Table of Contents

- From Corvus to Keyhole Shipyards—Past, Present, and Science Fiction by Jim Beall

- Are We Really Just Wired Differently? by Tedd Roberts

- The Near Future of Human Genome Engineering by Dan Koboldt

- Mars, Moon or Bust! by Les Johnson

- Do Dungeon Masters Roll Magic Dice? Willful Self-Deception on the Campaign Trail by Bob Kruger

- Strange Sex Alien Reproduction Through a Biologist’s Eyes—and What This Could Mean to Science Fiction by Dave Freer

- The Science of Dr. Gribbleflotz by Rick Boatright

- A Quantum of Consciousness by John Lambshead

- Radium Girls of Science and Science Fiction by Jim Beall

- Dark Matter of the Human Genome by Dan Koboldt

- Of Dragons and Valkyries: Helicopters in Fiction by Kacey Ezell

- Homo Stellaris: Becoming the People of the Stars by Robert E. Hampson, Ph.D.

Baen Books

Free Nonfiction 2016

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.

From Corvus to Keyhole Shipyards–Past, Present, and Science Fiction © 2016 by Jim Beall

Are We Really Just Wired Differently? © 2016 by Tedd Roberts

The Near Future of Human Genome Engineering © 2016 by Dan Koboldt

Mars, Moon or Bust! © 2016 by Les Johnson

Do Dungeon Masters Roll Magic Dice? Willful Self-Deception on the Campaign Trail © 2016 by Bob Kruger

Strange Sex: Alien Reproduction Through a Biologist’s Eyes and What This Could Mean to Science Fiction © 2016 by Dave Freer

The Science of Dr. Gribbleflotz © 2016 by Rick Boatright

A Quantum of Consciousness © 2016 by John Lambshead

Radium Girls of Science and Science Fiction © 2016 by Jim Beall

Dark Matter of the Human Genome © 2016 by Dan Koboldt

Of Dragons and Valkyries: Helicopters in Fiction © 2016 by Kacey Ezell

Homo Stellaris: Becoming the People of the Stars © 2016 by Robert E. Hampson, Ph.D.

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eISBN: 978-1-62579-499-4

From Corvus to Keyhole Shipyards—Past, Present, and Science Fiction

by Jim Beall

Stories of fighting captains and admirals fill histories and novels alike but, though ships and fleets may win battles, shipyards win wars. A nation's navy is merely a snapshot in time of its maritime military power, while a country's shipyards constitute its strategic, forward-going strength. Shipyards repair damage so that ships can fight again, replace ships lost in battle, and incorporate new technological advances and battle lessons learned. In fact, at any point in time few ships in the fleet contain all the latest technologies, but a shipyard must have every one of them and the tools to add them.

Shipyards and the Shape of the Ancient World

This is nothing new. For example, the First Punic War (264 - 241 BC) was at base a naval conflict as Rome sought to end Carthage's dominance of the Mediterranean Sea. Rome began without much of a navy, but captured a grounded Carthaginian galley and used their shipyards to build a fleet (some sources say one hundred ships in sixty days). They knew they were better soldiers, but that their enemies were better sailors, so they incorporated a new tech: the Corvus. (Figure 1)

Figure 1. Roman "Corvus" Boarding Ramp (Image courtesy of Look and Learn: http://www.lookandlearn.com/)

Imagine the Carthaginians' dismay in the next battle (Mylae) when odd-looking vertical boards pivoted on their masts and suddenly plunged down onto their decks, locking the ships together (Corvus is "crow,” named for the steel "beak" on the bottom) for a century-strong boarding party of Roman legionnaires to storm across. The result was a great Roman victory, including the capture of some thirty Carthaginian ships. Unfortunately, the Romans soon lost that fleet, but built another. They continued to repeat the process, implementing new techs as they went. In fact, it would be the fifth Roman fleet that beat Carthage and forced them to sue for peace. Thus, the Roman shipyards ultimately won that war.

One analogous situation in science fiction would be Walter Jon Williams' excellent Praxis series. In the opening novel, a multi-thousand-year-old space empire falls into civil war. The fleets of the two sides suffer almost mutual annihilation in the very first battle. From there, it is as much the race between shipyards as it is the space battles that decide the conflict.

An even more dramatic case from history was the Venetian Empire. From the Middle Ages until about the time of Columbus, Venice dominated the Mediterranean through a combination of military power, trade, and diplomacy. A key player in the Venetian success was the Arsenale shipyard which—by using parts prefabrication and assembly line practices on a scale that would not be matched until Henry Ford—could build a warship in a single day. Indeed, Venetian officials would invite visiting dignitaries to witness the process for themselves. (Footnote 1) The Arsenale shipyard was so intimidating that it actually prevented wars!

Shipyards Enter the Modern Era

As the size of warships and the scale of wars increased, so did the importance of shipyards. Shipyards became global players as tensions rose before World War I when many nations including Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire all ordered dreadnoughts from the yards of Britain and Germany. Of those nations that bought warships, only Japan would invest in major shipyards and, by doing so, become a major naval power in its own right. (Footnote 2) The British yards would outbuild the German ones by such a margin that the strategic Battle of Jutland (May 31, 1916) would be fought nine versus five in battle cruisers and twenty-eight versus sixteen in dreadnought battleships, with even larger ratios in cruisers and smaller ships.

Why don't more stories feature yard workers as major characters? Perhaps their roles lack excitement? Tell that to the yard workers who were aboard HMS Prince of Wales when she and HMS Hood fought KMS Bismarck and KMS Prinz Eugen in the most famous Atlantic naval action in World War II.

The Prince of Wales was such a new ship that her two quad turrets (which housed eight of her ten main guns) still did not have all the bugs worked out. Not only did one hundred civilian technical experts from Armstrong Vickers sail with the battleship, but they were also credited with helping to keep her guns firing (Footnote 3). Even with their efforts, the British battleship's eighteen salvos during the critical engagement fired only fifty-five of the seventy-four rounds that should have been fired. The three hits those salvos achieved led the German warship to break off action and attempt a return to port. Meanwhile, the Prince of Wales (and the Armstrong Vickers' technicians) had been hit by three fifteen-inch shells from Bismarck and four eight-inch shells from Prinz Eugen.

The Yorktown and the Battle of Midway

Yard workers were also aboard the key warship during the most famous Pacific naval action: The Battle of Midway. Instead of finishing construction, this time they were still repairing previous battle damage and the account reads like a novel all by itself.

Claude Sexton Gillette almost certainly spotted the ten-mile-wide oil slick trailing behind USS Yorktown (CV-5) before his plane touched down on the crippled aircraft carrier on May 26, 1942. After all, that was part of the reason why he was there. Admiral Nimitz, who was the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, had dispatched him upon reading the Yorktown's damage report that had been delivered to him by plane a day earlier while the carrier was still many miles from Oahu, limping home at her best speed of about twenty knots.

The damage had been inflicted on May 8 during the Battle of the Coral Sea and included multiple compartments destroyed by a bomb that had punctured the flight deck and exploded fifty feet inside the ship. The machinery for one plane elevator was badly damaged, the radar and refrigeration systems were lost, and lighting was out on portions of three decks. Eight near misses had ruptured three fuel tanks and opened seams in the hull. Rear Admiral Aubrey Fitch, who was aboard the damaged carrier, had reportedly estimated that repairing the Yorktown would take ninety days. Based on coded intercepts, Nimitz knew he didn't have ninety days; he had three.

Captain Gillette, manager of the Pearl Harbor shipyard, was hardly a stranger to battle damage and the challenges of effecting repairs. In fact, he and the team that he brought along might have been the most experienced experts in the world with respect to naval bomb and torpedo damage. Gillette had held his post at Pearl Harbor since before the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941. Already one of the top engineering duty officers in the U.S. Navy before the war began, he and his shipyard had been doing nothing but repairing warships ever since.

Due to their efforts, a steady stream of ships had steamed back out of harbor to rejoin the Fleet or to West Coast facilities for modernization and final repairs. The Japanese thought they sent them to the bottom, but Gillette's shipyard sent them back to war. (Footnote 4)

Gillette radioed back to Nimitz that Yorktown could be repaired, but that it would take a supreme effort.

The work began even before the carrier arrived, as yard workers started prefabricating bulkheads and other structural elements while the Yorktown was still at sea. The carrier entered Pearl Harbor the afternoon of May 27, and shipyard workers poured aboard. They would work nonstop until she left. Early the next morning, the carrier was in Dry Dock #1 and, with at least a foot of water still being pumped out, Admiral Nimitz was among those sloshing about in waders to inspect the hull damage.

Nimitz spent some time staring up at the burst seams and other damage. Reportedly, he then turned to the senior yard officer present and said, "We must have this ship back in three days." Hull repair expert Lieutenant Commander H. J. Pfingstag gulped and said, “Yes, sir.” Six months earlier, Pfingstag might have said it was impossible, but that was some thirty-five bombs and torpedoes ago.

Gillette and the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard took on the Yorktown repair effort not only with hard-won expertise, but also with massive brute force. They didn't have enough time to repair all the hull seams, so they welded an enormous steel plate over the entire damaged section. The size of the yard force was also unprecedented, numbering some fourteen hundred, all working round-the-clock. The effort required so much electricity that the Navy contacted the president of the Hawaiian Electric Company, who arranged a series of rolling blackouts in Honolulu.

The shipyard workers literally poured the industrial power of a major city through their tools and into USS Yorktown.

Yorktown left Dry Dock #1 on May 29, and steamed out of Pearl Harbor early the next morning with hundreds of yard workers still aboard. Some would disembark later while the carrier refueled, but about a hundred would remain aboard.

With the arrival of USS Yorktown, the U.S. Navy had near-parity in carrier planes. She would bear all the attacks during the decisive Battle of Midway. The first Japanese wave hit her with three bombs, holing her flight deck and rendering her dead in the water. The second wave arrived an hour later, but assumed they were attacking a different carrier, because repair teams (including the remaining yard workers) had already gotten Yorktown back to 19 knots. They then hit the damaged carrier with two torpedoes, causing her to lose all power and develop a list, but she would probably have survived to return to Pearl Harbor except for a submarine attack days after the battle.

The Japanese would lose four carriers during the battle. Even as USS Yorktown bore all of the enemy attacks, her air groups sunk one enemy carrier (Soryu); one of her spotter planes found the last one (Hiryu); and ten of her dive bombers (flying off USS Enterprise) participated in its sinking.

