planets that could support life, the fraction of those planets that give rise to life, and the fraction of those planets that evolves intelligent life. The problem, though, is that we have no idea what numbers we should plug into it.

Can we guess? We have to look at human life, the only example we have. Intelligent life arose on Planet Earth in 4 billion years. In the 100,000 years since we evolved intelligence, we have gone from hunter-gatherers to globally-connected space-exploring civilizations. Assuming we continue to develop and expand, we will be all over the galaxy a few million years from now. So the time it takes between the beginning of life and the colonization of the entire galaxy is, at least in our example, about 4 billion years.

But the universe is 14 billion years old, so civilizations have had plenty of time in which to develop. Life needs heavy elements, which are only produced in the most extreme environments like supernovae or colliding neutron stars, so the longer the universe has been around, the better the environment for life to arise. Still, some of the first stars exploded less than a billion years after the big bang, which means it would have been possible for the first forms of life to arise 13 billion years ago. If it evolved to intelligence, then it would have spread across the galaxy ten billion years ago, and only continued to advance since!

If humanity is any example, intelligent life advances fast, a mere blink of an eye compared to the age of the universe. In science fiction we see all kinds of alien life forms encountering each other at about the same technological level, but this is unrealistic. Given the vast amount of time the universe has been around, if life arose elsewhere, it would be much more likely to be ancient than our age.

Science enthusiast YouTuber Isaac Arthur has gone further and suggested that as humanity expands, we will create artificial habitats around each star until the star is completely obscured from outside view. These swarms of habitats are called Dyson Spheres, after the physicist Freeman Dyson who first proposed their possibility. They would still give off infrared radiation as a heat signature, so we would be able to detect them. So if intelligent life besides us arose in the Milky Way, it would most likely be old and have covered all the stars with Dyson Spheres, so we should not be able to see any stars in the sky. Furthermore, this logic applies to all galaxies. Since we see billions of galaxies in the sky, and have so far found none to have the heat signature of a Dyson Swarm, then we might be pressed to conclude that we are the only intelligent species in the observable universe; a lonely and depressing thought.

So if civilizations are rare, what might be the reason? Some say it is because when civilizations advance enough, they turn introspective, have a strict non-interference policy, die out by natural disaster, or wipe themselves out in wars. But in order to resolve the Fermi Paradox, these explanations would have to apply to all civilizations, setting a heavy burden of proof to meet.

A more favorable resolution is something called the Great Filter, which would be an event in the course of the development of life that is extremely improbable. Any Great Filter candidate would have to be something that have happened only once in the history of life. There are several key events that fit this criterion, but I will focus on two of them: abiogenesis and intelligence. Since we have only one example of each happening, we cannot assign probabilities to them, so either or both might be extremely improbable.

We still do not know how life began on Earth. Though we have created simple bacteria in the laboratory in extremely artificial conditions, we have not observed it in nature nor in laboratory-reproduced conditions of the early Earth. If the Great Filter is abiogenesis, then life may truly be rare in the universe.

The evolution of intelligence is a happier Great Filter possibility, because it would mean that the universe is teeming with bacteria, plants, animals, and perhaps other Kingdoms we do not have on Earth. Imagine sending probes to planets around other stars, only to get back pictures of wild forests and creatures, ripe for colonization!

On the other hand, it may be that intelligent life is quite common, and we simply have not been able to find it yet. After all, the fraction of our own galaxy we have searched is so small that, as Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it, to claim there is no other life in the universe is like scooping up a glass of water from the surf and proclaiming there are no whales in the ocean. Space is big, and we have a lot of exploring ahead of us, and with the new telescopes we are building we may be on the brink of answering this age-old question.

NaNo Results 2016

I did it! I wrote a full novel draft in one month! The Void Stared Back, first draft, has a final word count of 28,800 (including editing notes). The official NaNoWriMo goal is 50,000 words, but my own personal goal was just to get it done. From what I have been able to gather in my studies, most writers are too wordy, having to cut and pare down to get their stories to be short enough. I am the opposite; I struggle to get my word count up to an acceptable level.

When starting out in writing (or any craft, really) we have a psychological barrier to success. The first book seems like an insurmountable sheer-faced mountain until you finally get to the top. The second is easier, and so on. This NaNo draft is the second first draft I have finished. It was easier than the first draft of Raiders, and I expect they will only get easier from here.

Don’t expect to see The Void Stared Back on shelves anytime soon. NaNo is meant for practice and momentum, not for great prose. There were times as I wrote when I though “ugh, this is the worst,” but instead of making it better, I added a note reminding my future self to fix it, and moved on. Now that I am finished, I am tired of this story, so I will put it aside for a while and let my brain go off to other things.

