BAEN BOOKS

FREE NONFICTION 2011

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

The Size of it All © 2011 by Les Johnson

Terraforming Ganymede with Robert A. Heinlein, Part I © 2011 by Gregory Benford

The Amazon's Right Breast © 2011 by Tom Kratman

Terraforming Ganymede with Robert A. Heinlein, Part II © 2011 by Gregory Benford

The Aliens Are Not Among Us © 2011 by Les Johnson

Gravity’s Punch © 2011 by Tony Daniel

A Baen Book Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

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ISBN: 978-1-4516-3777-9

The Size of it All

by Les Johnson

The Hubble Deep Field, showing about 3000 previously unknown galaxies. (Image courtesy of NASA, R. Williams and The Hubble Deep Field Team (STScI).)

For ten days in 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope pointed its mirror to a small patch of seemingly empty sky near the Big Dipper and started collecting light. (“Seemingly empty” means that no stars or galaxies were at that time known to be in that particular piece of the sky.) The part of the sky being imaged was no larger than the apparent size of a tennis ball viewed from across a football field. It was a very small portion of the sky. What they found was awe-inspiring. Within that small patch of nothingness was far more than nothing. The image revealed about three thousand previously unseen galaxies, creating one of the most famous of Hubble’s images and my personal favorite. The sky is not only full of stars but also of galaxies and they are very, very far away.

One of my favorite daydreams is also one of my scariest. When I am outside on a clear, cloudless night, I like to imagine that I am on a spaceship in the deep between the stars, looking out at the vastness of the universe. During this daydream, I often fondly recall my favorite science fictional spaceships – the Enterprise (Star Trek Classic, of course!), the Drusus (from the pulpish German language serial Perry Rhodan), or the Nostromo (Alien) – and wonder what it would be like to be truly in the middle of deep space, far from Earth and our familiar solar system. My thoughts alternating between the wonder of it all and the terrifying thought of what it would be like to be stranded there, so far from home.

I’ve told some of my friends and colleagues about this daydream and many have asked, “Why do you place yourself in interstellar space and not just somewhere in our solar system between the planets? After all, those distances are so large that you would probably experience the same thing there!” Intellectually I know they are right. Buy hey, it’s my daydream and if that’s how I can get to the stars, then so be it! The distances between planets are enormous and, given our current technological capabilities, if I were to be stuck there it would look and feel much the same as if I were stuck between the stars Alpha Centauri and Epsilon Eridani. In both cases, the stars would be my only companions within the void.

That says a lot actually. Space is big. Huge. Incomprehensibly large. It is so large that I contend none of us can really understand how big it really is. Most Earthly distances are experiential – we can go from here to there and experience traveling the miles between. Save for a very few, this is not so for space. I believe that even those who have been to space don’t really comprehend the distances they’ve traveled and they are just as clueless as the rest of us when it comes to what lies beyond.

In the 21st Century, those of modest means can purchase airline tickets for a reasonable price and travel virtually anywhere on the globe. Catching a flight from my adopted hometown of Madison, Alabama to Tokyo last year cost about $1000 with a total in-the-air flight time of sixteen hours. The distance between Madison and Tokyo is approximately nine thousand miles, which means my effective speed was about five hundred and seventy-five miles per hour. For someone used to traveling by car at seventy miles per hour, that’s pretty fast. And yet it still took sixteen hours to get from here to there. To fly around the globe would take, at that speed, over forty hours.

In 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins made the trip from the Earth to the Moon in three days using rockets. If they’d been traveling by the airplane I used to get to Japan, knowing full well that airplanes cannot fly through space, then it would have taken over four hundred hours – or seventeen days – to make the journey.1 The rockets used in Project Apollo reached speeds of over twenty-four thousand miles per hour. This staggering speed would allow me to travel the 9000 miles from Madison to Tokyo in a mere twenty-two minutes. By anyone’s measure, that’s fast. Unfortunately, to travel within our solar system that’s not fast enough.

At about the same time Armstrong was walking on the Moon, Dr. Werner Von Braun, the father of America’s space program, met with President Nixon and unveiled his plans for sending people to Mars within the next decade. Using rockets larger than the Saturn V, the round-trip voyage to Mars would nonetheless have required approximately three years to complete. Granted, this included some time actually at Mars, but the majority of the astronauts’ time away from home would have been spent traveling between worlds, not exploring. The situation really hasn’t changed since then; we’re still using chemical rockets and even if we made the leap to using rockets powered by nuclear fission, the trip time would remain about the same – we’d only reduce the number of rockets required to be launched from Earth to space, most carrying rocket propellant, in order to complete the voyage. And Mars, while not the closest planet to the Earth, is still not very far away when compared to its planetary siblings. We are not even close to having the technology required to send humans to visit the other planets in our solar system.

Because of their much smaller size, we have been able to send robotic explorers outward to every other planet in the solar system. Their voyages have taken years.

To make the distance between worlds in our solar system easier to discuss, scientists devised a new unit of measurement called the “Astronomical Unit,” or AU. One AU is ninety-three million miles – the distance between the Earth and the Sun. On this scale, Jupiter is about four AU from the Earth, Neptune is about twenty-nine and Mars (the planet it would take us three years to explore) is only one-half AU away! If we were talking about distances in our more-familiar miles, then Neptune would be two billion, six-hundred-ninety-seven million miles away. I challenge anyone to tell me they can really comprehend such a vast distance.

Beyond Neptune lies the former-planet, Pluto and a legion of its icy rock cousins in the Kuiper Belt – all are still well within the solar system, orbiting Sol, our sun. The very edge of Sol’s influence, and hence the acknowledged outer boundary of our solar system, is known as the heliopause. It is at this point that the sun’s outward radiation pressure, the light streaming forth from the sun’s nuclear processes, is balanced by the light coming in from all other stars in the galaxy combined. The heliopause is thought to be about two-hundred-fifty AU’s away. That’s two-hundred-fifty times ninety-three million miles.

On this scale, the nearest star system – Alpha Centauri – is about two-hundred fifty-thousand AU’s more distant from Earth than the heliopause! Once again, our units of measurement fail us. Fortunately, nature provided us with a pretty cool way to measure distances as large as this: the Light Year (LY). A LY is the distance light, in a vacuum, will travel in one year’s time. On this scale, Alpha Centauri’s 4.2 LY distance makes it sound like it is pretty close. Until we remember that a LY is really 63,239 AU or 5,878,000,000,000 miles. Are you, like me, starting to feel pretty small?

Before we go farther into deep space, it might be useful to find a way to at least visualize the comparative distances discussed so far. If you imagine that a one AU distance can be shrunk down to be one inch, then the Earth would be orbiting the Sun at a distance of one inch. Mars would be orbiting the Sun at one and a half inches, Jupiter at five inches, and Pluto at thirty-nine inches. The heliopause would be about two hundred fifty inches – twenty feet – away. On this scale, the distance to Alpha Centauri would be about four miles. That's a lot of inches.

Okay. Now we can discuss and visualize the distances to some pretty cool places like Barnard’s Star (5.9 LY) or Wolf 359 (7.8 LY) or Epsilon Eridani (10.5 LY) and not trip over ourselves reciting the zeros. Figure 1 shows the relative position and distance to several nearby stars.

Figure 1 shows the stars nearest our sun and within about ten Light Years. (Image courtesy of Richard Powell and atlasoftheuniverse.com.) http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/12lys.html

These are the stars closest to us. But what about the really interesting places that may not be so close? Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has over two hundred billion stars and is about one hundred thousand LY in diameter. Since we are embedded within it, we cannot take a picture of our own galaxy from above. Based on what we can see, we know that it looks a lot like our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, shown in Figure 2. For the record, the Andromeda Galaxy, a close neighbor in galactic terms, is about two and a half million LY away. The light that left Andromeda and was captured by the camera that took the photograph in the figure had been traveling through space at 186,000 miles per second for over two-and-a-half million years.

Figure 2 shows the Andromeda galaxy, which is very similar in structure to our own. The distance across our galaxy is approximately 100,000 light years. (Image courtesy of Mike Herbaut & the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator.)

The daydream I mentioned at the beginning of this article first occurred after I read a story in the Perry Rhodan series in which our hero finds himself in contact with an ancient and highly-advanced technological civilization. In order for them to show him their capabilities, they send him and his interstellar spaceship – the pride of a growing Earth-based spacefaring civilization encompassing stars out to about one hundred LY from Earth – into the void between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies and strand him there for several days. That image of being so far away from home, where only the light of galaxies, not stars, can be seen in the mostly-dark sky, haunts and captivates me still today. They, of course, bring Rhodan back home so that he can have many more adventures in deep space.

I’m feeling small again... If the universe were composed of just the Milky Way, as was thought to be the case only about one hundred years ago, then our place within it would now be understood. Alas, the universe is far larger still.

The next step outward into the universe can only be accomplished using our telescopes. And as we gaze outward, shock of shocks, we discover that there are more than just a few galaxies. There are billions of galaxies out there, each containing billions of stars. They are not evenly distributed. In fact, they seem to be grouped together in distinct sets. The set in which we find ourselves is called the Local Group and it is comprised of about thirty galaxies with our Milky Way galaxy roughly at its center. The diameter of the Local Group is approximately ten million LY. That’s 10,000,000 LY.

The Local Group of galaxies is a small member of the Local Supercluster, which has a diameter of one-hundred-ten million LY. The best visualization I’ve seen for understanding our place in The Local Supercluster was created by Andrew Colvin and is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 traces our place in the solar system out to The Local Supercluster. (Image courtesy of Andrew Colvin.) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/a/a7/20100606032423!Universe_Reference_Map_(Location)_001.jpeg

And now for something completely different and very, very strange: In the 1980s, astronomers noticed that our galaxy and all of the galaxies in the Local Group are being pulled toward something we cannot see at over one million miles per hour. The something toward which Andromeda, our galactic cousins and we are being pulled is called, “The Great Attractor.” My advice is to try not to think about it...

Zooming yet further out, we can see the distribution of superclusters surrounding our home supercluster, also known as the Virgo Supercluster (Figure 4). Remember that each of the dots making up this illustration represents a galaxy, not an individual star. Don’t forget that each galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars.

Figure 4 shows the distribution of superclusters surrounding our own, The Virgo Supercluster, centered in the middle of the sphere of observation. Please note that we are placed in the center of the sphere because we are making the image by looking out in all directions – not because we are actually at the center of anything in particular. (Image courtesy of Richard Powell and atlasoftheuniverse.com.) http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/superc.html

The known universe is comprised of multiple galactic superclusters separated by ... well, essentially nothing, creating immense structures. Early on, astronomers assumed that these structures were pretty much uniformly distributed in the universe. After all, what could possibly cause structure on such a large scale? This notion was shattered when the Great Wall, a group of galaxies five hundred million LY long, two hundred million LY wide and fifteen LY thick was discovered. (See Figure 5.) Within a few years, another “wall” of galaxies was found and called the Sloan Great Wall.

Figure 5 shows the distribution of galaxies as seen from Earth. The figure shows the galaxy groupings, which, when looking from the top left to corner of the image, forms what appears to be a wall -- the "Great Wall." (Image copyright by Mario Juric and J. Richard Gott, Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University.)

For those still trying to put their arms around the distances involved, the Great Wall is over one billion LY away from Earth.

We’re finally near the end and close to knowing, if not really grasping, the size of it all. Based on very recent findings from many deep space missions, including the Hubble and Chandra Space Telescopes, the Wilkinson Anisotropy Probe, and others, we have learned the universe is about ninety-three billion light years in diameter.2 Just for perspective, let me convert that to miles just so we can at least say we’ve done it: 550,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles.

Now, back to my daydream – where was I? Oh yes, somewhere near that Great Attractor...

End Notes

1 For the sake of simplicity, I am ignoring the fact that the distance one must travel between objects in space is actually much greater than the straight line distance between them. The path you follow is curved; and everything is moving. The Apollo spacecraft was directed toward a point in space where the Moon would be when it, the Moon, and the spacecraft, arrived. The Moon may be two hundred forty thousand miles away, but to get there you have to travel a distance greater than that due to the curved path that physics demands spacecraft follow.

2 For some, this number may not make sense. After all, haven’t we learned that the approximate age of the universe is only 13.7 billion years and, if we are limited by the speed of light, shouldn’t the universe be 13.7 billion LY in diameter? That would be true if the universe weren’t expanding. But it is expanding, rapidly, and that means that the actual distance (“space time”) through which the light travels is actually much larger than it would be if it weren’t expanding. Think of running across a bridge while someone is stretching the bridge. You may be running at a constant rate (the speed of light) but the distance you cover once you’ve crossed the bridge is larger than it was when you first began.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

JPL has created an elegant interactive map of our galaxy that is worth checking out: http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/SIMGuide2Galaxy_508.html

The Scale of the Universe is an excellent interactive tool that lets the user zoom out from our experiential frame of reference here on the surface of the Earth to the ends of the universe: http://primaxstudio.com/stuff/scale_of_universe/

There’s the classic short film, “Powers of Ten” that begins at a Chicago picnic and every ten seconds takes us an order of magnitude father away into we are well into deep space: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

The updated version of “Powers of Ten” that takes into account what we’ve learned since the original was made in 1977: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPm3QVKlBJg

The End

Terraforming Ganymede with Robert A. Heinlein

by Gregory Benford

Discovering Heinlein, for most who have, is like having sex or dropping acid: you don’t forget your first time.

–Adrienne Martini, Locus 2011

There it is. Gosh, $2.50. But...I can’t wait!

I recall thinking that, when I sighted Farmer in the Sky for sale in the big Post Exchange in Tokyo. It was 1953 and less than 300 miles away, the Korean War was raging. Our father was a senior staff officer for General McArthur and often worked weekends and came home late at night. We had little time with him, and though our mother compensated, that’s not the same kind of fun.

So we read a lot. My brother Jim and I had already read Rocket Ship Galileo (published in 1947), Space Cadet (1948) and Red Planet (1949) from our school library. These early Heinlein books were the first science fiction we’d ever seen, since we grew up in deeply rural southern Alabama. SF opened horizons beyond those we already had discovered, living in occupied Japan.

We were fans, even if we didn’t even know it yet, so of course we couldn’t wait for the school to acquire Farmer. We pooled our money and bought the book, our first hardcover acquisition. It cost $2.50, a full five weeks’ worth of both our allowances, ran 216 pages and carried the great illustrations by Clifford Geary that made the Heinlein “juveniles” so visually memorable. A bargain, never regretted.

I still have it, though the dust jacket has vanished, lost somewhere in the many moves of a military family. Farmer and other Heinleins made such an impression on Jim and me that we took up astronomy, both of us got PhDs in physics, and I’ve published nearly a hundred astronomical scientific papers. I started my stargazing by focusing on Jupiter, the towering backdrop for Farmer in the Sky, which looked through my scope as in the figure. The thrill of personally seeing the Galilean moons, whose discovery by Galileo Galilei in 1610 shook mankind’s complacent geocentrism, was heady stuff to my teenage imagination.

My second novel was a direct homage to Farmer, a sort of prequel to its events, set many decades earlier. Published as a novella in Amazing in 1972, then expanded in 1976, The Jupiter Project tried to follow both the Heinlein model of scrupulous scientific clarity and (somewhat) his style.

Jupiter Project explores the social pressures on a small crew of scientists studying the Jovian system from a lab orbiting near Ganymede. Despite the potential for new discoveries, they face the stubbornly nagging question of whether space and exobiological research will ever have any relevance to the people back on Earth who fund such ventures. As the story begins, the station is about to be closed down, and the protagonist, seventeen year-old Matt Bohles, isn’t happy. Life onboard the aging cylinder space station is cramped, Spartan and dangerous, but "The Can" is home. To forestall being shipped back to a filthy, perilous and unfamiliar hell called Earth, he steals a small ship and sets out to discover Jovian life. Instead, he uncovers an even more important find. There the novel ends.

But that was just the plot setup. The real pleasure I had in writing The Jupiter Project lay in two learning curves. First, by copying Heinlein’s approaches, I learned much about writing. Dialog, character development, pacing, attention to authenticating detail in all the senses–Heinlein could imply an entire society, filled with taken-for-granted technological wonders far beyond his time, in a single throwaway sentence. (The classic example is “The door dilated.”) Next, I discovered a core truth of hard SF: dealing with reality, and then taking it a step further–in this case, imagining how to terraform Ganymede–is FUN. It’s playing tennis with the net firmly up.

In Farmer in the Sky young Bill Lerner and his family move to Ganymede. We first see a future Earth of austerity, dappled with some good foresight, such as an offhand description of what is clearly the casual use of microwave ovens:

I grabbed two Syntho-Steaks out of the freezer and slapped

them in quickthaw, added a big Idaho baked potato for Dad...

then stepped up the gain on the quickthaw so that the spuds

would be ready when the steaks were.

The journey is described with Heinlein’s characteristic blend of fast-paced adventure and meticulous research, a style of painless reader education that runs through all his books.

The novel describes the Lerner family’s flight to Jupiter, in which Bill organizes a Boy Scout troop to fill the time. Such activities recur throughout Heinlein YA novels -- he thriftily inserted scouting references so he could sell magazine rights to Boy’s Life, the magazine of the Boy Scouts of America. Heinlein strongly supported the Scouts, and once pointed out to me that everyone who had ever walked on the Moon was an Eagle Scout.

Farmer in the Sky celebrates 19th century American frontier life and homesteading by imagining much the same situations on Ganymede. But that demands terraforming, whereby sentient life from Earth transforms the very nature of nonsentient worlds. By this system, life from Earth–not just humans–grows independent of the fate of the Earth. Heinlein assumed, based on the best scientific knowledge of the times, that Ganymede has a rocky surface under an ice layer–which we now know it does, plus a deep ocean. By enormous amounts of work, ingenuity, and heartbreaking perseverance, these raw materials can be slowly reworked into a richly welcoming world.

Things go well at first, though conditions are harsh on Ganymede. Then a “rare” alignment of all four of Jupiter's major moons causes a catastrophic quake, killing most of the colonists. The family considers returning to Earth, but the pioneer spirit prevails. They remain, despite the dangers, to rebuild and win another home for humanity. Bill sets out to survey more of Ganymede, where terraforming continues, and by the end of the book we see how it’s changing.

Heinlein was scientifically accurate throughout, except for that quake. The devastating alignment of Jupiter's massive Galilean moons that he describes can never happen. The three inner moons–Io, Europa and Ganymede–orbit in resonance with one other, so that even if two line up, amplifying tidal forces, the third will always be non-aligned, frequently on the opposite side of Jupiter, offsetting the effect.

What else did he get wrong? Very little. He was scrupulously accurate, using the latest astronomical information. His only limit seems to be what was known at the time. He and his wife Virginia (biochemist, athlete and WWII WAVE, who was fluent in seven-plus languages and reputedly a better engineer than her husband) spent countless hours in research, fiercely dedicated to getting it right for their readers. They once spent days, back when slide rules were the apex of calculation speed, in working out the ballistics of an interplanetary trip (for The Rolling Stones), only to summarize their work in a few breezy paragraphs. Inspiring.

Heinlein knew, as did those who followed in his footsteps, that inevitably, as humanity opened the solar system to exploration and commerce, it would be cheaper in energy to tug in small asteroids from the orbits between Mars and Jupiter than to lift them with mighty rocket engines from Earth. So in the late '70s, I began thinking about world building and social implications of terraforming, constructing a future history that led to Farmer in the Sky and beyond.

I’ll present the first half of The Future of the Jovian System here as a popular historian would. The second installment will be prefaced with thoughts on recent astronomical discoveries about the Jovian system, and on how Robert Heinlein’s work still shapes the future, both in style and in his influence on others. I’ll take up what we now know of Ganymede and how future explorers might get from the early world-shaping of fiction to future environments there.

Father of all! in every age,

In every clime ador’d,

By saint, by savage, and by sage,

Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

–ALEXANDER POPE

HOW THE SOLAR SYSTEM WAS WON

THEY SAID, OF COURSE, that it was impossible. They always do.

Even after the human race had moved into the near-Earth orbits, scattering their spindly factories and cylinder-cities and rock-hopping entrepreneurs, the human race was dominated by nay-saying stay-at-homes. Sure, they said, space worked. Slinging airtight homes into orbit at about one astronomical unit’s distance from the Sun was–in retrospect–an obvious step. After all, there was a convenient Moon nearby to provide mass and resources. But Earth, they said, was a benign neighborhood. You could resupply most outposts within a few days. Except for the occasional solar storm, when winds of high-energy particles lashed out, the radiation levels were low. There was plenty of sunshine to focus with mirrors, capture in great sheets of conversion wafers, and turn into bountiful, high-quality energy.

But Jupiter? Why go there? Scientific teams had already touched down on the big moons and dipped into the thick atmosphere. By counting craters and taking core samples, they deduced what they could about how the solar system evolved. After that brief era of quick-payoff visits, nobody had gone back. One big reason, everyone was quick to point out, was the death rate for those expeditions: half never saw Earth again, except as a distant blue-white dot.

Scientists don’t tame new worlds; pioneers do. And except for bands of religious or political refugee-fanatics, pioneers don’t do it for nothing. To understand why mankind undertook the most dangerous development project in its history (so far), you have to ask the eternal question: Who stood to get rich from it?

By the year 2124, humans had already begun to spread out of the near-Earth zone. The bait was the asteroids–big tumbling lodes of metal and rock, rich in heavy elements. These flying mountains could be steered slowly from their looping orbits and brought to near-Earth rendezvous with refineries. The delta V wasn’t all that large.

There, smelters melted them down and fed the factories steady streams of precious raw materials: manganese, platinum, cadmium, chromium, molybdenum, tellurium, vanadium, tungsten, and all the rare metals. Earth was running out of these, or else was unwilling to further pollute its biosphere to scratch the last fraction out of the crust. Processing metals is messy and dangerous. The space factories could throw their waste into the solar wind, letting the gentle push of protons blow it out to the stars.

Early in the space-manufacturing venture, people realized that it was cheaper in energy to tug small asteroids in from the orbits between Mars and Jupiter than to lift them with mighty rocket engines from Earth. Asteroid prospecting became the Gold Rush of the late twenty-first century. Corporations grubstaked loners who went out in pressurized tin cans, sniffing with their spectrometers at the myriad chunks. Most of them were duds, but a rich lode of vanadium, say, could make a haggard, antisocial rockrat into a wealthy man. Living in zero-gravity craft wasn’t particularly healthy, of course. You had to scramble if a solar storm blew in and crouch behind an asteroid for shelter. Most rock-hoppers disdained the heavy shielding that would ward off cosmic rays, figuring that their stay would be short and lucky, so the radiation damage wouldn’t be fatal. Many lost that bet. One thing they could not do without, though, was food and air. That proved to be the pivot-point that drove humanity still further out.

Life runs on the simplest chemicals. A closed artificial biosphere is basically a series of smoldering fires: hydrogen burns (that is, combines with oxygen) to give water; carbon burns into carbon dioxide, which plants eat; nitrogen combines in the soil so the plants can make proteins, enabling humans to be smart enough to arrange all this artificially.

The colonies that swam in near-Earth orbits had run into this problem early. They needed a steady flow of organic matter and liquids to keep their biospheres balanced. Supply from Earth was expensive. A better solution was to search out the few asteroids which had significant carbonaceous chondrites–rocks rich in light elements: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen. There were surprisingly few. Most were pushed painfully back to Earth orbit and gobbled up by the colonies. By the time the rock-hoppers needed light elements, the asteroid belt had been picked clean. Besides, bare rock is unforgiving stuff. Getting blood from a stone was possible in the energy-rich cylinder-cities. The loose, thinly-spread coalition of prospectors couldn’t pay the stiff bills needed for a big-style conversion plant.

From Ceres, the largest asteroid, Jupiter looms like a candy-striped beacon, far larger than Earth. The rockrats lived in the broad band between two and three astronomical units out from the Sun–they were used to a wan, diminished sunshine and had already been tutored in the awful cold. For them it was no great leap to Jove, hanging there 5.2 times farther from the Sun than Earth.

They went for the liquids. Three of the big moons–Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto–were immense iceballs. True, they circled endlessly the most massive planet of all, three hundred and eighteen times the mass of Earth. That put them deep down in a gravitational well. Still it was far cheaper to send a robot ship coasting out to Jupiter, looping into orbit around Ganymede, than it was to haul water from the oceans of Earth. The first stations set up on Ganymede were semiautomatic–meaning a few unlucky souls had to tend the machinery.

If they could survive at all. A man in a normal pressure suit could live about an hour on Ganymede. The unending sleet of high-energy protons would fry him, ripping through the delicate cells and spreading red destruction. This was a natural side effect of Jupiter’s hugeness – its compressed core of metallic hydrogen spins rapidly, generating powerful magnetic fields that are whipped around every ten hours. These fields are like a rubbery cage, snagging and trapping particles (mostly protons) spat out by the sun. Io, the innermost large moon, belches ions of sulfur and sodium into the magnetic traps, adding to the protons. All this rains down on the inner moons, spattering the ice.

It was not feasible to burrow under the ice to escape –the crew had to work outside, supervising robot ice-diggers. The first inhabitants of Ganymede instead used the newest technology to fend off the proton hail: superconducting suits. Discovery of a way to make superconducting threads made it possible to weave them into pressure suits. The currents running in the threads made a magnetic field outside the suit, where it brushed away incoming protons. Inside, by the laws of magnetostatics, there was no field at all to disturb instrumentation. Once started, the currents flowed forever, virtually without electrical resistance.

Those first men and women worked in an eerie dim sunlight. Over half of Ganymede’s mass was water ice, with liberal dollops of frozen carbon dioxide, ammonia and methane, and minor traces of other frozen-out gases. Its small rocky core was buried under a thousand-kilometer-deep ocean of water and slush. The surface was a thin seventy-kilometer-deep frozen crust, liberally sprinkled over billions of years by infalling meteors. These meteorites peppered the surface and eventually became a major facet of the landscape. On top of Ganymede’s weak ice crust, hills of metal and rock gave the only relief from a flat, barren plain.

This frigid moon had been tugged by Jupiter’s tides for so long that it was locked, like Luna, with one face always peering at the banded, ruddy planet. One complete day-night cycle was slightly more than an Earth-week long. Adjusting to this rhythm would have been difficult if the Sun had provided clear punctuation to the three-and-a-half-day nights. But even without an atmosphere, the Sun from Ganymede was a dim twenty-seventh as bright as at Earth’s orbit. Sometimes you hardly noticed it, compared to the light of Jove’s nearby moons.

Sunrise was legislated to begin at Saturday midnight. That made the week symmetric, and scientists love symmetry. Around late afternoon of Monday, Jupiter eclipsed the Sun, seeming to clasp the hard point of white light in a reddish glow, then swallowing it completely. Europa’s white, cracked crescent was then the major light in the sky for three and a half hours. Jupiter’s shrouded mass flickered with orange lightning strokes between the rolling somber clouds. Suddenly, a rosy halo washed around the rim of the oblate atmosphere as sunlight refracted through the transparent outer layers. In a moment the Sun’s fierce dot broke free and cast sharp shadows on the Ganymede ice.

By Wednesday noon it had set, bringing a night that was dominated by Jupiter’s steady glow as it hung unmoving in the sky. This slow rotation was still enough to churn Ganymede’s inner ocean, exerting a torque on the ice sheets above. A slow-motion kind of tectonics had operated for billions of years, rubbing slabs against each other, grooving and terracing terrain, erasing craters in some areas.

In the light gravity–one-seventh of Earth’s–carving out immense blocks of ice was easy. Boosting them into orbit with tug rockets was the most expensive part of the long journey. From there, electromagnetic-thruster robot ships lugged the ice to the asteroids, taking years to coast along their minimum-energy spirals.

AGRIBUSINESS IN THE SKY

“Ice might be nice, but wheat you can eat.”

So began one of the songs of that era, when the asteroids were filling up with prospectors, then miners, then traders. Then came settlers, who found the cylinder-cities too crowded, too restrictive, or simply too boring. They founded the Belt-Free State, with internal divisions along cultural and even family lines. (Susan McKenzie, the first Belt Chairwoman and a proud native of the Outermost Hebrides, was three generations removed from her nearest Earth-born Scot relative. Not that Belters stopped to think about Earth that much anymore.)

By then, the near-Earth orbital zone was as comfortable as a suburb, and as demanding. The few iceteroids available in the asteroid belt had already been used up, but ice from Ganymede, originally hauled to the asteroids, could be revectored and sent to the rich artificial colonies. As the colonies developed a taste for luxury, increasingly that meant food. No environment can be completely closed, so human settlements throughout the solar system steadily lost vapors and organic matter to the void. No inventory ever came up 100 percent complete. (Consider your own body, and try to keep track of a day’s output: feces, urine, exhaled gas, perspiration, flatus, sheddings. Draw the flow chart.) The relatively rich inner-solar-system colonies soon grew tired of skimpy menus and of the endless cycle in which goat and rabbit and chicken were the prized meats.

Inevitably, someone noticed that it would be cheap to grow crops on Ganymede. Water was plentiful, and mirrors could warm greenhouses, enhancing the wan sunlight. Since Ganymede was going to ship light elements to the asteroids and beyond anyway, why not send them in the form of grains or vegetables?

Thus began the Settlements. At first they were big, domed greenhouses, lush with moist vegetables or grain. The farmers lived below in the sheltering ice. Within two generations, humans had spread over a third of the moon’s purplish, grooved fields. In the face of constant radiation hazard, something in the human psyche said mate!–and the population expanded exponentially.

Robot freight haulers were getting cheaper and cheaper, since the introduction of auto-producers in the Belt. These were the first cumbersome self-reproducing machines, sniffing out lodes of iron and nickel, and working them into duplicates of themselves. An auto-producer would make two replicas of itself and then, following directives, manufacture a robot ion rocket. This took at least ten years, but it was free of costly human labor, and the auto-producers could work in lonely orbits, attached to bleak gray rocks where humans would never last. The ion rocket dutifully launched itself for Ganymede, to take up grain-hauling chores. Every year there were more of them to carry the cash crops sunward.

Working all day in a skinsuit is not comfortable. Day-to-day routines performed under ten meters of ice tend to pall. Fear of radiation and cold wears anyone down. For the first generation Ganymede was an adventure, for the next a challenge, and for the third, a grind. One of the first novels written in Jovian space opens with:

Maybe I should start off with a big, gaudy description. You know–Jupiter’s churning pinks and browns, the swirling white ammonia clouds like giant hurricanes, the spinning red spots. That kind of touristy stuff.

Except I don’t feel like writing that kind of flowery crap. I’m practical, not poetic. When you’re swinging around Jupiter, living meters away from lethal radiation, you stick to facts. You get so vectors and grease seals and hydraulic fittings are more important than pretty views or poetry or maybe even people.

The psychological profile of the entire colony took a steep downward slope. Even the kids in the ice warren streets knew something had to be done.

In the long run, no large colony could live healthily with the death-dealing threats to be found on any of the Jovian moons. Therefore, erase the dangers.

All sorts of remedies were suggested. One serious design was done for an immense ring of particles to orbit around Ganymede, cutting out most of the incoming high-energy protons. Someone suggested moving Ganymede itself outward, to escape the particle flux. (This wasn’t crazy, only premature. A century later it would be feasible, though still expensive.) The idea that finally won looked just as bizarre as the rest, but it had an ace up its sleeve.

The Ganymede Atmosphere Project started with a lone beetlelike machine crawling painfully around the equator of the world. Mechanical teeth ground up ice and sucked it inside, where an immense fusion reactor waited. The reactor burned the small fraction of heavy water in the ice and rudely rejected the rest as steam. From its tail jetted billowing clouds that in seconds condensed into an ammonia-rich creek.

This fusion plant crept forward on caterpillar treads, making a top speed of a hundred meters an hour. Its computer programs sought the surest footing over the black-rock outcroppings. It burned off toxic gases and left a mixture of water vapor, ammonia, oxygen, and nitrogen, with plenty of irritating trace gases. The greatest danger to it was melting itself down into a self-made lake. A bright orange balloon was tethered to the top. If the crawler drowned itself, the balloon would inflate and float the plant to the surface, to be fished out by a rescue team.

The trick was that the fusion-crawler wasn’t made with valuable human labor, but rather by other machines: the auto-producers. Decades before, the auto-producers had begun multiplying like the legendary rabbits who overran Australia. Now there were hundreds of them in the Belt, duplicating themselves and making robot freighters. The Belters were beginning to get irritated at the foraging machines; two had been blown to fragments for trespassing on Belters’ mines. Simple reprogramming stopped their ferocious reproduction and set them to making fusion-crawlers.