Yorktown would not have even been there except for Captain Gillette and the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard.

More WW II Repairs

Perhaps even more remarkable was the aftermath of the Battle of Tassafronga (November 30, 1942, off Guadalcanal). Three U.S. cruisers would be heavily damaged, with Minneapolis and New Orleans both having their bows blown off by Japanese torpedoes. (Figures 2 and 3)

Figure 2. USS Minneapolis and her coconut logs temporary bow.

Source: USN official photographs - public domain

Figure 3. USS New Orleans would steam backwards all the way across the Pacific

Source: USN official photograph - public domain

Both ships would jury-rig temporary bows and get to shipyards. Minneapolis would use coconut logs for part of the bow, and the more damaged New Orleans would steam backwards all the way to the Puget Sound! Both would return to service in about nine months. The Japanese thought they were destroyed; the shipyards sent them back to battle to prove them wrong.

Technology Escalates

Throughout World War II, shipyards regularly upgraded warships to incorporate new technologies (such as radar) and new weapons (such as replacing pre-war anti-aircraft guns with 40 mm Bofors). American submarines had many of their external elements removed when it was learned that they increased the vessels' underwater noise signature. Thus, shipyards constantly improved the combat power and survivability of American ships such that the longer warships were away from a shipyard, the further they were behind technologically.

This aspect was a key theme of Joe Haldeman's novel The Forever War, in which relativistic velocity time dilation greatly extended the time from ship departure and arrival in combat zones. That is, a state-of-the-art warship would be many years behind the enemy because the defenders would always be fighting nearer their shipyards. Similarly, the human force that fought the climactic battle in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game was comprised of the oldest and least advanced ships because they had been dispatched earliest.

The pace of technology increased after WWII even as ship lifespan lengthened due to both peace and peacetime budgets. Ship design has changed to reflect this by shifting to increasingly modular construction techniques. Such methods decrease construction costs, allow more manufacturing at distant facilities (and later emplacement at the yard), and easier future refitting. Modern ship construction time-lapse videos can be mesmerizing. (Footnote 5)

The U.S. Navy's use of modules has recently been expanded to include temporary "mission packages" that can be changed to fit ship assignment. This concept was a key design element of the new USS Freedom and Liberty littoral combat ship (LCS) classes. The LCS designs allow different equipment configurations for different mission profiles—including surface warfare, mine countermeasures, and anti-submarine warfare—with the mission-specific components able to be swapped out quickly at a yard. In the figures below, note the design flexibility features such as open software architecture, internal crane system, and reconfigurable volumes, and how specific mission package modules make use of those features.

Figure 4. USS Freedom (LCS-1) Class

Image courtesy of Lockheed Martin

Figure 5. LCS Mission Package Modules

Image courtesy of Lockheed Martin

One can view the remote controlled, twin 30 mm cannon modules arriving and being installed on USS Freedom here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjG_dBUehAk) (between time 2:30 and 2:45 in the video).

Looking into the near future, consider the laser mount that has been both developed and deployed aboard USS Ponce ((AFSB(I)-15).

Figure 6. USS Ponce ((AFSB(I)-15) - source: US Navy, public domain

The laser system can be seen in action in the demonstration video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbjXXRfwrHg. Such mounts will likely be engineered into modules and retrofitted into the fleet.

Weapon suites as modules are not new. Bethlehem Steel may have been one of the first U.S. firms to market them for distant delivery, having contracted in 1912 with the German shipyard A. G. Vulcan to supply the 14-inch main battery for the dreadnought battleship Salamis being built in Germany for the Greek navy. The 1914 outbreak of World War I and the resulting blockade by the British Royal Navy prevented delivery, so Bethlehem Steel (probably violating U.S. Neutrality) sold the guns (including barbettes, turrets, and associated armor) to the Royal Navy. They were clandestinely railed across the border on special flatcars (the cannons were twelve feet longer than standard carriages) into Canada and on to Britain where the Royal Navy built a class of monitors around them. (Footnote 6) In even more open defiance of U.S. Neutrality, Bethlehem Steel built complete "submarine kits" and railed them across to Canada for assembly. (Footnote 7)

Shipyards in Science Fiction

Turning to science fiction, A. E. Van Vogt addressed some of the potential implications of the massive industrial complex that would be necessary to build a major space warship in the short story "The Sound" (1950). In that story, the extreme complexity and long duration of construction led to children growing to adulthood knowing they were destined to crew the vessel upon completion. Like in many other older works, the ship was described as being built on a planet, leaving aside all the many and serious gravity well problems associated with such a massive object (let alone lofting it into space). More recent authors have avoided those issues by writing shipyards as spaceyards in orbit around planets or in asteroid belts. One exception is David Drake's excellent Leary series (first book: With the Lightnings), in which he carefully crafted a design rationale in his storyverse that allowed it. This series is also notable in the current context because one shipyard is a family business and the main characters spend so much time there that the yard practically becomes a character in its own right. Another exception is the Destroyerman series by Taylor Anderson (first book, Into The Storm), in which a shipyard becomes an agent for social change.

Spaceyards!

Spaceyards allow weightless transport of materials and zero-g assembly. This would be crucial when one considers that the ships are generally postulated to be many times the mass of the USS Gerald R. Ford. For example, the mass of Captain Kirk's Enterprise was more than twice that of the nuclear aircraft carrier of the same name and later Starfleet vessels got even larger.

The challenges of building a true space navy may best be illustrated by running some numbers. For example, the structural mass of the basic skeleton of a small Stanford Torus space habitat (imagine a forty-meter diameter doughnut one mile in diameter) would be about eighty thousand tons. (Footnote 8) Manufacturing it in sections on Earth would require close to two thousand Falcon Heavy rocket launches. If NASA or some other organization managed one such launch every week, it would take well over thirty years just to get the basic skeleton parts into orbit. A space habitat of that size would merely be sufficient to house the first few thousand construction workers, not for the hundreds of thousands of yard workers, fleet personnel, commissaries, families, schools, farms, and—of course!—bars and saloons. (Footnote 9)

Shipyards and the Honorverse

Large space fleets of massive warships have long been a science fiction staple, but Dave Weber's Honorverse is one of the few that has addressed the full importance of the facilities that build them. The entire plotline of his Flag in Exile (Spoiler Alert!) involves a wartime military campaign by one star nation to capture a shipyard to close the technology gap enjoyed by its foe. Remember, shipyards are the only places that must contain all the most recent tech because it is there that ships are refitted and modernized. Thus in Flag in Exile, a shipyard is properly written as a strategic level prize fully worthy of major fleet maneuvers and battles.

To appreciate just how such vast spaceyard facilities must be, and how massive the necessary investment in infrastructure, consider the following (LAC = "Light Attack Craft") size comparisons:

Figure 7. Honorverse Minotaur class LAC carrier, 6,178,500 tons, 1131 × 189 × 175 meters

Image by BuNine, courtesy of Baen Books

The Minotaurs are far from the largest warships in Weber's "Honorverse," however, as "super dreadnoughts" routinely massed over eight million tons, and the shipyards of the story's Star Kingdom built over four hundred of those vessels! Author David Weber provided some dimensions for the capitol system shipyard (Hephaestus) and the numbers are astounding!

"The station had simply grown, steadily and inevitably, adding additional lobes and habitats—cargo platforms, personnel sections, heavy fabrication modules, shipyards—as they were required … It stretched over a hundred and ten kilometers along its central spine, and tentacles reached out in every direction, some of them the better part of forty or even fifty kilometers long in their own right. It boasted a permanent population of over nine hundred and fifty thousand." (Mission of Honor)

To place into perspective the necessary infrastructure to support the industrial base inherent in such a shipyard, consider Burns Harbor, one of the largest and most modern U.S. steel mills:

Figure 8. Burns Harbor steel mill

Image Courtesy of ArceloMittal

Burns Harbor employs about four thousand, occupies about one thousand acres, and its construction required significant time, energy, and capital. (Footnote 10) The mill can produce about five million tons of steel per year, so making the metal for one superdreadnought would consume the entire mill's output for over a year and a half. Furthermore, the Star Kingdom had over thirty under construction at one time! (Plus however many smaller warships such as battle cruisers, heavy cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers.) Simply mining and transporting the raw materials to keep thirty or fifty Burns Harbors running would itself require staggering infrastructure investments in addition to the yard itself. (Footnote 11) This would require the yard's system to also host immense industries associated with mining, refining, power generation, vast waste heat radiator arrays, component manufacturing, etc. just to support the yard's throughput. (Footnote 12) The resources, infrastructure, and other related demands required to keep Hephaestus operating would threaten to subordinate all other activities in its host star system. (Footnote 13)

Despite the enormous investments needed for an Hephaestus-size shipyard, any star empire fielding fleets cored by hundreds of multi-million ton capital ships would require just such a level of support infrastructure, whether centralized in one or two systems or dispersed throughout the realm. The advantages of economy of scale and defense favor one or two massive facilities, while increased overall survivability and reduced societal impacts might argue for more and smaller yards. The higher the spaceyard efficiency and throughput, the greater it would be seen as a threat. In the case of historical Venice, the Arsenale shipyard effectively deterred potential adversaries. A strong case could be made that if forced into war with Venice one should have begun by attacking the Arsenale itself.

That is exactly the scenario portrayed in Weber's At All Costs and Mission of Honor. In the first novel, (Spoiler Alert!) the enemy was essentially forced to stake everything on a desperate invasion to conquer the Star Kingdom capitol system. This set the stage for multiple major space battles featuring fleets with hundreds of superdreadnoughts at their respective centers. The reason for the enemy attack was that a new naval warfare technology—Keyhole—threatened to turn the balance of power and render them effectively helpless. They knew that Hephaestus was so large and efficient that it could quickly modularize the system, modify warships, and deploy Keyhole fleetwide. (Footnote 14)

From Corvus to Keyhole, it's all about the shipyards. It always has been.