They say you have to write a million words before you get published. I would guess, thinking back over the years at my pre-writing, abandoned chapters, short stories, and full drafts, that I am at about 150,000. If my momentum keeps up, it should not be long before I get that count up to mastery.

Magic II: What is Not Science?

Magic series:
Four Types of Magic
What is Not Science?
What if Nothing is Real?

Of the topics to contemplate philosophically, one topic has particularly tickled my mind: the nature of magic. It is fascinating in a different way than other topics, because few if any philosophers have discussed it. When someone says, either in real life or in fiction, “it’s not magic,” I have consistently been confounded. What does this mean?

It's not magic . . . we swear.

When people say magic, they seem to be talking about the mechanism behind something. Yet magic is completely distinct from science. In fact, it seems that a phenomenon can fall into one of two categories, magic or science. So to understand what magic is, we might first explore what science is.

There have been several schools of thought over the centuries regarding science. Rather than go through all of the incorrect ones, I will list them so that you can look them up on your own if you want, and get straight to the point. The past theories are Inductivism, Deductivism, and Paradigm Theory. Today, the prevailing theory of science is Systematicity Theory. Basically, science is not just a method that humanity invented a few hundred years ago and continues to use today, but it is an ever-improving set of the best ways to systematically examine anything that can be studied using observation and reason.

Last year, I wrote a summary of four ways that I find the word “magic” is used: Functional, Supernatural, Natural, and Sympathetic. There is something here that immediately stands out: the Natural category. Natural magic is simply alternative laws of science that a fictional universe runs by. But if it is alternative science, why do we call it magic? Is it merely because it is different from the real universe? If that is so, then wouldn’t real science count as magic in our universe? The science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke once said “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” meaning if someone told us a piece of technology we didn’t understand was magic, we would have no way of telling whether they were being truthful or not. Based on this non-distinction between magic and advanced technology, we can say that Natural magic is really not magic at all.

Your ancestors called it magic, and you call it science.
Well I come from a place where they are one and the same thing.
—Thor

But we have already said that if something is science, then it is not magic. So we have found what I think to be the greatest barrier to understanding the concept of magic: its definition is contradictory. But we don’t want to raise our hands and dismiss magic as a useless topic; we want to dig deeper. So for the purpose of this discussion, I will choose the definition of magic as not science, because that is how I think it is most commonly used.

Let’s look at the definition of science again: the systematic study of anything that can be studied using observation and reason. Notice something: nowhere in there does it exclude consciousness or the supernatural. Here my view deviates from that of most scientists, but I see no reason not to include them. We do not currently have the means to study these things, but we have no reason to believe we never will. Consciousness interacts with the physical world; our brains know about it, and we can talk about it. Science is ever improving, and as we went from Biology to Psychology to Neuroscience, I think it is not unreasonable that the next step along that chain might be a science of consciousness. So Sympathetic magic is just another form of Natural magic, or just an illusion of magic.

And what is the supernatural? Well, it is supposedly another layer of reality that is not bound by natural laws, but can interact with the natural world. But if it can interact with the natural, then there must be some mechanism by which it can interact, and some mechanism by which it can cause the apparent suspension of natural laws. These mechanisms would be their own kind of natural laws. Thus anything supernatural is really an extension of the natural, and the line between natural and supernatural is arbitrarily drawn between what we understand and what we do not yet understand. All throughout history, we have examples of what was once thought to be supernatural becoming understood as a part of the natural: the planets moving according to the law of gravity; life evolving by mutation and natural selection; plagues, famines, and natural disasters. So Supernatural magic, like Sympathetic magic, is also another form of natural magic.

But hold on, what if the supernatural cannot be understood? What if, in how it interacts with the natural world, it is not consistent in anyway that could possibly make sense? Well then I would place it in the category of Functional magic. Functional magic is my term for any phenomenon whose function precedes its essence, that is, it exists because it happens, not the other way around. If Doctor Strange twists his hand and an apple un-eats itself, there is no mechanism behind it, it simply happens. The same is true when Harry Potter waves his wand and his dishes wash themselves. Functional magic is when something is not mysterious merely because it is unknown, but it is mysterious inherently. No matter how much you think about it, how systematically you examine it, it does not make any kind of sense.

We have seen that, of the four types of magic, only one is truly distinct from science: Functional magic. And here is the difference: a scientific phenomenon makes logical and mechanical sense if you study it deeply enough, where as a magical phenomenon does not. In any universe that adheres to the principles of logic, as any potentially real universe must, this is impossible. So the phrase, “it’s not magic” truly is meaningless, as it amounts to saying “it’s not something that cannot exist.” Magic is what we put in our fantastic imaginary universes when we want to instill a sense of mystery and wonder. It is a shortcut we take when we want to assert something without bothering to think up a mechanism behind how it works. Magic is impossible. Or, if you prefer to think of magic as a set of rules by which the universe works, you could say that magic is all around us, and we call it science.