Freighters hauled the crawlers out to Ganymede, following safe, cheap, low-energy trajectories. The crawlers swarmed out from the equator, weaving through wrinkled valleys of tumbled stone and pink snowdrifts, throwing out gouts of gas and churning streams. The warm water carried heat into neighboring areas, melting them as well. A thin gas began to form over the tropics. At first it condensed out in the Ganymede night, but then it began to hold, to spread, to take a sure grip on the glinting icelands below.

The natives saw these stolid machines as a faint orange aura over the horizon. Crawlers stayed away from the Settlements, to avoid accidents and flooding. Their rising mists diffused the fusion torches’ light, so that a second sun often glowed beyond the hills, creeping northward, its soft halo contrasting with the blue-green shadows of the ice fields.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Copyright © 2011 by Gregory Benford

NASA image of Jupiter aurora in UV, Hubble Space Telescope Bright streaks and dots are caused by magnetic flux tubes connecting Jupiter to its largest moons: * Io: bright streak on the far left * Ganymede: bright dot below center * Europa: dot right of Ganymede dot Image originally from http://apod.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001219.html Credit: John T. Clarke (U. Michigan), ESA, NASA

The Amazon’s Right Breast

by Tom Kratman

Yes, that was the book’s original title. Toni didn’t like it. “No nipples on covers, Tom,” she said, and she be da boss.

In any case, now that I have your attention...

I

Have a seat. You already know where the beer and cigars are; help yourself. Now, lemme tell ya a story; true story, as it happens.

Once upon a time, in the dim mists of antiquity, which is to say, circa 1992, a US Army infantry captain was drinking whiskey while sitting on the front porch of his wife’s family’s house on their ranch in Panama. The ranch was sufficiently remote that, while it’s not exactly the middle of nowhere, you can see the middle of nowhere from there – said true middle of nowhere being just about a half a mile down the road.

This captain was on terminal leave, between leaving the Army and entering law school. Between watching the grass grow, watching the cows and horses eat it, etc., having not a damned thing to read in his own language, and – of course – the whiskey, the captain had a lot of time and opportunity to think. Among the things he thought about were the changes coming to the Army – and, by the way, he still had, and has, a great emotional attachment to the Army, and especially to the infantry – and how much he wasn’t going to like them and, indeed, wouldn’t have liked them had he stayed in. One of the things he didn’t much like was the set of changes – if you had asked him he’d certainly have called those changes “decay” – resulting from the large scale presence of women in the Army.

Oh, sure, he knew some good ones. Indeed, he knew one MP lieutenant whom he’d gladly have taken on as a rifle platoon leader in the first company he’d commanded. Hell, for that matter, he’d at least have considered firing any of the lieutenants he’d had at the time to make room for her.

*****

A brief digression, here: that MP lieutenant is a more important part of the story than she likely knows. See, this captain and that lieutenant – Kat Miller’s her name – had served together previously, in Panama, without being remotely aware of each other’s existence. She was an enlisted MP on the Pacific side of the Canal; he an infantry buck sergeant on the Atlantic side. His only recollection of her there is having seen her standing gate guard once at Rodman Ammunition Supply Point.

The captain actually became aware of her existence at the National Training Center and was somewhat impressed. Then, some months later, in Egypt, during Bright Star 85, he got to observe her a bit more closely. And he’d been very impressed. Indeed, he’d been so impressed he didn’t really trust what he was seeing. So, sneaky bastard that he was, he took to walking the perimeter at night, chatting with the MPs of Lieutenant Miller’s platoon.

Yup, they worshipped the ground she walked on. And, though she was quite good looking, they didn’t worship her especially because she was good looking, but because she was good. That doesn’t mean that her men – being brainless, as most young men are, most of the time – weren’t affected by it. But it wasn’t the primary factor.

So he told her so, on the dusty street of an old abandoned RAF base north of Cairo. The conversation went something like this.

“Lieutenant Miller.”

“Sir?”

“For what I am about to say, you may report me to Equal Opportunity. Nonetheless, it must be said. I have been an observer of women officers for some time, and you are –”

“Sir, don’t worry about it. I have my own opinion of most female officers.”

“Okay. Well, in any case, you are the first and, so far, the only woman officer I have found to be worthy of commission, in any branch. I don’t think most men holding a commission are worthy, either. For whatever that may be worth to you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

*****

On the whole, though, and more because of the baleful influence of radical egalitarian feminism and its demands for appearances over reality and form over substance, he thought introducing large numbers of women soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines had been a mistake. Miller was an illustration of what perhaps could be, not what was.

Ah, but at least they weren’t in his beloved infantry, since few or none were quite as admirable as Lieutenant (later Colonel) Kat Miller.

Amidst his reveries, one of the things that occurred to this captain – sitting there, sipping whiskey, half a mile from the middle of nowhere – was that, if an angel of the Lord were to descend and announce that women would never be allowed into the Army’s infantry, and all it would cost would be the captain’s life, he wouldn’t have even asked the manner of his death.

Since the skies didn’t open, nor such an angel descend, he decided to do the next best thing within his power. He was going to write a book on the subject.

II

If you haven’t figured it out yet, the captain was me. And, whiskey’s influence at the moment or no, I was deadly serious about writing that book. That said, it wasn’t a momentary decision. It had been building for many years.

My first assignment – after leaving Fort Polk, LA, where I did initial entry training, more specifically, OSUT – was to Company D-2nd Battalion, 502nd Infantry, with the 101st on Fort Campbell, Kentucky. At that time, the WAC, or Women’s Army Corps, barracks for Fort Campbell were behind my own company’s. Despite proximity, we didn’t have much, anything really, to do with the WACs. They were, for all practical purposes, fillers, who worked for organizations to which they didn’t belong, none of those organizations being infantry. They didn’t go to the field much, if at all, while we mostly lived there, for certain highly constrained values of “lived.” Misery wears a Screaming Eagle patch.

In any case, we didn’t have much to do with each other, the WACs and the grunts. We observed them. Maybe they observed us, too; I don’t know. One thing I, and the rest of my company, observed, en masse, was a young WAC, middling cute, actually, sitting on the front steps and pleading with what I believe to have been her (male) First Sergeant. Why she had a male first shirt I don’t know, either. I do know she was pleading for something, and that he was firmly shaking his head “no.” Unfazed, she kept it up until finally, tossing his arms in the air, he agreed. I know, too, that the next Thursday evening we saw her, trundling her sleeping bag to a waiting car, driven by a male. Someone down to the left end of the formation announced, “Well, now we know what she was begging for.”

We didn’t really know, of course, though it was a fair guess that what she’d asked for was a three or four day pass to spend with her boyfriend and what her first sergeant had done was give it to her, even though he apparently didn’t think he should. We did know, however, that her particular technique would not have worked for us, with our top sergeant, Jack “the Rack” Rackley. He’d have given us the stub of his middle finger, the rest having been shot off, and sent us on our way, quite possibly with extra duty for wasting his time. We were not, and I am not, nearly so certain that her technique wouldn’t have worked with Rackley, for her.

*****

Fast forward about ten years. For my many, oh, many, sins, though an infantry officer, I am serving as a logistics weenie, pending taking over a rifle company. I am in charge of the Port Support Package, in Alexandria, Egypt, during that same Bright Star I’ve already mentioned. The Women’s Army Corps is gone; gender integration reigns. This is my first experience of women soldiers, at any real proximity, and I am not impressed.

I am about to let my troops – none of whom were really mine except for the exercise – take a richly deserved day off in this, Party Central of the Islamic world. Naturally, being somewhat educated about the Islamic world, I fall them in for an inspection of their go-to-town clothes. Everything is fine, until I get to the two women in the group. I get to them, standing side by side. I look up. I look down. I look up and over; I look down. I count, Yup, four jugs, four nipples. Then I look up again and order, “Both of you, go put on bras.”

And they, in a way remarkably similar to that WAC on Fort Campbell with her first sergeant, proceed to attempt to argue the subject with me. The conversation, which quickly becomes entirely one way, goes like this:

“Shut the fuck up and listen. This is a Moslem city. You will start a riot if you go out in public like that. But that doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that I am a fucking captain, you are fucking privates, and you will fucking well do what I fucking well say and go put on your fucking bras.”

That worked, of course, but it shouldn’t have been necessary.

Note that the two girls came back, to apologize, a couple of days later, after another American female was sexually assaulted in an elevator. The apology, while certainly sincere, was misdirected. They felt they’d been rude, as if to an equal, and unwise. The idea that their wrong was in being ill-disciplined was, as far as I could tell, completely alien to them.

*****

Fast forward another four years. I’ve commanded two companies by now, a mechanized infantry company and a mechanized infantry battalion’s headquarters and headquarters company, and am looking for a third. Fun times are over for a while and I am out of the line, working on a brigade staff for Army Recruiting Command, AKA USAREC. Eventually, I am able to escape staff and command a recruiting company.

USAREC is the first assignment where I am working with women, in large numbers, day in, day out. As far as being recruiters for the Army goes, I have no complaints. They’re as good as anybody. However, this does not mean that there are no problems. Suffice to say that, in Recruiting Command, fraternization is normal and sleeping with subordinates quite unremarkable. No, I didn’t, though the offer was there from time to time. It’s not good for discipline, doncha know.

A book comes out, Weak Link: The Feminization of the American Military, by a former infantry officer, Brian Mitchell. It’s a pretty fair compendium of all the problems associated with large numbers of women in the military, as well as a fair bibliography of opinions, both pro and con, on the matter. It is not, however, without flaws. One of these is a question at the macro level: Can we afford to lose a substantial number of women – the bottleneck in the production of the next generation’s cannon fodder – in war? Mitchell ignored the question, though it is, absent invention of an artificial womb, in fact, pretty damned important.

The other concerns an incident that took place in South Korea, in 1976, where, with war seemingly impending, and the commanding general having ordered everyone to their battle positions and assembly areas, large numbers of women take to their heels, or show up for duty with children in tow, and no small number of males kiss off their duty to ensure their girlfriends are safe.

I ask one of the female master sergeants, there at headquarters at 5th Recruiting Brigade, one who had been in Korea at the time, about the incident: “Is this true?” It was. However, while true, the incident is misleading. “Sir, we were still WACs. We weren’t trained to fight. They barely let us even look at weapons. Nobody had ever said fighting was expected of us. Hell, Congress had ruled we were not to fight. What kind of general outranks the United States Congress?”

“Good point,” I agree.

*****

That incident in Korea isn’t the only misleading thing with some bearing on the subject. A movie comes out while I’m with USAREC, Glory, concerning the raising, training, and early combat actions of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, one of the state’s two free – that’s important – black regiments raised for the Civil War. It’s a good movie, in most respects. But it fosters a couple of half truths which, like most half truths, are wholly misleading.

In the first place, the 54th was not a regiment of runaway slaves. Oh, there are some; men who escaped – self-selecting, like William Carney, as they did – at a time when escape was quite difficult and very dangerous. Most of the men of the 54th, however, were born free. Some, indeed, were born free in Canada. Company G, for example, was recruited in Toronto and came south to fight.

What difference does that make? It makes a vast difference. If one were to peruse the accomplishments of the black regiments in the Civil War, one wouldn’t find much to commend or condemn among the regiments composed of freedmen. Oh, they were important to the war effort, but not for fighting so much as for labor, and to guard behind the lines. The couple of occasions they were given the chance to shine, notably at the Petersburg Crater, circumstances, to include some incredibly stupid decisions, tended to screw them.

So the best we can say of the freedmen regiments is that we don’t know. That said, it would be a very surprising thing – an unconscionable defense of slavery, really – to suggest that having been enslaved didn’t do bad things to one’s character, didn’t set one in the mind of being inferior, didn’t strike at one’s self confidence and morale at the very core.

The good regiments, conversely, 54th and 55th Massachusetts, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Louisiana Native Guard, 1st and 2nd Kansas Colored, 20th USCT...some few others...were by and large free born. They did well, fought well, and, in disproportionately large numbers, died well. But they had never, in the main, been subjected to the literal degradation and decay of slavery while, for that fraction which had, they had either self-selected for sheer obstinate courage or could draw considerable moral support from those who had or who had been born free.

And then there’s the other thing that annoyed me about the movie, that scene where the men of the 54th – explicitly, if wrongly, portrayed as runaway slaves – are issued their first uniforms and everything changes in an instant from disorder, indiscipline, and general raggedness to precision, as if the mere symbol could change the reality.

The very idea is nonsense. One doesn’t overcome a lifetime’s conditioning with a symbol. No, not even if you desperately want to. No, not even if you can convince a court and legislature that your fantasy must be given wing. It just doesn’t work like that.

*****

Fast forward another year. Saddam Hussein, UHBP, has come through for me. I am getting sick of USAREC and he, stout and helpful fellow that he is, has invaded Kuwait. I am on the phone within hours to my branch manager. Within a day or so I have orders to go to Fort Bragg. I am, so I am told, the only captain to escape from USAREC for the First Gulf War. Yes, yes, it’s as an ad hoc Civil Affairs bubba, but, as the chaplain in Vietnam once prayed, “We thank Thee for this war, O Lord, fully mindful that while it is not the best of all possible wars, it is better than no war at all.”

While over in the Gulf, first in Saudi Arabia, then in Kurdistan, and for reasons completely incomprehensible to me, three different females – all quite cute, and I mean really cute, not “Saudi cute”– develop what appear to be crushes on me. Look, I said it was incomprehensible, didn’t I? One is an Air Force enlisted woman, one an Army Medical Service Corps lieutenant, one an Army Reserve engineer captain in a reserve Civil Affairs unit. No, I’m not wearing a wedding ring, but that’s because I would prefer not to have a finger torn off, as one of my sergeants did in my second command. I go out of my way to make clear I am married. The Air Force girl backs off. The second lieutenant gets angry, largely because of the stupid way I handled her. The captain couldn’t care less that I’m married, and she’s married, too.

The point, though, is that none of them should have been interested. Yet, as the wise man said, “Eros mocks Mars.” Hey, at least I didn’t go through with it with any of them, though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted. And, just as they shouldn’t have been interested, I shouldn’t have been tempted. Yet I was. (Yes, ladies, should any of you actually read this; I was tempted.)

In any case, I didn’t, unlike the (married) reserve Civil Affairs captain who was screwing the (married) buck sergeant with the impressive chest in the 24th Infantry Division’s Inspector General shop. Well...actually they were apparently screwing out in the sand dunes, but you get the idea. And at least they were keeping it within the Army family, so to speak, unlike the (married) Navy girl with the Dolly Parton silhouette who was caught boffing the British Marine on a pile of camouflage nets in a tent at the base by the Turkish-Iraqi border.

Let me say it again, because it’s important: “Eros mocks Mars.”

*****

My last duty position in the Regular Army is as the Adjutant – in semi-civilian-speak that would be personnel management officer – for the 96th CA. The office is a mess. There’s a three year backlog of paperwork. Yes, literally three years. It takes months to get through it and get caught up. In the process of doing so, I find in my desk the record of an investigation dating to some not-very-distant time prior. I don’t know if every charge in it went to court-martial, though some did.

One of the subjects of the investigation is a young female non-com. Her (married) first sergeant, on a deployment to Honduras, if memory serves, made her a simple and straightforward offer: Blow jobs for good NCOERs. This sounded fair to her. In her words, in her sworn statement: “I need good NCOERs.”

Brother, sister, Eros mocks Mars? Hah! Eros makes Mars his bitch. And to quote somebody or other, “A ring plugs no holes.”

And then I left the Regular Army and headed for law school by way of Panama, which brings us back through that porch a half mile from the middle of nowhere, and my determination to write a book that would at least keep women out of the infantry, the armor, the combat engineers, and the artillery, of all varieties.

III

Lest my reader be in any doubt at this point, as far as generally permitting women in the combat arms goes, when I began my little project I was, as they say, “Agin it.” The one exception was just that, exceptional, and not worth what would have followed, based on everything that I had seen to date concerning large numbers of women in the armed forces: indiscipline, fraternization, de facto prostitution, demoralization, etc., none of which was curable in good part because of the highly politicized coddling of military women emanating from the White House, Congress, Academia, the Media, the Judiciary, all of it egged on by NOW (the National Organization for Upper Middle Class White Women, sic) and DACOWITS (Defense Advisory Committee On Women In The Services).

Hence, my first year of law school, into the issue I – you should pardon the expression – plunged. I spent altogether too much money on books, some of them rather hard to find, altogether too much on the phone, talking to people from PPCLI, The Black Watch of Canada, CFB Petawawa, etc., and a vast amount of – fortunately free; I was a law student, after all – Westlaw and Nexus time, tracking down everything available on the subject.

And discovered a number of interesting things. Chief among these, unsurprisingly, is that feminists writing on the subject were worse than clueless. They couldn’t even grasp what they didn’t know. Got a less than credible myth on women in combat? Nay, sister; that myth – since it supports the agenda – is now Pravda.

This, by the way, was not restricted to feminists without any military background. Oh, no; some of the military feminists were among the worst of the lot. Example: The late Major General Jeanne Holm, in her Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution, warmly cited an incident during the First Gulf War, wherein some Iraqi POW, safely disarmed and behind wire, calls a female MP guarding him, “bitch,” to which she responds, “prisoner.” The incident purports to show women as capable of doing anything a male soldier could. How the general came to the conclusion that guarding a prisoner someone else has captured and disarmed is equal to that capture and disarming is left begging. Was she so ignorant she didn’t know the difference? Did she assume her audience was so ignorant they wouldn’t know the difference, so long as it fit the agenda? Inquiring minds would like to know. Sadly, my ouija board is down for calibration. We can be sure, however, that ignorance and an agenda fit in there somewhere.

As an aside, sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. I should have expected such nonsense when the very determined-looking young woman gracing the cover didn’t know enough to adjust her helmet’s chin strap properly, while apparently neither Holm nor her publisher knew any better, either.

That kind of ignorance – bad analogies, especially – was something of a theme running through feminist writings on the subject. Sometimes it was tacitly equating a doctor with an infantryman. Sometimes it was holding up a spy as an exemplar of women combatants. Bonnie Tsui’s She Went to the Field was a particularly egregious example of this.

Sure, there are risks to both standing the line and gathering the intelligence, but they are not the same risks either in quality or intensity, nor are the moral factors required all that similar, being individual on the one hand, and collective on the other. Sometimes, in an exercise of ignorance incarnate, it was things like pretending that Dr. Mary Walker deserved her later revoked Medal of Honor, or that Jiminy Peanut, the nation’s worst ex-president, reinstated it because she deserved it. Or accepting at face value – never answering or even raising the question of likelihood – every cross-dressing tale out there, especially the thoroughly disproven literary fantasies of “Lucy Brewer,” pseudo girl Marine.

Cross-dressing women combatants? Oh, it’s just barely credible that it might have happened, somewhere. Questions like how she managed to hide her sex, especially how she managed to hide her sex during her period, never seem to get answered. Even so, accepting, purely arguendo, that it happened, guess what? It says absolutely nothing – zero, zip, zilch, nada – about the prospects for gender integration because a woman who has actually been successful in hiding her sex has also, thereby, removed herself from the pool of visible, prospective romantic interests. What kind of mental-logical deficiency leads people to think that a hidden woman stands in the same position as an open one? I confess, this baffles me.

Or... But if I go on, I’ll no doubt be accused of misogyny. I’m not sure why; there are plenty of men just as ignorant about the subject, and just as insistent that their ignorance is wisdom.

Though, speaking of misogyny, there are those feminist pacifists, who made and make no bones about their reasons for wanting women integrated throughout the combat arms. They – if only implicitly – think it would either reduce American ability to wage war or, at least, make the military more humane, less masculine, and less warlike.

Is it possible they know what they’re talking about or suggesting? No, it isn’t just possible; it is certain that this would be the result if these pacifist women – aided and abetted by a craven political class, an ignorant and arrogant judiciary, and some morally cowardly flag officers (that means morally cowardly generals and admirals; Lord, forgive us our redundancies) – were able to have the introduction of women into the combat arms done their way.

Something herstorians (sic) trot out regularly (illustrating thereby their own intense lack of fitness to comment) are the examples of royalty – Vietnam’s Trung sisters, Queen Teuta of Illyria, Elizabeth I of England – and female political chiefs – Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi, for example.

How valid are examples like those? Not too very. They do show something about the intense devotion a female chief can inspire in her male followers, true. And that’s about it.

Royal and politically highly placed women are above the ruck and muck, you see; so elevated that romance and sex – even where these women don’t fall under what we might well call the “mom factor,” men’s natural devotion and obedience to mother figures – are more or less unthinkable to the rank and file. Such women are, in the nature of their positions, not integrated, even in the rare cases where they’re not past the age to inspire romantic leanings in others. That said, both the Trungs and Teuta are examples of feminists ignoring the rest of the story where convenient; they may know about and cite to these women, noting in particular Teuta’s defiance of Rome. They won’t usually tell anyone that the Trungs were defeated and committed suicide, or that Teuta’s fate was defeat in war followed by dismemberment of her kingdom, along with a hefty punitive tribute to Rome.

IV

Ah. So after all this research, old Tom has all the ammunition he needs to make a fair argument against women in the combat arms, right?

Ummm...no, actually. Oh, yes, in the course of my researches it became pretty damned obvious that feminists had less than nothing credible to say on the subject. Indeed, their thoughts represented a net diminution of human understanding.Still, I was able to glean a few, more or less misty and occasionally hidden, truths. Some of these were women specific. Others, a bit more expansively, concerned the integration of sexually compatible people, male or female, heterosexual or otherwise.

The first of these, and the really important one, was that it had been done, repeatedly, if rarely, though never successfully in a way that modern progressive sensibilities would approve of, were modern progressives to look at and admit the details.

The details? Consider Joan of Arc, for example. Brave? Yes. Inspiring? No doubt. Effective? Enough, surely, to make the English want to see her burn. Proof positive of the ease of integration of men and women in combat units? Not a bit of it.

You see, Saint Joan wasn’t just a girl nominally leading an army. Oh, no. Recall her other name? Sure you do; she was called the “Maid of Orleans.” That’s right: Maid...virgin...unsexed, elevated above all that by sanctity and fanaticism...untouchable and untouched. Joan says nothing about integration of sexually compatible people; she addresses only the possibility of integration where love, lust, sex, romance, favoritism, and de facto prostitution (“I need good NCOERs”) are or can be made non-issues.

Elevation of a potential sexual partner and love interest into the sacred realm of the untouchable is one way – sometimes – to put an end to personal love, lust, sex, romance, favoritism, and de facto prostitution. Marriage has been another, though – remembering that female sergeant and reserve captain (have I mentioned that I’d gladly have commanded a firing squad to shoot the son of a bitch? Her, too, since the husband she was cheating on was also a soldier), out in the sand dunes by Nairiyah, Saudi Arabia – not a foolproof one. Marriage without proximity tends to fail more often.

Still, with proximity, it has been done.

This is from memory, old memory, so it may be off in some of the details. Somewhere in the bowels of Building 4, Fort Benning, GA, there is, or was, a collection of forty or so thin volumes covering German experiences on the Eastern Front in World War Two. One of these, one I ran across in the Spring of 1984, concerned a Russian heavy tank, more or less isolated behind German lines, circa November, 1941, that managed to trundle up to a crossroads through which the supplies for an entire army of some eleven German divisions had to pass. Over a period of three days the Germans tried repeatedly to destroy the thing, since that army was going nowhere fast until its supply lines were secure. Their own tanks, underarmored and outgunned, just weren’t up to it. A night attack by engineers wasn’t quite successful. Finally, they were able to do so by distracting the crew and maneuvering an anti-aircraft gun to shoot the thing in its more lightly armored ass. Three of the four crew were killed. The one survivor was a woman, as was one of the dead. The other two dead were their husbands. In all, they were their regiment’s political commissar, his assistant, and their wives.

Note some of the interesting features and parallels here. They were a political crew, hence probably fanatical, transcendentally motivated, as was Joan. Sex, rather than being an impossibility, was a given, but equally sexual and romantic competition was a non-factor, a given, given their married status. They were a tank crew, hence danger was about equal, while jobs were distinct, so there was little room for the play of favoritism. And the couples were physically close enough for the marriages to be real and effective.

Similarly, there was ancient Thebes’ (the Greek one, not the Egyptian) Sacred Band, which I mention in the book and, in effect, recreate in the book. The Sacred Band was composed of gay lovers, in pair bonds. You want to know who destroyed Sparta’s hegemony over ancient Hellas? You know, Sparta? 300? “Here obedient to their laws we lie,” Sparta? Nightmarish apartheid state Sparta? Yeah, three hundred gay guys, which is also to say three hundred sexually compatible people, leading Epaminondas’ main effort, on the left, at Leuctra, 371 BC.

But, again, the details are instructive. Yes, they were three hundred sexually compatible people but, like that Russian tank crew, they were effectively married and close enough in space for the quasi marriages to be effective. Marriage? I think so, in effect. Men weren’t allowed into the unit except in dyads. And seriously, if a wedding ring means something, what does it mean when two people chain themselves together at the waist before going into battle, as at least one account I’ve read about the Sacred Band claimed? That, boys and girls, is commitment. “Together we conquer or together we die.” So – as with that tank crew – romance, lust, love, and sex were preemptively taken care of, not subjects of competition.

Even so, the parallel only carries one so far. Favoritism? In a glory-driven military culture – which is to say, one not a whole helluva lot like our culture – favoritism was being posted at the point of greatest danger. Fatigue work? They had slaves for that. Promotions? They didn’t have chains of command or ranks quite the way we do; their fighting style was just too simple to require a complex chain of command.

Sadly, the most we can say from these examples is that sexually compatible people have been successfully integrated if, and only if, love, lust, sex, romance, favoritism and de facto prostitution can be made military non-factors.

This is not something that can be done by decree, however. Laws and rules? No. I once met a wise sergeant, at the USDB at Fort Leavenworth, trying to explain how female prisoners still managed to get pregnant. Holding his hands palms inward, about six inches apart, he said, “Deterrence always seems to fail by about this much.” Indeed, an Assistant Inspector General of the Army, one Major General – later reduced to brigadier general; what a travesty! – David Hale, used his position to seduce – though morally it was a lot closer to rape and the filthy swine should have hanged by the neck until dead for it – the wives of his subordinates. Get that? The number two man in the IG? You know; the IG? The people who are supposed to enforce the rules? Yeah; when some idjit trots out the armed forces “incredible ability to control behavior and change values,” just tune that person out; they’re too stupid and ignorant to be entitled to an opinion.

Perhaps I should say it again: “Eros makes Mars his bitch.”

Where rules, regulations, and laws fail, however, structure can sometimes succeed. It did with the Sacred Band. It did with that Russki tank crew. It did with the 54th Massachusetts. And it also has with women.

The first of these, in approximately modern times, were the female regiments of the Kingdom of Dahomey. Although possibly tainted with a touch of shocked gentlemanliness, the record from the French, who crushed them, is still pretty clear. Those women fought. They didn’t win; they didn’t even get a decent exchange ratio. Still, they fought and that’s the important thing.

Then, in the Great War, there was Maria Bochkareva’s somewhat tackily named “Women’s Battalion of Death.” There were other Russian all female formations, but that was probably the only one of note. Discipline was fierce, with roughly 85 percent attrition before ever leaving for the front. Fierce discipline? I recall reading one anecdote in which Bochkareva supposedly came upon one of her women making the beast with two backs with a male soldier from a nearby regiment. She pinned the two of them to the ground. Bodily. With a bayoneted rifle. In any case, Bochkareva’s battalion did go to the front, did participate in combat, briefly, and apparently did do reasonably well.

Then there were a couple of Viet Cong companies mentioned by SGM (Ret.) Dan Cragg and LTC (Ret.) Michael Lanning in their Inside the VC and NVA. Yes, all female. And, again, they did reasonably well until attrition and wastage wore them out.

So, from Bochkareva to Victoria Charlene, we can say with at least some confidence that ground combat units composed entirely of women can do at least reasonably well.

V

Integration is, of course, the really big bugaboo. Everything’s, everyone’s, got to be integrated. After all, it worked with whites and blacks in the armed forces; why not with everyone?

In the first place, no, sadly, it hasn’t worked all that well. Oh, sure, in the infantry, the armor, combat engineers, artillery, and such it’s worked reasonably well. Not perfectly, no, but reasonably well. In other branches? Branches that do not have the same kinds of stress applied in living and training? Nah. They’ll work together, different ethnicities. But become true friends and comrades? That’s a lot less common. It’s actually kind of rare, in peace, though the current campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan may have helped some.

On the other hand, if it has worked all that well, why do we still need a large and intrusive race relations (the name changes, that term – expanded for women – covers the idea in the plain) bureaucracy? Why set aside days, weeks, and months for this minority heritage or that? Why regular requirement for nag sessions? Why preferential promotions? Quotas? (Oh, yes, we do.)

That’s simple; it hasn’t worked all that well. It’s better now than when I was a private, where the company I was in had organized, dues paying, membership drive holding chapters of the Black Panthers and the KKK, this quite despite monthly nagging sessions from the race relations bureaucrats. Mind you, that was shortly after Vietnam and the entire Army was in appalling shape.

Remember what I said about ignoring history where inconvenient? It’s interesting, isn’t it, that in trying to equate racial integration with gender and gender-orientation integration, people in favor of the latter ignore the history of military racial integration. Where did it really start in any useful way? Go back again to the Civil War regiment I mentioned above, the 54th Massachusetts, which wasn’t the first black regiment, but was the first that mattered. Right; that was, in the rank and file, a segregated regiment, rather like old Thebes Sacred Band.

Now imagine the 54th charging up the glacis of Battery Wagner if it had been integrated in accordance with thoroughly enlightened sentiments. Imagine it composed of a mix of people who really didn’t much like each other, had very little in common, and weren’t all that enlightened, anyway. Imagine it failing miserably – white and black, nicely integrated and all together in utter disgrace. Imagine that failure setting back the cause of racial integration and equal rights by a century or two. “It isn’t hard to do-oo...”

And when we did integrate? Brother, sister, we were lucky, lucky in having some hard core corps of thoroughly professional and dedicated black officers and especially non-coms who came up via the Regular Army’s four traditional black regiments. If you want to know why it ultimately worked, to the extent it has, look at the whole history; look to the foundations that were laid from 1863 to 1948.

Of course, that will never do. The integration über alles crowd, like a mass of whining spoiled brats, will cry, “But I want it nowww!” Which is approximately as realistic as, and even less responsible than, Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Was racial integration ultimately worth it? Yes, despite the costs we paid and, to some extent, continue to pay. American blacks represented too large a manpower pool to ignore, and too large a talent pool to misallocate, while there were serious problems with providing their units with officers, in the segregated army, whenever that army had to expand for a major war.

Is gender and gender-orientation integration in combat arms worth it? Certainly not to the armed forces. Even if we could overcome love, lust, romance, sex, favoritism, and de facto prostitution – something I find most unlikely – I’d still have to say, “No.” The numbers are simply too small, while the intrusions of the EO (Equal Opportunity, the bureaucratic successor in interest to “Race Relations”) will be just as grand.

“But why can’t we? Waaah! That’s not fair! Waaah...I want it nowww! It’s not faiaiairrr! ”

Simple; we could overcome, to a degree, racism because it is at least mostly learned behavior and what can be learned can be unlearned. Sexual attraction is not, at least mostly, learned behavior, but innate and will never be unlearned. Again, go ahead and hold your hands palms inward about six inches apart, and repeat to yourself, “Deterrence always seems to fail by about this much. Deterrence always seems to fail by about this much. Deterrence always seems to fail...”

Besides their fixation with laws, rules, and regulations, the gender and gender-orientation integration crowd simply starts with a fundamentally fraudulent assumption. This is that the only real problem with these things is intolerance, and all that is required is to educate those wretched straight white males and everything will be just peaches and cream. “After all, it worked with integrating blacks.”

Well, sure, if you’re mindless enough to think that straight white male (or just straight male) intolerance is the only possible problem, then that makes perfect sense. But, to quote somebody or other, “Well, it ain’t, see?”

In the first place, racism, intolerance, bigotry, etc. are – again – learned behaviors. But childhood, the home, the school, the neighborhood are not the only places to learn them. You can also learn them from assholes, especially to include bigoted assholes, of which every group has its fair share. Yet another good place to learn them is from the simpleminded nagging you will endure at mandatory EO sessions. Anecdotally, I always found that racial intolerance was at its highest following one of those. I’ve no particularly good reason to believe that it would be any different if oriented toward gender and gender-orientation bigotry.

Let me state that a little more plainly: As near as I can tell, racial tolerance in the armed forces has improved since Vietnam despite, not because of, the race relations and EO programs inflicted on us.

In any case, the whole “we can easily integrate genders and gender-orientations because we integrated races” meme is nonsense. The two issues have little or no similarity, even if some lack the imagination and intelligence to see the differences. Which, as mentioned, they do, since they can’t see past the “straight [usually white, but sometimes just straight] males are to blame for everything” meme.