Footnotes:

1) Apparently during in the summer of 1574, one galley was built, launched, and armed in one hour to impress King Henry III of France. (Frederic Chapin Lane, Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders of the Renaissance, New York, Arno Press, 1979, p. 144)

2) The warship ordered by the Japanese was the battle cruiser Kongo. The more-or-less blank check contract with Vickers essentially called for the fastest and most powerful ship in the world. According to various sources (including Richard Hough and Janes Fighting Ships), it created great consternation in Britain. This was because it was being constructed within sight of several clearly lesser battle cruisers being built for the Royal Navy, inviting easy and dismaying comparisons. As a consequence, the last pre-WWI Royal Navy battle cruiser class (the "Splendid Cats") were progressively altered during construction to the point that the last (HMS Tiger) ended up an entirely separate class. Japan would go on to build three more Kongo's domestically and then build the rest of the navy that fought in World War II.

3) From the Prince of Wales battle report:

"The loss of output in Prince of Wales' case might, in fact, have been much greater had it not been for the energetic measures taken to remedy defects before, during and between the different engagements."

And:

"The presence in each turret of one of Messrs. Vickers Armstrong's erecting staff was of the greatest assistance."

Note that the practice of civilian yardworkers and technicians being aboard warships during initial operations continues to this day. For example, see the video of two of the new USN warships here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WN9xp2SIP0

4) Battleships USS Pennsylvania (BB-38), USS Maryland (BB-46), USS Tennessee (BB-43), and USS Nevada (BB-36) had already departed Pearl Harbor. USS California (BB-44) and USS West Virginia (BB-48) had been refloated and were well under repair. A great many other ships, including auxiliaries, destroyers, and cruisers had also been repaired and returned to service.

5) Watch the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) being built:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW9HpDKegK4

Here is cruise liner AIDAprima being built:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I51m3AI6hyA/

6) Due to their origin, the Royal Navy originally named the four monitors: General Ulysses S. Grant, General Robert E. Lee, Admiral David Farragut and General Stonewall Jackson. The USA asked they be renamed—perhaps to make the Neutrality violations less public—and the Royal Navy complied.

7) Because of their U.S. origin and assembly line production, the submarines were commonly called (to neutral U.S. embarrassment) "Ford Submersibles."

8) The total mass of the habitat this size would be about ten times the structural mass but the rest would not require the same precision in engineering and assembly as it would be shielding, water, soil, etc. Thus lunar regolith or material gathered in space could be used and emplaced locally. Much more information on space habitat designs can be found on the web, including at the National Space Society site: http://www.nss.org/settlement/space/stanfordtorus.htm

9) Norfolk Naval Shipyard employed over forty thousand workers during World War II. The scale for spaceyards would likely be one or more orders of magnitude greater, given that much of the material would probably be refined and fabricated there, not simply finished and assembled. That is, the complex would also include the equivalent of Bethlehem Steel, General Motors, General Electric, etc., as well as provide accommodations, residences, and all the other facilities necessary for sustained human habitation.

10) A video showing the construction of the Burns Harbor mill can be viewed here:

http://usa.arcelormittal.com/News-and-media/Videos/?videoID=1204

11) It is worth noting that space mining should easily be able to yield the raw materials necessary for Honorverse navies. For example, the Solar System asteroid 16 Psyche appears to be comprised of enough nickel-iron to build over one hundred million of Weber's superdreadnoughts.

12) Outsourcing the mining, etc. to other star systems would certainly be possible but the infrastructure demands would still remain. Additionally, it would add the need for building and operating a separate interstellar merchant fleet dedicated to carrying a great many megatons of raw materials and parts.

13) Australian tennis player Rod "Rocket" Laver is the only individual to win the tennis Calendar Year Grand Slam twice. Laver, a wiry southpaw, was once described as an unimpressive body hanging from King Kong's left arm. Similarly, a shipyard on the scale of Hephaestus risks turn a thriving star system into little more than a shipyard support operation.

14) Spoiler Alert—in Mission of Honor the enemy begins with shipyard attacks, precisely as an enemy of Venice might have initiated hostilities by attacking the Arsenale, only the vacuum of space means all the skilled workers and technicians have nowhere to flee.

Are We Really Just Wired Differently?

by Tedd Roberts

It's a common attitude in modern society that persons with extraordinary talent are simply wired differently than everyone else. The notion is reinforced by findings of differences in brain structure between persons with different talents, abilities, and even neurological disorders. In contrast, if there is one thing that neuroscientists are sure of, it's that the human brain is highly "plastic"—capable of overcoming disease and even rewiring itself after injury. There is new emerging evidence that many of the differences aren't really there, and the human brain is capable of re-wiring at need.

The notion of "wired differently" has its basis in developmental neuroscience and is omnipresent in popular psychology and social behavior, so it is no wonder that it has also influenced popular fiction. Therefore, this essay will not only examine the science behind the functional wiring and structure of the human brain, it will also look into how these ideas (true or not) have made some key appearances in science fiction.

What Makes the Human Brain Different in the First Place?

It is common to conduct medical research in nonhuman primates—rhesus monkeys, for example—in order to have a research model that is close to human, without the myriad difficulties of working in humans. By this I mean that the monkeys tend not to get bored, they can perform memory tasks in the absence of work and school schedules, and they tend not to spend much time on social media! (They do like cat videos, though.) Figure 1, shows the progression in brain size and shape from rodents to humans, so you can see how a monkey brain may be much more suitable to the study of brain function than a rat.

Figure 1: Brain size and complexity comparison. Top, size comparison between rat, monkey and human. Bottom, brains shown the same size to illustrate differences in brain surface complexity. Images courtesy of neuroanatomy departments, National Institute of Basic Biology, Japan, and University of Washington.

The human brain, however, is much more complex than a rhesus monkey's. This is evident in the comparison at the bottom of Figure 1. While gorilla and chimpanzee brains approach the complexity of human brains, they are still one-half (gorilla) and one-quarter (chimpanzee) the size of the human brain. [Note that scientists do not experiment on Great Apes—chimps, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans—in part because of the intelligence concomitant with their complex brain structure.] Despite the similarities, however, there are critical differences between primate and human brain.

The major functional difference between human and primate brain lies in language and communication. Great Apes have been taught limited sign language vocabularies and learn to communicate quite complex concepts with human handlers. For this reason, we will actually exclude Great Apes from the following discussion. Figure 2 shows a map of various functions on an outline of the human brain, with emphasis on Wernicke's and Broca's areas. Starting with evidence from human patients with damage to these regions, and continuing with electrical mapping intended to spare these functions in patients undergoing brain surgery, we actually know quite a bit about the function and wiring of these two regions. Wernicke's area processes the understanding of language, and is located adjacent to brain areas associated with vision and hearing. In other words, the language center is "wired" to the brain areas associated with reading and listening. Broca's area is necessary for spoken language, and is likewise in a region that intersects with the motor output (muscle control) brain areas necessary to form speech.

Figure 2: Localization of sensory and language processing centers on schematic of the human brain. Image copyright 2011, Tedd Roberts, Teddy's Rat Lab (http://teddysratlab.blogspot.com).

The key piece of information to be gained from this comparison is that human brains have unique structure and function in these two brain regions to support hearing, reading and speaking language—most primate brains do not! The exception, of course is the Great Apes, but even there, Broca's and Wernicke's areas are much smaller and less developed than in humans. Here, then, is the clear indication that at least one element of the human brain is clearly wired for a specific function!

The distinction has been used to good measure in SF as well, and is central to the plot of the 1968 movie The Planet of the Apes. In the movie, three human astronauts land on a planet ruled by intelligent, talking apes; humans in this case are the unintelligent, speechless primates. The fact that a human could speak comes as a surprise to the apes, and they vivisect one astronaut's brain to figure out how this can happen. Likewise in Michael Crichton's Next (2006), the plot involves splicing of human genes onto animals to give them various degrees of speech and/or intelligence. While much of the speculation in Next is inconsistent with the current understanding of human and primate neuroscience, it still supports the public understanding that speech equals intelligence, and that the human brain is specifically wired for that ability.

Left Brain vs. Right Brain

Having established that there is definitely an importance to the wiring of the brain that makes humans unique, it is important to note that the speech and language centers in the human brain are "lateralized"—that is, they exist in the left half of the brain. The equivalent locations on the areas on the right side of the brain do not support the same functions. The first research on the left brain/right brain nature comes from Dr. Roger W. Sperry, whose epilepsy research determined that cutting the corpus callosum—the "wiring" between left and right halves—was an effective treatment for reducing epileptic seizures, but caused a separation of functions within the brain. For example, if a patient was shown a picture in a manner that it only appeared in the portion of their vision that projected to the right half of the brain, they could not name what they saw. However, if they had the ability to write with their left hand, they could write the name!

Much of our understanding of laterality comes from studying epilepsy and stroke patients. A person with damage to Broca's area might lose the ability of speech, but could still sing songs. Damage to the right half of the brain might impair the ability to draw or paint, but the ability to write would be spared. Sperry was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1981 for his work on laterality of the brain, and from his work derived a whole pop psychology notion of "left brain dominant" vs. "right brain dominant" individuals—with science, math and logic associated with the left brain and art, intuition, and creativity associated with the right brain.

This dichotomy is nicely illustrated by the writing of James P. Hogan, who enjoyed placing both left and right brain characters in his novels. Most notably, the protagonists of his novel (and sequels) Inherit the Stars, Christian Danchekker and Victor Hunt exhibit left brain and right brain traits, respectively. What is notable about this dichotomy in the two characters is that while both are identified as scientists, Hunt considers himself an engineer and creator, solving problems by intuition and imagination while Danchekker plays the classic logical/rational scientist, who is frequently wrong—precisely because of his limited imagination. This is not terribly surprising, as much of Hogan's later writing would express admiration of engineers and creative individuals and distrust of scientists.

I am certain that many readers will have seen an internet video that shows a spinning ballerina, if you perceive the dancer spinning clockwise, you are right-brain dominant, if counterclockwise, you are left-brain dominant. I find it relatively amusing that I, a scientist, quite good at math and logic puzzles always see the dancer spinning clockwise. However, it is relatively easy to reverse your perception and see the ballerina turning in the opposite direction! Thus, the left vs. right laterality supposedly uncovered by the optical illusion is more a trick of our visual system, and not indicative of our wiring at all.

The problem with the left-right view of brain function is that modern functional imaging of the human brain shows that it just isn't true. Moreover, if logic vs. creativity were a product of the native wiring of the brain, then it most certainly could not be learned or trained! Yet, in the course of researching and checking background assumptions for this article, I came across websites and even training academies that purport to teach you to do exactly that—shift your usage from left to right brain, or vice versa.