So we have found the answer to what magic is. Case closed, right? Well, not exactly. There is one way to turn everything I’ve just talked about on its head, but it requires some rather dramatic changes to the metaphysical nature of reality. And that is a discussion for another time.

My Writing Journey and NaNoWriMo 2016

Picture by Mark Hess on Pinterest

Since I started this blog a year and a half ago, it has been a journey for me and my writing. I upgraded from Microsoft Word to Scrivener. I wrote a comprehensive outline for the first book of Moebius, for which I have unsuccessfully tried to write a draft for over a decade. I finished my first and second draft of my fanfiction novella, and published it on an online forum. Now, I am ready to break into a draft of an original science fiction story.

I have wanted to write a book since long before the seed of Moebius was sown in Zeldean soil. It started before I can remember, with the playful fantasies of a young child. The first storytelling memories I have are of stick figure comic adventures. My brothers and I built up a mythos of heroes, villains, young kids who love to go on adventures, and the goofy people they meet on the way. My first attempt at a book was around 10 years old, when I wrote a 100-word first chapter about a boy who woke up, went outside, bent down to pick up a stainless steel fork in the road, and then was abducted by a flying saucer. The mind of a child is a truly strange, often wonderful thing.

In my young teen years, I went through a phase of video game concept design. My brothers and I would draw platformer levels and imagine them coming to life. A couple of friends joined with us to plan out a Legend of Zelda game, which we turned into The Chronicles of MoebiusQuest to avoid copyright issues. I look back with fondness to when we drew scenery in notebooks and crafted character models out of pipe cleaners.

MoebiusQuest turned from a video game into a book series, which my friends and I began to co-author. One of us would write a chapter, then send it via e-mail to the others, who would mark it up in colored text and send it back. The first person would then respond to each comment in another color, and so on. Sometimes our conversations would go so long and so off topic that they would exhaust all the colors in the interface, and we would have to either repeat them or change the background color.

I started six separate drafts of Moebius, scrapping each version as I learned more about writing, and starting over again. During this time, I came up with idea after idea for books to write. Some were trash, born of a child’s mind, but some I still keep on the table today. Out of this, Raiders of the Forsaken Archives was born, and the seed for The Void Stared Back was planted.

The next significant event happened when I started this blog, sparking a major increase in the time and effort I gave to writing. From this, I finished a comprehensive, solid outline for the first book of Moebius, which has evolved into a giant sci-fi/fantasy universe in the years since its conception as MoebiusQuest. I completely finished Raiders, and now I sit on an outline for a new book to start power-writing in only a few days.

November is just around the corner, which means it is almost National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo, as it is called, is an event where eager authors from all over sit down and crank out 50,000 words, encouraging each other along the way. I have wanted to participate in the past, and this year, I am ready. As you may imagine, the fraction of those who make it through NaNoWriMo is low—between 10% and 20%. Nevertheless, I have been preparing and outlining for months, and I promise here and now that I can and will have a finished draft of The Void Stared Back by November 30. It may not have 50,000 words, but it will have a beginning, a progression, and an ending. I have proved to myself with Raiders that I can do it, and finishing a first draft in a month is just one more step forward.

Creating Rivalries — Captain America: Civil War

There is no question that the Marvel Cinematic Universe rules the film industry these days, with two blockbusters released every year. I love everything about them; the quality, the characters and acting, the directing, the way they build up scale and magnitude. The MCU is to my early adulthood what Stargate was to my childhood. In addition to being great all-around, the films have lately had intriguing themes, including Avengers: Age of Ultron. Today I will talk about how Captain America: Civil War split its viewers into factions of Team Cap and Team Iron Man.

Civil War opens with the Avengers fighting a dangerous criminal. Things go sour, and a floor of the nearby skyscraper is destroyed. This leads to the proposal of a governmental act that would require “enhanced” individuals to register with and work for the US government, or to retire. The writers did a great job of giving both sides good arguments from lots of different perspectives, and putting loved and respected characters on both sides. In effect, this divided the fans fairly evenly over which side to root for, and, when the movie ended without resolving the issue, sparked discussion and debate in families, friends, and all over the internet.