What, after all, are the similarities? Let’s see; males learned to despise females, in the home, from their mothers? Uhhh...no. Men don’t like women? Uhhh...no. Men and women are about equally strong, physically, as blacks and whites are, and thus any woman can do any job any man can do? Oh, puhleeze!

And then there are the thoughtless, sometimes fraudulent, similarities sometimes claimed. You know: “There’s no difference between Captain X favoring the girl (or guy, if he swings that way, or girl, if she swings that way) he’s sleeping with on the sly and Captain Y, the born-again Christian, favoring his Baptist buddies.” And there’s no difference between liking and loving, or disliking and hating? Again, puhleeze!

And that’s the very short, one over the world, version of what I found in researching and what my own experiences told me. Sadly, that truncated version barely scratches the surface. You’ll get that when you try to compress an eighty or ninety thousand word book that you wrote eighteen years previous – and can’t find a copy of – into something under ten thousand.

I see, for example, that I haven’t mentioned Soviet female snipers, who existed, no doubt of that, though we may perhaps discount their kill records to some degree as being wartime propaganda. They’re also not a very good example of integration, since in battle they shifted locations frequently, operating in support of, but not generally as a part of, the forward units. In other words, their chain of command was different. So even if romance kicked in, it was displaced in time and space.

VI

But how to do it? It’s a toughie. We’ve not only got the problems I’ve been harping on, ranging from love, lust, sex, romance, favoritism, and de facto prostitution to the distractions imposed by the EO bureaucrats; we’ve got practical problems, both physical and moral.

I took, and take, considerable personal pride in being able to figure out how to do pretty much anything organization and training related. So, once I found there was just enough historic backing for the notion of women in combat units, I began listing the problems. You can’t deal with or fix a problem, if you don’t know and admit it exists.

What are the problems? I’ve mentioned or alluded to a number of them above, but below is a somewhat truncated list, in no particular order:

1. Physical strength.

2. Women are too rational to be manipulated and led the way young men are.

3. Things that currently work to motivate young men will no longer do so in the presence of women.

4. Pregnancy.

5. Children, with the woman having custody. (And there’s a fine example of the truly heroic levels of dishonesty within DoD. Yes, there are many, many single male parents. Few of them have custody, so in few cases does it matter to the military. Women are also single parents, and usually have custody. This is a not insignificant problem within DoD. Right, that means there is no comparison between the two, though the PC clowns at DoD will try to equate them. Lying sacks of shit!)

6. Fraternization, favoritism, and de facto prostitution, with resultant demoralization, not only of men, but of less sexually desirable women.

7. Malingering. (Yes, too many military women do malinger. Men would, too, if they could get away with it. Women are allowed to, especially via pregnancy. Men, usually, are not, and, of course, never for pregnancy. It is men that allow women to malinger, and male physical labor that covers it up.)

8. Field sanitation. (Yes, women have a little problem there that men do not.)

9. Lack of certain training opportunities for women.

10. Lack of experienced female combat leaders.

11. The baleful influence of the EO Fascisti.

12. Sexual harassment / complaints. (Have I mentioned yet that I was once privileged – if that’s quite the word – to hear half a dozen Air Force females comparing notes on how to set their male bosses up for this, so as to make life easier for themselves? Did I mention that the Air Force did a study which determined that about two-thirds of sexual harassment and, IIRC, rape complaints within USAF were purely and completely spurious? The study appears to have slipped down the memory hole. Yet it was done.)

13. Special arms and equipment required by, or useful to, women.

14. Straight males can’t be trusted to train them.

15. Unwillingness of men from some cultures (Islamic, notably) to either give way before or surrender to women. “Oh, that’s their problem.” Ummm...no; and someone who claims it is only demonstrating their own ignorance. When it drives up our casualties and gives the enemy a moral shot in the arm, it’s our problem. It might not be a problem for the ignorant PC clowns who won’t be out there soaking up unnecessary casualties, but it will be for the PBIs, male and female, who are.

16. Woman as the bottleneck in the production of the next generation’s machine gun fodder.

17. The tendency, historically demonstrated, for men to forget the mission and charge to the rescue if their female comrades are at risk.

18. Rape of captured women.

19. Greater difficulty in committing combat forces if they include women. (Yes, some feminists think that’s a good thing. See, e.g., Professor Maria Lepowsky’s testimony before the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, circa 1992.)

20. Hard wired differences that may – we just don’t know – make women unsuitable for combat to the extent that they are typical women.

A portion of those are really pretty easy to fix. Just toss gender integration. If putting straight men and women together, along with gays and lesbians, in the same units leads to “sexual tension” (that, by the way, is a silly-assed euphemism for the distraction caused by love, lust, sex, romance, favoritism, and de facto prostitution; it’s silly-assed because it addresses a mere fraction of the problem, thereby hiding the rest), then we ought to be able to eliminate it by not putting them together. That this would outrage the social engineers is gravy. Thus, 3, 6, 11, 12, and 17 are basically solved, while 2, 4, 7, 13, and 19 are at least mitigated.

However, as soon as we do that another set of problems arises, all related to item 1. Women just aren’t that strong, typically. They’re a bit closer to men in lower body strength, but not generally equal, and there’s normally no comparison in upper body strength. Yes, yes, there are women athletes, Olympians, for example, who are tremendously strong. Unfortunately, strength is their lives. It’s what they do, pretty much all the time. When someone can tell us how a woman can build and maintain that kind of strength while still leaving training time for things like marksmanship, field fortification, mines and booby traps, chemical defense, first aid, and any of the thousand-odd other things a modern soldier must know and be able to do, then women Olympians or other female athletes will have some bearing. Until then – and it will never happen – no, they don’t prove a thing.

There’s another touch of ignorance involved, and I’m not quite sure where it comes from. Somehow, some way, a lot of people seem to assume that training ends with basic training. If it were true, plainly we could take a very strong, Olympian, say, woman, basically train her for a couple of months, and that would be that; she would still be strong at the end of her training. Problem solved.

Nah; it doesn’t work that way. Training is continuous. Good, properly trained, troops, in combat units, more or less live in the field. No, not nine to five; Sunday to Saturday, 24/7, sometimes for weeks and months on end. They are moving, shooting, and communicating continuously, with bare scraps of time for sleep and hastily wolfed down meals. And it still isn’t enough.

I’ll phrase that another way. There isn’t time now to train men perfectly in everything they must be able to do while keeping them fit to fight. If women were to be in the infantry, say, and had to spend as much time as they would on physical fitness, just to keep up, they might be strong enough, but they’d also be technically and tactically incompetent.

This is clearly suboptimal. What to do about it? Could we limit female presence in the combat arms to just those very few women who are naturally about as strong as a man? I don’t see that satisfying feminists. Especially do I not see emphasizing natural abilities satisfying leftists and feminists who are convinced that everything, to include bodily strength, is a mere social construct. I do see it bringing to bear all the wretched meddling of the EO Fascisti, and for very little gain to anyone.

How about mechanized infantry, then, where the vehicle does the heavy porting? Unfortunately, the Bradley is practically a tank, in every objective sense. In the Second World War it would have been the most powerful tank out there; a Tiger II or JS-3 wouldn’t have stood a chance. Being practically a tank imposes some problems, notably ammunition upload if not actually firing the gun, and maintenance. Still, there would be at least nine or, since they’re girls, hence smaller on average, maybe eleven or twelve women to do the work. So we’d have to redesign the seats? So what? It’s at least possible that we could create female mechanized infantry and make it work.

Note: The Israelis have a gender-mixed, but mostly female, infantry unit, the Caracal Battalion. I understand it is considered to be second rate within the IDF. It appears to have been raised as a sop to Israeli feminists.How effective it would be is hard to say. And there is little out there on them that isn’t blatant propaganda. I’d be very surprised, assuming Israeli and American men and women are not all that different, if there isn’t quite a lot of fraternization going on, with all the problems that – again, you should pardon the expression – come from that. In any case, so far the battalion’s major operations appear limited to border guard and the 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. I don’t know that either proves much. There is apparently a tendency among the women of the Caracal to treat open lesbians like absolute dirt.

(At this point, Tom turns his eyes Heavenward and muses aloud: “Since the Caracal is a cat, I wonder if colloquial Hebrew has the same word and intent for ‘pussy’ as English does, and, if so, how the men in the battalion take that.”)

“Well, what about putting them in armor, Tom? You did mention that Russki tank crew, after all.”

Nah. The KV-1 I mentioned weighed about forty-five tons and mounted a 76.2mm gun. A round for the 76.2 weighed under fourteen pounds. A modern M-1 Abrams is about fifty percent heavier, which translates to heavy parts, generally. The 120mm shell in the M-1 weighs three to four times more, depending on type of round. And the weight of the new track for the M-1 is simply outrageous, something like seven tons, meaning four people would have to drag three and a half tons when breaking track. It’s possible for four men, if barely. For four women, or two and two? One doubts. In any case, we could try putting women in tanks, but I suspect it would be an exercise in either futility or dishonesty.

More dishonesty? Oh, yeah. Let me give you another example. Back in 1979, the Army conducted the Female Artillery Study. Thirteen hand-picked women, much larger than a male crew, after a considerable program of physical conditioning and technical training, successfully layed, loaded, and fired the 105mm cannon. However, note that the guns were positioned by men; the ammunition was offloaded and broken down by men (have I mentioned that one should never get into a fistfight with artillerymen? They are very freaking strong), in fact, all of the really hard work was done by men. And for the lightest guns we had. Yet this was a “success” purporting to prove that women could serve the big guns. What do you call that but “dishonesty”?

“But the Canadians put women in their Armoured Corps, Tom? Ha, ha; gotcha!”

Uh, no; I checked. Women were – and I believe still are – in their Armoured Corps, but in lighter armored cars; think LAVs, not tanks. And, even there, their tanks – Leopard Is – were a lot lighter than ours, mounting a lighter, 105mm, gun, and lighter track. I understand the Canadians tried, but it just didn’t work out.

“But what about the Israelis?”

Not them, either, except as instructors on the apparent theory – a sound one, I think – that women are just ever so good at shaming men into better performance.

Going back to artillery for a moment, note that both the Canadians and Israelis do have women in their artillery. On the guns, pumping rounds downrange? No, generally not. They do the physically lighter work, FDC, survey, that sort of thing. A few are Forward Observers, as was that Canadian captain killed in Afghanistan. Been there, done that (the FO part, not the KIA part); it’s easier than being a grunt, even despite the radio which she was almost certainly not carrying.

Unfortunately, the total amount of physical work for the battery – and it is immense – hasn’t changed, and the women cannot do an equal share when it becomes necessary – ammo download and breakdown, say – for FDC and everyone else to pitch in. This means more exhausted men. Someday, I predict, shells are going to fall short, and on the wrong people, because of that. Mistakes happen, and they happen more often when people are exhausted.

And you wonder why I detest liberal social engineers?

“Well, then; what about the current campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, you sexist, fascist beast?”

I don’t know. I do know that a couple of women – one MP and one medic – have won well-deserved medals for actions in combat. Note that list of problems. Look for the one that says women won’t be as brave as men. Right; it isn’t in there. I don’t know – and really I don’t think – we’re on very firm ground in assuming men are inherently braver than women, as individuals. We’re probably on much firmer ground in thinking that women who have been coddled and protected, and had men do all the hard parts, may be on average less willing to take courageous, aggressive action.

Sadly, however, it is not the courage of individuals, per se, that usually matters but the courage of groups. I really wouldn’t expect equal group courage from a gender integrated group, in part because the men will coddle the women to the extent they can, and then some. I think it’s at least possible to get as much courage out of a purely female group as a purely male one.

The thing is that, whatever we do, it has to be done well. There is no room for enlightened – which, when discussing war, is code for ignorant – liberal sentiment. A female combat unit may be defeated, with disastrous casualties, as was the 54th MVI at Battery Wagner. They should not be put in a position to be humiliated, like the troops at The Crater. They have to be able to perform in war. It’s not enough that they be able to put on a thin show in peace that the PC crowd can manipulate to try to “prove” a point. War is the place where pious platitudes fall flat. Battle is where legislators and judges have no real positive power. The enemy, however, gets a vote.

But to learn how to do that – because, yes, despite the parade of horribles I’ve written above, I think it can be done – you’re going to have to read the bloody book. Heheheh.

Ah, and I see I left out something important, history of the story-wise. You see, I wrote that original book as nonfiction. In the end, though, I didn’t like it. I’m a pedantic SOB – to say nothing of insensitive – at the best of times. This was only exacerbated by being a law student at the time. It was, by the way, the first book that I ever wrote. Somewhere around here I may still have a copy but where it is...

In any event, I didn’t like it. So I set it aside and worked on a novel that eventually became A Desert Called Peace, Carnifex, and The Lotus Eaters. At that point, I rewrote the book, then still called The Amazon’s Right Breast, as a novel, set in the same universe as the others. I liked that a lot better, well enough to let you all see it. Have fun.

And, so, I will leave you with this thought, from G. K. Chesterton:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

PS: I am really looking forward to the reactions to the book from both hidebound traditionalists and – ahem – enlightened liberals. You see, I gave them both a portion of what they want but, especially in the case of liberals and the PC swine, in the way most carefully guaranteed to offend their sensibilities. The traditionalists get to keep their males-only organizations and the male ethos. But there are still women in there fighting their hearts out. The left gets several things they really want – gay marriage, gays openly serving, women in combat – but without a bit of respect shown to social engineering or integration. This ought to be fun.

PPS: Why the title? Because, while I don’t think the Amazons existed, in fact, I think there is an important moral point to one of the details of the story: To be a combatant a woman is going to have to give up a significant portion of what we think of as femininity, in the case of the Amazons, half their mammaries.

The End

Brains Aflame

Out on the Frontier of Neuroscience with a World-class Researcher

by Tony Daniel

There are whole millennia of human history filled with gibberish spoken about the mind, the soul, the brain, and about what it means to be a conscious person. For science fiction in particular, such speculation seems to be the first and last refuge of the writer with not much to say and it has produced a distinct genre of bellybutton-lint gazing literature over the years. Most of these products (I hesitate to call them books or stories) are about as interesting as having to sit through an inescapable encounter with someone who insists on recounting a particularly random dream to you—that is, they are tales full of logic holes (and therefore not fantasy, which depends on consistent internal logic for the magic to be any fun) and devoid of plausible storylines (and therefore not SF, which lives and breathes plausibility).

In a word, crap.

Which is annoying, because the hard facts about what we know and don’t know about the brain are far more interesting than ungrounded speculation and make far more entertaining stories. What’s more, those facts are getting more interesting almost moment to moment these days.

I talked recently with my friend Dr. Michael D. Devous, Sr., a Dallas-based brain scientist who is a powerhouse researcher in neuroimaging and neuro-pharmacology. Mike is an M.D.-and Ph.D.-bearing professor of radiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, where he’s also the Director of the Neuroimaging Core for the Alzheimer’s Disease Center and of the Neuroimaging Core of the North Texas Traumatic Brain Injury Model System. Mike is also an avid science fiction reader and (one of these days!) an aspiring SF writer.

Neuro-imaging, in particular the advances in the functional MRI devices brain scientists use to see inside of brains, has revolutionized what we know about what lies inside our skulls.

“The hallmark of brain study ten to fifteen years ago was the autopsy,” Mike says. “Now the functional MRI allows me to view brain structure in exquisite detail while you’re still alive. With an MRI, I can watch you go through an entire perception and the associated memory retrieval, identification and emotions associated with that percept in one picture per millisecond intervals. I can literally play back a movie of your having a perception or an emotion or both.”

What Mike sees are networks.

“The brain is not unitary as we usually think of it. The organization of the brain is regionally dependent and the brain is a network of networks operating in a massively parallel manner. From what I can actually see and prove, we are beings who are organized in a bottom-up manner when it comes to cognition.”

Before the coming of advanced MRI techniques, the normal method for attempting to understand brain function was through lesion studies—that is, through studying people with severe head wounds or disease-produced injuries to various regions of the brain. This led to a great deal of talk about “areas of the brain” that are responsible for this or that mental function. Speech was said to be “concentrated” on the left side, and, say, music on the right. What Mike sees is much more interconnection. Brain structures are more like traffic hubs expanding into networks throughout the brain, and not really anything like the “seat” or governor of this or that function or ability.

These networks are remarkably similar among people, but they are not identical.

“There are ten billion nerve cells in an average human brain each branching into about ten thousand connections. A baby is born with many, many more of these connections than an adult. Maturation cuts connections rather than adds them. The technical term is dendritic pruning. One of the things we’ve learned recently is that you can grow more neurons and you can regain a good deal of brain plasticity and functionality. It’s all a matter of creating the proper conditions.”

Case in point: cochlear implants. These devices for the deaf have become extremely common in the past decade, and their sophistication has increased enormously. What started out in the 1990s as a gadget that could only signal “loud” and “soft” sounds to the auditory nerves now allows a huge swath of previously deaf people to hear and understand speech itself. For many deaf children who receive implants before the age of five or six, you really can restore normal hearing with an implant—that is, until the batteries need changing (which fortunately isn’t a difficult procedure).

But there was a class of deaf people for whom the new implants didn’t work. Mike and his team realized that the issue wasn’t the implants or even the nature of the person’s deafness, but was a network issue within the brain.

“The implants were functioning; the brains were receiving the signals. It turns out that real speech is quite bilateral,” Mike says. “When the pre-processing distribution doesn’t work, the brain doesn’t know how to proceed and this is interpreted as silence.”

Mike knew a particular class of drugs that were good at unjamming certain neural pathways: amphetamines. In an experiment that has since become a common treatment, Mike used a targeted dosage of amphetamines to do just that with a group of cochlear implant “failures.” The outcome was dramatic. Many of these people had a fourfold increase in hearing within eight weeks. And, unlike the dopamine-pumped souls in Awakenings for whom neuro-pharmacology was more a fleeting hope than a promise, Mike’s amphetamine-induced hearing gains were permanent.

“Amphetamines stimulate learning. The problem is, you need to take them in the proper environment and in the right amounts,” says Mike. “But I see no reason they might not be used to enhance mental function in the next ten to fifteen years. We’re on the edge of a mix of technology and pharmacology that may be able to enhance normal brain function. I see no fundamental reason why it would be impossible to increase a measure of functionality—say, IQ—by twenty to twenty-five percent in the near future.”

It’s a matter of recreating the environments in which brains learn and grow in ability. With fMRI and other imaging, Mike is able to actually see this happen in real time, and experimentally verify what works and what doesn’t to create or restore neuronal plasticity and brain network complexity.

“Right now I can look at an MRI and tell you, by seeing how certain areas light up and which do not, whether a word you hear is a noun or a verb,” Mike says. “Other people have done studies where they induce temporary emotional trauma—they show pastoral scenes and then flash on a few seconds of, say, a car accident or murder scene—and they have accurately mapped the neuronal state that such experiences produce. Turns out, they’re remarkable similar across humans as a species.”

I asked Mike to look ahead to the near and mid-term future and make a couple of predictions.

“For one thing, I think we’ll cure Alzheimer’s in ten to fifteen years,” he says. “We have to do so, or we’re going to have the mother of all health care crises on our hands. Alzheimer’s accounts for 60 to 75 percent of all dementias and, with the Baby Boom maturing and average lifespans increasing, huge parts of the population are being affected by it. Right now in the economically developed world, half the aging population is going to make it to their late 80s. I expect life expectancy to increase into the 90s and up to 100 years soon, and as we cure and mitigate heart diseases and cancer (which we’ve become very good at doing), we open the way for Alzheimer’s and other cognitive impairments associated with aging.”

There are two apparent culprits in Alzheimer’s. The necessary-for-normal-cell-function protein amyloid is normally broken apart for reuse by a cleaving process in cells. When this system breaks down, a clump of amyloid amino acids is produced known as beta amyloid—and unfortunately beta amyloid is toxic to nerve cells. Another substance known as tau protein used by cells to build their microtubules is also an Alzheimer’s culprit, as overproduction of tau also kills nerve cells.

There are current therapies being feverishly researched to reduce or inhibit beta amyloid production. Dealing with tau overproduction still lies on the research horizon.

“What we can do with functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, is accurately diagnose Alzheimer’s at an early stage. If we develop therapies to reduce or prevent beta amyloid build-up, we’ll then be able to nip the disease in the bud,” Mike says. “I expect that in a few years getting an Alzheimer’s MRI screen at, say, age 50 will be as common and widespread as having your prostate checked or any other age-dependent screening procedure. I fully expect to see diagnosis and treatment in the economically developed world within about fifteen years or so, maybe sooner.”

Mike sees even more change in the mid-range future. “We’re nowhere near getting portable fMRIs at this point or implantable devices that can give you a readout of your brain state. It’s going to be an expensive device for some time. But the imaging research is going to pay off in so many ways, some of them quite soon. I suspect we’ll see enhancement in the military first just because they have more concentrated money to throw at it. And soldiers are expected to undergo more dangerous procedures than civilians. That’s just the way it is.”

Mike thinks that sensory extension interfaces will be the first enhancements that will come along. According to Mike, the military is already working on inducing infrared perception that can be switched on and off in human vision. And implantable communication and auditory-enhancement chips are a logic extension of present-day cochlear implant technology.

“As far as the big bugaboo of using pharmacology to reduce or eliminate inhibitions and thus allow soldiers to kill with more emotional ease—I just don’t see it. For one thing, our inhibitory networks are part and parcel of our frontal lobes. That’s one of the things our frontal lobes do, one of the things that makes us human. If you turn off the inhibition to kill, how do you tell the brain when it’s all right and when it’s not all right to kill? You might have soldiers killing their generals or civilians when they get home. It’s not something that will convey any military advantage. Quite the opposite. I don’t see it happening.”

For the rest of the population, Mike predicts significant gains in cognition in the next few decades.

“There’s a certain form of extreme epilepsy in infants that calls for a hemispherectomy—that is, destroying half of the infant’s brain,” Mike say. “If this isn’t done, the child’s chance of dying is almost one hundred percent. What we’ve seen is that in cases where this was done, the children who then survive turn out to be—normal. By age twelve or so there may be a few tests that show some slight impairment in certain areas, but by and large what you have is a normal child. This fact speaks volumes about what the brain is capable of. Think about it: we can get by fine on half a brain. It’s proven. So there’s obviously a lot that can be done with the structure evolution has given us.”

We might surmise that there’s something special in having a bicameral, dual-hemisphered brain.

Not so much.

“All the talk about people being left-brained and right-brained, about right-brained people being more creative and left-brained people being more analytical is interesting—as talk. It doesn’t really hold up empirically.”

According to Mike, a two-hemisphere brain is common among animals, even some invertebrates, and is probably a reflection of the need for depth perception and three dimensional manipulation for creatures that are bilaterally symmetric.

The secret to human mental ability, says Mike, is the gene that allowed primate brains to begin enfolding. This exponentially upped the amount of surface area of the brain within a given volume. Because of cell mechanics, density can’t really increase, so surface area is where it’s at as far as cognitive function goes in animals.

(Incidentally, according to Mike, the brain-enfolding gene has been introduced in some experimental mice, but the mice babies die in the womb. It seems the super-smart mice of N.I.H.M. still lie in the future. Whew.)

One of the tests of a theory of mind—that is, an understanding of one’s own individuality—is the so-called “dot test” where a bit of paint or rouge is put on a subject’s face and he or she is shown a mirror. If the subject moves to wipe the dot off his or her own face and not the mirror, it’s assumed there’s a level of personal awareness, or at least a facsimile thereof, present in the individual.

“When we see this in birds or other non-mammalian species, it’s very likely something else other than a theory of mind at play,” says Mike. “With birds, it’s a kind of mating behavior, because it goes away immediately when it’s no longer useful for courting. And we can design sophisticated ‘dot tests’ that take into account an animal’s physical make-up. What’s amazing is how extraordinarily few animals exhibit it. Basically some primates, dolphins, and humans. Dogs and cats do not. Pigs might.”

Mike anticipates a combination of technology and drugs that can create environments where learning, say, new skills, or developing abilities that others possess and that we lack might be induced.

“The abilities of what we used to call ‘idiot-savants’ are obviously present in the human brain. These people are born with them or acquire them. But usually these people have to give up some other functionality to support their abilities. What if we made it so you could acquire these abilities, but didn’t have to give up others? We’re learning how to do this through electronics and chemistry. It may seem strange at first, but look at those cochlear implant patients and beyond. All the data suggest that pretty soon you’ll adapt and forget you’re wired. We’re on the edge of a mix that will enhance normal brain function and take people to a different cognitive level. Many people alive today will live to see this happen. And it might well happen to some of us.”

Terraforming Ganymede with Robert A. Heinlein

Part 2

by Gregory Benford

World Making

I grew up, to the extent that I ever have, amid the farmlands of southern Alabama. Farming is hard work. Thinking of growing crops on distant worlds, as Robert A. Heinlein did in several novels, demands hard thinking.

In Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky pioneers on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede create their "soil" from scratch by pulverizing boulders and lava flows. Tough work, but in fact it will be even harder for any future farmers there.

We now know that probably Ganymede never had volcanoes—and if so, they spouted mostly water. The Moon has approximately equal amounts of silicate rock and water ice. It is fully differentiated into layers, with an iron-rich, liquid core like Earth. There may be a saltwater ocean 200 km down, sandwiched between layers of ice. Its dark surface regions, pocked by impact craters from four billion years ago, cover about a third of the surface. More recently made lighter regions, crosscut by long, deep grooves and ridges, cover the remainder. The light terrain most likely comes from tectonic flows driven by tidal heating.

Heinlein didn’t worry about radiation, but we now know he should have. Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System and the only moon with a magnetosphere. Jupiter's magnetic field overshadows it and funnels high-energy protons onto its surface. Ganymede receives about 0.08 Sv (8 rem) of radiation per day. (Sv is the standard derived unit of dose equivalent.) For comparison, the average amount of radiation taken on Earth by a living organism is about 0.024 Sv per year; the highest natural radiation levels on Earth are about 0.26 Sv per year. So without an atmosphere, Ganymede is deadly.

Indeed, the levels of ionizing radiation on the inner moons Io, Europa and Ganymede are hostile to human life. Adequate protective measures are hard, short of burrowing deep under the ice and rock. Callisto is the only one of Jupiter's Galilean satellites for which human exploration is feasible without massive shields.

But with an atmosphere, matters get easier. To have an Earth atmospheric pressure would demand an atmosphere about seven times as deep as ours. How to make it? First, melt the water ice with fusion reactors, and then let UV crack the water into oxygen and hydrogen. Let the hydrogen blow off and keep the oxygen. Add other elements, especially nitrogen, as needed. Let smart biology work on the gases for a while. Then cap the growing atmosphere with a monolayer that traps the gas. That’s a genuinely grandiose project, demanding biotech to grow the filmy layer, and orbiting satellites spooling forth millions of square kilometers of it.

Heinlein’s farmers seed the pulverized dust with carefully formulated organic material. They had no bioteched organisms, apparently because no one imagined those in 1950. We also now know the satellite has a thin oxygen atmosphere that includes O, O_2, and possibly O_3 (ozone). I showed that later in my novel, Jupiter Project, though enhanced by considerable engineering.

Ganymede is the only moon in the Solar System known to possess a magnetosphere, likely created through convection within its liquid iron core. This meager magnetosphere is buried within Jupiter's much larger magnetic field and connected to it through open field lines. But that connection could give birth later to a major energy industry.

Jupiter is similar to a device called a unipolar generator. It generates a vast domain dominated by Jovian magnetic fields (see figures). When Jupiter rotates, its ionized upper atmosphere, the ionosphere, moves relatively to the planet's dipole magnetic field. This makes the poles negatively charged and the regions closer to the equator become positively charged. This has to get balanced, and somewhat weirdly, some of that happens by running currents between the moons and the poles, making a beautiful aurora.

Generally, the incoming solar winds makes the main ovals, which are bright and narrow (less than 1000 km in width) circular features at 16 degrees from the magnetic poles. Ganymede, Europa and Io have satellite auroral spots, the footprints of their magnetic field lines connecting their ionospheres with the ionosphere of Jupiter. It’s a marvelous electrodynamic engine.

Those glowing spots develop because the co-rotation of the plasma is slowed in the vicinity of moons. The brightest spot belongs to Io, which is the main source of the plasma in the magnetosphere. Europa's and Ganymede's spots are much dimmer, because these moons are weaker plasma sources.

Still, a million amperes flows from the top of Ganymede’s atmosphere in a narrow tube of magnetic fields. Io’s is much larger still—one could harness it and beam the energy to Ganymede on microwaves. Imagine harnessing that for the early days when you have few fusion plants -- and of course sunlight is a chilly 1/27 of Earth’s. Heinlein didn’t know of this, and I didn’t either when I wrote Jupiter Project.

With surface gravity of 0.146 g, even less than Luna’s 0.18 g, Ganymede is a light place to live. It’s cold, with a maximum temperature of 152 Kelvin (our room temperature is 300 K). Think of it as like the Arctic, with the Sun a mere small hot dot in the sky. The capped atmosphere could run temperatures up a lot, but not above water’s freezing point. After all, you’re 5.2 times further from the Sun than Earth.

But in that thick atmosphere you can also fly—with an Earth atmosphere pressure, and some extensions on your arms, you can ride updrafts with ease. Heinlein predicted such feats in a wonderful, crisp short story, “The Menace from Earth,” set on Luna--but on Ganymede it’s even easier.

Why Go?

Both Heinlein and those who followed knew that inevitably, as humanity opened the Solar System to exploration and commerce, it would be cheaper in energy to tug small asteroids in from the orbits between Mars and Jupiter than to lift them with mighty rocket engines from Earth. So I began constructing a future history that led to Farmer in the Sky and beyond. I’ll present it here, as in Part 1, as a popular historian would. There we left our colonists with some crunched gravel and grit, but had not really introduced biology. Heinlein didn’t use biotech either—this was around the 1950s, and DNA had barely been discovered. But I have the advantage of sixty years of progress, and have even started some biotech companies myself (Genescient, LifeCode). So I envision how we’ll use that to make a new world…

HELP WANTED: MUTANTS

Any atmosphere can blunt the energy of incoming protons and screen against the still-dangerous Sun’s ultraviolet, but to be breathable, it has to be engineered. Once a tiny fraction of the ice plains were melted into vapor, a greenhouse effect began to take hold. Sunlight striking the ice no longer reflected uselessly back into space; instead, the atmosphere stopped the infrared portion, trapping the heat. Once this began, the fusion-crawlers were a secondary element in the whole big equation.

The fresh ammonia streams and methane-laced vapors were deadly to Earth-based life. A decade after the first fusion-crawler lumbered through a grooved valley, hundreds of them scooped and roared toward Ganymede’s poles, having scraped off a full hundred meters of the ice crust. They had made an atmosphere worth reckoning with. Ice tectonics adjusted to the shifting weight, forcing up mountains of sharp shards, uncovering lodes of meteorites, which in turn provided fresh manufacturing ore for yet more fusion-crawlers.

The first rains fell. A slight mist of virulent ammonia descended on the Zamyatin Settlement. It collected in a dip on the main dome, dissolving the tenuous film on it. After some hours, the acid ate through. A whoosh of lost pressure alerted the agriworkers. They got out in time, scared but unshaken. These were farsighted people: they knew one accident wasn’t reason to kill the project that gave them so much hope.

The only solution was to change the atmosphere as it was made. Further rains underlined the point – it became harder to work outside because the vapors would attack the monolayer skinsuits. The fusion plants were no help. They were hopelessly crude engines, chemically speaking, limited to regurgitating vapors that had been laid down three billion years before, when the moon formed. They could not edit their output. As they burrowed deeper into the ice fields, the situation worsened.

Io, the pizza planet, had once enjoyed a more active stage. Its volcanoes had belched forth plumes of sulfur that had escaped the moon’s gravity, forming a torus around Jupiter that included all the moons. On Ganymede, this era was represented by a layer of sulfur that now occasionally found its way into the deep-dug crawlers’ yawning scoops. The result was a harshly acidic vapor plume, condensing to fierce yellow rains that seared whatever they touched. Fifty-seven men and women died in the torrents before something was done.

The fusion-crawlers had been a fast and cheap solution because they were self-reproducing machines. The answer to bioengineering of the atmosphere lay in a tried-and-true method: self-reproducing animals. But these creatures were unlike anything seen on Earth.