Since Dr. Sperry's experiments in the ‘60s, science and medicine have developed much more precise methods for examining the function and even the wiring of the human brain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging—a variation on the MRI that tracks oxygen utilization (and hence neural activity) in the brain shows that while there are some lateralized functions such as speech, both hemispheres are active in the brain for any given function; the aforementioned corpus callosum allows both hemispheres of the brain to communicate and send signals back and forth. Even in the case of muscle control—in which the motor areas of the brain control muscles on the opposite side of the body—movement of one limb still causes some activity on the opposite side of the brain, mainly to control balance and posture.

The communication between hemispheres of the brain is an important contributor to the wiring of the brain, and damage to this wiring is where researchers see most evidence of laterality. At the same time, it is essential to reversing that laterality, especially as seen in stroke recovery, or in the near-miraculous recovery of juveniles who sustain brain injury, but can recover function despite damage to lateralized functions. The most astounding proof comes from the development of children who undergo cerebral hemispherectomy for a number of disorders (epilepsy, stroke, hydrocephalus, etc.). As with stroke rehabilitation, physical therapy can restore near-normal muscle function despite the lack of the appropriate motor cortex; and up to the teen years, even language and speech functions can migrate to the right hemisphere.

With respect to left and right brain function, therefore, the notion that humans are prewired for certain functions has some basis in neurophysiology, but it is not an unchangeable feature of the wiring of the brain. We do know that some defects in wiring lead to neuropsychological disorders. It is thought that the Autism-Asperger's Spectrum Disorders are the result of unbalanced wiring, particularly from sensory areas to the regions which integrate sensory information and with attention, decision and communication centers. On the, whole, though, normal human brain function and wiring are capable of rearrangement when necessary.

The Infamous Political Brain Study

Related to the issue of left vs. right brain is a highly controversial study reporting differences in the brains of college students self-described as having liberal or conservative views. The study from the University College of London in 2011 (doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.017) examined the brain structure of 90 students and correlated size of two structures with their political leanings. The results showed that self-professed liberal students had larger cingulate cortex, while conservative students exhibited a larger amygdala. Many commentators immediately jumped on the findings and proclaimed that since "everyone knows" that the amygdala is responsible for fear, and the cingulate is associated with behavioral flexibility; therefore, liberals had flexible minds, while conservatives were ruled by fear!

The problem here is that interpretation of the results more often exposes the commenter's bias, rather than any real difference in the brain. The issue is the "everyone knows" part of the interpretation. While it is true that the amygdala is involved in fear response, it is also an important component of the human memory system; it is active in many emotional contexts as well as recall of "historical" and autobiographical memory. Likewise, the cingulate cortex is not just involved in behavioral and cognitive flexibility, but is essential to comparing expected and actual outcomes of an anticipated event. Thus, amygdala would be active when comparing a current event to history, while cingulate would be active when determining whether that event was expected or surprising.

One could therefore reinterpret the UCL findings as "liberals have an unrealistic expectation and are surprised when things don't happen the way they expected, while conservatives have a realistic view based on past history." Again, this is a controversial stand, and about as likely to be true as the former interpretation. Reasons why neither conclusion is likely stem from the location and type of study. In the first place, the study was conducted on college students in London—the political spectrum of English college students is unlikely to match those of middle-aged Americans (or any other age or nationality). Second, the study was correlative, the size (volume) of many brain areas were computed, then a regression identified these two areas as correlating to the self-identified political ideology. Correlation can go either way—regional sizes (i.e. wiring) may be involved in political outlook, or the thought patterns associated with the political ideology may affect usage (and hence developmental size) of the brain areas. In either event, it is an essential truth of science that correlation does not equate to causality; sometimes events just occur together and are correlated by chance.

This raises an interesting question as to whether use of a brain area can change its wiring. A former post-doc from my laboratory studied birds that store food for the winter and do not migrate. He found that the memory areas of the brain enlarge during summer and fall, and shrink during winter and spring. The interpretation is that the birds must store and remember information regarding their food locations as they build their caches. Once food is removed from the cache; they no longer need to keep that information. This gets back to ideas of memory formation discussed in the June 2015 article "Remember to Remind Me" (http://www.baen.com/remember). However, it does not apply, since mammalian brains do not work the same as in birds; squirrels and other rodents also store food for the winter, but their memory regions do not expand and contract in the process.

The conclusion from these findings is interesting, but ultimately inconclusive. Human brains differ, but whether that difference correlates with political orientation is uncertain. In addition, given some new findings from male and female brains (discussed below) there is unlikely to be a strict one-to-one relationship between wiring and ideology.

Male vs. Female Brain

Having negated the concepts of left vs. right brains (both physically and politically), at least "we all know" that male and female brains are wired differently, right? After all, Heinlein explored this quite powerfully in I Will Fear No Evil in which billionaire Johann Sebastian Bach Smith's male brain has great difficulty adapting to control of the female body into which it was transplanted. Popular psychology [Confession: I may have become a bit jaded by the term] revels in "gender differences" in the human brain, supposedly identifying not just males and females, but underlying trends toward homosexuality and transgender.

Figure 3: Male vs. Female Brain. More than 100 biochemical and anatomical differences have been identified—but are they really significant to brain function? Image © 2016 by Dean Drobot. Used under license from Shutterstock.com.

To start with, scientific accuracy specifies that these are sex differences, given that "gender" is an etymological (language) term, the correct biological term is "sexual dimorphism." Second, the greatest difference between male and female brains is biochemical, and not wiring. The source of the difference is the estrogen, one of two hormones responsible for female menstrual cycle, and a powerful modulator of brain function. For this reason alone, some brain areas associated with hormones and sexuality will be different between men and women; however, estrogen is present in the brains of both men and women, and at similar quantities.

The acknowledgement of sex differences in the human brain came to the forefront of neuroscience in the 1980s, and are particularly associated with research reports by Drs. D.F. Swaab and M.A. Hofman. A very good review and meta-analysis of many studies is compiled in a 2013 review by Amber Ruigrok at Cambridge University (publically available at doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2013.12.004). More than 100 discrete sex differences can be identified—ranging from the genetic, to the biochemical, to the anatomic. These differences are thought to account for the differential distribution of diseases and disorders of the brain, such as the presence of autism-spectrum disorders in males, and a skew toward more bipolar and schizophrenia cases in females.

But are these actually wiring differences, and do they account for different behaviors, skills and even sexual identity in humans? A 2015 study says no. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) (doi: 10.1073/pnas.1509654112) by scientists from Tel-Aviv University, Max-Planck Institute and University of Zurich. The researchers performed an exhaustive study of over 1000 male and female brains, and used using multiple imaging techniques to construct a scale of "maleness-to-femaleness" for many of the sexually dimorphic brain regions as identified by Swaab and Hofman's reports in 1984, as well as the 2013 meta-analysis. The researchers found that rather than clear sex differences, the majority of adult brains were a mosaic of male and female characteristics, irrespective of sex or sexual identity. Thus the supposed "outliers" of the nurturing male and computationally adept female are less the exception, and much more the rule, given a vast dichotomy of brain morphology and function.

Does this support the idea that behavioral traits are due to the mosaic, and hence the wiring of individual brains? In this case, the scientific results tend to support the notion of different abilities from different wiring, it just does not support the idea that the different wiring conforms to the preconceived biological categories.

Strangely, this is an area in which science fiction is rather silent. Heinlein's fictional brain transplant left Joan Eunice Smith nevertheless acting female. Likewise, the head-hopping "Telepathy Corps" in David Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr series, always manage to manifest their own personality, overriding the biological wiring of the host brain. Similar conditions exist throughout the cyberpunk genre, in which the cyber-linked or virtual-reality humans continue to manifest personalities derived from their biological nature. Perhaps this is an area in which the misnamed effort to "end binary gender bias" in SF can take the lead—examining how gradations in the sexual mosaic in the brain intersect with identity and personality!

Twin Brains

SF and science are both fascinated by the notion of twin or cloned brains. Certainly there are many examples of treating clones as virtual twins in fiction, but the reality of the twin brain is much subtler.

Perhaps the most notable study of twin brains is ongoing right now on Earth and in the International Space Station. Fifty-one year old Scott Kelly currently holds the record for most days in space by an American, and at the end of his (current) one-year stay on the ISS, he will be in fourth-place internationally, with over 450 days in space (cumulative over his career). His identical biological twin, Mark Kelly (husband of former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords) is likewise an astronaut, but with only 45 days in space. Scott Kelly's mission to spend one-year in the ISS (along with Cosmonaut Mikhail Korniyenko) provides plenty of opportunity to examine the effects of long-duration space flight on the human body—but more importantly, it provides the opportunity to compare effects between the Kelly twins, with particular emphasis on the differences in genes, proteins, and physiological/neurological function.

This is an important study considering the fact that despite identical genetics (and hence neural wiring) between identical twins, their personalities and abilities are so often widely different. Twins are common in my extended family, and it is fascinating to see how different such twins behave; even more so than ordinary siblings. Neurological studies show that while identical genetics may confer a predisposition to disorders such as alcoholism, depression, schizophrenia, etc., twins quite frequently do not develop the same disorders, and when they do, the disorders arise a very different times in the individuals' life.

If twins, with genetically identical wiring, can be different in personality and talents, how do those differences arise? Here we can return again to science fiction for illustration. Lois McMaster Bujold's protagonist Miles Vorkosigan is a strategic genius, with a distinct tendency to think outside the box. His clone-twin Mark is in many ways Miles's exact opposite. Leaving aside the fact that Mark was cloned as part of a plot to kill Miles; the author delves into important questions that are frequently summed up as nature vs. nurture. A very important review from 2011 by Dr. Joan Stiles (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51047911_Brain_development_and_the_nature_versus_nurture_debate) makes it quite clear that despite genetic programming, experience plays a vital role in affecting nervous system development. Nature, environment, experience; all play a role in the wiring of the human brain. Thus Miles Vorkosigan, from the toxin which affected his growth, to the family environment with his parents Aral and Cordelia, received a vastly different development than Mark, who was subject to accelerated growth and absence of family.