Captain America: Civil War is certainly not the first story to divide its fans into factions. Twilight, for example, sent mobs of teenage girls fighting over whether the main character should get it on with a vampire or a werewolf. But Civil War did something more: it got people thinking about and discussing ideas that always have been and will be relevant in society. This is a prime example of why I love fiction, especially in the present era. I love this movie so much, I wish I had more to say about it. I could talk about its fantastic special effects, its compelling characters, and how it pushed the larger story forward in a way that feels natural, but these would be out of place in this discussion. At its core, Captain America: Civil War is a story about two companions torn apart and brought to blows over a compelling question that has no easy answer.

My First Novella! Bionicle: Raiders of the Forsaken Archives

I have finished a book! Bionicle: Raiders of the Forsaken Archives is a fanfiction based on the LEGO line, Bionicle. As a child, Bionicle had everything I wanted in a story: adventure, flashy magical powers, an in-depth, immersive world, and a buildup of scale and magnitude. Bionicle hit me at the sweet age where nostalgia grabs hold, and the story grew up with me.

You can read Raiders of the Forsaken Archives here on the BZPower forum. BZPower is a place where fans of Bionicle get together and share stories. I am surprised and delighted to see it alive and active after all these years. It goes to show that, if you let it, whatever you love as a child will stay with you into adulthood.

I started writing Raiders around ten years ago, working on it off and on, sometimes going for months only adding a sentence or two. However, once I started this blog, I took it to the grindstone. Though the first draft took ten years, the second draft took only three months, and the line editing, a week. Getting myself in the mindset to write more was one of my original goals for this blog. It is so satisfying to find that my writing incentive has indeed increased tenfold.

Though I wanted Raiders to be a novel, it only ended up with 30,000 words, well under the 40,000 novel threshold. I think, though, that I could have passed the mark if I had written a third draft. After finishing, I wrote a list of problems with the final draft, most egregious of which was doubling the number of characters at the 3/4 mark. Since fanfiction has low expectations, I can leave these problems unfixed. But the list gave me an idea: each time I finish a draft of a book I want to publish, I will write a list of problems, and write another draft to fix all of them.

Raiders was written with a sequel in mind. I don’t know right now whether I will write that sequel, but if I do, I am sure I will have as much fun with it as I did with Raiders.

Someday, I hope sooner rather than later, I will look back on Raiders and wonder how I let something so awful be revealed to the public. Right now, though, I simply feel pride. I like my beginning, I like my ending, and I feel satisfied that I made the middle interesting enough to keep you going through it. And now that I have proved to myself that I can finish a book, I can write my first original novel with the concrete surety that I will finish it.

Giving Crash Bandicoot a Good Story

I grew up playing video games in the Nintendo 64 era. Many of the games I played back then are still among my favorites today. One of those that I keep coming back to is Crash Bandicoot.

I love Crash. It is ridiculously fun to play, with its challenging levels, bunches of crates to break, and hidden collectibles. But for story, it is considerably lacking. Maniacal villain Dr. Neo Cortex wants to take over the world, by giving marsupials self-awareness and enlisting them into an army. Crash is a bandicoot who undergoes the process, but the brainwashing fails, and Crash escapes. He then has to traverse the islands to stop Cortex’s plan. Oh, and Crash also has a girlfriend named Tawna he has to rescue, but we try not to think about her because she looks like something out of an H. P. Lovecraft horror story.

Neo Cortex looks like a great cartoon villain; sinister, grumpy, and a little cute. His theme songs are amazing. But his battles feel shallow, like there isn’t really any reason to fight. Sure, the fate of the world may hang in the balance, but we don’t know enough about the world to care. Here, then, is my alternative story for Crash Bandicoot.

First and foremost, Cortex’s taking over the world thing has to go. This is a story about a mutated bandicoot on a few small Oceanic islands, so the scope of the story should be the same. So what if instead of a megalomania complex, Cortex has a personal motive? In the later games, whose existence I almost never acknowledge, Neo has a niece, Nina Cortex. Perhaps she has an accident, and is in an incurable vegetative state. Neo wants to restore her, so he conducts experiments giving animals intelligence, hoping to apply the knowledge he gains to his niece.

Cortex treats the animals cruelly, and one of them, Crash, rises up against him. But Cortex does not recognize Crash as a person, asserting that humans are superior to animals no matter what. This adds an element of irony to the earlier boss battles, when Crash has to fight other animals who have been subjected to Cortex’s experimentation. With these changes, Cortex has a reason to hate Crash, and Crash is justified in fighting him. And when the final battle arrives, it is charged with emotion and feels like a true climax.

Yes, I know the game was marketed for kids, but those of us who loved it growing up still love it now, and it is a fun exercise to imagine how it could have been more interesting to us as adults. Even with the story it has, Crash Bandicoot is a trilogy I will revisit time and again for years to come, and the remastered versions in the works are one of several reasons I plan to get a Playstation 4 sometime in the next few years.

Budabygah!