The central authority on Ganymede, Hiruko Station, introduced a whole catalog of high-biotech beings that could survive in the wilds of near-vacuum and savage chemicals. Hiruko Station’s method was to take perfectly ordinary genes of Earthside animals and splice them together. This began as a program in controlled mutation but rapidly moved far beyond that. Tangling the DNA instructions together yielded beings able to survive extreme conditions. The interactions of those genes were decidedly nonlinear: when you add a pig to an eel, flavor with arachnid, and season with walrus, do not expect anything cuddly or even recognizable.

There were bulky gravel gobblers, who chewed on rocky ices heavy with rusted iron. They in turn excreted a green, oxygen-rich gas. The scooters came soon after, slurping at ammonia-laden ice. These were pale yellow, flat shapes, awkward and blind on their three malformed legs. They shat steady acrid streams of oxy-available mush. Hiruko Station said the first plant forms could live in the bile-colored scooter stools. Eventually, plants did grow there, but they weren’t the sort of thing that quickens the appetite.

Both gravel-gobblers and scooters were ugly and dumb, hooting aimlessly, waddling across the fractured ice with no grace or dignity, untouched by evolution’s smoothing hand. They roved in flocks, responding to genes that knew only two imperatives: eat and mate. They did both with a furious, single-minded energy, spreading over the ice, which was for them an endless banquet.

Hiruko Station liked the results, and introduced a new form – rockjaws – that consumed nearly anything, breathing in the ammonia-rich atmosphere, and exhaling it back as oxygen and nitrogen. Rockjaws could scavenge far more efficiently than the gravel gobbler, and even bite through meteorites. Metallic jaws were the key. The high-biotech labs had turned up a method of condensing metal in living tissues, making harder bones possible.

Rockjaws were smart enough to stay away from the Settlements (unlike the others, who constantly wandered into greenhouses or tried to eat them). At this point the long-chain DNA-tinkering of Hiruko Station ran afoul of its own hubris. The rockjaws were too smart. They were genetically programmed to think the loathsome methane ices were scrumptious, but they also saw moving around nearby even more interesting delicacies: gravel-gobblers. And they were smart enough to hunt these unforeseen prizes.

Hiruko Station later excused this miscalculation as an unfortunate side effect of the constant proton sleet, which caused fast genetic drift and unpredictable changes. Hiruko Station pointed to the big inflamed warts the creatures grew and the strange mating rituals they began to invent – none of this in the original coding. The scooter flocks were showing deformities, too. Some seemed demented (though it was hard to tell) and took to living off the excretion of the gravel-gobblers, like pigs rooting in cow manure.

First Hiruko Station tried introducing a new bioengineered animal into the equation. It was a vicious-looking thing, a spider with tiny black eyes and incisors as big as your finger. It stood three meters high and was forever hungry, fine-tuned to salivate at the sight of any mutation of the normals. This genetically ordained menu was quite specific and complexly coded, so it was the first thing to go wrong with the ugly beast. Pretty soon it would hunt down and eat anything that moved – even humans – and Hiruko Station had to get rid of it.

That led to a surprising solution to other rising societal stresses. The only way to exterminate the spiders was by hunting them down. Many men and women in the Settlements volunteered for the duty. After some grisly incidents, they had grudges to settle, and anyway it gave them a reason to get out of the domed regularity of their hothouse gardens and manicured fields. Thus was revived a subculture long missing from Earth: the Hunt, with its close bonding and reckless raw life in the alien wilderness.

These disorderly bands exterminated the spiders within a year. Hiruko Station found it was cheaper to pay the hunters a bounty to track down and destroy aberrant scooters, rockjaws and gravel-gobblers, than it was to try for a biotech fix. It was also healthier for the psyche of Ganymede’s settlers. The Settlements were tradition-steeped societies – internal discipline is essential when an open valve or clogged feed line can kill a whole community. The Hunt provided an outlet for deeply atavistic human urges and pressures, long pent and fiercer for their confinement.

A LARGER CANVAS

The atmosphere thickened. Hiruko Station added more mutant strains of quick-breeding animals to the mix, driving the chemical conversion still faster. The biotechnicians found ways to implant microprocessors into the animals, so that they wouldn’t get out of control. That was expensive, though, so hunting continued, echoing the heritage of mankind that came down from the plains of Africa. Bounty hunters were hard to fit into the labor scheme, and the socioplanners kept trying to phase them out, largely from sheer embarrassment. But Earthside 3D programs lapped up tales of the rough ‘n’ ready bountymen and –women of the Hunt, giving what the planners felt was a “false image” of the Settlements. Mutation of the released gene-engineered animals was rapid, however, and the biosphere was never truly stabilized. The hunters became an institution. To this day, they are an unruly crew who don’t fit into planners' orderly diagrams.

Rain lost its sulfuric tang. Steam rose at morning from the canyons, casting rosy light over the Settlements. The moon’s first rivers cut fresh ravines and snaked across ice plains.

All this hung in delicate balance. Huge sodium-coated mirrors were spread in orbit nearby, to reflect unceasing light on the paths ahead of the fusion-crawlers. This speeded evaporation and was used also to hasten crops to ripeness. But Ganymede was, after all, an ice world. Too much heating and a catastrophic melting of the crust would begin. If the crust broke or even shifted, moonquakes would destroy the Settlements.

Thus it was a careful hand that started up the first Ganymede weather cycle. Solar heating at the equator made billowing, moist clouds rise. They moved toward the poles as colder air flowed below, filling spaces the warm air left. As they moved, masses of warm clouds dropped sheets of rain. This meant there was only one circulation cell per hemisphere, an easier system to predict than the several-cell scale of Earth. Rainfall and seasons were predictable; weather was boring. As many on Luna and in the asteroids had learned long before, low gravity and a breathable atmospheric pressure gave a sensational bonus: flying. Though Ganymede would always be cold and icy, people could soar over the ice ecology on wings of aluminum. Compared to the molelike existence of only a few generations before, this was freedom divine.

There came at last the moment when the air thickened enough to absorb the virulent radiation flux. Years later, a foolhardy kid stepped outside an airlock five hours before the official ceremony was to begin, and sucked in a thin, piercingly cold breath. She got back inside only moments before oxygen deprivation would have knocked her out, but she did earn the title she wanted: first to breathe the free air of Ganymede. Molecules locked up for billions of years in the ice now filled the lungs of a human. Her family was fined a month’s labor credit by her Settlement.

By this time Europa’s cracked and cratered face was also alive with the tiny ruby dots of fusion-crawlers, chewing away at that moon as well. They crept along the cracks that wrapped the entire moon, melting the wall away, hoping to open the old channels below the cracks. In spots the churning slush below burst forth, spreading stains of rich mineral wealth. Jove itself, hanging eternally at the center of the sky, was now the only face unmarked in some way by mankind.

Not to be outdone, the Republic of Ganymede hastened the heating of their air. They laid a monolayer over the top of the atmosphere, spinning it down from orbit and layering it in place, letting it fall until the pressure supported it. All the while, weaving sheets stitched themselves together and automatically locked as the smart-layers stretched. This gossamer film stopped the lighter molecules from escaping into space, feeding the chemical reactions balanced in the atmosphere and hastening the greenhouse effect. Chlorfluorocarbons, especially, did their complex work. The designers of the atmospheric cap left holes large enough to let orbital tugs slip through. With control modules fitted to the boundaries of these openings, they could be closed at will. From the Ganymede surface, Callisto, Europa and Io swam in the sky, lambent with halos of gauzy, scattered light.

Rain hammered the plains of Ganymede and evaporated within hours. But the gas density rose and water did its ancient trick of passing through phase transitions at the change of a degree or two. The first lake on Ganymede formed in a basin of dirty meteorite rock eight kilometers wide. This created a ready source of fresh water and soon elaborate homes were carved into the spongy rock overlooking the view. In insulated suits people could sail and even swim. Mirrors hung in orbit, focusing sunlight on fields that slowly turned an odd blue-green, patches spreading wherever water trickled.

Space continued to yield up mineral riches. Near-Jovian space held many useful nuggets the size of cities, both the Trojan asteroids, locked in stable resonance at Jupiter’s Lagrange points, and the wide-wandering Transjovians. At first, ready access to manufacturers made producing metal-rich products much cheaper on Ganymede, where the skilled workers and robot factories already were. This briefly cut into the asteroid commerce from the outer planets, but there were other commodities flowing both ways along that same slow route.

Interplanetary trade increased. Stations around distant Saturn drew food and other perishable supplies from Ganymede to support their key energy industries. Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were fast becoming "the Persian Gulf of the Solar System" – a phrase referring to an era centuries past, when fossil fuels in a single Earthside zone provided the major energy sources. Now the outer planets were the largest sources of deuterium and helium-3 to drive the fusion economy. Saturn was the most valuable of the three, because of its relative proximity, low radiation, and excellent system of moons. The largest of these--gloomy, ruddy Titan--was now explored and its resources identified. Some tried to make a go of it at the bottom of that chilly bowl of primordial soup. Few stayed – something in the human psyche cried out to see the skies. Robots busily labored on, untouched by such biological considerations, in murk where only people with acute claustrophila could be happy.

There were many other moons, though, some ripe for development and colonization, some just icy rocks with a number, not a name. A portion of these were set aside as preserves, where scientists and selected tourists could see how the ice worlds had once been. Some never felt the explorer’s boot, held for far-future technologies to understand. Humanity had learned from the Age of Appetite to preserve bleak wastes and allow them to become future frontiers.

As always, economics called the tune. Moons just now boiling off their ices had to find innovative ways to compete with long-established Ganymede. They quickly realized that not capping their atmospheres would make it simple to profit from the new business of slinging asteroids, using atmospheric braking effects to dissipate incoming energies.

Simple chunks — nickel, iron, differentiated silicates rich in rare ores, the usual—came arcing in on long slow ellipses. Deftly dropping their momentum with a brush through uncapped atmosphere simplified and shortened their delivery orbits. Vast fortunes were made and lost with bewildering speed in the early days of the Second Asteroid Rush. Demand continued to escalate, as the off-Earth populations increased in numbers and affluence, but transport was the key to supply. The Jovestar Conglomerate crashed when their monopoly market faltered. Their legal crews, moving quickly, had locked up mineral rights of the obvious first million Trojan asteroids, and their grip on those could not be broken. But the Transjovians were still out there for the plundering, if only they could be cheaply moved to near-Ganymede orbit. The siren song of fabulous wealth ensured that it happened sooner rather than later.

The Europa entrepreneurs jumped into the fray, taking advantage of every last commercial possibility. Since their atmosphere was open to space, they had long sent asteroids zooming through it, en route to easy orbits in Ganymede’s neighborhood. The incoming asteroids, linked to guiding tugs, also heated up Europa’s air, and properly marketed, provided a valuable tourist attraction, with their well-choreographed displays of burnt gold, electric blue, and ruby amber. As the trajectories of these rockships became more graceful and regularly scheduled, they began to carry passengers. Later, atmosphere-grazing in protected fallsuits became popular. In the freewheeling ethical climate of the time, bookings were permitted for those who signed on as suicides. Indeed, the rates were even lowered, contingent on use of long-obsolete suits. The in-fall failure of century-old systems sealed the decision for some with second thoughts.

Some time later, a large Earthside foundation proposed capping the Callisto atmosphere. They intended the largest work of art possible – a gaudy, beribboned design of loops and swirls that could be seen (properly magnified) throughout the Solar System. The glorious monolayer film would have changeable polarization and colors, so that later generations of artists could express themselves through it.

This idea was opposed by a rare coalition of environmentalists – Keep Callisto Clean – and business interests, who wanted to horn in on Europa’s atmospheric deceleration franchise. The foundation lost its zoning permit. Undeterred, they set about plans to move Pluto into a long, looping orbit, which passed through the inner Solar System. Suitably decorated, they said, Pluto would make a magnificent touring art gallery.

Ganymede, oldest and wealthiest of the Jovian colonies, was becoming relatively luxurious. A shining complex of high-end hotels and shops went up, surrounding a sybaritic waterpark that took full advantage of low gravity. Reservations to surfglide at the wave pool became the most hotly sought date in the Settlements. The songs of The Beach Boys, fallen into obscurity as Earth’s rising oceans made crashing waves a source of societal terror, became wildly popular again. Surf culture was resurrected, albeit in forms no twen-cen California Girl could have foreseen.

Soon there was talk of starting a power-generating plant on Io. Not one using the volcanoes there – those had already been tapped. This plan proposed hooking directly into the currents that ran between Io and Jupiter itself – six million amperes of electricity just waiting to be used. Work began. Soon they would harness the energy that drove the aurora.

The forward vector of humanity had by now passed beyond the Jovian moons. Near Earth, the first manned starship was abuilding, soon to depart for Alpha Centauri. Given the engineering abilities of humanity, the matter of whether an Earthlike planet circled there seemed beside the point. (As it turned out, there was no such world within 18 light years.) Humans could survive anywhere. Better, they would prevail, and learn to enjoy just about anything. Any place where sunlight and mass accumulated, mankind would find a way to form a roiling, catch-as-catch-can society – and probably make a profit doing it.

Of course, there was Jupiter itself. It and the other gas giant planets had formed the backdrop for all this drama, but that was all. Many a Ganymede native, perhaps as he lounged beside a lake in a heated skinsuit or banked and swooped through gossamer clouds, peered up at the swollen giant and idly wondered. Jupiter occupies two hundred and fifty times as much of the sky as Luna does from Earth; it was never far from the minds of the millions who lived nearby.

So it was probably inevitable. A physicist on Luna had developed a new theory of Jove’s interior, accounting for all the latest data on pressure and temperature and chemical composition. She found that there had to be stratified bands of pure hydrogen metal near the surface of Jupiter. Such hydrogen metal might be close to the outer layers of rock, shallow enough to mine.

Her theory suggested that once compressed into being by Jupiter’s huge gravitational pressure, metallic hydrogen would be a stable form. At great expense, laboratory tests synthesized a few grams of the stuff. It was incredibly strong, light and durable. It could even survive a slow transition up to low pressure. If you could go down there and mine it...

The pressures deep in that thick Jovian atmosphere were immense. Where they had even been measured at all, the conditions were brutal. The technology for handling the mines was completely undeveloped. It was an insane idea.

They said, of course, that it was impossible. They always do.

COME THE PIONEERS

So endeth my own historical version of our possible Jovian future(s).

I wrote Against Infinity as a sequel to Jupiter Project. In it, I supposed the big agricomplexes were productive but didn’t really build a coherent culture. For this, Ganymede needed farmers who would own land, care for it painstakingly, and build communities. That’s how America was built; we know how to do it.

So in this era, Farmer in the Sky’s Bill Lerner and his family came to Ganymede to start their farm. He saw farming as a natural role as humanity rolled out from its Earthly bounds. After writing that novel, Heinlein hammered out the great “juveniles” to follow: Between Planets (1951), The Rolling Stones (1952), Starman Jones (1953), The Star Beast (1954), Tunnel In the Sky (1955), Time for the Stars (1956), Citizen of the Galaxy (1957) and finally Have Space Suit — Will Travel (1958). To my taste he improved steadily, but Farmer remains my favorite.

So I followed later with a novel set after Farmer, in 1982: Against Infinity. It is set in a terraformed Ganymede a bit before the time of Farmer. It concerns hunting a special prey on Ganymede--an unknowable alien artifact that roamed and ruled Ganymede for countless eons, its purpose unknown.

In another sense it’s about my own growing up, hunting and roving in the rural South. The great aspect of the American South is that it never truly leaves you, even if you haul off to exotic California to pursue a scientific career and write the occasional novel. I’ve gone further still since, setting several stories around Ganymede. Eventually, I’ll finish them into a novel and complete the Jupiter Trilogy, I suppose I’ll call it. This is how science fiction develops—as a continuing conversation between authors and fans and just plain readers. It’s one of our great strengths.

Others have used the Jovian system to their own ends, perhaps most famously in Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2061: Odyssey Three (1987). In that novel, Ganymede is warmed by the new sun Lucifer and contains a large equatorial lake. It becomes the center of human colonization of the Jovian system.

So the dream goes on. Jupiter swims still in our skies, beckoning.

Terraforming implies more than human survival: it is the

evolutionary extension of life from Earth beyond the Earth. I’m sure that Heinlein thought of terraforming as itself an act of nature, inevitable and ordained. We ambitious primates came out of Africa and are still on the move, a natural outcome of evolution’s unfolding mysteries.

There’s even a practical side to this, I think: we need to study, understand, and experiment, and make our mistakes on other planets first-- before we mess with the one we live on. So Heinlein’s ideas resonate even more now, as we consider grand schemes like geoengineering, to offset climate change. There are lessons to be learned on other worlds.

Farmer in the Sky is paying conceptual dividends long before a boot makes its first print on the icy plains of Ganymede, beneath the great globe of churning Jupiter.

Notes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere_of_Jupiter#cite_note-55

The Aliens Are Not Among Us

by Les Johnson

Figure 1 — The Earth as seen from Apollo 17. (Image courtesy of NASA.)

The aliens are not among us. The truth is out there—and it is that we are not being visited by extraterrestrials. A flying saucer didn’t crash at Roswell, we aren’t reverse engineering alien technology at Area 51, and otherworldly tourists, anatomists or anthropologists are abducting no one from their homes.

I’ve said it and I’ve said it with certainty. Could I be wrong? Yes, and I will be the first to admit my mistake when someone brings forth credible evidence that our planet is being visited by creatures from another world. But until then, I will be a skeptic on this issue.

Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Now, I may not be in the same league as Carl Sagan, but in this case I agree with him completely. Stories of strange lights in the sky, sightings of aircraft performing seemingly impossible acrobatic maneuvers before “shooting straight up,” presumably into space, or recollections of missing time after observing one of these weird aerial phenomena do not qualify as extraordinary evidence.

But what about the pictures? Since there have been cameras, there have been fuzzy pictures of these strange objects in the night sky. Most are obviously fake, some are clearly explainable, and, yes, some are truly puzzling—but a puzzling object seen from an aircraft window does not an alien spaceship make! Much simpler explanations (than alien visitors) are almost certainly waiting in the wings to be proffered.

I don’t want to get into a debate with true believers out there who have seen something they cannot explain, or have read about an encounter that had to be with a creature from another world. Sending me pictures taken with your cell phone camera will not convince me. No, the evidence would have to be something akin to Gort standing on the National Mall for me to be convinced aliens are visiting us.

Why am I so adamant? Why would I take a position that will almost certainly cause many readers to call me “closed minded” and a veritable Luddite? Because the thought of us being visited by aliens from another planet at this time simply is so highly improbable as to be, for all practical purposes, impossible.

Let me be clear. I do believe that there may be other life in the universe. I find the thought of humanity being alone in the universe to be not only depressing, but also arrogant. Surely, if it can happen here, with us, then it can happen elsewhere also. But, almost as certainly, life is rare. Intelligent tool-using life is likely even more rare. It is incredibly unlikely that intelligent, tool using life just happens to come visit us during a brief moment in the history of our species when are beginning to explore space ourselves.

I’d better explain how I come to this conclusion.

SPACE IS BIG

(Talk about an understatement.) In a previous essay for Baen, I discussed the enormous size of the universe in great detail. To avoid being redundant, I’ll attempt to summarize how big the universe is and why that this is important and relevant to the topic at hand. The Earth is ninety-three million miles from the Sun. If we imagine that the planets in our solar system can be represented by a series of marbles orbiting the Sun in the center of a room, then we can shrink this ninety-three million mile distance to one inch. (Scientists do this and instead of an inch, they call this distance an Astronomical Unit, or “AU.”) On this scale, Jupiter would be five inches from the Sun and the dwarf planet Pluto would be at a mere forty inches. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be about four miles away. And that is the nearest star. The light from Proxima Centauri takes over four years to reach us traveling at 186,000 miles per second. The distance from here to Alpha Centauri is so large that scientists had to invent yet another term to make it easier to comprehend—the light year. One light year is the distance light travels in one year, making Proxima Centauri about 4.2 light years distant. Our galaxy, which contains hundreds of billions of stars, is over one hundred thousand light years across. The nearest galaxy to our own, the Andromeda Galaxy, is over two-and-a-half-million light years away.

Figure 2—The Omega Centauri star cluster contains many stars like our sun. If life were to develop on a planet around one of these stars, it would take 15,000 years for an alien spaceship to get to Earth even if they were traveling at the Speed of Light. (Image courtesy of the NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute.)

According to what we know about how the universe works, our knowledge of physics, there is a natural speed limit for us and for any aliens out there: the speed of light. 186,000 miles per second is the fastest anything can go. We’ve never observed anything going faster and it appears that it would actually take infinite energy to accelerate anything other than light to that speed. So the best we, or any aliens, can hope to achieve is some speed that is a significant fraction of the speed of light. If we assume that we can get a spacecraft the size of the Space Shuttle to travel 75 percent of the speed of light (which is pretty darn fast, considering that Voyager 1, our fastest spacecraft, is traveling at about 38,000 miles per hour or 0.005 percent the speed of light), then it would require at least 9.35 X 10^22 joules of energy. Wow. At that speed, the journey would take about five-and-a-half years and require one hundred percent of humanity’s current global energy consumption for 195 years! All of that energy would have to be somehow provided to the spacecraft. And that’s just to get here from the nearest star. Crossing the gulf from farther away would lengthen the travel time considerably, only making the duration of such journeys even harder to believe when compared to a human, and presumably, alien lifetime.

All right, so an interstellar voyage will take a while and require lots of energy. Surely, out there somewhere, someone or something may have the interest and ability to take the trip. Well, yes, perhaps, but it doesn’t seem very likely.

LIFE IS RARE

In our solar system we know of only one place life exists. Earth. There are claims that fossilized primitive life has been found in meteorites from Mars or elsewhere, but the data is inconclusive and I must invoke Sagan’s requirement once again. Bring on the extraordinary evidence.

We’ve looked out into the cosmos and found that there are many, many stars and we are now learning that planetary systems are common around them. We’ve also found that the vast majority of these stars and planetary systems are inhospitable to life as we know it. (Yes, the “as we know it” part will be a red flag for some. I’m not entertaining the idea of fanciful beings composed of "pure" energy—whatever that is—nor those that normally occupy extra-dimensional spaces. I’m talking about life based on chemistry.) Life is, by its very nature, complex and organized. And for it to develop requires somewhat stable conditions that almost certainly includes a stable planetary orbit. This rules out many of the planets we’ve found around other stars that have wildly elliptical orbits, or orbits that are not circular, which produce wildly varying climactic conditions not suitable for life to exist.

The star itself must be stable and boring. A variable star, one that changes its energy output dramatically over some period of time, would not produce the kind of stability needed for life to develop. Imagine Mars being warm and wet long enough for primitive life to take hold and then it being plunged into its current desiccated state, with these wild extremes repeating on cycles of a few million years each.

The stellar neighborhood must be stable and boring. Having a star explode and go “nova” would be a very bad day for planets circling nearby stars. Massive stellar explosions, called supernova, occur somewhere in the universe virtually every day. Being on a planet within about a thousand light years of a supernova would likely have the same effect as sterilizing surgical equipment, killing not only bacteria but any higher order life.

The planetary system cannot have too many asteroids and comets careening around because sooner or later one of them will hit the planet bearing life and restart the evolutionary process in much the same way ours was restarted in the event that wiped out the dinosaurs. Fortunately for us, in our solar system, these events are not very common on a timescale of millions of years.

The life-bearing world would have to be in the Goldilocks Zone (not too hot, not too cold) for life based on chemistry as we know it to exist. If the planet is too close to the Sun or if it has the “wrong” atmospheric chemistry, you get the hellish conditions we find on Venus. If it is a little too small or too far away from its star, you get the cold and dry Mars.

And from here it gets more complicated still. There are entire books written on the subject of why the Earth may be unique in its ability to evolve and sustain life. I don’t want to get into that topic here so I will simply summarize the conclusion I’ve reached: The long-term "stable" conditions favorable for the development and evolution of life are exceedingly rare.

INTELLIGENT, TOOL-USING ALIENS ARE VERY, VERY, RARE

Now, Les, how can you possibly know that? Putting one’s religious beliefs aside, life appears to have developed and evolved on planet Earth over about four billion years. (I’ll talk about Deep Time a little bit later. For now, let’s just say that four billion years, that’s 4,000,000,000 years, is a long, long time.) Biologists can show that we humans are merely the latest development of a series of evolutionary processes and historical events spanning this chasm of time. We are not the inevitable byproduct of evolution. There is a common misconception about evolutionary theory that many people believe—that evolutionary processes are somehow guided (self guided?) to create beings of ever-increasing complexity and intelligence until it finally produces an intelligent, self-aware species like us and then, voila! We are here and evolution’s purpose is fulfilled.

Alas, this is not the case. The Theory of Evolution says that species evolve to survive and those physical characteristics that allow a species to survive, prosper and reproduce will propagated and preserved as long as they are useful survival characteristics. If a mutation doesn’t serve a useful purpose in keeping the creature in which the mutation occurred alive long enough to reproduce, then it is not likely to be one that is passed on to future generations.

In evolution, there is another aspect that is often overlooked in general discussion, even by my biologist friends: history. The world is not simply a tug of war between competing species with generations born, living and dying, some passing on their more successful characteristics to future generations. No, events play a pivotal role and some events are true game changers. Arguably one of the most successful species ever to inhabit the Earth, the dinosaurs, had their reign end rather abruptly about 75 million years ago when an errant meteor is thought to have hit the Earth, dramatically changing the climate of the entire planet, making it less hospitable to dinosaurs and more hospitable to the small, furry mammals from whence we descended. This pivotal event in the Earth’s history is the one that allows us to exist and ponder how we happen to be here.

But, as they say, there is more to the story. What characteristics must a species have to build spaceships that would travel between the stars?

Alien life would have to be intelligent in order to figure out how to build spaceships. Okay, so intelligence is a survival trait that has allowed humanity to survive and reproduce. But is it the only trait required for a technological society? Not by a long shot.

Consider dolphins. Many believe that dolphins are intelligent, that they have language and that they experience many of the higher-order thought processes that we previously considered being the sole province of humanity. That’s just great for the dolphins—as they swim around in the ocean, seemingly carefree, playing with each other and amusing human biologists and tourists alike. But without fire they will never be able to alter their environment to build spaceships.

Figure 3—No matter how intelligent dolphins may be, they will not be building spaceships anytime soon. (Image courtesy of Allen McCloud.)

Consider the dolphins again and let’s assume they are, or will be able to be, as intelligent as humans. Even without the fire issue, how will they be able to manipulate their environment to make things without hands and fingers? Better yet, how could they do this without opposable thumbs? Without the ability to grasp, making tools is much more difficult and making complex tools is likely impossible. So, from an evolution-to-space-traveling-species point of view, being a dolphin is a dead end.

What, then, is the likelihood of natural processes creating life and that life evolving a species that is intelligent, capable of using tools, making fire, and curious enough to invent space travel?

It is clearly not zero, after all, we’re in the process of doing just that. But I can say it is a very low probability.

DEEP TIME IS UNDERESTIMATED

(Yes, that is another understatement.) We humans in the developed world have, on average, a lifespan of fifty to eighty years. We have recorded history going back a few thousand years. There is archeological evidence that humans have been around for one hundred thousand years; most of that time was spent in the “survival mode” without a whole lot in the way of civilization being built, let alone spaceships.

In the context of the history of the Earth, recorded human civilization occupies about 0.00008 percent of Earth’s history. Let me put that another way—the sum total of human civilization, in years, rounds to zero when considering the age of the Earth, let alone the age of the universe.

Current estimates place the age of the universe at about 13.75 billion years. That’s 13,750,000,000 years for those of you who like to see all the zeros. The earliest stars in the universe probably didn’t give rise to life because the early universe was lacking most of the elements in the periodic table – including most of those we require for our physical bodies to exist. Elements lighter than iron, including the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen which, when combined with hydrogen, make up much of the stuff from which we are made, were formed inside those early stars as their fusion processes converted primordial hydrogen and helium into them. Elements heavier than iron had to wait for massive stars to explode as novae or supernovae in order to be created. It took time for these processes to occur and it is because of them that we are here. To again quote Carl Sagan, “We are made of star stuff.”

The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. In that time, evolution has produced many species, some of which have been quite successful—from an evolutionary point of view. Consider again, for example, the dinosaurs. They reigned supreme over the Earth for about 180 million years, disappearing about 75 million years ago. According to fossil and genetic evidence, modern humans have been around for only about 100,000 years, or 0.1 million years. Hmmm. 75 million versus 0.1 million—it sounds like those dinosaurs had a pretty good run.

But what does this have to do with alien visitors? Well, if you strictly play a numbers game and look at the age of the Earth, not even considering the age of the universe, what is the probability that alien visitors who are, by all alleged accounts, no more than a few hundred years ahead of us technologically, would just happen to start paying a visit to the Earth when we humans are here to see them? Looking at our fractional time of existence on the planet, which is roughly 100,000 divided by 4,500,000,000 (0.00002 or 0.002 percent), the chances are slim that they would be here at a time when humans exist at all. Slimmer still is the chance of them happening by when we have a technological civilization. If we liberally define a “technological civilization” as one in which we know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, then we can date its beginning with the publication of De revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) by Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543—merely ~500 years ago. What is the chance we’ve been visited by aliens since that time? Roughly 500/4,500,000,000 = 0.0000001 or 0.00001 percent. Folks, that is a pretty small number.

Figure 4—A diagram of the solar system as Copernicus envisioned it. (From his 1543 book, De revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium.)

Let me be blunt: the chance of an alien species evolving, developing intelligence with the physical characteristics that allow them to make fire and use tools, evolving to the point at which they can travel through space (obeying nature’s speed limit), crossing immense distances, and just happening to reach Earth at a time that we, too, are starting to explore space is, within any reasonable rounding error, ZERO.

At this point, some might say, “But Les, you are now underestimating the effect of deep time! Science and technology are advancing at an amazing pace. Who’s to say that ET hasn’t found a way to tap the quantum vacuum energy (or some other breakthrough). Look how much we’ve accomplished in the last 500 years—maybe the extraterrestrials are a thousand years ahead of us technologically.”

My conclusion is unchanged. Look at the odds. It wouldn’t make a difference if they were 50,000 years ahead of us technologically. The odds of them being here, now, and with a technology that we would recognize are too small to worry about. Might such a super civilization have visited the Earth in the past? Perhaps. If so, then it is far more likely that they arrived to find an Earth populated with dinosaurs and not human beings.

Actually, I truly wish they were here. I’d like to think that the universe abounds with intelligent, tool-using species that travel between the stars. I want there to be a Federation of Planets (thank you Gene Roddenberry) with myriad species learning from each other and exploring the great unknown that is the universe. I am not so naïve to assume that in such a future there wouldn’t be conflict. I can put up with conflict in my wish list for the future; though I doubt there would be massive interstellar wars given the impracticality of interstellar travel to begin with. But that is another essay waiting to be written. . . .

Gravity’s Punch

by Tony Daniel

The Heat Death of the Universe Got You Down? Fight Back with Science!

Here’s how things seem to stand. Entropy is increasing. London Bridge is falling down. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a picture of the fall, and time is its measure. Gravity (and its evil twin, inertia) runs the clock. Particles without mass, such as photons, can’t be made into clocks (that is, structures that measure the passage of time) all by themselves, and as more and more material transforms into such massless particles, the material world degrades to low-level energy in fits and starts, fizzles and pops.

All matter eventually becomes heat lugged outward in the form of force-carrying particles such as photons and, maybe, gravitons. Outward to where? To nowhere.

It’s a picture of the universe as one flaming arrow shot into the dark. The arrow hits no target because there is no target out there.

The expanding pressure is inexorable. The cosmological constant does not allow the universe to contract again. All the black holes evaporate. The coarse-grain irregularities of nature even out. Those force-carrying particles the bosons are all that remain and they spread until they are so far apart they can no longer cause any change in another portion of existence. Their world lines intersect nothing ahead. Without matter and causation, you can’t build a clock.

The clocks don’t stop, they simply cease to exist.

The universe dies.

Or lives on in an ineffectual forever, depending on how you want to look at it.

Every bit of this rather depressing conception is founded on two basic assumptions. Assumption #1: scientific law is deterministic or probabilistic in nature always and everywhere. Assumption #2 (which usually incorporates Assumption #1): the current understanding of physics is more or less correct and we can extrapolate from it.

Both of these assumptions, it seems to me, are dubious when you get to thinking about them. My point here is going to be that a healthy skepticism toward determinism in its various guises is not merely okay from a scientific perspective, but that it actually is the scientific perspective, as opposed to science’s evil orc version, twisted into existence by certain Sarumans of the intellectual class. Let’s call this scientism.

Consider the Heat Death model. Isn’t there something slightly . . . sadistic about the whole affair? Doesn’t it have the feel of somebody attempting to impress you with how puny and ineffectual life is destined to be? I can’t imagine Egyptians bowing to their Pharaoh felt any more in the grip of an uncaring, omnipotent, petty little god than those of us who accept that this, our precious universe, is going to end in frozen bosonic tears.