Aside from clones, however, there are still relatively few fictional treatments of twins that do not consider them as identical in genetics and behavior—from telepathic links to finishing each other's sentences. Interestingly there are twin sisters that write SF: Brianna and Brittany Winner, authors of The Strand series of young adult SF novels. Unlike the examples above, it appears that the Winner Twins share many traits in common: despite diagnoses of dyslexia and dysgraphia at age 9, they also had college-level verbal skills by that age, and were recognized as authorial prodigies by age 12! They report that they share many traits, which fuels their collaborative writing and other endeavors.

Figure 4: The diversity of the human brain. Clockwise from top left: Overlaid elements illustrate logic, biochemistry, electrophysiology, computation and gene expression. Image copyright 2015, Robert E. Hampson, used with permission.

Incredible Plasticity

If there is a takeaway conclusion, it is that individual human brains are wired differently; however, it is not the wiring which accounts for differences, but the experiences and patterns that are laid down upon genes, biochemistry, anatomy and physiology of those brains. As Isaac Asimov proposed in "The Ugly Little Boy" (1958), the capabilities of the brain and intelligence (and personality) are the products of experiences, rather than simply wiring. This is evident in the ability to learn new skills such as languages or musical instruments. Likewise, a stroke patient can undergo rehabilitation therapy to regain muscle abilities, or an amputee/quadriplegic can learn to operate an artificial limb. That plasticity is greatest in the developing brain: learning is easier, and at the youngest ages, brain areas explicitly not wired for certain functions can take them over even in the extreme case where one hemisphere is damaged and/or removed because of disease.

So, where does that leave the myriad Internet memes, brain trainers and personality tests? As with anything, some of them work, some don't. True aptitude, memory and personality tests consist of hundreds of questions and/or assessments administered under controlled conditions. Simply looking at a video of a spinning ballerina cannot detect essential differences in inductive vs. deductive reasoning. A 2014 report from seventy neuroscientists associated with Stanford University and Max-Planck Institute concluded:

"To date, there is little evidence that playing brain games improves underlying broad cognitive abilities, or that it enables one to better navigate a complex realm of everyday life."

(http://longevity3.stanford.edu/blog/2014/10/15/the-consensus-on-the-brain-training-industry-from-the-scientific-community-2/)

On the other hand, it is most definitely possible to engage the plasticity and capability of even older human brains to learn new skills such as languages, martial arts or ballroom dancing!

Yes, we are just wired differently; in fact, each human is wired uniquely. By its very nature, the wiring of our brain cannot alone account for different personality, emotion, political outlook, skill, talent or ability since even individuals with similar traits would necessarily have different neural wiring. Even genetic identity (twins and/or clones) results in different experience, such as Scott Kelly experiencing ten times as many days in orbit as his twin brother. Thankfully, this is good news! It not only means that our experience shapes our traits, it provides considerable hope for restoration and recovery of brain function as our medical science advances in the treatment of neurological diseases.

The Near Future of Human Genome Engineering

by Dan Koboldt

Altering the genetic code in humans has long been a staple of science fiction, just as it's represented an important goal for biomedicine. Until recently, making targeted changes to the genomes of living cells was not really feasible, at least at large scale. The available techniques for genome editing required custom-engineered proteins that were laborious and time-consuming to produce. That changed with the development of the CRISPR/Cas9 system, which allows targeted, precise changes to the DNA of living cells.

How It Works

Like many of our tools for DNA manipulation, this one originated in bacteria. In 1987, researchers studying E. coli noticed a strange pattern near the end of one of the bacteria's genes. It was a DNA sequence immediately followed by its mirror image (the same sequence in reverse), then about 30 non-repetitive bases, and then the palindromic structure again. Over the next two decades, this pattern—called clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats or "CRISPRs"—was observed in many other types of bacteria (more than 40 percent of all species).

The function of CRISPRs remained a mystery until 2005, when three independent research groups noticed that the 30 bases of "spacers" between palindromic repeats matched the sequence of certain bacteria-invading viruses called phages. CRISPRs encode RNA molecules that help guide DNA-cleaving enzymes called CRISPR-associated (Cas) proteins. Together, they form a sort of adaptive immune system. When a phage invades, the bacteria incorporate small portions of the invading DNA as spacers in CRISPR structures. The RNAs produced by these structures partner up with Cas enzymes to identify and destroy the invader's genome.

The Cas9 protein of Streptococcus pyogenes can cleave nearly any DNA sequence complimentary to its guide RNA. With some modification, the enzyme can instead change the genome sequence in a precise manner. The power of this system is in its simplicity: by modifying the sequence of the guide RNA—which is much, much easier than modifying a protein structure—we can alter the genome of living cells with surgical precision. And those cells don't have to be bacteria: CRISPR/Cas9 works just as well in plants and animals.

Image: Nature Publishing Group: John van der Oost, et al, Nature Reviews Microbiology 12, 479–492 (2014). Reprinted by permission.

Possible Applications

Simple and precise genome engineering with CRISPR/Cas9 opens a realm of possibilities. Animal models of human disease are perhaps the best place to start. Every person has about 3 million genetic variants compared to the human genome reference, so it's often difficult to identify which ones contribute to disease. With this system, we can introduce candidate mutations into a laboratory animal, such as a mouse, to determine if it results in a similar disease. Once we identify the disease-causing mutation(s), such laboratory animals can become the front line for testing possible treatments. And because Cas9 can be given many different editing "targets" at the same time, we could even introduce several genetic changes at once to model complex diseases like diabetes and heart disease.

Another application of CRISPR/Cas9, and one that I'm personally very excited about, is functional screens of genetic changes in living cells. A simple but not widely understood fact is that, while we know the location and sequence of most of the ~20,000 genes in the human genome, we have no idea what many of them do. One way to study gene function is to disrupt or alter its sequence in cell lines or model organisms. CRISPR/Cas9 offers a way to do that with some precision. In essence, we can learn about how the genome works by inducing specific changes and measuring the effect they have on a cell.

The potential applications go well beyond research. Genome editing should make it easier to develop better crops and healthier animal stock, and probably even customized pets (no, it won't make your cat pay more attention to you . . . some things are just too ingrained).

That's all good news for the research community, but let's be honest: the truly exciting applications for this technology involve editing human genomes. First up: correcting the underlying defect in severe genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell disease, and Huntington's disease. The appeal here is that such diseases are typically caused by defects in a single gene. Correcting that defect in a patient, if we can manage to do it in the relevant tissues, might offer a permanent cure for many such diseases.

Image: Horizon Discovery Group. Used by permission.

Another way CRISPR/Cas9 might improve human health is in the defense against infectious diseases. Researchers have already demonstrated that it can be used to protect human cells from infection by viruses like Hepatitis C, which implies that we might be able to use it to boost immunity to dangerous pathogens. It's not yet an immediate cure for human viral infections, but it still offers a glimmer of hope for patients suffering from chronic viral infections by herpesvirus (fever blisters), HIV (AIDS), varicella zoster (shingles), and others.

Ethical, Moral, and Safety Concerns

By the time we're born, our body comprises millions of individual cells, each with their own copy of the genome. Correcting a genetic defect in all of them is destined to be a difficult and inefficient process. But if the CRISPR/Cas9 system were paired with another technology—in vitro fertilization (IVF)—would allow us to make changes to germ cells (sperm and eggs) or human embryos prior to implantation.

Most people would agree that using genome editing to correct the underlying defect in patients with severe genetic diseases—like cystic fibrosis or sickle-cell anemia—is a good thing.

But as our knowledge of the human genome grows, the possibilities go far beyond that. Right now in 2015, we know mutations that lower cholesterol, protect against HIV infection, and reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease. Then again, we also know mutations that affect hair color or eye color. There's even one that boosts your chances of making it as a world-class sprinter. As long as we're addressing health risks, is it all right to confer some of those traits as well?

The movie Gattaca (1997) portrays a society in which most parents employ genetic manipulation technologies to conceive children with the best possible hereditary traits. These designer babies grow up and get all the cool jobs because they're genetically "superior" in nearly every possible way. The children conceived without such manipulations are considered inferior, and are basically destined to live out their lives as janitors or trash collectors. Gattaca portrays a future that seems both distant and unlikely, but a technology that allows us to edit the genomes of human embryos brings it into the realm of possibility.

As appealing as it may be to think about all of the good things we might do with CRISPR/Cas9, we still don't know enough about the potential long-term risks of human genome engineering. In the past, technologies developed to correct genetic defects have had off-target effects. Early clinical trials of gene therapy with recombinant viruses, for example, were halted after some participants developed leukemia. And changes made to a human embryo can be passed on to children, which means that they could have unforeseen effects in future generations.

The beta hemoglobin gene (abbreviated HBB) offers a useful example. Severe mutations in HBB cause sickle cell disease in autosomal-recessive fashion, meaning that a person must inherit two mutated copies of the gene to get the disease. It would be tempting, therefore, to use CRISPR/Cas9 to reverse the disruptive mutation in the germ cells of known mutation carriers. Yet individuals with just a single mutated copy of HBB are naturally resistant to malaria, a major cause of morbidity and death in Africa. This "carrier advantage" helps explain why severe disease-causing mutations persist in African populations at frequencies higher than we'd expect. If we used CRISPR/Cas9 to systematically remove HBB mutations, we could almost certainly reduce or eliminate sickle cell disease . . . but future generations might be more susceptible to malaria.

Image: sickle cells, Creative Commons (CC BY).

The Genetic Future

Thus, there are both ethical and safety considerations that must be addressed before we plunge whole-hog into human genome engineering. Mindful of this, an international group of scientists proposed a moratorium against conducting "genome surgery" on human cells. But a voluntary moratorium is not enough to prevent this research from happening, especially in countries who haven't agreed to it. That became apparent earlier this year, when a research team in China used the technique to modify the genomes of human embryos. They used "non-viable" embryos from a local fertility clinic, and hoped to employ CRISPR/Cas9 to alter the gene for β-thalassaemia, a severe blood disorder. The results of the study were disappointing and the journal that published it is rather obscure, but that's the smaller problem. The larger one is that Chinese scientists were able to do this and get it published, with virtually no oversight from any outside authority.

The only positive outcome from the study is that it sounded an alarm bell for the medical and research communities. Human genome engineering is coming, whether we like it or not. As a science fiction author, I think it's exciting. As a scientist, I also think it's a little terrifying. We have only begun to debate the ethics and morality of altering our own genetic code. With great power comes great responsibility, and we've never had more genetic power than we do right now.