First, let me put paid to any idea that I’m saying we need to adopt a more subjective or culturally relative outlook on the Big Fizzle or any other scientific question. How do we humans conceptualize time? Is it even possible to escape through happy subjectivity? Might we really decide how we want to look at the end of everything?

The answer is no, of course. Our sense of time is not merely a mental affair. The world is too much with us to believe in that kind of lint-gazing drivel. Time, for us humans, is based on a psychological sense of a personal history and a personal, continuing future. Consciousness and self-awareness depend upon it. And self-awareness and the ensuing ability to conceptualize is our primary species adaptation. Without our sense of time out there, beyond our personality, there wouldn’t be any language or meaningful thought. Nothing would seem real except our own inner nattering. A thinking being’s perception and conceptualization of time defeats its inherent tendency toward narcissism and solipsism.

So how well does our human sense of time match up with the clocks of the universe? We should expect it to match pretty well, since the brain has pretty clearly created a rough-and-ready representational simulation conditioned by existence. Of course, the brain is fully capable of creating false memories and its sense of time can break down due to disease lesion or injury and leave a person stranded in the present, the past, or some alternate and fairly meaningless Erewhon. We recognize these as mental pathologies easily enough, however. By and large, our neurological mapping of time is so reliable it has allowed us not only to survive but to become the dominant species of an entire planet.

A related question that bears in on the difference between science and scientism: does the universe, like us humans, have a memory and a sense of its own future?

The scientism believer is immediately appalled by the idea. It’s so . . . anthropocentric, full of hubris. So pro-human. Ugh.

But the answer is: sure it does. Here on Earth, one glance at sedimentary rock or the magnetic striations on the ocean floor produced by the poles’ fairly regular flip-flops from north to south provide a readable record of the past. Up in the sky, the universe’s base metabolism, the cosmic background radiation, is a present-day record of the big bang birth and a continuing reminder of the cold equations that predict the end of it all.

Of course the convinced disciple of scientism may argue that none of these “memories” mean anything to the universe. That, like a compact disk existing in a future when all audio has been transferred to MP3s and all the old players have broken down, the information sits there for eternity and the music on the CD is never played again (a future probably nearer than we suppose).

But this objection is hypothetical at this point in the universe’s history. Here on Earth, we humans are the CD players for the known universe. We interpret the encoded information we come across like those magnetic stripes on the ocean bottom, and make general deductions about reality from them – in the case of those stripes, we deduce the principles of plate tectonics. But even without us, the effects of the past do affect the present and will affect the future. That’s the whole point of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. There’s meaningful information everywhere, and it creates its own consequences. Time marches on.

Physical time and psychological time (and, in a broader sense, concepts of nature and nature itself), while not the same, are obviously fundamentally related. Witness how easy it is for us to grasp the relativity of time as predicted by the General Theory of Relativity, for instance, once we’ve understood a few appropriate analogies and/or mastered some math. The idea that nobody can understand Einstein is so much hogwash. People have adapted quite nicely to these new ideas. Why? Because something about reality, even undiscovered reality, matches up with the pattern recognition ability that forms our inner sense of time’s passage.

So when I say I’ve got a very bad, ugly and sad feeling about the heat death of the universe, I believe I’m expressing a thought beyond my own personal taste and proclivity, a thought based on a very real conception of time. It isn’t the same as whether or not I think watermelon tastes good (I do!), but more like whether or not I think cold-blooded murder is wrong (I do!). Watermelon is a preference, while being opposed to the murder of innocents is a self-evident moral truth.

Of course, some people are okay with murder. And some people will be okay with the whole heat death of the universe thing. These people we may call . . . how to put it . . . the self-deceived. Who else could wish such a fate upon the blooming buzz of creation?

But can there really be something objectively true about the dislike most of us feel for the unpleasant idea that everything is going to end in ineffectual blahness? Does this uneasy sensation tell us something about the current state of our knowledge? If we ignore scientism’s siren call for despair and a twisted sort of resigned pleasure to our own puniness, might this queasiness really mean that we are missing something important?

First, we need to know if physics as we currently conceive it can come to our rescue. Maybe we’ve simply gotten something wrong. What about time symmetry? It’s a truism that the equations of physics work backward and forward in time – or rather, that the passage of time in a larger sense has no effect upon them. Why, then, are all the clocks ticking the hours until doomsday? Can we simply turn the hourglass upside down and start the sand running backward?

Unfortunately, no. Sure, there’s time reversibility, time commutation so far as it goes, but it goes precisely as far as the Second Law of Thermodynamics allows.

Eggs do not unbreak themselves without the presence of a nearby system of lower entropy, say a magician manipulating smoke and mirrors, a filmmaker playing around with video, or a physicist powering up a particle accelerator. The universe as a whole has no nearby system of lower entropy upon which to draw. We’re all we’ve got, baby. Egg making and breaking generally only proceeds in one direction.

What about black holes? Are they the universe’s saviors? After all, are they not spawning “baby universes” all the time? Doesn’t universe formation follow a kind of natural selection process with universes that are likely to spawn even more black holes “fit” to survive? It’s a stylish idea, but one that seems to be as completely mistaken as the elegant old steady state hypothesis.

Black holes don’t last forever and every bit of matter that falls into one eventually comes back out in another form. Information may or may not be destroyed within – there’s controversy. In any case, the processessing of matter in a black hole takes a long time. A very long time. But the existence of Hawking radiation puts paid to all the grand cosmological theories of the multiverse birthers. Every black hole, from the tiniest singularity to the monster at the center of the Milky Way, is running a slight temperature and is going to vomit up everything in its stomach sooner or later in some form or another.

In the end, every black hole will disappear before the death of the universe. Every bit of matter that falls into a black hole will radiate back out as low-level energy. Those knots of space-time are going to untie themselves. It’s just going to take a long while.

Black holes cannot save us.

Where else might we look for a brighter future, both literally and figuratively?

One thing most definitely missing at the moment in our description of existence as we know it is a theory of quantum gravity. Observable gravity is well handled by modern classical (that is, Einsteinian) physics. The analogy of the stretchy rubber sheet with rocks set upon it works beautifully both to help picture gravitation effects on bodies with mass and, what is a different effect, gravitational radiation (any gravitational deformation produces a gravity wave that travels outward at the speed of light). The sheet bends with the weight of the rock and ripples with the force of its plop onto the sheet.

But the certainty of classical physics breaks down at the quantum level. Nobody has ever discovered the supposed force-carrying particle for gravity, the graviton. This may be due to the incredibly small size a graviton is expected to have. Or it may be due to the fact that we have no real idea of just what gravity is to begin with.

In the famous Sidney Harris cartoon, a mathematician works out an equation on a blackboard and in the midst of the operators is the expression “THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS.” The caption of the cartoon has his colleague commenting: “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.”

A lot rides on “step two” when it comes to quantum gravity. There are attempts at explaining how the big bang happened -- or, rather, attempts to describe what conditions would be in place for there to have been a big bang – that depend upon an interpretation of gravity as being like all the other fundamental forces (that is, the electroweak and strong nuclear) but smaller. Way smaller. Only mighty at the tiniest levels conceivable.

Just how small can we conceive things to be?

Continuous time can’t be measured in units shorter than the time it would take a photon to cross the Planck length, a measurement twenty orders of magnitude littler than a proton in an atom. It comes out to about 10-24 second. And the first tick of this clock was the most important 10-24 second of all existence. According to some quantum cosmological theories, it was then that a quantum fluctuation produced a particle out of nothing. A special particle.

This is maybe not as strange as it sounds. Virtual particles are not merely a theoretical construction in quantum physics. They’ve been proved to exist. Naked space can and does “create” particles (always in twos with baryons, but singly with photons and the like), and with a blade of sufficient tininess – a blade with a sharpness approaching the Planck distance – these particles can be winnowed apart and teased into continued existence. See the Quantum Connection novels of Travis S. Taylor or my own Metaplanetary and upcoming Guardian of Night [Baen, February 2012] for some of the fun science fiction writers can have with such concepts.

But in the quantum fluctuation theory, this first virtual particle was different from your ordinary run-of-the-mill virtual particle. It had enormous mass and incredibly low entropy. It was, in fact, everything that is, held together at the moment of birth by the concerted action of the unified forces of nature. It couldn’t last long that way, however.

Tick.

Symmetry cracks. Gravity separates out first among all forces..

Tock.

Kaboom. Or Ka-bloom, maybe is the better expression.

The clock started, and the universe ran . . . downhill. It’s this presumption about the quality of quantum gravity – that it is essentially one with the other fundamental forces, merely the first portion of the original force of forces to break symmetry – that gets us to our current bleak state. But it is entirely a presumption because nobody has successfully worked out a theory of quantum gravity.

Not for lack of trying, of course.

John Wheeler’s “quantum foam” of wormholes, entangled, knotty loops, vortices of spinning Planck-sized cellular structures, and a bunch of other possible shapes and sizes, as well as so-far analogy-less mathematical constructions, have been proposed.

Perhaps the most famous of the quantum gravity conceptualizations at the moment are those of string theory. I won’t dig into the meat of those ideas here, but will note that with much of string theory predicting observable consequences and creating repeatable experiments has proved problematic. You can’t help but suspect that this is because string theory may turn out to be about as useful as medieval philosophical arguments for how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Show me an angel, and then we’ll talk about pins and dancing.

But what if there are no gravitons, no fundamental particles that are force carriers for gravity? Some recent theories describe gravity as an emergent property of the universe rather than a fork in the road one portion of existence took after the big bang. Gravity becomes something like thermodynamics, fluid dynamics or biology – a consequence rather than a cause.

The key to such theories is the attempt to stand the idea that gravity causes entropy on its head. Instead, entropy is itself a fundamental force and gravity is a product of this “entropic principle.” All of the laws of at least Newtonian physics can thus be derived from viewing the universe as relatively coarse-grained. Within certain areas you can treat all the different particles as if they were one and the same.

Take as an analogy a wooden kid’s block that is uniformly green on all six sides. This doesn’t mean that every molecule on the block’s surface is green. There may be some blues mixed in there. There may be some yellows. In fact, there may be no “real” green reflectors at all. Nevertheless the block appears green, and we can call it green and it will do “green block” things. The universe is lumpy and a lump often behaves uniformly for certain purposes.

So the idea is that gravity arises as a boundary effect when two or more such coarse regions interact. Think of a balloon. If we rub the outside of a latex balloon to make static electricity, the dust motes concentrate on that side due to the electrostatic charge on the exterior. But in the case of emergent gravity, the effect is inertial, occurs at a much larger scale (and doesn’t make that awful, cringe-inducing balloon squeak). In fact, say the emergent theorists, as a general rule we can state that entropy in the universe acts to separate and tease apart matter so that it maximizes itself, that is, that it maximizes the overall entropy. And that separation and destruction of coarseness, the propensity to smooth out the lumps, is what we experience as gravity.

An interesting part of this theory – and the part that may give us hope to avoid the heat death of everything – is that it treats gravity as pure information.

We can look at quantum phenomenon – especially the force carrying particles – as carriers of information about other particles, for example “normal” matter, say baryons like electrons and protons. In this view, the universe is in a sense a computer, and the discrete entities of quantum mechanics are its bits and bytes. The problem with this idea has been gravitons. As in, where are they? What are they? Do they behave like the other force-carriers, and exactly what kind of information do they carry? Nobody knows.

What if emergent gravity theory is right and there simply are no gravitons to begin with? Gravity would then be not a basic-unit bit or byte but a larger subroutine. This would make our conception of time emergent as well. What matters is the information contained in the universe, not its physical placement. And, through various mechanisms such as a black hole event horizon or, heck, even a perpetually traveling photon, information can be made to seem to last forever.

We might escape the end of time by essentially crawling into our own bellybuttons.

Or, to put it another way, entropy saves -- and makes incremental backups which we can stash in places we hope are removed from the hard drive. The hard drive? We know that’s going to crash. But so what? We’re information, baby.

Gravity? We don’t need no stinking gravity!

Yeah, right. First, I am queasy with the idea of existence becoming a mere backup to a dead reality. Don’t you get the sneaking suspicion that something is going to get lost along the way? I know I’ve never done a successful full restored from a back-up without something going missing. Furthermore, I’m not at all convinced that if the beauty and truth of existence becomes disembodied, generalized, and transmuted into a static form that anything that, er, matters about it will remain.

Second, it is very difficult to conceive of gravity as anything but a fundamental force. Granted, this is intuitional, and intuition can be very wrong. Yet extraordinary claims, such as emergent gravity, require extraordinary proof precisely because intuition is more often right than not – since it is but the sum total of our rules of thumbs derived from experience (plus, maybe, a dash of creativity and a jigger of single malt insanity). In any case, we should listen to intuition, absent any other evidence. And, like string theory, the predictable, observable consequences of emergent gravity theory do not seem apparent.

Furthermore, the inflection of gravity with entropy smells like a tautology, an A = A statement, as well. Finally, the conflation of information with physical forces in general has the feel of an analogy run wild. More specifically, it feels like it may be the psychological product of humanity in the current developed world sitting for hours in front of the glowing screens of our current dominant technology and getting stuck in information-age metaphors for everything.

Do we really live in an old laptop with a battery failing from being plugged into the a.c. current too long? Yuck.

Which sends us back to the tragedy of the dying universe again.

One recent escape hatch that seems more promising than a theory of emergent gravity is put forward by the mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose.

Penrose’s Cycles of Times is a unique book, the likes of which we seldom see these days: it’s written for the general reader but doesn’t soft pedal any of the complexity of thought (or math) that leads to the conclusions. If you’ll persevere to the end, you’ll love it – or at least feel like in completing it you’ve finished something like a mental marathon (although your final time may leave something to be desired. Mine did.).

In Cycles, Penrose proposes what he admits is a conjectural notion of universe formation. In his youth, he admits to having admired prettiness of the old steady state model of the universe, where matter is being born from quantum fluctuations and such, where the universe is expanding forever, and where the road goes ever on, as it were.

Then Penrose ran into Stephen Hawking and gave all that nonsense up.

Penrose makes an argument in Cycles for something with similarities to the old balanced beauty of the steady state while taking into account all the new stuff such as the steady-state-killing discovery of the cosmic background radiation and black holes. Penrose assumes that gravitons somehow exist on the quantum level and will be described sooner or later.

He argues that at the extreme end of things -- the heat death of the universe after all the black holes have evaporated and all that remains in existence are mass-less protons and gravitons -- the geometry of the universe will match the geometry necessarily in place at the time of the big bang. Time, things happening, low entropy flowing to high via the Second Law of Thermodynamics, all of which Penrose says are permutations of the same phenomenon, would lose expression in the dark after the long twilight.

The moment the last boson passes beyond the last causation possibility of any other particle, the big bang will have its freshly lined football field, or its empty chess board, if you prefer.

The game can begin again. The ball can bounce.

At least the necessary smooth geometric conditions would be in place for a big bang to occur. What’s more – and this is important to Penrose, who is queasy about theories that involve assumptions of unique conditions -- you don’t have to consider such initial, “pre” big-bang conditions to be unique, singular, or highly improbable. They are the outcome of the death of our universe, and of any universe.

And so we could be somewhere in the midst of an endless cycle of expanding and "bouncing" universes, in a kind of a amalgamation of the big bang and the steady state. Would the physical constants and laws have to be the same from universe to universe? I think Penrose would say as long as the laws of the new universe were scalable and could be mapped onto our own using the advanced mathematical version of saving in a different file format.

I am more cheered by Penrose’s idea for escape than by any of the others, but even Penrose admits that his is only an attempt to lay the groundwork for a new big bang at the end of our current universe. He’s doubtful that quantum fluctuations can produce such an event (he mainly finds the unique and random nature of such an event aesthetically displeasing, it seems) and he doesn’t know otherwise how the thing itself would happen.

At least with Penrose, we return to the notion of cycles of time. We get an elegant rhythm to being. The universe may be entirely deterministic and somewhat repetitive, but at least it isn’t doomed to fizzle and go away forever.

In Tom Godwin’s famous, melodramatic story, “The Cold Equations,” a young girl stows away on a rocket ship bringing emergency medicine to stop a plague on a distant planet. The ship has only enough fuel to take the weighty cargo and one human to its destination.

Millions of people are at risk. The ship requires a trained pilot. And if the stowaway remains, the ship, and its vital medical supply, will run out of fuel before it gets to its destination.

Even if you haven’t read the story, you can probably guess what happens. What, in the logic of the story, has to happen. Let’s just say it doesn’t have a happy ending.

Must we treat our hope for something other than frozen nothingness at the end of time as if it were that fresh-faced eighteen-year-old girl?

Contrary to the tenets of scientism, I don’t think that is the pickle in which we find ourselves.

Recall assumption #1: scientific law is deterministic or probabilistic for the entire cosmos and assumption #2: the current understanding of physics is more or less correct and we can extrapolate from it.

We’ve seen that as regards the ugly Heat Death rigmarole, assumption #2 is not merely uncertain, but wildly off the mark. Despite some intriguing suggestions, we are missing any understanding of gravity on a quantum level.

But what about assumption #1? Is not this the basis of science? Not at all.

Science may or may not have a basis in what we currently view as rational. Science does not even assume inductive logic. David Hume was right to throw it out as a certainty. What happens always trumps whatever has gone before.

This is enormously cheering.

Nobody knows what is going to happen.

There may be rules to this game of which we are unaware. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion (you might even call it faith) that there are.

Heat death ain’t pretty. There’s no fun in it. No entertainment. No beauty. It just feels incomplete as a prediction and as an explanation for anything, like a song that cuts off before its proper conclusion. Why should this sense of incompleteness be any less meaningful than some presumption that science as we know it is necessarily done, finished, and that existence is ultimately kaput. Human aesthetic perception can be just as world-based as human sense of time. Why shouldn’t it be? A honed sense of beauty is a survival mechanism, too.

Anyway, I hope and expect that this universe will escape such a fate.

If I’m wrong and somebody shows me I’m wrong, then so be it. But so far nobody has.

As the philosopher William James puts it:

“When scientific and moral postulates war, and objective proof is not to be had, the only course is voluntary choice, for skepticism itself, if systematic, is also voluntary choice…Freedom's first deed should be to affirm itself. We ought not to hope for any other method of getting at the truth if indeterminism be a fact.”

In my case, the postulates are probably more aesthetic than moral. But if our universe’s fate to experience an ugly, wasting death is not predetermined, then who is to say we cannot find a way for it (and maybe even us as a species) to escape the coming fizzle? Who is to say we can’t make a solution for ourselves once we discover what gravity really might be on the small scale and what scientific truths even beyond some hoped-for grand unified field theory may exist and be out there for discovery? We should at least not go down without a fight.

And who knows, maybe gravity will be on our side in the end.

Science and Society in the Citizen Series

by John Lambshead

There is an old saying about science in science fiction: If the story could be written without the science then it's not SF and should not be written as such.

“Hard” SF is supposed to encompass stories that use science and technology that is at least theoretically possible, as opposed to “soft” sf which embraces fantastic developments. The difference between soft SF and fantasy is largely a matter of style, or to quote Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

The downside of hard SF is that it can date awfully quickly.

One of the fascinating blindspots in most hard SF stories, is that they rarely considered the social implications of innovative technology. The future is often depicted as socially exactly like the present, only with impressive gadgets.

What strikes me most looking back at the original Star Trek communicator, apart from the large size, was that they only used it as a mobile telephone, perhaps the dullest and least important use of a modern device that has generated a societal revolution in human mating rituals. While on the subject of “love,” I would suggest that the contraceptive pill has done far more to change the world than, say, nuclear or electronic technology, because it changed our culture.

Which brings me to the science of Into the Hinterlands and The Citizen series. The series is a science fiction tale based around the life of George Washington. It is not a biography but a trilogy of novels that try to distill key issues in this remarkable man's life and present them in an exciting and readable format.

It is not unusual for sf authors to draw upon historical events to provide the background culture and plot for a novel. After all, nothing is more persuasively real than reality. David himself is a past master at this. Consider the Lt. Leary/RCN series.

Drake himself says: “I've read Patrick O'Brian's novels and I love them. Some reviews have referred to my Leary/Mundy series as an SF version of Hornblower. That's not correct; I did an SF version of the Aubrey/Maturin series, Patrick O'Brian's superb knockoff of Forester's Hornblower.”

But the Leary series is far more than that. Daniel Leary may be an officer in a Republic of Cinnabar Navy that draws its culture from the Royal Navy but Cinnabar is not Eighteenth Century Britain. Culturally, it is the late Roman Republic: David read classics at the University of Iowa.

The series also draws heavily on historical events for the background politics to the novels. For example, the political situation of Some Golden Harbor is based on the life on Aristodemus, Tyrant of Cumae, and the general political situation in Southern Italy in 500 BC, intercut with events from the South in the American Civil War and the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Drake's genius is to recognize the essential human interaction from disparate sources and to merge them seamlessly into a believable whole.

There is a further subtle advantage of drawing political situations from the classical world. The political slogans and ideology of the time are meaningless to a modern audience so all that is left is the naked power politics in all its glory, the way a long buried corpse shows the skeleton, not the soft tissue that once concealed it.

For example take the political slogan from classical history, “Freedom of the Greeks.”

To the modern eye it looks like a call for the right of self determination of the Greek people. Actually, it was more complicated than that. The “Greek people” was merely a linguistic concept, somewhat like the “English-speaking peoples” today.

Politically, the slogan meant that each tiny Greek polis, or city-state, should be completely independent to wage eternal war on all other Greek city-state within range. Disunity was not so much a political problem as an ideology. When a city-state planted a colony, usually due to overpopulation, the new state was equally independent and would happily declare war on its parent.

The squabbling city-states were easy pickings as soon as the Mediterranean came within the sphere of great powers. The Ionian city-states on the coast of Asia Minor, unable to come together to put up a unified defence, were conquered by Croesus of Lydia. From then on they were always a province in someone else's empire. The city-states in southern Greece fell in quick succession to Philip of Macedonia.

Each new would-be conqueror of the Greek polis persuaded them to revolt against their current owner by announcing the “Freedom of the Greeks.” In 307 BC, Demetrius Poliocertes arrived of Athens with 250 ships and proclaimed the Freedom of the Greeks, driving out the forces of King Cassander of Maecedonia. He repeated the trick in 302 BC, and again in 294, each time making the same proclamation.

The Irano-Hellenic King Mithradates the Great pulled a similar stunt in 90 BC proclaiming “Freedom of the Greeks,” apparently with a straight face, to persuade the cities to rebel against Rome. The silver-tongued Athenians made great fun of the sunburn on the face of the fair-skinned, taciturn Roman General Sulla, likening it to oatmeal. Sulla, who had no sense of humor, razed Athens to the ground in retaliation without bothering to make a proclamation.

The English phrase “Freedom of the Greeks” does not even begin to describe the power of this propaganda, but from the perspective of two millennia of hindsight, the ideology falls away and we see these political power-plays for what they were.

The Citizen series presents something of a different problem than that of the RCN stories. In order to tell Washington's story, David was obliged to recreate two things, a social-cultural situation that matched the American colonies in the eighteenth century and a technology that would offer the fictional Allenson and other characters the same sort of strategic choices that were open to Washington and other people of the time.

Recreating late eighteenth century British society and politics is easy enough. It is close enough to modern Britain to be recognisable and understandable, but different enough to give a period atmosphere. But we come to an immediate and fundamental issue: slavery.

The English colonies in the New World were one of the only two slave economies in modern Western culture since the Fall of Rome, the other being Brazil. It is an irony that a nation founded on the highest ideals of the Age of Enlightenment also incorporated one of the most despicable social systems ever invented, but Orwellian “doublethink” is a universal human trait.

New World slavery added a further pernicious twist in that it was race-based. In the Classical World anyone, from any class, nation or race, could find themselves in the unfortunate position of being a slave if fortune turned against them, so free descendants of slaves were indistinguishable from anyone else. Mayor of London Boris Johnson's great-great-grandfather was a Turk who bought (and married) his great-great-grandmother. She was a Circassian slave-girl. Circassian girls were considered to be especially beautiful in Turkey in the mid-nineteenth century and fetched high prices at auction, £100 or more.

Far from being stigmatized, Boris boasts about this relationship because it livens up the political CV of what would otherwise be just another Old Etonian Tory toff.

With race-based slavery, stigma follows the descendants of slaves, so slavery and race remain a burning issue long after the institution is abandoned. Race and slavery is still a hot issue in the USA.

This presented David with a serious problem because slavery was not a significant issue to the English colonists in the New World. It was a backdrop that no one seemed to question too closely. David had to recreate the wastefulness and inefficiency of a colonial slave economy without slaves. Otherwise our story would inevitably be all about slavery, as to ignore an issue so important to modern Americans would be perverse. David solved the problem by making the “slaves” a non-sentient alien species—Fleeks.

Please do not misunderstand me, slavery in the New World was, and is, an extremely important topic. It merits serious treatment in novels but it is so important that we have to take it out of Hinterlands or it would completely dominate to the detriment of the story we are trying to tell.

I added a variant of indentured servants to reinforce the message. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, indentured servants were poor provincial British who borrowed money from an employer for a ticket to the colonies and then worked for nothing for a period of years to pay off the debt. In practice, there was a continuum between indentured servants and white slaves, since the difference could be just a legal technicality. Even today, the cultural group at the bottom of the social pile in the British West Indies are the “redlegs,” descendants of white slaves and indentured servants.

The famous buccaneer and Governor of Jamaica, Sir Henry Morgan, was supposed to have arrived in Barbados as an indentured servant, although we may rightly be suspicious that this part of his story was invented for romantic reasons. Morgan came from a family of Welsh provincial farming squires (a bit like Allenson in the Hinterlands) so was hardly impoverished. Indeed, his uncle (and father-in-law) Edward Morgan had been Governor before him. Morgan sued French author Alexandre Exquemelin (who served under Morgan, incidentally) for publishing the allegation and won £200. And yet, and yet, there is a fascinating entry in the Bristol Apprentice Books of the ninth of February, 1655, listing a Henry Morgan of Abergavenny, Labourer, bound to Timothy Tounsend of Bristol, Cutler, for three years to serve in Barbadoras.

I'm digressing. Let's return to the Hinterlands.

David's next problem was to recreate the social and economic isolation of the American colonies and the difficulty of moving deeper into the Hinterland through the wilderness behind the British colonies.

To take the latter point first: Travel through the wilderness was by foot, horse or possibly canoe. There were no roads so carriages were not useful outside the immediate area of the colonies. With a wonderful bit of lateral thinking, David came up with a transport system that mimicked these limitations wonderfully. Colonists move through the Hinterland by means of machines that travel through a “Continuum” that is outside of normal space-time in a bubble of reality, rather like the time-vortex in Dr Who. But unlike the Tardis, the technology is limited. The bubble is self contained, with very little moving in or out of the field around it. Physical objects and modest amounts of visible light (so the pilot can navigate) pass through the field.

Materials incur a drag when moved through the continuum so Continuum vehicles have to be as light as possible, further limiting the technology. Just to add to the woes of Continuum transport design engineers, some materials, notably metals, incur far more drag than others.

Most importantly, heat cannot escape from a reality bubble in the Continuum except as a thin trickle of infra-red. Firing some sort of puissant energy weapon inside the bubble would be suicidal. Similarly, rail guns are out of the question due to rapid heat build up. Chemical explosive powered guns would be lethal due to fumes as well as heat build up. The pilot's only realistic weapon system is to throw things or use a mechanical device like a crossbow or, for portability, a spring gun.

Then we have the problem of an energy source. A motor generating significant amounts of waste heat or fumes is out of the question. The pilot is then reliant on low-drag batteries for power. That is okay for short runs of known duration but any exploration of the Wilderness will require the pilot to use good old muscle power and pedal. The lightweight Continuum transport “frames” used by our intrepid explorers are essentially high-tech electric bicycles.

High-tech bicycles have a long pedigree in science fiction. Have a good look at Wells’ description of the design of his time machine, while bearing in mind that Wells’ passions included socialism, free love, and bicycling.

To the stars and beyond, by pedal power—David has a wicked sense of humor to be sure, but he has recreated the sheer physical demands of journeying through the colonial American wilderness, without which our story would be a nonsense. It was hard work and you took only what you could carry. This was not a job for the old, the sick, or the irresolute.

There is a further human factor necessary to properly recreate the strategic situation in the American colonies—the native American human population. There are various ways this could have been handled. For example, remnants of a collapsed culture found over the Hinterlands or rebels who have fled into the wilderness, but these would fail to describe the innate alienation both social and biological between native American and European culture.

David’s solution was elegant and close to reality. He postulated the Riders, a branch of humanity that split off early in our history—just like the real history of the native Americans. How Riders left the planet, and continue to move through the Continuum, was a bit of a head-scratcher. Hence David invented the Beasts, nontechnological Continuum travellers, because a technological alien species would warp the story.

I do not want to go into the biology of why another technology-using species in our corner of space time is very unlikely as that will be the subject of another essay.

I expanded on David's ideas and could not resist linking the Rider exodus to the Toba Event and the effects of “bottlenecking” in human evolution. I then developed Rider culture around these points with nods to native American culture.

My professional life was as a research scientist in phylogenetics, ecology and evolution, so biology does tend to weave through the story. To understand the Riders we have to look at current thinking on human evolution.

Around five to seven million years ago a strange primate lived in Africa that was the ancestor of chimps and humans. Note that not only are chimps human beings closest relatives but people are chimps closest relatives. From a chimp's perspective we are more like them than anything else in the animal kingdom.

Our chimp-hominid joint ancestor was a nonspecialized animal that was bipedal on the ground but quadripedal in trees using a grasping foot. No fossils have been found of this beast but we have a fair idea of this creature's morphology because we do have fossil evidence for a close descendant that lived in Africa around four and a half million years ago,Ardipithecus ramidus, one of the first hominids.

The chimp-hominid appears to have been under evolutionary pressure to specialize and it went in two directions. The ecology of Africa in this period was changeable, with forests advancing and retreating in oscillations. Such instability speeds up evolution. Genetic evidence suggests that the split into two separate clades (literally “branches” or evolutionary lines) was done by about five million years ago, although there seems to have been a long period of interbreeding.

One clade specialized in an arboreal lifestyle—the chimps took to the trees—while our ancestors became increasingly adapted to the plains of Africa. Incidentally, the genetic evidence suggests that chimps evolved faster than human beings. Note that “evolved” in this context simply means changed.

Jumping forward in time to around two million years ago, we encounter a species of hominid named Homo erectus (I will simplify here for the sake of clarity otherwise we will get buried in the detail of paleontological arguments). This organism evolved in Africa, or possibly Western Asia, and spread across the Old World. It has the same generic name (Homo) as us and is probably the first hominid that is recognizably “human.” For example, there is evidence that they used fire as a tool. However, they were not us.

The H. erectus line speciated allopatrically, i.e. geographically. The African clade evolved into H. sapiens—us! The first morphologically recognizable human fossils are only two hundred thousand years old and were found in Ethiopia. The first evidence for the creative human mind was found in a South African artefact dated to seventy thousand years ago. It is an abstract pattern on two pieces of ochre. We don't know whether this marks the evolution of the human mind as being later than the evolution of human morphology but it is a possibility.

Suspiciously, something else very special happened about seventy thousand years ago; the Toba Event. A super-volcano under Lake Toba in Sumatra let rip, causing global cooling and weather instability.

Human beings came perilously close to extinction. We were reduced to somewhere between one thousand to ten thousand breeding pairs and this is seared into our genetics. We are the result of what is known as genetic bottlenecking, which is why the human genome is so similar in all human beings, and why it is such a mess. Inbreeding is horrendously dangerous for us. For example, the children of first cousins are ten times more likely to have genetic defects than the norm. Only 3.4 percent of babies in the UK are born to Muslim parents, but they account for about 30 percent of recessive gene diseases. The reason is that 55 percent of British Pakistanis are married to first cousins, rising to 75 percent in Bradford, and many of the parents are themselves the descendants of first cousin marriages.

Baen Barflies may recall Jim Baen’s and Karl Ugland’s interesting monographs on the subject of inbreeding.

For the Citizens series, the Toba Event is when the first humans left Earth to become The Riders. How this happened is still a matter of debate to the characters of Into The Hinterlands. All Riders are descended from a handful of individuals, probably a single hunter-gatherer band. I tried to show the impact of genetic bottling on Riders by a simple and relatively unimportant genetic peculiarity: most are left-handed.

Extreme bottlenecking has also had an effect on Rider culture. They live in warring hunter-gatherer clans but they exchange women from clan to clan. Only the clans that adopted this cultural behavior would have survived genetic catastrophe.

Such genetic evidence as exists suggests that early human societies did something similar. Women had a greater genetic dispersion than men, who seemed to have stayed in one region—reproductively speaking.

I had a model for the Rider exodus from human evolution. The sudden jump in human mental ability as indicated by artefacts occurs close to or just after the Toba Event and it is tempting to ascribe cause and effect. Genetic bottlenecking followed by unfavorable climatic changes could cause rapid evolution. For whatever reason, human beings made a cultural Great Leap Forward about fifty thousand years ago and soon afterwards small groups made the long trek out of Africa to populate the world.

Non-African human beings are therefore a bottleneck from a bottleneck, just like Riders. There is still more genetic diversity in Africa than the rest of the world put together, although curiously there appears to have been a degree of genetic input into the human genome outside Africa from two of our sibling species, one unknown and H. neanderthalensis—the original native Europeans.

After a few hundred thousand years or so, the geographically separated populations of H.sapiens would probably have followed the H. erectus clade and speciated, but the Great Leap Forward kept leaping forward and we have shrunk the world with our technology. The genetic pools of human populations are connected by increasingly fast-flowing connective streams to form a single global genetic ocean.

But what of Riders, are they human? Are they the still H. sapiens, the same species as us? An analogous question is whether H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens are the same species.

It is always a bit of a shock to nonbiologists to discover that what constitutes a species is largely a matter of convention and opinion. Biological classification is the art of naming species and putting them into hierarchies of natural groups according to shared characteristics, something that started with Aristotle. Phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary relationships and in the modern world classification is intended to reflect current thinking on phylogenetics, but the two should never be confused.

The classificatory level of species is no more real or artificial than any other taxonomic level, such as phylum or family. There are many theoretical biological definitions of species but broadly speaking a species can be defined as a shared unitary gene pool. This is something that is in a constant state of evolutionary flux.

Historically, species were defined by degree of morphological difference according to the subjective opinion of the individual taxonomist, which made for lively scientific conferences. Latterly, the percentage degree of difference between selected genetic markers is commonly employed, which at least has the advantage of being more objective if a lot less fun.

So, I would not class H. sapiens as conspecific (same species) as H. neanderthalensis because (i) they were morphologically distinct (the practical definition) and (ii) they were not part of the human gene pool. The overlap seems to have only produced an input of about four percent.

So what of Riders? Well, morphologically Riders do not seem to have had sufficient time to develop a clear distinction with H. sapiens so would be the same species. However, Riders and people rarely (never) seem to interbreed for cultural-behavioral reasons. Now, this is significant because it implies that the gene pools of Riders and people are separated. In that situation, division into two species is inevitable if the separation continues for long enough—probably a minimum of hundreds of thousands of years. However, if Rider, or human, behaviour changes such that they start interbreeding then they reform as a single species.

H. erectus spread around the Old World and underwent allopatric speciation. H. sapiens did the same thing but remained a single gene pool due to the Great Leap Forward. The future for Riders is uncertain, assuming they even survive contact with people. . . .

Finally, David had to address the economic and social isolation of the American colonies. It is difficult for modern people to emotionally grasp how big a barrier was the Atlantic Ocean. We live in a world where any significant event, and much trivia, on one continent is beamed in real time to the other, where you could wake up one morning in one continent and on a whim decide to travel to the other with the confident expectation of being there within twenty-four hours, where the trip to the airport could take longer than the transatlantic flight, and where the biggest obstacle to travel is bureaucratic complexity.

In the eighteenth century a ship put out from Bristol or Liverpool and disappeared over the horizon, sometimes never to be seen again. Travel times to America would typically have been of the order of two months but could be longer.

The wind-powered oceanic ships were entirely dependent on natural forces so followed set routes that took advantage of wind and wave. For example, the “Traditional and Best Route” to travel from New York to London would involve sailing south to just off South America before turning East to the Canaries and then North. Columbus followed a slight short cut via the Azores known as “The Downwind Route.” A glance at a globe demonstrates that these are a long way round.

The Atlantic Ocean reappears in Into the Hinterland as The Bight, an area of the Continuum where there are no habitable planets. Interworld ships have to jump it in one go. David invented the “chasms” in the Continuum to recreate the transatlantic trade routes. Chasms are semi-permanent energy currents that flow through the Continuum. Ships can ride along them obtaining a free increase in speed and hence range. The Cutter Stream colonies only exist because of a powerful chasm called the Cutter Stream that runs across the Bight from the area of space containing the Home Worlds (the Europe analog).

Smaller chasms in the Hinterlands serve the same strategic function as rivers. They act like roads, expediting movement along set channels. Historically, the rivers of North America favored the French. The British had put their colonies in the wrong place.

Colonies may be planted in inhospitable reasons for military purposes or reasons of political prestige but as such they will never progress beyond military outposts. For a colony to prosper and attract immigration it has to have viable two way trade with home. It has to have exportable products that will make a profit for a commercial shipper. Merchant ships are quite different from state-controlled navies. Commercial viability is a balance between operating costs, speed and range, and the value of the transported goods.

I had to invent transbight interworld ships that had operating costs linked to range. The obvious way range would be limited was heat build-up within the reality bubble around the ship. It would hardly be viable to pedal a merchant ship across the Bight any more than one could paddle a merchant ship across the Atlantic. Crews cost, not just in wages but in supplies. So an interworld ship would use a motor of some sort. Motors are machines that increase entropy by turning other forms of energy into heat.

So I envisaged an interworld ship would start a voyage with a core of chilled iron. As it runs through the continuum, heat from the engines is fed into the core until it reaches high temperatures and the ship can go no further. Increasing range, or speed, or cargo capacity means increasing the size of the chilled core. But the chilled core exerts a drag requiring bigger motors that generate more heat, and so on. The general mathematical pattern of such relationships is that each linear increase in “capacity” will require an exponential increase in size of the ship. For a cargo of a given value, there will be a travel time beyond which the shipper is running at a loss.

While on the subject of interworld ships, I should point out that economics also applies to where a merchant ship can dock. A military assault vessel, such as HMS Ocean, can turn up on any coast and transport men and materiel ashore using only its own assets. That capability costs a great deal of money, which would make a merchant ship uneconomic.

The interworld port in the Cutter Stream is by the capital, Manzanita City, or to put it another way the capital is beside the port. The port has heavy duty, mirror-flat, landing aprons that can support a loaded interworld ship without stressing its lightly constructed hull; reinforced hulls that could land anywhere would add weight that would add drag, increasing costs. The port on Manzanita has vital infrastructure to “refuel” the ships, to whit a large lake of clean freshwater to quickly cool down the core, speeding up turnaround time. And time equals money.

The early British regular army campaigns in North America built roads through the wilderness as the army moved, something that seems insane to modern eyes but actually it was a tried and tested military strategic option. All civilized imperial armies built roads for the movement of troops and supplies when invading a wilderness. To give just one example, the Romans left military roads all over Western Europe. The city I live in is built on the A2 road, known to my Anglo-Saxon forbears as Watling Street. This road runs from the channel ports to London and then in a great curve across the Midlands to the giant Roman military base at Chester.

One point to remember is that the American mainland colonies in the eighteenth century were of minimal value to either Britain or France. The motivation for conflict between the two global superpowers in North America was largely a matter of national prestige and politics, not economics. A modern example might be confrontations between the Soviet Union and the USA, often through proxies, in Indochina, Africa or the West Indies.

That is probably a good place to finish. I hope readers find the story entertaining. I hope I have done a decent job bringing Jim Baen and David Drake's superb concept to life but, most of all, I hope I have done justice to the memory of that remarkable Englishman and American, George Washington.

John Lambshead

Southern England, 2011

BEATING DECLINE: Miltech and the Survival of the U.S.

by

J.R. Dunn

Part I

Dangerous times await the United States in the international arena. We are facing a period of relative decline in respect to other nations and the global community as a whole. Many are aggressive states with little reason to be friendly to us or to defer to our interests. Our status as leading nation will be challenged, imperiled, and disregarded. This circumstance is locked in and we cannot avoid it. Debt, inflation, overextension, and defense cuts, not to mention a strange national diffidence toward acting as world leader, guarantee this state of affairs.

On the occasion of his retirement in June, defense secretary Robert Gates warned against further defense cuts. “Frankly,” he was quoted as saying, ”I can’t imagine being part of a nation, part of a government … that’s being forced to dramatically scale back our engagement with the rest of the world.” Extraordinary words from a man who initiated more cuts than any previous secretary: over 30 programs, including the F-22 Raptor, the Army's Future Combat System, and the AF-1 airborne laser. In other words, some of the programs most crucial to maintaining American military capability in the 21st century.

Even as Gates made his departure, the Obama administration was ordering cuts of $400 billion over a period of twelve years. Leading liberal politicians such as Rep. Barney Frank have gone even further, calling for up to $1 trillion in cuts. And this is not to overlook the recent debt ceiling deal, in which automatic cuts to defense, amounting to $500 billion over and above the amounts already mentioned, will occur if a formal bipartisan budget agreement is not achieved.

At risk is the USAF’s B-3 bomber, the Navy's CG(X) cruiser and EPX intelligence plane, the Marine’s Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, the Army's Ground Combat Vehicle, and the Navy’s new TAOX tanker and the next generation ballistic missile submarine. Talk has also been heard of cutting Army battalions, reducing the number of fleet aircraft carriers, basing fleet units in the continental U.S. rather than at forward bases, dismantling most of our nuclear arsenal, and axing that perennial target, abandoning U.S. Marine Corps aviation.

The reasons for this impasse, while interesting in themselves, do not really concern us as much as the simple reality of what we face. It’s in the cards and we will have to deal with it. How do we go about doing that?

Other dominant states have undergone the same ordeal. The United Kingdom and the Soviet Union can serve as examples. Following its magnificent WW II stand against fascism, the UK suffered a lengthy period of political decline in which its global empire, one of the best-ordered and in many ways admirable of all imperial systems, was stripped away in less than twenty years. The Soviet Union, a much less admirable state, suffered an explosive collapse in the early 1990s following its failure to implement socialism on a national scale while simultaneously challenging the West in the Cold War. Both nations benefited from the existence of an even more powerful national entity that ensured global stability while they adapted to their new status—the United States itself. Countries that might have contemplated taking advantage of the suddenly weakened superstates were held off by the American presence, allowing the UK and USSR to make their transition in relative security. (Only one nation attempted to throw the dice—Argentina in the 1983 Falklands conflict  A shrunken Royal Navy succeeded in straightening out the Argentines with  assistance from the U.S.)

No guarantor of international stability exists today. The United States will go through its period of readjustment very much on its own. As for challenges from lawless and predatory powers, the question is not if but when. What is in store for us is not conquest, not humiliation, not even necessarily defeat, but a slow erosion of influence and power that will limit our ability to meet crises and make our national will felt. We are already experiencing that erosion, and it will continue for some time to come.

Emerging Threats

Expansionist states on the cusp of becoming major regional powers will wish to exercise their newfound capabilities. Most see the U.S. as an obstacle. There can be little doubt that each of them views America’s current difficulties as a clear opportunity.

- China—Looks forward to taking back the rogue “province” of Taiwan while at the same time extending its control over the Western Pacific. An internal faction of unknown size and influence involving senior officers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would not at all mind giving the U.S. a black eye in the process.

- Iran—Wishes to gain control over the Persian Gulf and the surrounding states in hopes of establishing something on the order of a Shi’ite caliphate. Its current nuclear weapons program is troubled (it suffered a serious setback as the target of the first tailored cyberweapon), but continuing. Further concern arises over extensive governmental influence from a Shi’ite apocalyptic cult comprised of believers in the imminent return of an Islamic messiah, the Twelfth Imam.

- North Korea—After nearly seventy years, still the personal domain of the world’s sole communist dynasty. Unstable and run by a family of doubtful sanity, North Korea is a perpetual irritant. With its arsenal of crude atomic weapons, it is in the peculiar position of being too weak to fully assert itself yet too well-armed to be ignored. Eventually this conundrum will be resolved through some kind of action.

- Russia—Interested in reestablishing military dominance over Eurasia while also clawing back a few strayed remnants of the old USSR. Important sections of the military and security organs are subject to feelings of anti-American revanchism over the results of the Cold War.

- Venezuela—Has eagerly adapted the mantle of spearhead of Latin Marxism from Cuba, with some success among neighboring states. Has also established close military ties with China and Iran, which include agreements for basing rights and emplacement of advanced strategic weapons systems.

- Pakistan—About to explode thanks to an evil synergy involving a totally corrupt military, an effectively unrestrained Islamist element, and seething ethnic rivalries. The problem lies in its possession of up to 110 nuclear weapons. (Nearly as many as the UK.) 1

- There also exist wild cards—threats that while perhaps unlikely, are within the realm of possibility.

- Europe—Union has not proven as easy or as popular as anticipated. It has long been pointed out that the EU has all the trappings of a neofascist state without the controlling ideology. That could change, and not necessarily for the better. Consider the UK or Ireland attempting to secede from the EU under such circumstances. The technical name for this is “civil war.” (Interestingly, one of the few novels to deal with the concept of European union, Angus Wilson’s satirical SF novel The Old Men at the Zoo, climaxes with exactly such a scenario.)

- Mexico—A potential government takeover by one of the cartels, or alternately a front politician under their control, would turn our southern border into even more of a war zone than it is already. We have been ignoring the Mexican drug war for several years now. We may not have this luxury for much longer.

- A Revived United Arab Republic—The “Arab Spring” has not turned out to be as happy an event as many of us hoped. The most powerful political group in the Arab states is the Muslim Brotherhood, a secret society with fascist antecedents considered to be the grandfather of all Islamic terrorist and Jihadi organizations. Any or all of the “liberated” Arab nations could fall prey to this outfit. (It appears that Egypt is doing so now.) The ramifications will be nothing but ugly.

- And let’s not forget the jihadis while we’re at it. That’s a fifty-year war and we are only one-fifth of the way through it.

Beyond these, we have the “unknown unknowns”—potential threats that we simply cannot foresee. An informed European of 1910 would never have guessed at fascism, Nazism, or communism, which dominated much of the 20th century and came close to destroying Europe. What awaits us in the next half-century is anybody’s guess. (How about a combination of the Singularity and neofascism?)Keeping in mind the words of a great statesman (Calvin Coolidge): “If you see ten troubles comin’ down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into a ditch before they get to you,” one or more of these will confront the U.S. while we are at the same time repairing the ravages of recent excesses, maintaining our standing in the international community, and fulfilling our obligations to our allies and treaty partners. There have been easier periods for this country.

We are no longer a hyperpower, and the status of superpower is slipping from our grasp. Within a decade, the U.S. will be merely one great power among a rising cohort of powers. We no longer possess the forces that defeated the Soviet Union, twice humiliated the armies of Saddam Hussein, and that for decades have guaranteed peaceful commerce across the oceans of the world. While much can be accomplished through diplomacy and alliances with other powers, situations will arise in which military force is the sole option. We must find alternatives to the vast resources that are no longer available to us.

We will not, for the foreseeable future, have access to the traditional American method of spending more money to buy more guns than anyone else on earth can afford. What does that leave us? With yet another traditional American method, one that used to be called “Yankee ingenuity”: using technology to solve problems that cannot be addressed in any other way.

The RMA and the American Dilemma

The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)2 is the formal name for changes in warfare brought about by technological innovation in the post-Vietnam period. Originally a Soviet concept, the RMA involves advances in such fields as computers, sensor technology, guidance systems, and communications which together hold the potential to increase the destructive capabilities of weaponry by an order of magnitude. Examples include precision-guided munitions (PGMs), stealth aircraft, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Considerable debate has occurred concerning the RMA’s effect on operations, strategy, tactics, and doctrine.

The RMA fell into disrepute after defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld utilized it as the basis of his “transformational” doctrine for the U.S. military. It was the source of the infamous “light footprint,” in which small, technologically advanced forces would destroy much larger conventional armies, requireing reduced outlay in time, resources, and finances. Rumsfeld was not completely mistaken—the forces that defeated Saddam Hussein in 2003 were much smaller than those dispatched to the Gulf in 1990. Technology made up the difference. What Rumsfeld overlooked was the fact that occupation and combat are two different things. Occupation requires large numbers of boots on the ground to assure security, control, and a smooth transition of power. The failure to meet those requirements in the wake of the Second Gulf War resulted in a lengthy guerilla conflict which sapped American resolve and nearly cost us the victory.

Over the past few years, military thinkers have begun to acknowledge that the RMA, far from being discredited, will continue to influence military affairs for the foreseeable future. Technology remains a major driver of military innovation and despite everything the United States remains the forerunner in technology. A 2008 RAND study, “U.S. Competitiveness in Science and Technology”3 found that the U.S. spends 40 percent of the world’s budget for research, produces 38 percent of new patents, and 63 percent of cited research papers. We also lead in application. The U.S. is the sole nation to have fielded a fleet of stealth fighters and bombers, the sole nation to have made the transition to combat drones, the first adaptor of battlefield robotics, and is very likely the first nation (along with its junior partner Israel) to have created and utilized a cyberwarhead. Technology will enable the United States to endure the challenges to come, and to put the fear of Uncle Sam anew into the world’s bandits, fanatics, and would-be Napoleons.

Maritime Power

Naval power is the most important aspect of American military strength. The seapower thesis of Alfred Thayer Mahan^4— that the United States comprises a “continental island” closer in nature to maritime states such as Japan and the UK than to the continental powers of Eurasia—has proven far more durable than most 19th-century geopolitical theories.

Since the destruction of the Japanese Imperial Fleet in 1944, the U.S. Navy has had no serious rival for control of the seas. For a short period in the 1980s the development of a Soviet blue-water navy caused some worries, but those ended along with the USSR. It is no coincidence that international trade based on maritime shipping underwent a boom during the postwar period. Security provided by U.S. naval dominance of the world’s oceans was a major factor in economic globalization. The vast amounts spent on America’s fleets have repaid themselves many times over.

In the early 21st century, U.S. maritime power faces its first major challenge in nearly seventy years. The fleet is steadily shrinking. In August 2011 it stood at 284 ships, less than half the 575 in commission twenty years ago. At the same time, several foreign fleets are in the process of establishing themselves as serious competitors. The Indian Navy is friendly. The Chinese and Iranian navies, not so much. In addition, piracy has undergone a dramatic rebirth, in Somalia in particular but also in areas such as the Indonesian archipelago. The 21st century sailor will have his hands full.

The Navy’s plan to meet these challenges is embodied in a doctrine called “AirSea Battle.” While little is known about this new strategy, it can be assumed to be a maritime version of AirLand Battle, the U.S. Army’s extremely effective late 20th century ground-combat strategy. AirLand Battle was based on the theories of the eccentric but brilliant USAF officer Col. John Boyd^5, who spent a lifetime attempting to create a universal theory of warfare. AirLand Battle is a complex strategy of maneuver utilizing Boyd’s “decision cycle” (also known as the “OODA Cycle”)6, in which actions carried out at an accelerated pace deny the enemy any opportunity to respond. Large-scale disruptive aerial attacks are followed with swift flank attacks by mechanized units, assaulting not fixed geographic targets such as cities or bases, or even distinct military formations, but any enemy force within reach. The goal is to confuse and disrupt the enemy until utter collapse ensues. AirLand Battle is a strategy by which small, outnumbered forces can defeat much larger opponents through speed, maneuver, and initiative.

AirLand Battle never saw action against the Warsaw Pact, its original target, but found its moment in the two campaigns against the Iraqi Army. These were virtual textbook operations, with the U.S.-led Coalition dominating the battlespace from the start and swiftly subduing the Iraqis with very few direct engagements.

AirSea Battle^7 is a combined-services strategy in which the USAF and Navy will act as a single offensive force. Working from the AirLand Battle template, we can assume that USAF long-range air assets will strike first, disrupting and demoralizing enemy maritime forces. They will be followed by naval air, surface, and submarine elements, striking with PGMs, cruise missiles, and long-range torpedoes. If carried out with the same ferocity as AirLand Battle, this strategy would climax with surviving enemy units fleeing the battlespace, leaving it dominated by U.S. naval forces.

Two major questions arise: can such a strategy be carried out by a steadily shrinking Navy? And can a strategy so dependent on the ever more vulnerable aircraft carrier remain viable into the 21st century?

Fleet carriers are among the most impressive warships ever to take to sea. But all things move toward their end, and carriers of the Nimitz and Ford class may have seen their day. The Chinese, the most serious maritime challenge facing our Navy, are doing their best to make the carrier obsolete. China considers the South China Sea as its territory, going so far as to refer to it as “blue soil,” an inherent part of the Chinese heritage. It has laid claim to the Spratleys, the Paracels, and other small island chains in defiance of Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines. It has never given up its claim to Taiwan. It has suggested that other states—specifically the U.S.—abandon all interest in the area, in clear disregard of current treaties and the traditional law of the sea. (The U.S. is responding by sending its first three operational Littoral Combat Ships^8 into the South China Sea. This is a carefully calibrated riposte: while not strategic assets, these shallow-water vessels—which the media have taken to calling “stealth ships”—are capable of a variety of missions including shore assault, reconnaissance and surveillance, special warfare, and deep-water combat. The message is easily read: we’re ready for anything.)

Whatever Chinese plans may be, one element that can upset them is the aircraft carrier. Each possesses the combat power of a medium-sized nation, unmatched versatility, and the moral force of a weapon that has never been adequately countered. The Chinese have worried about them for a long time, and have put a lot of work into countermeasures. These include:

- Cruise Missiles—Entire families of sea-launched cruise missiles are deployed on both surface ships—including fast patrol craft—and submarines.

- Song Class Diesel Submarines, —quite capable and very difficult to detect^9. In 2006, a Song-class sub surfaced without warning only a short distance from the USS Kitty Hawk.

- The J-20 Stealth Fighter——from its size clearly not an air-superiority aircraft, but most likely intended as a strike aircraft^10. It would be surprising if it wasn’t used against carriers.

- The DF-21D Ballistic Missile—over the past year, a new version of the DF-21 MRBM with anti-ship capabilities has been fielded^11. The Chinese can deploy hundreds of these missiles in a short time frame.

- Electromagnetic Pulse Weapons (EMP)—China has apparently modified a number of nuclear warheads to trigger a high-altitude EMP pulse capable of damaging or destroying nearby electronic equipment^12. While some are intended for use against Taiwan, others may target aircraft carriers. The code names of these weapons are  “Assassin’s Mace” for older warheads and “Trump Card” for warheads using newer technology. (This is a good opportunity to kill the “EMP as national threat” myth. There’s been a lot of rhetoric expended claiming that the pulse from a single nuclear warhead set off 200 miles above the U.S. could fry all electronics gear across the country and plunge us into a new dark age. Well maybe, under perfect laboratory conditions, but even that’s doubtful. As a physicist pointed out to me, for this to work, you need to have more energy coming out than the original explosion put in. A little thing called the First Law of Thermodynamics forbids this.)

It would be a difficult trick to carry out a warfighting strategy with one of its central elements at the bottom of the briny deep. Potential defenses exist, chief among them directed-energy weapons. High-energy lasers would defeat most anti-ship threats, in particular missiles of all varieties. Unfortunately, the free-electron laser (FEL), the most well-adapted for naval use (FELs are tunable and can be fired at the best wavelengths to cut through sea haze, salt spray, fog, and other maritime commonplaces), was canceled by Congress last June^13. (The Navy’s primary new offensive weapon, the electromagnetic railgun, was canceled at the same time.) Nothing less than such a universal defense will do. The Kamikaze campaign of 1945 clearly demonstrated how difficult it is to defend ships from determined attack. It won’t require the loss of very many $15 billion carriers along with their air wings to drive the U.S. out of the South China Sea or the Persian Gulf more or less permanently.

While the Chinese launched their first carrier—formerly the Ukrainian Varyag—this past summer, and are constructing at least two domestic carriers, they possess no support craft or escorts to sail with them. They’re unlikely to play a major role in the time-span we’re considering here.

But the fleet carrier is by no means the ultimate evolution of the aircraft carrier. The Navy has already studied the feasibility of smaller carriers^14. In fact, future carriers may not resemble our current models, with their vast and crowded flight decks, in any fashion at all.

The key to this development is the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle—the combat drone. The Navy came late to the drone revolution, but in recent years has gone all out to catch up. Last February marked the debut of the Northrop Grumman X-47B, a drone designed to take off and land on a carrier^15. The Navy wants drones operating with carrier forces by 2018. Subsequent development of drones is likely to transform the carrier itself. There is no reason why drones need to operate exactly like manned aircraft, requiring a flight deck, arrestor gear, and the entire panoply of traditional naval aviation. Properly designed drones could be launched from any type of surface ship, or, for that matter, from submarines running underwater. It’s possible to foresee a time when every naval vessel, including support ships, operates a unit of drones, from a dozen aboard a support vessel such as a tanker to fifty or more aboard a guided missile cruiser.

Such drones would be very different birds from today’s pioneer models—nearly autonomous, cheap, and far more capable. They could well be expendable, with no recovery necessary. (The USAF has already fielded such a design, the MALD. See below.) It’s possible that they wouldn’t even be armed, instead destroying their targets by kinetic kill. Consider a swarm of hundreds of small, fast, maneuverable drones suddenly appearing out of nowhere, with no obvious source (and target) like a conventional aircraft carrier in sight. Such a capability would complicate enemy strategy immeasurably. It would also go a long way toward lowering the cost of a fleet and increasing the number of available combat vessels.

The drone revolution is by no means limited to aerial platforms. Application of drone technology to both surface and submersible craft is in process. Former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead initiated development of a long-range UUV (Unmanned Underwater Vehicle), a robot submarine capable of operating independently for long periods on missions covering thousands of miles^16. Roughead envisioned a basic guidance system and power plant module that can be reconfigured with weapon and sensor suites tailored for each particular mission. Such UUVs would patrol independently, report in by satellite linkage, and return to port on their own. Smaller versions could act as drone torpedoes, maintaining station on a semi-permanent basis and launching themselves at enemy shipping when the war signal arrives.

Necessary technology such as advanced AI algorithms and compact power plants remains enticingly out of reach. But less complex versions of such UUVs could very likely be launched today. These drones could accompany a fleet, acting as a first line of defense against enemy subs, be monitored constantly and rendezvous with surface vessels for maintenance and refueling. Such drones would be relatively cheap and expendable where manned submarines would not be.

Preliminary work has also been done on surface drones by the Navy in cooperation with the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), the DoD’s in-house research department, particularly involving an unmanned frigate, the Anti-submarine warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV)17.  An ACTUV could patrol vast areas of ocean for months with no human input. On encountering a sub, it would notify its naval HQ, and perhaps also latch onto the sub’s signal and follow it wherever it went, rendering the crew’s life incredibly nerve-wracking. One interesting development involves the Navy’s creation of an online game, ACTUV Tactics, where outside players compete as ACTUV’s or sub skippers, in order to work out the best tactics to encode as operational algorithms^18.  (What’s that you say? Potential enemy sub skippers can log on too, and learn all the tricks? I guess nothing’s perfect.)

Another weapon overdue for technological enhancement is the sea mine, an often underrated asset. During the last months of WW II, mines dropped from USAAF B-29 Superfortresses into the Inland Sea and coastal areas brought Japanese maritime activity to a standstill, completely isolating the Home Islands.

The 21st century mine will be a far cry from the anchored “dumb” mines of WW II. They will have limited autonomous capability, be able to detect and target individual ships, avoid minesweepers, and maneuver into optimal attack positions. Several warheads could be fitted with programmable fuses to suit the targets. Networks of these mines would communicate and coordinate their attacks. Enemy fleets and merchant marine vessels might well be locked into their ports, unable to emerge for fear of hordes of “smart mines.” When hostilities end, the mines would be signaled to surface and wait for pickup.

A picture of the fleet to come begins to take form, surrounded by a cloud of undetectable drones, preceded by a shield of small unmanned submarines, with robot frigates patrolling the fringes, and the manned ships on the center. Small in numbers, and nowhere near as impressive as a Nimitz-class carrier and its escorts, but with a potential combat power orders of magnitude greater than any current fleet. Stealthed, laser and railgun armed  (we can assume that these programs are on “zombie” status, with current work carefully preserved and waiting for funding), integrated into satellite weather, detection, and communication systems, capable of tracking targets at the other side of the ocean and engaging them at half that distance. Such a fleet would possess capabilities unknown up to this point in time, and perhaps unguessable even today.

Maintaining Air Superiority

For several decades, the U.S. Air Force has carried the banner of military technological innovation. Working with DARPA, the “Pentagon’s mad scientists,” the USAF has been responsible for the most spectacular and effective technological breakthroughs of recent years, including stealth aircraft and the combat drone. Can this partnership prevail into the 21st century?

Since WW II, the U.S. has possessed effective air superiority over other combatants. Except for short periods over Korea in 1950-51 and Vietnam in 1966-67, American superiority was so overwhelming that at times opponents didn’t even dare challenge it. During the First Gulf War (1991), Iraqi Air Force units defected en masse to Iran to avoid destruction by Coalition air assets. After the Hussein regime was overthrown in 2003, pathetic little monuments were found in the desert where Iraqi MiGs had been buried in sand to protect them.

Technology was the leading reason for American superiority in the air. Following the Korean War, John Boyd discovered that the USAF had gained ascendancy over Communist air forces when the F-86E Sabre was introduced to combat in 1952. Unlike earlier models, the E Sabre featured hydraulic controls, enabling it to shift from one maneuver to the next before enemy MiG-15s could react. This created an extraordinary situation in which the USAF was provided with the winning edge without even realizing it. (This insight formed the basis of Boyd’s “decision cycle” thesis.)

While the U.S. currently retains this edge, there’s no guarantee it will keep it. Aviation technology is a fast-changing field, sensitive to breakthroughs in many technical disciplines. Both Russia and China have tested stealth fighters, with the Russians claiming their Sukhoi PAK TA T-50 as fully equal to the USAF’s F-22 Raptor, the premier U.S. air superiority aircraft^19. Production of the Raptor was capped at 187 planes by Secretary Gates over the protests of Air Force staff. While Gates claimed that the less-capable F-35 Lightning II would take up the slack, questions about program costs and delays have arisen over the past year. (Both the F-22 and F-35 have experienced serious systemic flaws over the past year that led to some aircraft being grounded. These should be viewed as shakedown problems not uncommon among new high-performance aircraft. The B-29, the bomber that defeated Japan, had numerous failings including uncontrollable engine fires and windows popping out at high altitude. The F-86 killed so many pilots that it was called the “lieutenant eater.” The B-47, the first strategic jet bomber, had a particularly stark drawback—in the early models, the wings tended to fall off during sharp turns.) The Marine Corps S/VTOL version is currently “on probation” and may well be cancelled. We could end up with far fewer than the 2,400 F-35s planned.

Another threat lies in advances in radar. It is possible to design a radar system that can detect, if not track, stealth aircraft. Australia’s JORN (Jindalee Operational Radar Network) system detects the turbulence created by an aircraft’s passage and is claimed to have a range of several thousand miles^20. The Chinese are known to be working on an ultra-high frequency radar for the purpose of defeating stealth. It is easily possible that further advances could negate the stealth advantage, leaving the U.S. without air superiority for the first time since 1944.

The answer to this dilemma may well lie in the UAV. It’s remarkable to consider that the drone revolution that has transformed so many aspects of warfare was a matter of pure inadvertence. The original MQ-1 Predator drones were unarmed and were retrofitted with AGM-114 Hellfire missiles only after it was realized that the time lag between drones detecting a target and a fighter-bomber response was unnecessary. Since that time, drones such as the MQ-9 Reaper have been designed for weapons carriage from the first. We can assume that all drones from this point on will possess at least the capability of being armed.

It has been understood since 1972, when a Ryan Firebee operated by remote control easily outmaneuvered an F-4 Phantom in a series of dogfights, that drones could operate in the air-superiority role. It would be a simple matter to fit Predators or Reapers with AIM-9 Sidewinder or AIM-120 AMRAAM missile kits to enable them to operate as fighters. But both lack necessary speed and maneuverability, although the RQ-170 “Beast of Kandahar” drone, with its stealthy features and swept wings, appears to be approaching that level.

There’s little reason to doubt that DARPA, in its thorough way, is working on such aircraft and that prototypes may be flying at this moment at Groom Lake or a similar test base.

On the other hand, the future may already have arrived in the form of the Miniature Air-Launched Decoy (MALD), a small, expendable drone designed to confuse and overwhelm air defense radars^21. MALDs can be programmed to maneuver precisely like manned aircraft, and can be launched by the hundreds from transports, hopelessly saturating any current air-defense system. Raytheon has begun developing versions of the MALD fitted with sensors and warheads, transforming them into armed fighter drones.