Mars, Moon or Bust!

by Les Johnson

It’s time for the space human exploration advocacy community to get its act together. A change in U.S. Presidents, as will happen this year, almost always leads to a change in American space policy and plans. Whoever is elected this year will set the policy the country will be living with on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11: July 20, 2019. With that reality in mind, those of us who wish for mankind to make additional "giant leaps" can no longer afford the perpetual bickering amongst ourselves that has characterized the pro-space advocacy community since about the time Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. It is time for those of us who desire to see humans expand throughout the solar system (and then beyond) to come together, compromise, and unite behind a plan to get us again started down that path. The situation is complicated further by the very vocal disagreement between the “private” versus “public” space development communities; another distraction we cannot afford.

No human has been beyond Earth orbit since 1972 when astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt finished their exploration of (a small part of) the Moon and departed for home. We’ve sent plenty of people into space since then, but they have all been sent to Low Earth Orbit and, as beautiful as it is, LEO is less than 500 miles from home. This is a travesty.

Within the major space agencies of the world, including NASA, The European Space Agency (ESA), Russia, China, and Japan, it is assumed that humans will once again travel beyond LEO and venture to the Moon, asteroids, Mars and beyond. New Space companies, like SpaceX, make no secret that their eyes are first set on near-Earth space but their real goals lie much farther away. Elon Musk has said that he personally wants to walk on Mars.

In addition to the general goal of sending people back into deep space, there is an emerging consensus that such missions are affordable and a priority for the world’s leading space powers. The Europeans are talking about a “come back to the Moon” effort that would lead to a permanently-inhabited base there by 2030. NASA has its sights set on sending people to Mars by the 2030s, with an interim asteroid visit in the '20s. China, like Europe, says it will send people to the Moon in the 2020s or 2030s. Russia, not be left behind, is reportedly developing its own plans for lunar exploration. If all the plans turn into reality, then we’ll need a robust traffic control system to keep up with all the rockets coming and going from Planet Earth. Alas, many if not all of these plans are likely just optimistic dreams. Building Moonbases and rockets to carry people to and from Mars requires money and a time commitment that is far longer than the typical election cycle.

Doing what Americans often do, let’s for the moment ignore the rest of the world and think about American space priorities, public and private. If we all agree that we should be sending people beyond LEO, then where should we go? With public opinion widely supportive of space exploration, surely we can get behind a plan to send people to [X]. (Fill in your favorite destination here.) And therein lies the problem. The American space advocacy community cannot seem to agree and unite behind a single next destination. Instead, multiple groups are out there, pushing their own competing visions, while our real progress toward deep space remains largely in “neutral.” For a partial list of space advocacy organizations and what I perceive as their destination goal, see Table 1.

Table 1. Notable space advocacy organizations and their goals. Note: The quoted purposes/goals come from the websites of the listed organizations.

In the early 1960s, while NASA was just learning to fly in space, there was an implicit understanding that people would first orbit the Earth, go to the Moon, and then move outward to Mars and beyond. Kicking off the “Symposium on Manned Planetary Missions 1963/1964,” Marshall Space Flight Center Director Wernher Von Braun said:

Man has not yet traveled into space more than 200 miles from the Earth’s surface and it will be some time before an astronaut or a cosmonaut steps out of a spacecraft and stands on the surface of the Moon, which is only 240,000 miles away. We are not too early to begin serious study of the manned exploration of interplanetary space. When you consider that the time lapse, from the conceptual studies of the new launch vehicle to operational readiness, it considered to be approximately 10 years, we are definitely not early at all.

Von Braun, speaking at a time when we’d barely been able to send one person into orbit and 5 years away from sending Neil Armstrong to the Moon, clearly believed that Mars missions were no more than 15-20 years away. He envisioned the progression that many still have today: Earth orbit to Moon to Mars. If only it were that simple. It is worth noting that the destination debate was vigorously alive in the Apollo decade but kept in check, hence keeping the nation focused on going to the Moon, by the inspiration goal set by the late President John F. Kennedy and the political will to honor the goal (of a very popular, assassinated leader).

Destination Moon

Figure 1. Edgar Mitchell moves across the lunar surface as he looks over a traverse map during exploration of Fra Mauro. Lunar dust can be seen clinging to the boots and legs of the space suit. Image Credit: NASA/Alan Shepard

For many, the choice destination for humanity is as obvious as a full Moon on a clear summer night—the Moon. It's close enough that we can reach it in a matter of a few days, as was demonstrated conclusively the Apollo missions. Going back to the Moon will surely be easier and more affordable now than it was when we went in the '60s. There is still a great deal to learn about the Moon scientifically, and potential commercial interest seems to be high. And when you compare the cost and complexity of a return to the Moon with a mission to Mars, it is clearly the more affordable option.

The above summarizes the beliefs of many in the pro-Moon advocacy groups. And they’ve had pretty good success in convincing our politicians that this is the best course of action. Both Presidents Bush directed NASA to develop plans for a return to the Moon, and Bush 43 actually redirected much of the space agency to start developing the rockets and systems necessary to make it happen. Unfortunately, neither was able to garner enough political support for their plans to endure beyond their terms in office. After President Obama assumed the presidency, NASA was redirected away from the Moon toward asteroids and Mars.

The title for the lunar section was selected with intentionality: Destination Moon is a classic, pre-Apollo 11 science fiction story about a mission to the Moon funded commercially. Of all the possible deep space destinations to which we may want to send humans, the Moon is the most likely candidate for purely commercial funding by someone who may not really care if he or she gets an immediate Return on Investment. This line of thinking reminds me of Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold the Moon. (But I suspect the real-life businessman of whom we’re all thinking will make sure he gets to go and won’t let anyone tell him he cannot!)

Mars Awaits

Figure 2. On May 19, 2005, Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the sun sank below the rim of the Gusev crater on Mars. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell

As implied by Wernher Von Braun, Mars is seen by many as the ultimate twenty-first century goal for human exploration. It is the most earthlike of the terrestrial planets, has liquid and frozen water, and might have at one time been an abode for life. These attributes make it an interesting destination for science, exploration, development and eventual colonization. Unlike the Moon, we can actually envision ourselves living and working on Mars—one day, perhaps, terraforming it to become a second Earth.

The problems are distance and time. Getting a human crew to Mars with any imaginable near-to-mid-term propulsion technology will take approximately nine months. Including time spent on the surface and the return trip, any crew will spend 2.5 to 3 years away from home in deep space as they journey from Earth to Mars and back again. It will require many rocket launches to assemble the ship and to load it with propellant and supplies. Launch windows that allow us to get there in a reasonable amount of time open only once every 26 months. The logistics for a Mars mission are far more extensive and complicated than for a trip to the Moon, or even for maintaining a Moonbase.

Mars may await our arrival in the flesh; we’ve been there for nearly a hundred years in fiction. Edgar Rice Burroughs took his readers there in 1917 with the publication of A Princess of Mars; H.G. Wells brought the Martians to us even earlier—1898 was the year The War of the Worlds was first published. Finally, Andy Weir took us on a realistic journey to The Red Planet in his book, The Martian and in the film of the same name. None have made going there seem easy and, unfortunately, it isn’t. (And, equally unfortunately, it is impossible to list all of the great books written about Mars within the constraints of this article; so please accept a nod to a few that stand out: Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson), The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury), and, simply, Mars (Ben Bova).

And then there are the Asteroids

Figure 3. Asteroid Eros, taken by NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission in 2000. Image Credit: NASA/JHUAPL

Near Earth Asteroids, as their name implies, are asteroids that fly within or near the same orbital path around the Sun that the Earth follows. They’re made of the same general stuff as the Earth, which means their abundant resources are potentially very useful for Earthly industries and near-term space-based ones. NASA plans to send astronauts to study a captured piece of asteroid early in the next decade. Two American companies and at least one European one have announced plans to sometime mine and process resources from asteroids. Asteroids are potentially easy to reach, from a space propulsion point of view, but visiting them may not be as straightforward as returning to the Moon or even going to Mars. For example, there isn’t enough gravity to “land” on most asteroids, so a visit will likely be more like a rendezvous and docking maneuver. Their compositions are largely unknown and the risks of sending a human crew to a poorly characterized destination are high. NASA is seeking to address this risk by developing a low-cost capability to survey NEA’s using small, low-cost robotic precursors propelled by a solar sail. The first of these, the NEA Scout, will launch in 2018. (Full disclosure—Author Les Johnson is the Solar Sail Principal Investigator of the NASA NEA Scout project.)

While fewer in number, good books about asteroids are out there, it just takes a little more time to find them. Notable examples are Eon (Greg Bear), In the Ocean of Night (Gregory Benford), and On to the Asteroid. (A shameless plug for the new Baen novel by Les Johnson and Travis Taylor to be released in August 2016.)

Another Option

As I wrote in a previous Baen essay, (Using Outer Space to Improve Life on Earth) there is another option: forgo sending people beyond LEO until after we build a network of space-based solar power stations to provide carbon-free green electrical power to the Earth, allowing us to wean ourselves from coal and oil and establish a space-based infrastructure that can then be used to perform more affordable exploration of the Moon, Mars or asteroids—effectively putting on hold any deep space exploration until after some pressing needs are addressed here at home.

With these competing visions, each full of both promise and peril, is it any wonder that we haven’t been able to reach agreement, let alone consensus, regarding where we go next? And the bickering brings along yet another problem: the dreaded “why?” question. Why go the Moon? Why explore Mars? Why spend all that money to go to an asteroid? There are good scientific reasons supporting exploration of each destination. There are potential economic arguments as well. Table 2 shows a high level assessment of each of the above destinations and the pros and cons of each. (And, yes, there will be those who disagree with the assessments contained herein. To them I say, “too bad, write your own article!”—actually I wouldn’t say that—let’s just agree that reasonable people can look at the same data and reach different conclusions.)

Table 2. The relative “doability” of various possible destinations for human exploration in terms of complexity, cost, return or technical difficulty. The sideways arrow () indicates “neither high nor low,” the down arrow () indicates the attribute trades unfavorably as compared to other destinations and the up arrow () indicates it trades favorably.

More seriously, we, as a community, have had problems articulating the answer to the “why?” question in a manner that builds political support. It is an unfortunate fact that government spending on space is pitted against defense, social entitlements, medical care, etc. When a group advocating a particular destination criticizes another destination, they are only providing ammunition to the critics of all space exploration—a potentially fatal endeavor that the community has been practicing for decades—to our detriment.