A MALD air-superiority system could be deployed in a number of ways. They could be launched from transports or AWACs (launch racks have been developed for this purpose), goading an opponent into sending up his aircraft, which would then be downed en masse by the drones. Range could be extended by shutting off the engine and gliding, or alternately by zooming up to high altitude, deploying a balloon or parachute, and drifting until a threat appears. (A USAF anti-radiation missile, the AGM-136 Tacit Rainbow, operates on this principle.)

Manned fighters carrying MALDs in lieu of bombs or external fuel tanks could launch them just before coming into enemy radar range. After the first wave of drones engaged the enemy, the F-15s and F-22s would fly in to mop up.

Whatever the technique (and experienced pilots and weapons officers will no doubt come up with far more intricate and effective tactics), it is clear that cheap drones can make up for shortfalls in manned air-superiority aircraft. With its current head start in UAV technology, the U.S. need not drop into second place (and in air combat, anything below number one is the loser) anytime soon. It’s also clear that drones will not “replace” so much as supplement manned fighter aircraft for the foreseeable future. There will always be a need for conscious mentalities, if only to figure out when the battle’s over.

A Bomber Revival?

The USAF has traditionally been a bomber service, its major mission that of strategic bombing, its legendary figures—Mitchell, Arnold, Spaatz, LeMay—bomber pilots and commanders. It was only in recent years that fighter pilots were granted the same lofty status as the bomber aristocracy.

But the manned bomber has had a rough time in recent decades, squeezed between improved air defenses and the titanic expense required to overcome them. Of the last three proposed strategic bombers, the B-70 Valkyrie was cancelled outright in the early 1960s, the B-1 Lancer was cancelled and then resurrected in the 1980s, and the B-2 Spirit, the storied “stealth bomber,” was limited by its cost of over $1 billion apiece to only 21 aircraft (20 of which are still flying, one having crashed at Guam in February 2008).  The Air Force currently possesses under 200 strategic bombers, a derisory number compared the thousands deployed during the Cold War, much less the tens of thousands that fought WW II.

But drone technology may, paradoxically, rescue the manned bomber. Secretary Gates cancelled a bomber scheduled to be fielded by 2018. Apparently having second thoughts, Gates green-lighted a new bomber project just before his retirement. This Deep Strike Aircraft will be a stealth model that can fly either manned or unmanned, depending on mission requirements. While little is known about the B-3’s actual configuration, the bomber would possess both conventional and nuclear capability, carrying PGMs, bunker-busters, or air-to-ground rockets. Defense could be provided by high-energy lasers and also by versions of the MALD with the B-3 in effect carrying its own escort force, deployed upon entering hostile airspace and accompanying the bomber on its run against a target. (Aviation buffs will recognize this as the millennial version of the XF-85 Goblin,  a late 1940s fighter designed for carriage by the B-36 as an escort plane. If you wait long enough, every technical gimmick comes around for a second run.) Over $4 billion has been budgeted for strike aircraft development. If all goes according to schedule, 80 to 100 B-3s will join the inventory sometime in the mid 2020s^22.

Another revival is the Prompt Global Strike system, a weapon that could hit targets at intercontinental distances from CONUS (the Continental United States) within two hours. This weapon could strike high-value targets of temporary nature (say, a conference of terrorist leaders) without the diplomatic complications that might arise from launching an attack from a third-party state.

Several attempts have been made to develop such an asset, including a proposal to utilize surplus ICBMs or submarine-launched missiles in the role that was abandoned after it became apparent that there was no plausible way to assure bystander nations that they weren’t packed full of nuclear warheads. Attention shifted to hypersonic aircraft, with several projects initiated, including the Falcon (Force Application and Launch from CONUS), a reusable hypersonic cruise vehicle launched by rocket and capable of carrying a 12,000 lb. payload up to 9,000 miles, and the Blackswift, a Mach 6 multimission aircraft developed by DARPA for use as a spy plane, bomber, or satellite launcher^23. Although funding of $1 billion was authorized, the Blackswift was cancelled in 2009.

But the hypersonic aircraft concept proved too tough to kill. The past year has seen some promising developments, including a successful test of the USAF’s X-51 hypersonic missile and flights by the Falcon HTV-2 which, though not flawless (the Falcons lost telemetry links with the ground and shut themselves down), produced valuable data. It was further revealed that yet another hypersonic bomber project, dubbed “Son of Blackswift” is under development. It appears that the U.S. will have an intercontinental fist to add to its conventional arsenal.

The United States need not relinquish its superiority as regards air power. The crucial question involves funding. Aerospace technology is expensive and often the first to be cut, as shown by the B-70, the B-1, and the Blackswift. But such cuts often represent false economies. Early in WW II, American pilots were forced to fight in sturdy but obsolescent aircraft such as the Bell P-39 and the Curtiss P-40 that simply could not stand up to the Luftwaffe’s Me-109s and Fw-190s, much less the superb Mitsubishi A6M Zero. It required two years for adequate American designs to appear. It would take far longer today, and wars in the millennial era simply don’t last that long. (The UK, on the other hand, spent large amounts during the mid-1930s developing fast, maneuverable eight-gun fighters, the Hawker Hurricane and the Supermarine Spitfire. These aircraft saved the country during the Battle of Britain.)

End Notes for Part One:

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/world/asia/01policy.html?pagewanted=all Calling all Seals!

2. http://www.csbaonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/2011.06.02-Maturing-Revolution-In-Military-Affairs1.pdf

3. http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG674.html

4. http://www.historynet.com/alfred-thayer-mahan-the-reluctant-seaman.htm

5. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/59/pilot.html

6. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/fm/6-0/appa.htm

7. http://www.airforce-magazine.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2010/August percent202010/0810battle.aspx

8. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/lcs.htm

9. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/song.htm

10. http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/01/19/chinas-j-20-fighter-stealthy-or-just-stealthy-looking/

11. http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2009-05/verge-game-changer

12. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jul/21/beijing-develops-radiation-weapons/print

13. www.wired.com/dangerroom/tag/free-electron-laser/

14. http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2011-05/twilight-uperfluous-carrier

15. http://www.as.northropgrumman.com/products/nucasx47b/index.html

16. http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_26/uuv.html

17. http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/TTO/Programs/Anti-Submarine_Warfare_(ASW)_Continuous_Trail_Unmanned_Vessel_(ACTUV).aspx

18. https://actuv.darpa.mil

19. http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&plckPostId=Blog percent3A27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post percent3A021e786e-04be-426b-ad32-dcbb54b90d00

20. http://www.defence.gov.au/dmo/esd/jp2025/jp2025.cfm

21. http://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/mald/

22. http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=586

23. http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/01/blackswift-swoo/

BEATING DECLINE – JR Dunn (V.2)

WAR IN THE DIRT

Land warfare will change most under America’s new circumstances. Since 1918, when the U.S. came to the support of the beleaguered Western Allies with two and half million troops, the massive American expeditionary force has been an international fact of life. For nearly a century, vast armadas carrying hundreds of thousands of American troops have played a critical role on battlefields as far-flung as North Africa, Italy, Normandy, the Solomons, the Philippines, Korea, and Kuwait. No potential opponent could afford to overlook the possibility of America deploying unmatchable military resources to any spot on the globe in defense of an ally or its own interests.

For the time being, that is over. We simply cannot afford that level of outlay in any situation not involving national survival. The world will be a colder, crueler, and more dangerous place for it. Until at least mid-century, American foreign interventions will be limited and brief. They are likely to follow the model of Afghanistan 2001, with U.S. skill and firepower coming to the assistance of friendly native forces. (But not Libya 2011, which was not an intervention as much as a performance art interpretation of

what an intervention might be like.) Larger interventions – though still minor compared to the world wars and the Gulf campaigns – will be restricted to supporting close allies.

It follows that if the U.S. is limited to dispatching battalions rather than divisions or armies, then those battalions will need to have a bigger impact when they reach the battlefield. This is where technology, acting as a force multiplier, will prove crucial.

One promising development involves utilizing information technology to increase a small unit’s C4I (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence) capabilities. A unit in which all troops are in communication, officers have a universal view of the battlespace, everyone knows where everyone else is, and all personnel are continually updated, would have an insurmountable advantage over less well-equipped adversaries. Clausewitz’s “fog of war” would be largely a thing of the past.

That was the thinking behind Secretary Rumsfeld’s plan for a “net-centric Army,” built around a program called Land Warrior. Fifteen years of development and half a billion dollars resulted in a system that was expensive, heavy, fragile, and loathed by many soldiers. A battery-powered CPU ran the system. Communications through a helmet headphone system transmitted encrypted signals up to a kilometer. A screen in front of one eye provided data input, including GPS positions. (Among other things, the screen could show a soldier what was around the next corner. Extending his rifle barrel enabled a digital sight to send a clear picture to the screen. The old dodge of putting a helmet on a stick could be dropped at last.)

But at sixteen pounds the system was too heavy in addition to the standard pack load, and the cost was edging up toward 80K per soldier. In a final attempt to save the program, the Army replaced military spec equipment with off-the-shelf commercial gear. This cut both weight and cost, but proved too fragile for rough military usage. The Army reluctantly canceled the program.

Redesignated the “Ground Soldier Ensemble,” remaining Land Warrior units were sent to Iraq for testing with the 4/9 Infantry Battalion, the “Manchus”. In Iraq, the Army learned a trick known to IT pros worldwide: give it to the kids and let them tinker with it. Within weeks, the Manchus had the Land Warrior equipment stripped down, reworked, and improved (e.g. chemlights were added to the screen to denote friendlies and targets). The new system worked so well that it equipped a full brigade shipping out for Afghanistan, the 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry. Results there were mixed – the system had been optimized for the Iraqi urban environment as opposed to rural Afghanistan -- but were still promising enough to revive the program.

The new program, called Nett Warrior, retained the improvements worked out in Iraq and Afghanistan. The weight was only 7.6 lbs., the cost roughly 48K per soldier. Three companies were competing for the final contract, with limited production scheduled to begin this year, when at the last minute, confusion enveloped the entire effort. In late July industry sources claimed that Nett Warrior had been canceled. The Army insisted that it had simply been placed on “hold.” Other sources reported that the program was being replaced with a smart phone using Android technology.

It’s difficult to imagine a smart phone providing all the functionality of the Nett Warrior system. Eventually something similar will be required on the 21st-century battlefield. Whether it will be introduced by U.S. forces is anyone’s guess.

Millennial Weaponry

Infotech has only begun to influence the evolution of infantry weapons. The most impressive result so far is the XM-25 “smartgun,” a 25 mm grenade launcher that fires programmable rounds in several different varieties – airburst fragmentation, high-explosive, and shaped-charge anti-armor.1 The frag rounds drew the greatest interest. The XM-25’s laser sight provides the exact distance to a target – say, a concrete wall. The round is then programmed to explode a meter beyond the wall – that is, directly above hidden enemy forces.

The XM-25 was tested in Afghanistan beginning in December 2010, to great enthusiasm from the troops, who christened it “the Punisher.” The gun destroyed at least two Taliban machine gun nests (a favorite Taliban tactic is to open up on patrols with heavy PAK machine guns from beyond the range of a squad’s organic weapons, then flee before air support arrives), and broke up four ambushes. So pleased were the troops that they were allowed to continue using the XM-25 after field tests were completed. The gun’s manufacturer ATK was awarded a $65 million contract to begin production.

DARPA has produced a similar item, a cybernetic gunsight that enables snipers to hit a target with the first shot. An internal CPU calculates distance, wind velocity, humidity, and other variables, and adjusts the sight accordingly. Several operational prototypes are being tested in Afghanistan.

Yet another DARPA program hopes to provide small units with their own air support in the form of drones. The USAF has never been happy with the ground support role, involving as it does low and slow approaches against dug-in enemy forces. Infantry, for their part, are often less than delighted with the amount of time required for an aerial response. DARPA would overcome this by providing a soldier – a Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) -- with a data link to an accompanying drone (either hovering overhead or in a nearby vehicle) which could be called in immediately in case of trouble. Raytheon is working on armaments for such drones in the form of the Small Tactical Munition (STM), a 13-pound GPS-guided bomb.  It’s very likely that these will see combat in Afghanistan, if they haven’t already.

I, Warbot

More than 2,000 robots have been employed in combat in Afghanistan, making it in a sense the first robot conflict. A third of these are Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) machines such as the Talon and the PackBot, which are deployed under remote control to detonate or defuse bombs and IEDs. (Technically, these aren’t actually robots but telefactors, but who knows the difference?) Others include mine-clearing machines such as the M-160, a “flail” that clears ground by slamming chains as it passes. These machines have performed valuable work and have saved no small number of lives.

What we don’t find are actual fighting machines – the “warbots” of SF lore. (At this point, it’s mandatory that Terminator be mentioned. Okay –Terminator.) The problem lies in autonomy.  Groundbots, as opposed to aerial drones, are simply incapable, at this point in development, of operating without close human supervision. In the early days of AI research, it was assumed that abstract problem-solving would be the major roadblock to creating useful machine intelligence. But problem-solving through sheer data-crunching presents little difficulty. The real challenge turned out to be everyday matters that we accomplish without a second thought thanks to countless subroutines developed over millions of years of evolution, things on the order of stepping over a rock or climbing stairs. Encountering the smallest distraction or obstacle can trigger what amounts to a cybernetic breakdown – not something you want in an armed machine. So while robot manufacturers such as Foster-Miller have armed their bomb-disposal units with shotguns, machine guns, and grenade launchers, these SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Remote Reconnaissance Direct Action System) units are operated only by remote control. The same is true of more advanced systems such as MAARS (Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System), an anti-personnel robot that can fire anything from pepper spray to 40 mm grenades^2. MAARS features both a mechanical fan to prevent it from swinging its gun toward friendly forces and software delineating no-fire zones. (These are strictly necessary. Robot weapons have already killed innocent victims. In 2007, a computerized Oerlikon antiaircraft gun belonging to the South African Defense Forces suffered a software glitch that caused it to fire wildly in all directions. The gun killed nine soldiers and wounded fourteen others before it ran out of ammunition.)

So it’ll be a long time before we see actual combat robots. But there are other roles that robots can play. One example is Big Dog, a quadraped robotic mule (I don’t know where they got “dog” either) designed to carry heavy loads over rough ground. Big Dog is another DARPA project, built by Boston Dynamics with assistance from other robotics manufacturers. It can carry over 300 pounds at five miles an hour (slightly faster than walking speed), and is capable of climbing hills. Films of the beast in action reveal disturbingly lifelike activity^3. A larger model, Alpha Dog, with a hundred pounds greater payload, is also being tested.

Even more disturbing is a second DARPA/Boston Dynamics program, the Cheetah, another four-legged robot featuring a head and a flexible spine^4.  The Cheetah is designed to run faster than any human and operate in a semi-autonomous mode as it stalks and runs down enemy forces. The possibilities of these things accompanying troops into battle are not difficult to envision.

Getting There

“I get there first with the most men.” That was how Nathan Bedford Forrest explained his Civil War cavalry victories. Getting there first has been standard American policy ever since, whether it involved railroads, trucks, mechanized units, or helicopters. Maintaining this advantage will provide a necessary edge in decades to come.

One innovative means is the military exoskeleton. DARPA has spent over $50 million in recent years developing an exoskeleton, the XOS, that will enable infantry to carry heavy loads over long distances at high speeds without arriving exhausted. Such suits could provide troops with ballistic protection and would certainly solve the Nett Warrior weight problem. Videos of the system reveal troops moving with surprising agility^5. The sole drawback is the lack of a compact power source. (Another design, the HULC, supports only the soldier’s legs while leaving the arms free. HULC has much lower power requirements.) While it might be impractical and too expensive to fit out all Army soldiers with exoskeletons, it would certainly benefit specialized troops such as mountain units.

A key element of American strategy for the past half-century has been vertical envelopment – the use of helicopter-borne air assault forces to spearhead attacks. While it has unquestionably proven itself, the helicopter does have drawbacks, including vulnerability, fragility, and a relatively slow airspeed. Helicopters have proven the Achilles heel of many operations, including the 1980 Iran hostage rescue mission (nearly half the choppers involved turned back due to mechanical failures), and this year’s Osama bin Laden raid. The recent deaths of thirty members of Seal Team Six in Afghanistan when their Chinook transport was shot down in what may have been a prearranged ambush underlines these shortcomings.

The military has attempted to supplement or replace the helicopter since the 1950s with little success. The Marine Corp’s V-22 Osprey is one example^6. Despite years of development and billions in costs the Osprey’s introduction to operations has been mixed. One serious shortcoming involves the fact that most Ospreys are unarmed. A version fitted with a chin turret was cancelled. A handful instead feature belly-mounted miniguns. Since the aircraft is simply too fast for helicopter escort, it is generally restricted to noncombat operations, quite a limitation for a military aircraft.

A partial solution to the helicopter dilemma has been offered by veteran manufacturer Sikorsky, which achieved a long-sought breakthrough in helicopter technology with its X-2 program^7. The X-2 mates a coaxial rotor system, in which two separate rotors turn in opposite directions on the same mast, with a rear propeller that can push the chopper up to 250 mph, almost twice as fast as conventional helicopters. The X-2 nearly matches the Osprey in performance without the heavy, sensitive mechanical linkages used in the Osprey’s flip-rotor system. The company is developing a military version, the S-97. Introduction of this helicopter may well revolutionize air assault tactics.

Even more innovative vehicles are in the works. DARPA has been bitten by the ancient aircar bug on behalf of the Marines in the form of the unfortunately named Transformer (TX) program, an effort to design a Humvee-class vehicle that can drive on roads and cross-country but in rough terrain take off and fly over obstacles much the same as a light helicopter^8. The Transformer (TX) will be operated by a cybernetic “autonomous flying system” being developed at Carnegie-Mellon that would enable even the most unskilled driver to take to the air without extensive training.

The Israeli company Urban Aeronautics has developed a vehicle it calls the AirMule (not the AirDog, fortunately), a ducted-fan lifter intended to carry wounded soldiers off the battlefield swiftly and in comfort^9. The AirMule is pilotless, guided solely by an onboard computer system. Such a vehicle could also carry supplies and weapons. Flight tests have been successful, with the Defense Department expressing considerable interest.

Will these designs go anywhere? Similar vehicles with various arrangements of fans, turbines, and so forth have been investigated for decades with few worthwhile results. But designers can take heart in the success of the new Martin Aircraft “jetpack.”10 The jetpack has been a reality since the 1960s, although its flight duration of roughly 30 seconds rendered it essentially useless. But the new model – not a rocket-propelled system at all but a man-sized ducted-fan vehicle – has overcome that drawback. Tethered manned tests and a computer-guided unmanned distance flight have revealed no basic problems. These vehicles would come in quite handy on future Abbotabad-type missions.

Yet another old dream has a chance of becoming reality. Ithacus was a 1960s proposal for an intercontinental rocket transport carrying several hundred infantrymen to any spot on earth on a few hours notice^11. Our lack of rocket-dispatched troops has gnawed at DARPA, and serious thought has gone into a solution. A program called Sustain (Small Unit Space Transportation and Insertion) overseen by the National Security Space Office has defined the mission and outlined a concept of operations for such a system. Picture something along the lines of an upgraded White Knight/Spaceship One system, a small suborbital module launched by a mother craft with effectively global range. Such a vehicle might carry as few as a dozen troops, which suggests special operations as the chief mission. An active Sustain system is probably decades down the line, but it will come. Imagine what the Seals would do with a capability like that.

Not even military field uniforms will remain untransformed. Research has begun on the creation of “biometric” fatigues that will monitor a soldier’s vital signs and immediately signal a medic if he is hit. With use of electrically active materials, these fatigues could tighten at the joints to form a tourniquet. Advanced models might even give injections.

Camouflage is another element aching to be upgraded. Camo gear custom-tailored for a particular area is already in the works. Photos of the area would be used as a pattern, to create a perfect site-specific camouflage that would be printed out using “direct to garment” technology.

It’s even possible that camouflage as such would no longer be necessary. Consider the “invisibility cloak” invented by researchers at the University of Tokyo^12. Microprocessors project the view on either side of the garment on the surface of the opposite side, with the wearer fading into the surroundings. While less than convincing close up, from a distance in a dim environment it might work rather well. Such “optical camouflage” would have no end of military uses.

We can picture the American soldier on a future battlefield – so speak; he’s a little hard to see. He is in direct contact with the rest of his unit, with a bird’s-eye view in his helmet visor of exactly what lies ahead, armed with a gun that doesn’t miss. He is accompanied by one, and perhaps more, four-legged robots moving eerily through the brush, transmitting imagery as they go. Overhead a barely-visible wraith glides in near-silence, providing recon and air support.

It’s tempting to think of such a figure as being invincible. But we need to keep in mind that his opponents, whether terrorists or legitimate troops, will have access to many of the same technological advances. Our soldiers have not yet encountered enemies armed with weaponry of that class, but that day is coming. We will need to work at it to remain ahead.

Orbital Encounters

Space is the sad story of the 21st century. The idea that the U.S. would be moving into the millennial epoch with no manned program at all would have been unimaginable as little as ten years ago. No other single development so clearly reveals how much we have declined in power and expertise.

Does the collapse of American manned spaceflight threaten U.S. security interests? Not directly – US warfighting capabilities are based on orbital satellite assets, mostly in geosynchronous orbit but to a lesser extent in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). These include communications, GPS, reconnaissance and surveillance, and strategic early warning satellites. The U.S. could not mount even the most basic military campaign without its satellite network.

None of these systems is related to any manned program. But the fact that the U.S. has abandoned manned spaceflight for the foreseeable future (and let’s not kid ourselves about planned “asteroid missions.” That program will last only as long as the next federal budget crunch) will only serve to encourage our rivals in exploiting the “new high ground” of near-earth space.

This is certainly true of China. The Chinese manned program is going great guns, and they fully intend to carry out a Lunar mission in the early 2020s, long before the U.S. can mount a return to space. More to the point, they have shown no hesitation about engaging in orbital warfare. On January 11, 2007, a Chinese ballistic missile destroyed a defunct weather satellite in polar orbit at an altitude of 500 miles^13. This strike generated something on the order of 300,000 pieces of debris, rendering that particular orbital plane unusable and threatening satellites at other altitudes. The Chinese simply shrugged off what was generally viewed as an act of thuggery matching the Soviet Union at its worst.

This newly-revealed satellite vulnerability may well have influenced the development of the USAF’s X-37B, a reusable unmanned “Space Maneuver Vehicle” operational since April 2010^14.

The X-37B has a convoluted development history, beginning as the USAF’s X-40A before being melded with NASA’s X-37 program. When that program was cancelled in 2006 (which seems to be the fate of most NASA programs these days), the Air Force in cooperation with the ever-dependable DARPA came to the rescue, adapting it as the X-37B. The premature shutdown of the STS Space Shuttle program left the X-37B as America’s only operational reusable spacecraft. (There has been no end of rumors about “black” spaceplanes operating out of Groom Lake under code names such as “Aurora” and “Senior Citizen.” These should be taken with a grain of salt. It’s difficult to see why valuable funding would be spent on the X-37B – much less the X-51 or Falcon HTV – if they actually existed.)

The X-37B is basically a mini-shuttle, roughly 29 feet long, with a wingspan of just under 15 feet and an operational weight of 11,000 pounds. Its launch vehicle is the Atlas V. It can remain in LEO for up to 270 days. It is a multimission vehicle, capable of placing small payloads in orbit, examining satellites, or reconnaissance. It has flown several missions since its introduction, their nature remaining secret, and their execution more than a little confusing to skywatchers.

The X-37B represents at a least a partial solution to satellite vulnerability. While payload is limited, DARPA is known to be developing a series of “minisatellites” of very small dimensions and weight. It is probable that at least some of these can act as emergency replacements for satellites damaged or destroyed during wartime. Apart from this, the X-37B can also act in the same role, using equipment within its payload bay.

The X-37B is the model for U.S. military space operations for the near future. Upgraded versions likely under development today will increase payload, time in orbit, and operational altitudes. Armed versions are not out of the question. It is probable that the first orbital strikes will involve combat drones. Since the U.S. has a dramatic head start in drone technology, it is unlikely that China or anyone else will be able to sweep us from orbit.

Space, of course, is crucial to any workable nuclear defense system in the form of projectile or laser satellites of the type researched as part of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The U.S. has low-keyed such systems for years, largely for political reasons. We have chosen to rely instead on 1960s era technology, a limited number of ABM missiles stationed at Fort Greely, Alaska. We may yet pay an ungodly price for this oversight. Both nuclear weapon and ballistic missile technology are becoming cheaper and more widespread. It is by no means difficult to picture a vicious dictator of the Saddam or Qaddafi type utilizing such weapons under any number of circumstances. At the moment, a defense is out of our hands. It will be decades before we will be able to afford a space-based defensive system. Until then, we must depend on luck to protect us. I’m sure that everyone feels as secure about that as I do.

CYBERWARFARE

Cyberwarfare is pure novelty, with everyone feeling their way across a bizarre and unknown landscape. The problem for the U.S. is that we tend to view such developments with a little more equanimity than we should, on the grounds that nobody handles new tech quite as well as we do. This attitude has turned around to bite us on several previous occasions. (See “Pearl Harbor.”)

There’s a distinct contradiction in the U.S. stance toward cyberwarfare: the U.S. is the leading state in offensive cyberwarfare, while our defensive preparations are pitiable.

Stuxnet Rules

American offensive cyberwarfare capabilities are embodied in the Stuxnet worm, which most experts view as a collaboration between the U.S. and Israel^15. Stuxnet was not so much an example of malware as a new order of cybernetic weapon, an extremely complex program with numerous capabilities, some of them never before seen in a virus^16.

Stuxnet was first detected in July 2010, although it had been active for at least six months previously. At first it was treated like any other malware outbreak, but in short order IT security experts realized they were dealing with something extraordinary. Stuxnet targeted not only one particular model of equipment – Seimens SCADA industrial control systems – but only those operating in a certain frequency range and sold by two particular vendors that had defied sanctions placed on Iran. It utilized not just one but four distinct “zero-day exploits” (previously unknown software vulnerabilities). It was able to hide in a computer’s rootkit while also propagating throughout any internal network it was introduced into. It was apparently able to communicate with outside servers while also being modified in situ.

All this was aimed at the Iranian nuclear program, transparently devoted to the development of nuclear weapons. Iran refined weapons-grade uranium at its Natanz site utilizing a gas centrifuge array run by a Windows network driving Seimens SCADA units. Stuxnet caused the centrifuges, whirling at several thousand rpms, to first speed up and then, some weeks later, drastically slow down while at the same time assuring watching techs that all was well. This treatment not only destroyed the centrifuges but also contaminated the uranium being processed at the time. Although an Iranian disinformation campaign claims that little damage was done, a large number of centrifuges were wrecked – the Federation of

American Scientists puts the number at 1,000. Further damage was caused to the Bushehr reactor, setting back its ignition by some months. Rumors of a “serious nuclear accident” at Natanz have also circulated.

Effects are still being felt, with tens of thousands of Iranian computers still infected. An assassination campaign targeting Iranian nuclear scientists has further battered the program, which staggers on, awaiting the appearance of Son of Stuxnet.

Defenses: Cyberstooges!

At some point in September (if not earlier) somebody planted a virus in a supposedly secure computer system at Creech Air Force Base, home of one of the most critical – and successful – contemporary American military assets. Creech is the control center for America’s drone fleet, where the Predators and Reapers are flown (through satellite linkages) against our country’s Jihadi enemies. It’s the last place anyone would want to find a virus. But find it they did^17.

The virus in question is a keylogger, malware that saves every keystroke made on an infected computer. By such means an interested party can reconstruct the instruction stream for the system in question. Somebody is really interested in how our drone fleet is operated.

How did this virus get into the network? Like many critical IT systems, the Creech network is isolated from the Internet through “air gap.” There are no connections, either by pipeline or broadband, between the Creech infranet and the Net at large. So somebody used the Bradley Manning method. They walked in with an infected flash drive or disk, popped it in, and that was all she wrote. Whether it was deliberate or accidental remains unknown. Whatever the case, it indicates a seriously flawed infotech security protocol.

To make things even worse, the security staff attempted to flush the virus without informing anyone in the armed forces cybersecurity hierarchy, either the 24th Air Force or Cyber Command. The Pentagon’s cybersecurity experts were kept in the dark for two weeks while the Creech team stumbled around fruitlessly. The 24th Air Force had to read about the virus in Wired.18

At last report, the virus was still infesting the system. But, we’re assured, nobody’s really worried about it. Isn’t that a relief?

With such unparalleled success in the offensive mode, how do we explain the pathetic state of American cyberdefenses? The record of successful hacking sprees directed against U.S. government and military targets leaves the impression that anyone can break in, take whatever they want, and saunter off at their leisure, much the same as a member of flash mob hitting a convenience store. In addition to the Creech exploit, during only the past year:

- In March, a defense industry computer network suffered the loss of files containing 24,000 documents^19. Many involved classified programs. At least one weapons system under development had to be totally redesigned after the specs and plans were hacked from the contractor’s database.

- In May, Lockheed Martin and several smaller defense contractors were hacked, with an unknown amount of information on secret projects lifted^20.

- In June, Google revealed that attempts had been made to hack hundreds of Gmail passwords of government officials in the Pentagon, the Department of State, and even the White House^21.

- In early August, IT security firm McAfee revealed that a five-year hacking campaign, which the company dubbed “Operation Shady RAT” (for “Remote Access Tool”, a type of software used to access offsite computers), had compromised 72 different targets worldwide^22. Of these, 49 were American. The others included the UN and the International Olympic Committee. Although McAfee was unwilling to state it outright, the guilty party was China. (Dell SecureWorks traced a connection to several Chinese command computers.)

This is only the tip of the iceberg. U.S. defense-related computer systems were attacked 6 million times in 2006. By 2010, this had grown to 6 million attacks a day. How many of these are successful is unknown. Obviously, someone is deliberately targeting American military cybernetic assets.

“Someone” could be any number of potential enemies or even allies. Some attacks originate from Russia or other former Soviet states. But in the vast majority of cases, “someone” is Chinese.

China possesses the largest and most organized cyberwarfare force in the world. While not capable of the sophistication of a Stuxnet-type attack, what the Chinese can accomplish through massed numbers and brute force beggars the imagination. On April 8, 2010, the state-owned China Telecom rerouted 15 percent of the world's Internet traffic through Chinese servers for 18 minutes^23. What they did with all that data remains unknown. Last July, China hacked every last member of South Korea's Cyber World social network – 35 million people, virtually every Internet user in the country^24.

The Chinese have accomplished these feats through a state-sponsored hacker militia called the “blue army.”25 In truth, it is probably no militia at all but instead a full-fledged military command.  The size and composition of the blue army remain unknown. It is headquartered in Jinan, where many of the most egregious hacking attempts have been traced. China is the sole nation to possess such a cybernetic military force.

The Chinese inadvertently raised the curtain on the blue army this past August in a propaganda documentary on the glories of the Chinese military. At one point background footage revealed a military computer screen actually set up to carry out a cyberattack by way of a subverted University of Alabama IP address. The screen displayed the name of the software and a window saying “Choose Attack Target” along with a list of addresses. What was the actual target? The Falun Gong, the spiritual sect that the Chinese Politburo for obscure reasons has chosen to persecute as a national enemy. (The footage also reveals that the blue army is not very sophisticated, more or less operating on the level of what we call “script kids,” newbies using prewritten code, as opposed to actual hackers.)

What is the blue army up to? Reconnaissance, probing, data theft, spying, recruiting for botnets (they had taken over as many as 750,000 zombie computers even five years ago), and loading viruses and logic bombs for later use.

Targeting the Infrastructure

A major target exists in the U.S. utilities infrastructure. The control systems of much of America’s technical infrastructure, including power, electricity, water, and sewage, has been made Internet accessible to save money and time on maintenance and operations. Since anything on the Internet can be hacked by one means or another, we have effectively handed a switch to our foreign enemies marked, “Flick this to shut down America.”

The indispensable McAfee released a report last April prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and titled "In the Dark: Crucial Industries Confront Cyberattacks."26 The CSIS interviewed 200 IT security execs for utility companies handling oil, gas, electricity, water, and sewage in 14 countries, including the U.S., Canada, Japan, and South Korea. Over 70 percent of the security chiefs reported that they had discovered malware introduced into their networks during 2010, nearly double the number for 2009. Over 40 percent considered their companies vulnerable, and 30% did not think their security was sufficient. Another 40 percent expected a major attack within the next year.