And that raises the latest issue that has divided us: the false dichotomy that pits government funded space exploration against that which is privately funded. I used the word funded with intentionality—when the U.S. government launches a satellite, it does so by buying a commercially available rocket from a company like Boeing, Lockheed Martin or, more recently, SpaceX. Even NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS) is being built of parts made by commercial space companies. Space launch is now inherently commercial and has been for years. Sure, there may be one or two ultra-wealthy individuals who can afford to fund their own excursions to the Moon, Mars, or an asteroid, but do we really want to have our space policy and future 100% dependent on the largesse of one or two people out of the world’s seven billion? Space exploration is, and will continue to be, a public/private partnership with ever changing roles and responsibilities. This is a highly visible battle that need not be fought; like the Mars/Moon/Asteroid debate, it only serves to provide the opponents of space development with more ammunition.

The Importance of a Common Goal or “Standard.”

How many remember Beta versus VHS? Cassette versus 8-Track? Mac versus Windows? How about IOS versus Android versus Windows Phone? In the commercial marketplace, standardization decisions, the rough equivalent of the space community’s need for a common, standard destination, is often resolved by the votes (money) of millions of consumers. It took time, and the winning and losing companies behind the competing standards spent millions of dollars trying to outsell their competition. Some won and others lost.

In the “marketplace” for extremely expensive , multi-year projects (government or privately funded) there won’t be the luxury of having space systems to take people to and from competing destinations funded for years, across many election or quarterly report cycles, with the more viable destination’s space system “winning” in the end. There simply isn’t the political will or near-term financial incentive to sustain such spending. And, so far, none of the groups advocating specific destinations have been able to elucidate the “killer argument” for their favorite locale that wins this seemingly endless debate. Nor, in my opinion, will any be likely to do so. All are worthwhile destinations; and, given limited funding, not all can be funded.

Even if going to any of the possible destinations is a government/private partnership, whatever plan is put in place will have to be supported and funded for years to come to fruition. Unity of purpose and advocacy are needed if we are ever going to again send people farther into space than Gene Cernan and the crew of Apollo 17.

Now, where did I put my Beta recording of  2001: A Space Odyssey?

So where does that leave us? We need a unifying goal, the equivalent of an industry standard. (Please see the sidebar for a discussion of why standards are often needed.) What shall we, the collective space advocacy community of Lunatics, Mars maniacs, and asteroid huggers do to intelligently debate and reach agreement on a plan (our own standard) behind which we can all stand and support? I see several options. Here are but a few:

1. Convene a nongovernmental study group composed of noted space advocates from different organizations and space advocacy groups, academics, space policy and international law experts, scientists, engineers, interested investment bankers and venture capitalists, and private space companies for a focused study and debate leading to a nonpartisan space policy recommendation for the next U.S. president. It is inevitable that not everyone on the team will get what they want, but it is imperative that all participants support the consensus product, and destination, whatever it might be.

2. Continue the public debate, perhaps with one group siding with a particular political party and another with the loyal opposition. And then let the election decide everything, at least for another four years . . .

3. Continue the public debate with each side influencing government policy makers, private companies and multibillionaires ad hoc, with no agreed upon single destination and letting the best idea win (and get funded . . . or not).

4. Encourage the government to implement Item #1 instead of it being done organically without governmental oversight.

5. Some great idea, of which no one has yet thought, gets the entire space advocacy community together and united behind a common space vision. Nirvana anyone?

Just remember that the longer we talk and debate, the longer it will take us to become a solar system-wide civilization debating the next great destination: which extrasolar system to explore first . . .

[The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any agency of the U.S. government, Baen Books, or anyone else!]

Do Dungeon Masters Roll Magic Dice?

Willful Self-Deception on the Campaign Trail

by Bob Kruger

A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay for Baen called “Dungeons & Dragons: The 40-Year Quest for a Game that Breaks All the Rules.” I covered a lot of ground, from the history of the game through its acquisition and revision by Wizards of the Coast, and explored the psychological hooks that may explain its popularity. One thing I touched on a couple of times was the DM’s angsty role as both judge and participant. I wanted to explore that some more, but I was already three times over my suggested word count, and, frankly, I had more thinking to do.

The DM role is both the core oddity and strength of D&D or any tabletop roleplaying game. Dungeons & Dragons cocreator Dave Arneson hit on the concept when he assumed the role of all the monsters in a tabletop miniatures game while serving as judge. Being both player and judge represents a clear conflict of interest in most games, but here the goal changed from beating the other players, to facilitating their good time. The way it works is that the DM tells a story and presents hazards for the players to confront. The players tell the DM what their characters attempt to do, and the DM objectively determines the outcomes, using dice to resolve uncertainties.

“Objectively determines the outcomes”? What a trick that would be! How can a Dungeon Master objectively determine the actions of creatures that don’t even exist, like dragons or orcs? How can the dice model any kind of reality? Dungeons & Dragons is an exercise in suspending disbelief. To collaborate on the story, everyone, even the Dungeon Master, provisionally accepts the DM’s bogus objectivity. This is pretty clear, but I think it goes even further in a superior game. The DM doesn’t just pretend he’s objective. At some level, to make the game work, he needs actually to believe it.

Expert gamer and Baen writer Ryk E. Spoor disagrees. Ryk ably presents a counterargument to my point. (Ryk, by the way, is the author of the Grand Central Arena series, the Balanced Sword series, and coauthor with Eric Flint of the Boundary series.)

“The GM’s job is to facilitate the PLAYERS maintaining the self-delusion that the game rules and dice rolls are unbiased, fair generators of the story they’re telling,” Ryk says. “You, as Lord God Almighty, CANNOT afford to be deceived by yourself (though being surprised by the PLAYERS is, hopefully, one of the things you look forward to). It is your job to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses, not just of the game system you use, but of the players and the characters they have chosen to play, and the various monsters, NPCs, objects, and conditions that influence play.

“In short, I am not ‘running a game.’ I am running a WORLD, in which the game rules are simply there to facilitate me helping people interact WITH the world. I am aware that the rules and the dice are highly imperfect tools in this interaction, and is my job to find ways to minimize their failures—or to utterly disregard them if they clash with the world. The world comes first—the consistency and logic that is the foundation of the world must be maintained so that the players have faith that it WORKS like a world, that they can explore it, understand it, be a part of it and not have it betray them at its foundations.”

I certainly agree with Ryk that it’s imperative to prepare your materials and bone up on the rules so you have a plan and don’t constantly have to look stuff up during play. But creating a consistent and logical world is a tall order. Can it ever be really consistent? Or is does it only seem to be because a DM of Ryk’s quality can make it appear to be so? In my experience, the best DMs are confident and don’t betray that they are making stuff up. That’s much easier if you actually believe what you’re saying—that is, if you are engaged in a sort of artistic two-mindedness, or, to put it plainly, self-deception.

In his book The Folly of Fools, renowned evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers explains this function of self-deception where those who deceive best, first deceive themselves. Having consciously to formulate a lie and make it both consistent and amenable to your audience is much more difficult than just speaking the truth as you perceive it. Trivers identifies “tells” like sweaty skin and shifty eyes that give liars away. He argues that we have evolved an arms race of improved cheating and cheating detection that culminated in our lying to ourselves to get what we want.

As an example, the NPR RadioLab segment called, appropriately enough, “Lying to Ourselves” describes a series of clever experiments that connect self-deception to achievement and happiness. Psychologist Joanna Starek claims that self-deception involves two contradictory beliefs that you actually hold but only one of which you allow into consciousness because you have a motivation for allowing it into consciousness.

An experiment performed by scientists Harold Sackheim and Ruben Gur supports her contention. They made a recording of each subject speaking a certain phrase and included it randomly in the sequential playback of other people saying the same phrase. Many people had a hard time telling the researcher which voice was theirs, but they nevertheless showed measurable physical signs of recognizing it. The researchers coupled this experiment with another, in which they asked people whether they’d ever had certain embarrassing thoughts that they knew people commonly have. Those very people who did worst at detecting their own voice tended also to deny ever having these common provocative thoughts. They were also the most unusually successful and happy people, while those who were the most honest had a greater tendency toward depression.

If DMs are self-deluded, they’re in very good company. Apparently self-deception helps us not only to lie but also to improve our performance, to up our game.

Having the players drive a story from the setting you’ve prepared is a fraught task. You run a tight gauntlet between railroading the players with the dice and script on the one hand and appearing to just make stuff up on the other, destroying the illusion of a living world. Agreeing on rules with your players and making pivotal die rolls “in the open,” that is, where everyone can see them, may give your players a sense of playing the odds in a logical way, but if the adventure is going to develop a real story, you’re really always improvising and using the dice as dramatic props.

In my recent guest blog entry for The Busybody, Loren Rosson’s blog that hosts his popular essays on classic D&D adventure modules, I suggested a productive bit of self-deception. The dice, you see, are magic and always tell a good story. If they threaten to tell a boring story or prematurely to end a character’s career, maybe you’re measuring the dice against the wrong thing, or maybe you even rolled them wrong and need to reroll. If the dice suggest a setback, then maybe you should look for interesting story complications in that setback. After all, these are magic dice. They don’t tell bad stories. Pay no attention to the Dungeon Master behind the curtain.

I put this idea to game designer Jonathan Tweet, architect and author of D&D 3rd Edition, and my good friend. Should the DM take direction from the dice while making the attitude adjustment that keeps him or her from dictating the story? Jonathan says no. “In the most rewarding game I ever ran, I had the players roll their dice in the open and made it clear what numbers they needed. If they failed a roll doing something dangerous, what happened at that point happened.”

Sigh. Do you see now how frustrating it is to broach the topic of self-deception with experts? Even if you’re convinced they’re sincere, you can’t trust them. Because, if I’m right, then part of their expertise lies in self-deception!

Okay, fine, letting the dice tell the story can be a good way of keeping the players timid. And if you’re running a survival-horror game, where nihilism is part of the spice, then meaningless random death goes with the territory. But really, the dice never dominate even in survival horror. You just use them less or work out the math ahead of time so that the encounters don’t short-circuit the game before it even gets going. You heavily foreshadow consequences. You encourage planning, which can be exciting for the players as they collaborate to beat the odds. And often, you encourage retreat.