This threat is about to grow exponentially worse with the introduction by many utilities of smart grid technology. A smart grid is an Internet-based system that enables remote monitoring and regulation of home, office, or building utilities by either the owner or the utility company itself. Many of these will allow customer Internet access of a company’s systems, which will transform security against hackers from “very difficult” to “absolutely impossible.” Three-quarters of America’s electrical companies are using, installing, or planning smart grids.

Imagine trying to carry out a military campaign with your country’s utilities flatlined, rioting and violence rampant in what used to be your cities, starvation beginning, and epidemic disease about to swoop in. Enemy strategy writes itself: slip a “blue stuxnet” worm into the U.S. utility net, watch the country dissolve into chaos, wait until American military assets head for home to confront the catastrophe, then take over Taiwan, the Spratleys, and whatever else catches your eye. Afterward, you offer your assistance to the U.S. in purging its systems in exchange for a promise to abandon the Western Pacific. Or just sit back and enjoy the spectacle, whichever you prefer.

This is not as farfetched as it seems. In 2007 Estonia was crippled by a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by a group calling itself the Nastri. (A DDoS attack overwhelms a network by sending large numbers of information packets (requests, e-mails, messages, etc.) until the network’s capacity to handle them is exceeded. It has nothing directly to do with MS-DOS connections with the outside world.) The attack shut down government websites along with public news sites and came close to bringing down the entire Estonian net. The Nastri was almost certainly supported by Russian military and security assets. (The reason for the strike? The Estonians had dared to move a Soviet-era war memorial. )

The same thing occurred when the Russian Federation came to the assistance of its oppressed Ossetian brothers in the swift and brutal Georgia invasion of August 2008. The Georgian net was brought down completely, crippling the government response to Russian aggression and cutting off Georgian connections with the outside world.

It’s not out of the question that such strikes have already occurred in the U.S. The Cleveland blackout of 2003 affected over 50 million people in both the U.S. and Canada. At the time it was explained away as tree branches falling on power lines. Today many IT security professionals believe it was a Net-based utility strike, a beta test of a new app, originating nowhere else but from China. (The first elements to go were power company computers, which had their alarm systems shut off while local power systems were methodically sabotaged.) Much the same has been said about the 2008 Florida blackout.

(Ironically, it was the U.S. that kicked off this style of cybersabotage with a 1982 CIA attack on the Siberian natural gas pipeline that the Soviets were using to gain precious foreign currency and also influence potential Western European customers^27. A “logic bomb” inserted into the control system wrecked the pumps, caused the pipeline to back up, and at last blew it up in an explosion visible from orbit.)

The Bogus Chip Problem

If all this wasn’t bad enough, we also have the subverted chip problem, which finally caught the attention of government security agencies only a quarter-century after it was first proposed in a novel by a pair of Frenchmen (Softwar [Le Guerre Douce] by Thierry Breton and Denis Beneich). An unknown but large number of chips and other hardware utilized in military and security devices were produced under contract by companies located within the borders of our friend China. The implications are appalling. Any one of tens of thousands of such chips could be hardwired to short out, shut down the system, send everything in the files to Jinan, or order the weapon it’s operating to attack the White House one dark night. Homeland Security does not even want to talk about this (their spokesman admitted to the problem at Congressional hearings this summer only after furious prodding)28. While it’s theoretically possible to sort out subverted chips (a chip with an extra logic circuit will show a minute but detectable difference in impedance, for one thing), the only practical solution is to replace every last suspect chip with one made in a secure U.S. facility. This will be slow, expensive, and, by the very nature of things, incomplete.

It’s not merely Junior hacking on a basement PC. So what is the response of the authorities, military and otherwise?  The National Security Agency’s (NSA) plans are of course unknown but likely to be potent and well considered. Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) appears to have  taken on the role of an über-McAfee or Norton, issuing detailed alerts that will be carefully read after an attack occurs. The FBI has established InfraGard, billed as an “industry-Bureau partnership” intended to protect the country’s infrastructure networks^29. But InfraGard depends on voluntary industry reportage and does not seem particularly well staffed or funded.

As for the military, U.S. Cyber Command’s primary mission was to defend military systems from foreign attack – not government or domestic networks. So it was a relief when last spring the Pentagon released its long-awaited cybersecurity plan^30. The Defense Department for the first time declared cyberspace to be “a domain of war,” in which cyberattacks breaching a certain threshold of damage or destruction equivalent to that of a real-world military action would trigger a full response from the U.S. military. This represented a long-overdue shift from the law-enforcement paradigm, in which cybersecurity was a problem for the FBI and the Justice Department, to a matter of national defense, with matching levels of resources and urgency. It also expanded military cybernetic responsibilities from defense of military systems to defense of all systems, government, business, and civilian, on a national level.

The plan climaxes with a statement of a frankness that would never be found in any civilian governmental document: “The department and the nation have vulnerabilities in cyberspace. Our reliance on cyberspace stands in stark contrast to the inadequacy of our cybersecurity.”

While we can’t be certain this plan caused any sleepless nights in Jinan, it does represent a useful step toward a doctrine of cyberwarfare, which the U.S. still lacks. And who knows? It may well bring to an end such probes and tests as those that caused the Cleveland blackout.

In the realm of practical solutions, a number of actions suggest themselves, most of them simply adapting standard IT security practice to the national level.

Air Gaps Work; Use Them – every critical or secret network, whether governmental, military, or industry, must be isolated from the Internet. No exceptions.

Personnel Discipline – no more Bradley Mannings wandering in and out of secure facilities with CD-Roms labeled “Lady Gaga.”  If someone is carrying a diskette, a CD, a flash drive, a memory stick, or anything else capable of holding data, sooner or later it will be plugged in.

No Smart Grids – these systems have been promoted to save money. How much in the way of savings makes up for a national catastrophe? The air defense system around New York City was shut down in large part to save money too. Smart grids need to be reexamined in light of the threat they embody. The concept must be reworked to remove any possibility of manipulation by hackers or foreign powers. Otherwise, it needs to be thrown onto the “attractive but dangerous tech” pile, along with dirigibles, the (original) Orion spacecraft, and light-water nuclear reactors.

Dump Subverted Hardware – immediate replacement is required. The entire inventory needs to be destroyed and all devices and circuits that could even possibly have utilized such a part must be replaced in toto. This is the only method of obtaining security in this case.

B Team Analysis – we require a “B Team” to examine, analyze, and report on the entire American IT system on a national security basis. This team should not only comprise government personnel, but also military officers, representatives of the staffs of Microsoft, McAfee, the Register, and the computer department of Carnegie-Mellon, the kids who walk around wearing Guy Fawkes masks, and if possible, the ghost of Colonel Boyd.

Establish a Cybermilitia –We require an independent cyberservice comprised of network defenders in large numbers. Perhaps the best solution would be an actual civilian militia after the model of the old Civil Air Patrol (CAP). The Net has to be guarded actively and constantly. One problem lies in the neo-anarchist posturing common among the IT community, but not everybody acts that way and even fewer actually believe it. Our IT strength lies with wild kids all across the country. We need to think about using them.

A Full Military Doctrine – not only to defend the U.S. and its cybernetic assets, both military and civilian, but to destroy, if necessary, any cybernetic threat to the nation’s well-being whether national or rogue. Cybersecurity needs to be transferred to military control -- unless we’re satisfied to have it handled by the same type of mentality that paws two-year-olds in airports.

This is only the beginning. We are at about the same point with cyberwarfare as was reached by air power in 1940 – before the huge raids of WW II, before supersonic jets, intercontinental bombers, radar networks, SAMs, or nuclear weapons. Cyberwarfare is leaving its infancy and is just out of the silk scarf and leather helmet stage. What awaits us is hidden within the bright glare of future days, but we can be sure at the very least that it will be fascinating, unexpected, and very deadly.

The Long Run

We’ve established that it’s possible, with some thought, effort, and money well spent, for the U.S. to get through its upcoming trials in relatively good shape. We must also rely to some extent on luck and the bottom not falling out completely. There are truly catastrophic scenarios in which a technological edge would provide us with little or nothing – a full-scale nuclear strike, an attack with tailored microorganisms (I’ve often wondered why most scenarios dealing with biowar, whether fictional or otherwise, are limited to one bug. Surely there would be two or three, one picking up where the other left off?), the destruction of the American – or global – Internet (this has been established as at least theoretically possible), a technological singularity gone wrong (or, for that matter gone right)31. But these are events for which no preparation would ever be enough. We make rational plans for plausible contingencies, and apart from that, we hope.

One other point relates to how we got into this sorry mess, which was easily foreseeable, and subject to some level of prevention –yet no such effort was made by anyone on any part of the political spectrum.

Why are we surprised by so many crises and stumble into useless wars that do not support our national interests and gain us nothing? Why do we tend to act too late, why we are so often unprepared? Why does the most powerful national entity in recorded history consistently look like eight kinds of jackass on the international stage? The reason is simple: the U.S. lacks, and has always lacked, a grand strategy.

The concept of grand strategy is often overlooked. It is the strategy of the long term, the strategy of nations rather than armies, the strategy that sets the overall goals and tells everyday military and diplomatic strategy how to reach them. The most successful states possess a grand strategy worked out and tested over generations that protects the nation and pushes forward its interests. It is usually very simple and can be stated in sentence or perhaps two. The grand strategy of Rome was: keep the barbarians on the other side of the Rhine, the Parthians on the other side of the Euphrates. The grand strategy of the British Empire was: do not allow any single power to gain total control of Europe. Both empires maintained these strategies throughout their peak periods, Rome for close to four centuries, the British even longer, if we count the Anglo-French wars of the 13th and 14th centuries.

When at last the Romans gave up, and began letting in barbarian tribes as a reward for acting as allies, the end was plainly coming. The British held on until the last ditch, going into what amounted to national bankruptcy in the 20th century to twice prevent Germany from controlling Europe.

An American grand strategy is a necessity for this century. We could do without it during the splendid isolation of our early years, when the Monroe Doctrine was our sole strategic necessity. Our entry into world affairs with WWI was not accompanied by any reconsideration of national priorities in response to new strategic realities. We have spent much of the past century trying to skitter back into isolation rather than face up to our global responsibilities. After WWII we did have a strategy against the USSR – containment – but it was situational, not universally accepted, and failed when applied in other parts of the world.

A grand strategy will guarantee this country’s status into the 21st century and beyond. We need to consider what such a thing would look like – how it would serve our national interests, how it would utilize our technological advantages, how it would express the American character, American hopes, and American ideas.

Because the U.S. will be back. Our decline will not be permanent. Our enemies are deeply flawed and skating ever closer to the edge. Iran has an imploding population, a vanishing resource base, and a government of madmen (as the recently Quds Force assassination conspiracy reveals clearly enough). It will not be the same place in twenty years. China also faces a population crash thanks to its grotesque birth-control policies, centripetal tendencies involving abused minorities, and the inevitable showdown between political tyranny and economic freedom. The Russians will eventually learn the lesson of Al Capone: that blatant gangsterism will take you only so far. They are all facing problems the U.S. has already overcome or simply does not have.

We are demographically healthy, with an expanding but not exploding population. Our economy will return to full health once the mania for federal intervention is left behind. We will benefit from recent trade agreements that create a Greater American free-trade zone that encompasses every nation on the Pacific coast of the Americas, an 8,000-mile-long chain that is likely to become the richest trade bloc in the world^32. Also acting in our favor is the beginning of a resource boom perhaps without parallel in our history. One example will suffice: the Marcellus Shale formation of the Northeast contains from 84 trillion to 410 trillion cubic feet of natural gas^33. That’s trillion with a “t.” (It also contains billions of gallons of liquid natural gas and ethane.)That alone makes the U.S. the natural gas equivalent of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, and Iran combined, and there’s more where that came from. We will begin to see the impact of our new resource base over the next twenty years, with full expression by mid-century.

It is not yet twilight for the United States. Our current drift is an interlude and not an epilogue. We are an old nation (with the second-oldest government on earth, behind the UK) but we are a young country. It is customary for the young to make mistakes, pick themselves up, and go on. We have made a lot of mistakes, but none of them are fatal. We are coming into our maturity, when we will do things differently. The American Century is dead and gone –bring on the American Millennium.

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END NOTES

1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/10/xm25_astan_reports/

2.http://www.qinetiq-na.com/products-maars.htm

3.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2bExqhhWRI

4.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAgY6uL4VQM

5.www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwaD5-GlHXg

6.http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/man/uswpns/air/rotary/v22osprey.html

7.http://www.sikorsky.com/Innovation/Vision+of+the+future/Technologies/X2+Technology

8.http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/TTO/Programs/Transformer/Transformer.aspx

9.http://robots.net/article/2972.html

10.http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/05/29/6743626-jetpack-soars-a-mile-high

11.http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/ithacus.htm

12.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKPVQal851U

13.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/18/AR2007011801029.html

14.http://news.cnet.com/8301-13639_3-20003260-42.html

15.http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2010-071400-3123-99

16.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html?_r=1

17.www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/virus-hits-drone-fleet/

18.http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/drone-virus-kept-quiet/

19.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14157975

20.http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/27/us-usa-defense-hackers-idUSTRE74Q6VY20110527

21.http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-02/google-s-discovery-of-attempted-gmail-hacking-prompts-u-s-investigation.html

22.http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/08/03/massive-global-cyberattack-targeting-us-un-discovered-experts-blame-china/

23.http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/28/technology/government_hackers/index.htm

24.http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/28/cyworld_korea_megahack/

25.http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/575780/201106171909/Is-China-US-Cyberwar-Inevitable-.htm

26.www.mcafee.com/us/resources/.../rp-critical-infrastructure-protection.pdf

27.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1455559/CIA-plot-led-to-huge-blast-in-Siberian-gas-pipeline.html

28.http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/07/28/v-print/118603/house-probes-policies-on-counterfeit.html

29.http://www.infragard.net/

30.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304563104576355623135782718.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories

31.http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20113-the-cyberweapon-that-could-take-down-the-internet.html

32.http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=588075&p=1

33.http://geology.com/usgs/marcellus-shale-assessment/

It's Lonely Out There – The Evolutionary Explanation for the Fermi Paradox

by

John Lambshead

The Fermi Paradox is named after Enrico Fermi, who postulated it in 1950 during informal discussion. It can be summarised as: if the truth is out there, why haven't we seen some evidence? Or to put it another way, where are the intelligent aliens? Not a single shred of evidence has ever been found of a piece of technology that is not human. All around us broods a silent universe, the silentium universi (things sound so much more authoritative when translated into Latin, don't you think?).

Physicists have dominated discussion on the Fermi Paradox, Fermi was a physicist, because it appears to be an issue of astronomy. But actually it is an issue of biology since it is about evolution.

In this paper I am going to address two points: How common is life in the universe, and how common is intelligent life. To gain an insight into the second point, I will be obliged to consider how intelligent life might evolve. For the purposes of this essay, intelligence is defined as human-level intelligence, i.e. the capacity to create a technological civilization.

Of course there are a number of explanations for the paradox of varying degrees of tinfoil-hatted looniness. For example, the Area 51 conspiracy theories to the effect the evidence exists but has been suppressed by the "government." Presumably, this is the one world secret government of giant shape-changing lizards from Draco – sorry, I have been reading David Icke's website again. It's one of those things that make you wonder whether there really is intelligent life on Earth.

You may be blissfully unaware that the world is actually run by a conspiracy of reptiloid aliens known as the Babylonian Brotherhood. Scaly-skinned members include George W Bush, Queen Elizabeth II and Boxcar Willie.

Boxcar Willie?

Moving swiftly on, less lunatic explanations of the paradox are simply untestable and hence pointless. Examples include the idea that alien technology is undetectable because it is too advanced for our primitive monkey brains to comprehend or is simply too, um, alien. For example, consider the Hooloovoos, hyperintelligent shades of the color blue (according to the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy). How do you detect the existence of hyperintelligent shades of the color blue?

Another untestable possibility is that aliens are deliberatively quarantining Earth for some social, scientific or alien reason. This is known somewhat unflatteringly as the Zoo Hypothesis. Presumably, some pettifogging minor official in the Galactic Central Bureaucracy has decided that we are not ready, or worthy, or whatever, to join the great Galactic Society.

Douglas Adams, who else, had a slant on this. He suggested Earth was located in Galactic Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha in the unfashionable uncharted end of the Western Spiral Arm, so guests are unlikely to drop by while in the neighbourhood. Sort of like living in Birmingham, or a flyover state in the USA.

The building of a new hyperspatial highway through the Sector should have solved the problem, were it not that the Earth was in the way so had to be demolished by a Vogon constructor fleet. I believe the corporate psychopaths call that creative destruction, something about eggs and omelettes.

I raise these points simply to dismiss them. We have to assume that if the universe teems with intelligent life then it will be enough like us that we could detect its activities. Otherwise, there is nothing to discuss.

The Fermi Paradox has been explained by something called the Rare Earth Hypothesis. This suggests that the Earth is uniquely capable of supporting intelligent life because of an extremely rare combination of favorable circumstances. The hypothesis was coined by Ward and Brownlee, who interestingly are not physicists, but a geologist/palaeontologist and astronomer/astrobiologist respectively.

The issue with the Rare Earth is that it is the antithesis of the Principle of Mediocrity, also known as the Copernican Principle, which is an important concept in scientific philosophy. Broadly speaking, it goes like this. If you have only one example of something then assume that it is typical of its type. One can think of it as a variant of Occam's Razor (good ole lex parsimoniae). In terms of probability, you are far more likely to be right if you assume ordinaryness rather than uniqueness. Hence Copernican, since Copernicus in 1543 demonstrated the principle by moving the Sun, rather than the Earth, to the center of the universe.

Some seventy years later, the Catholic Inquisition suppressed Galileo's work and labelled him a heretic for pointing out that the Earth went 'round the Sun. Actually, the Catholic Church banned mention of Galileo's and Copernicus' work as late as 1835, not that anyone took much notice. Galileo was not rehabilitated by the Church until a speech by Pope John Paul in 1992.

Before we judge the Church too harshly, it is worth noting that a Dutch television channel censored all reference to evolution in David Attenborough's Life of Mammals and reference to anthropogenic global climate change has been censored from his new series Frozen Earth by American television.

Some scientific conclusions will always be too shocking for the ears of the proles, at least in the opinion of the Establishment. And the Establishment is right to be concerned. Knowledge and ideas are the most dangerous things in the world to the stability of the status quo.

So can we reconcile the principle that the Earth is probably not special to the observation that we can find no evidence for alien civilizations in the rest of the universe? I think we can if we consider evolutionary biology. Most of the debate on this subject is between physical scientists who, inevitably, have a tenuous grasp of biology. My own grasp of quantum mechanics is less than profound so I sympathize. But in this paper, I want to look at the biology of intelligent life and see if it provides a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox.

Let's start with the famous Drake Equation (Frank not David). It is accepted wisdom that one loses half one's audience with every mathematical equation in a paper so I will not copy it out. The equation has seven variables, which means that (i) it will generate all possible probabilities between zero to one depending how the variables are set and (ii) a variety of different variable settings can give the same probability. It is worth pointing out that Drake formulated the equation as an agenda for discussion, not as a predictive or explanatory model.

The variables are:

1. Rate of star formation.

2. Proportion of the above stars with planets.

3. Proportion of the above planets that could support life.

4. Proportion of the above planets that do support life.

5. Proportion of the above life that evolves intelligence.

6. Proportion of the above intelligent life that develops detectable technology.

7. The life span of civilizations with detectable technology.

You can always add in extra variables; for example Brin (David not Frank) suggested an additional factor for civilizations that colonize new solar systems, but more variables merely add to the problem. It is actually helpful if we can simplify the equation so that is what I’ll do.

With anything like our current state of knowledge, variables three and four must be regarded as a distinction without a difference. We can only be sure a planet could support life if it does support life so we can merge these variables.

Similarly, variables five and six are probably the same thing and can be merged. The only working definition of intelligence in this context is a species that creates a civilization, and using the Principle of Mediocrity we can assume that such a civilization will use detectable technology. I will also ignore the last variable as there is no data, nothing into which to get one’s academic teeth.

That leaves us with just four variables. The first two are astronomic and have been comprehensively discussed elsewhere. I am going to consider the last two: the probability of life evolving on an Earthlike planet and the probability of that leading to a civilization.

To do this I intent to use the evolution of life on Earth as a model, applying Mediocrity, to see if it can explain the Universal Silence.

The oldest minerals on Earth are zircon crystals from Western Australia, about 4.4 billion years old. The oldest solid objects found in our solar system are certain meteorites dated to about 4.6 billion years. So we are probably in the right ball park (now there's an Americanism that has infiltrated British English – I am informed it is something to do with the American version of the game of Rounders) if we estimate the Earth's age to be 4.5 billion years – give or take a million or so. One can be so refreshingly cavalier about inexactitude when dealing with deep time. Evidence from the Moon suggests that there was a massive meteorite bombardment between 3.8 to 4.0 billion years ago so severe that it stripped away any previous atmosphere or oceans. That date sets our baseline for the earliest point for the start of life on Earth.

The universe is calculated to be somewhere in the region of 13.8 billion years so the Earth has existed for the last third of the life of the universe.

Earthlike rocky planets could only form after the first generation of stars spewed out metallic elements in supernovae. These stars probably formed quite quickly after the Big Bang, perhaps after just 0.5 billion years, and most of them had gone by 4.0 billion years. So, to pluck a figure out of the air in the finest traditions of speculative science, many Earthlike planets should have appeared by 5.0 billion years after the Big Bang, or 8.8 billion years ago.

Now let us address the question of how long it might take for life to develop on an Earthlike planet. The first indisputable traces life on Earth are bacterial fossils dated to 3.0 billion years before present. Bacteria are fairly sophisticated prokaryote (lacking a nucleus) cellular organisms. So we have two scenarios. The first is that bacteria arrived from space or that life evolved immediately – and one means immediately – after the bombardment.

For our purposes, the source of life is of no consequence. The key point is that life is found as soon as it was possible. Applying the Principle of Mediocrity, one can only conclude that life must be widespread across the universe, and that it has been knocking round the universe for the last 8.0 to 9.0 billion years.

The next link in our argument chain is to consider when intelligent life, civilization, is likely to appear. The big evolutionary jump is from a prokaryote cell to the much more sophisticated eukaryote cell. Oxygen is a highly reactive, toxic gas that appears in significant quantities in the Earth's atmosphere from around 2.4 billion years ago. We associate modern complex eukaryote cells with oxygen so these organisms were a going concern from at least this time. Oxygen-based metabolism raises biological productivity by around 100 to 1000 times, so the pace of evolution quickens once it appears.

The sophistication of the eukaryote cell makes possible sexual reproduction and multicellular organisms. Multicellularity appears to have evolved more than once so we can conclude that its evolution is probable, although it takes a considerable time (around 1.5 billion years).

Multicellularity allows the cell line specialization necessary for complex organisms such as plants, fungi and animals (incidentally fungi are a sister group of animals not plants). Once metazoa (animals) evolve, the push of evolutionary competition forces life to spread to exploit all possible ecological niches. Some of these niches only become usable by the evolution of increasingly complex organisms. So evolution drives increasing complexity.

A high rate of evolution requires an unstable ecosystem; organisms evolve faster at a time of change. However, too much instability causes localized catastrophe and even global mass extinction because change outruns the ability of organisms to cope. An organism cannot evolve mechanisms to adapt to unexpected catastrophe. The Goldilocks Principle of just the right amount of instability definitely applies.

The first evidence we have for the evolution of a mind capable of creating a civilization is not the manufacture of tools — many species use tools — but the creation of art. Art implies creativity, an ability for abstract thought separate from the mundane.

The first art we have ever found was created by a population that lived about seventy thousand years ago on the southeast tip of South Africa, two hundred miles east of Cape Town. These ancient South Africans engraved abstract (symbolic?) designs onto their artefacts. They also made more sophisticated weapons than had ever been seen before, but it is the art that is significant.

This population was drawn from our species, Homo sapiens, but they are not the first members of our species. H. sapiens evolved in Africa about a quarter of a million years ago from the hominid clade (line), which split from chimps about five million years ago. This raises the possibility that the modern human mind evolved long after the modern human body. I'll come back to this point.

So we have a time line for intelligent life on Earth. Life appears almost immediately but intelligent life took nearly four billion years to evolve. So, applying Mediocrity, civilizations should have been commonplace across the universe for the last four billion years or so.

Therefore we are still deep in the Fermi Paradox. Either the Earth is special or there should be traces of alien civilizations.

However, it is worth noting that four billion years for the evolution of intelligent life from the first tentative self-replicating molecules is a very long time even by geological deep-time standards. So I intend now to focus in on how intelligent life evolves. The human body appeared before the modern human mind so let’s start with that and ask what are the physical characteristics that have to evolve for the evolution of an intelligent mind? To do this we take at human beings as a typical example, applying the Principle of Mediocrity.

An organism must be complex and sophisticated to have the necessary cell line specialization for a central nervous system (CNS). Multicellularity appears to be a highly likely evolutionary outcome so the conclusion must be that complex life is commonplace in the universe.

The second key factor is size. The size of an organism's CNS is directly proportional to the size of the body it controls. Modern humans have a brain that is slightly bigger than body size would suggest but not by much. In fact, statistically adult humans do not have an unusually large brain. A large-enough brain is a prerequisite for intelligence but does not guarantee intelligence and, once the minimum threshold brain size is reached, brain size not an indicator of intelligence.

For example, men have statistically significantly larger bodies than women so have larger brains. Any man who publicly concludes from this that men are more intelligent than women has just demonstrated the falsity of his hypothesis – and I hope he gets good treatment in whatever hospital they incarcerate his bloody remains. Once the critical minimum size-threshold has been reached, intelligence depends on architecture and physiology.

Large organisms evolved repeatedly on Earth so it would seem to be a commonplace product of multicellularity. Hence we may predict that large animals are commonplace across the Universe.

Humans have key characteristics other than size. We are tetrapods that are obligatory bipeds so we had the possibility to evolve hands. This is unique among mammals and reflects our unusual evolutionary journey from the trees to the plains of Africa. This change of habitat is somewhat unusual and seems to have been driven by climate instability causing rapid retreat and advance of woodland.

We have forward facing "predator" eyes, our primary sense is sight, and good hand-eye coordination – again an evolutionary hangover from an earlier arboreal existence.

Most mammals are primarily smell and sound orientated but vision is our primary sense and we use sound near exclusively to communicate, our secondary method being visual. We can make a wide variety of noises so can exchange sophisticated abstract concepts. None of this guarantees intelligence. It merely allows it to develop. For example, birds have many of these features, a sophisticated high-energy metabolism, good vision and complex vocal and visual communication but they are small, having lost out in the competition with mammals to exploit large-body ecological niches. Large non-flying birds did evolve on isolated islands but had no potential for the evolution of hands. Wings are so specialised that it is difficult to see how they could evolve into hands. Evolution is difficult to reverse.

Therapod dinosaurs, birds' close relatives, developed all the physical bodily prerequisites for the evolution of intelligence since they had bird-like characteristics but, being non-flying, could be large and had the potential for the evolution of hands. Feathers did not evolve for flight but as a component of a high-energy sophisticated metabolism and a number of therapods were feathered. So why did an intelligent therapod not evolve?

It seems self-evident to the layman that intelligence, human-level intelligence, is an evolutionary advantage that increases a species’ survivability but actually that is not true. In general, overspecialization is never a long term advantage and intelligence in particular carries severe penalties with no increase in the probability of survivability.

Intelligent brains consume ridiculous amounts of energy. Our babies are born unformed because of the strain placed on our reproductive system by a large head. An adult human might not have an unusually large brain for its body-size but a baby does. Any more than one baby at a time is therefore likely to result in the death of the children and mother so we have a low reproductive rate. Even so, we still have a high death rate for mother and baby in natural birth. Our babies are born helpless and require lengthy parental care before they can survive independently. We also suffer from mental illness. As an aside, it is intriguing that high creativity correlates with maniac-depression illnesses.

Given all these disadvantages, it is not surprising that it takes time before circumstances favour the evolution of intelligence – but time is that something large animals just don't have too much of. Wide geographic distribution and large numbers of individuals offer a buffer against extinction. Small animals have these characteristics, not large ones, so large animals are more vulnerable to random extinction. Statistically, this means that large organisms have a shorter survival span as a species.

Feathered therapods (indicative of sophisticated physiology) appeared in the Cretaceous Period, and possibly as far back as the middle Jurassic so sophisticated therapods were around for about 50 to a hundred million years so, again, why no intelligent therapod?

What kick-started intelligence in humans? Given that our powerful brains have so many disadvantages and not much payback in terms of survival, at least in the early stages before technology, why was increasing brain power been selected for, generation by generation, until the evolution of the human mind?

The primary selection pressure is survival but the second is reproductive success: Darwin pointed this out in the Origin of Species. Complex animals reproduce sexually so success involves mating. Vertebrates have complex signalling systems and behavior to persuade another individual to choose them as a suitable partner. This can result in the evolution of anatomical features that are neutral or even disadvantageous to survival. For example, the growth of antlers in deer have a high metabolic cost, offer little survival advantage, but are essential for a male deer to intimidate competitors to win the hooves of fair deer maidens.

The more complicated an organism's reproductive system the more likely the sexes of a species are to have different reproductive strategies, and the mammalian system is very complicated. The best explanation of human intelligence is that it is the result of sexual selection by women. Men tend to be attracted to women who are fit, healthy, young and not yet pregnant (slim waist).

These characteristics are not unimportant to women (well, except the last) but women get stuck with the baby so, given that people are social animals, women are attracted to high status men who will be able to provide support for them and their children. In a social animal, high status revolves around sophisticated interaction, for which intelligence is an advantage because of the need to manipulate, and enjoy good relations with, other members of society.

Even our verbal facility is probably the result of female sexual selection. In British English, boys attempt to "chat up" girls at parties. If women kept selecting for intelligence in men then this would overcome any counter-survival effect of "wasting" resources on high energy brains.

But note that the exact choice of a sexual selection feature is a haphazard process. Women might have selected on developing an oversized red nose, the ability to hop around in a circle with effortless grace, or antlers. Female birds often select on feather coloration patterns and there is evidence that therapod dinosaurs had similar behavior. Bipedal therapods were mostly predators, like wolves or tigers, whereas we are social omnivores and that is probably the key difference.

The take home message is that intelligence is a rather unlikely end result that depends on a conjunction of haphazard ecological and evolutionary features.

Maybe an intelligent species of social therapod dinosaur might still have evolved if the Cretaceous Great extinction had not happened — but major catastrophes from local events up to mass extinctions are a regular feature of life on Earth.

Species survival over time, particularly for a large organism, is to a large extent a matter of sheer luck. We almost didn't make it. About seventy-five-thousand years ago there was a catastrophe, the Toba super-volcanic eruption. The Toba Event seems to have taken human beings to the very brink of extinction. Genetic evidence suggests that we were reduced to between one and ten thousand breeding pairs. All modern humans are genetically closely related, which is why inbreeding is so very dangerous for us.

Toba was a volcanic pinprick compared to the Deccan Traps associated with the Cretaceous great extinction, or the Siberian Traps with the larger Permian extinctions, but it was enough to nearly do for a large animal geographically restricted to Africa. Toba may even have given the kick needed to evolve the human mind and civilization, but our survival was touch and go.

And here, I think, is the explanation for the Fermi Paradox. There does not need to be anything special about Earth or H. sapiens. Applying the Principle of Mediocrity, the universe probably teems with life, quite complex life. But intelligent life is simply unlikely because the evolutionary dice are rigged against it. It is very unlikely that a large complex animal, with the right sexual selection system, will survive long enough for circumstances to kick start the path to a technological civilization.

You don't need a special, unique planet to evolve an intelligent organism. You just need a lot of life on a lot of planets and one or two will win the lottery no matter how unlikely the probability. It's just a matter of random luck. There is nothing special about someone who wins the national lottery.

I suspect it is the "probability of evolving intelligent life" that is the key variable that governs the Drake Equation: the probability must be close to zero. Should we survive long enough to break free of our solar system cradle, the last variable, I suspect we will find life in abundance but will probably never ever meet intellectual peers.

It's going to be lonely out there.

The End

Table of Contents

The Size of it All by Les Johnson

Terraforming Ganymede with Robert A. Heinlein by Gregory Benford

The Amazon’s Right Breast by Tom Kratman

Brains Aflame Out on the Frontier of Neuroscience with a World-class Researcher by Tony Daniel

Terraforming Ganymede with Robert A. Heinlein Part 2 by Gregory Benford

The Aliens Are Not Among Us by Les Johnson

Gravity’s Punch by Tony Daniel

Science and Society in the Citizen Series by John Lambshead

BEATING DECLINE: Miltech and the Survival of the U.S.

BEATING DECLINE – JR Dunn (V.2)

It's Lonely Out There – The Evolutionary Explanation for the Fermi Paradox by John Lambshead