Jonathan conceded that even rolling dice in the open is artifice. You gauge the dramatic possibilities and decide what activities to put at hazard. But originally Jonathan seemed to be suggesting that the dice tell the story, which would make them, well, magic dice. I submit that to use the dice like Jonathan claims to have done and have it pay off is impressive. It requires a sympathy with dice magic amounting to wizardly skill.

Let’s say I’m correct and good DMs deceive themselves. That’s only half the battle, right? Being confident is one thing, but surely self-deception needs to be matched by storytelling skill. Maybe self-deception convinces players you’re sincere. But you need to back that up with skill to overcome their inherent skepticism. Experienced—and often jaded—players can be a tough audience even when they want to believe.

Jonathan said that the default attitude of human beings to new information is not skepticism but gullibility, especially if they’re distracted (say, by dice rolls?). He pointed me to a study by Dr. Daniel Gilbert titled “You Can’t Not Believe Everything You Read” summarized here. Two sets of people were told to evaluate a list of statements to pronounce sentence on a crime. The statement list had true statements in green ink and false statements in red, and participants were told to pay attention to the difference. One group read the statements without interference; the other group was interrupted. Some of the false statements made the crime seem less serious; others, more serious. The interrupted group, which did not have time to really think about the statements, was more easily swayed by the false information and handed down more lenient or harsher sentences accordingly.

Therefore, being a good DM may not be so much a matter of overcoming resistance but simply not creating it, for example, by being slow to interpret dice rolls, or communicating through shifty eyes and flop sweat that you’re struggling to make things up.

Jonathan related how he performed an experiment of his own at the Burning Man festival a few years ago. He had a set of “fortune-deck” cards from his Everway roleplaying game. Everway uses divination rather than dice rolls and tables to help a game master adjudicate outcomes. He approached strangers and asked them to pull a fortune card, much like a tarot card, at random and asked if they thought they happened to grab their card. He said a large number of people insisted that the card they drew at random had personal significance to them.

It appears that people readily make judgments from sketchy or even meaningless information. “Self-deception” sounds like an impressively underhanded trick pulled off by the unconscious, but it probably gets a lot of help from the fact that we are hardwired to draw patterns and make associations from thin grist.

Consider the psychological state of Hyperactive Agency Detection, a well-documented cognitive bias. We tend to impute consciousness to inanimate objects, perhaps because it was safer for our ancestors to be paranoid. Did the wind stir the branches or was it a predatory spirit that sometimes took the form of a deadly animal? Those who bolted at false danger signals had far less to lose than those who failed to heed real ones. By the same mechanism, perhaps, we interpret dice rolls as carrying special meaning, blessing our endeavors or expressing disapproval. Or, for the DM’s part, helping him tell a story.

But am I blowing the con? Do we really want to know that D&D is the Emperor’s New Clothes? Actually, I don’t think it is, just like I don’t think any other kind of storytelling is. Quite the opposite. You make conscious decisions, but what really animates the story is the unconscious dimension of the exercise. Baen Books editor and author Tony Daniel concurs. “It’s about using a skill similar to what a writer and reader bring to writing and reading a good book. Using the entire mental repertoire at one’s command, both conscious and unconscious thought processes. Really this applies to any artist and art appreciator.”

To free up the unconscious, I think you need to appreciate its role, to trust it. Consciousness is just the iceberg tip of your brain processes. Exerting too much control forestalls surprise and discovery. At least, this is my experience and how I interpret the advice I get from other storytellers.

But the real clincher on the necessity of creative self-deception comes when the experts speak for themselves. In addition to interviewing Ryk E. Spoor, I asked game writer Jeff LaSala, as well as Wizards of the Coast founder Ken McGlothlen, for their general philosophy of DMing. They gave me a lot of great feedback that I may incorporate into future essays, but a few things they said spoke especially to their loose control over the exercise, and, dare I say, their willful credulity. Jeff LaSala said, “I like to think I don't . . . fudge or redefine rolls without justification. But as DM, I absolutely do prioritize player enjoyment above impartiality. But for randomness to mean something, for risk to be real, and for suspense to exist, I try to let most die rolls hold sway.”

Similarly, Ken McGlothen exhibited some faith in the dice.

“Good or bad die rolls,” he said, “should feel probabilistic rather than as favors doled out by the GM, even if a different outcome would seem to lead to a better story. In my experience, it rarely does; it tends to be about the GM stroking their own ego than letting the story be collaborative and malleable. “Never let a coherent, well-outlined story get in the way of a great story.”

Too much conscious control ruins potentially great stories. And this is the crux of how self-deception helps us get along, in D&D and more generally in life: we believe that luck will meet our efforts halfway. We look hard for meaning in disappointment and failure, and often we find it. It’s confirmation bias, and we make our own luck. Or maybe this is wrong, that believing our own fictions is not so much self-deception as receptivity to a deeper truth, getting in touch with a creative force that transcends us. Maybe God actually does speak through the dice if we adopt a receptive frame of mind, or through our fictional characters if we just listen hard enough to what they have to say. The processes that created us are still in motion. Maybe we’re all just characters in a larger game.

Strange Sex

Alien Reproduction Through a Biologist’s Eyes—

and What This Could Mean to Science Fiction

by Dave Freer

Sabella spallanzanni, the fan worm. Photo courtesy CSIRO Australia

Now: to save time and avoid disappointment, if you were hoping for outrageous and graphic tentacle-porn, read no further. If you think sex is purely for entertainment, you’re also going to be disappointed. On the other hand: I trained and worked long ago as a fisheries biologist. Sex you know means mixing up gametes to produce offspring. This isn’t porn, but describes mating in various real organisms—no, not orgasms (real or faked), just creatures, described in ordinary biological terms. I can’t write about reproduction without them. Of course, there may also be the occasional double entendre, but biologists have to have a sense of macabre humor; it’s how they cope with the pay.

When most of us think of “sex,” it tends to be in the “count the legs and divide by two” sense. For a biologist the answer could be twenty-seven or the difficulty of dividing by zero—which makes it interesting when science fiction meets biology, which it tends to do particularly when we write about aliens . . . and what springs from aliens. No. Not tentacles . . . or not unless you are referring to Eric Flint’s Mother of Demons. I mention this book particularly because Flint seems to have understood that reproduction (without which there is no society) tends to shape that society. When we meet aliens out there, or if one suddenly drops in and demands to be taken to your larder* understanding how that society works will probably hinge on their biology—which, as a biologist (would I lie to you—don’t answer that) would be to some extent shaped by their breeding. And that—simply based on the bizarre differences among Earth’s biota—is potentially both vastly varied and complex, and unlikely to be the same as humans.

I recall reading an essay recently in which some avant-garde soul posited that the future of sf sex was non-binary. My first thought was “well that about wraps it up for computer dating.” Once I’d worked out that this was not “binary” in the sense of binary numbers, 1 and zero, or yes and no, and that they didn’t mean the future of sf also included “maybe,” and instead they were positing that sex in sf would not be heterosexual couples, but “strange sex.” I think I was supposed to be shocked, but instead I laughed a lot. The author had plainly never come across turbellarian copulation with hypodermic impregnation (which gives an entirely new level to penetrative sex), or the copulatory stacks of the slipper limpet, Crepidula fornicata.

Slipper limpet. Photo by Daniel Davis via Wikimedia Commons

Slipper limpets change sex with age, males becoming females as they grow older and larger. It’s quite common to have stacks with all stages from immature on top to long dead at the bottom. Necrophile to pedophile. Male:male, hermaphrodite, heterosexual and female to female, sometime in multiple combinations, all having what humans would consider sadomasochist sex. Alas, biology has so much truly “strange sex” as a normal part of reproduction, that it’s hard to shock a biologist. It’s pretty good for sf ideas though.

So let me talk about a couple examples which make the most bizarre human variants look tame and dull . . . and actually exist and work. Of course, drawing examples from known biota for your sf to model strange futures and indeed alien society on, has two advantages. Firstly, much of it is weirder than most imaginings, and secondly one has a complete, actually successful and therefore hopefully plausible model.

Maybe I need to rethink the plausible part. . . .Take the annelids (the segmented worms), specifically the polychaetes. No, that is not even remotely related to the fashionable human “polyamorous” or even “poly-cheats,” except that they are both considered to be worms by some people. Sometimes called the bristle-worms, they’re very common in marine environments, show enormous levels of structural differentiation, and vary vastly in size (some getting several yards long, others being barely visible. They also display higher levels of intelligence than many political party caucuses, although I admit this is not what most would consider sentience. Still, they could evolve toward it, and on some alien world, something similar might have. After all, the development of metameres (a repeat series of segments) appears to have evolved successfully at least twice—the second time being in vertebrates.

Example of genus polychaetes. Photo by Hans Hillewaert via Wikimedia Commons

Given that, let’s talk about polychaete reproduction. It’s fair to say that compared to polychaetes, the most rainbow-haired polyamorous human . . . has vanilla sex. Really, really boring straightforward vanilla-bland. No, I don’t want try polychaete sex, I like bland, but their mechanisms work, appear long-term stable (the species continue to reproduce and survive, and the offspring do not suffer disadvantages against their competitors that would make them extinct in the short term. Oh and never mind rainbow, some are actually iridescent or luminescent).

The possibilities range from—at one end of the continuum—some species (including the beautiful sabellid fan-worms) who find relationships hard, but breaking up easy to do. They reproduce asexually, with the adult fragmenting or budding. Each of the offspring grows into a full copy of the parent, and there is never any doubt about who the father was.

Asexuality is quite rare, however—not mixing genetic material is not really long term advantageous to dealing with possibly changing conditions or even getting the edge on competitors. Most polychaetes are dioecious (male and female gametes are produced in separate individuals) although they also do both—but mostly in separate parts of the body.

Of course some species—in the family Syllidae are little double-adapters—asexual and sexual reproducers. They divide their bodies into two parts—becoming two individuals. The posterior end individual goes on to reproduce sexually . . . which is terminal. Yes, to have sex, means to die. But the anterior end can go on living, just budding off more individual posterior ends.

You see for many of the polychaetes, the male and female gamete—eggs and sperm—are not going to meet internally at all. Fertilization occurs outside the body, in the water they live in. You might say it happens largely without parental or even adult supervision—and with all the problems that causes. Internal fertilization leaves a lot less to chance, and a single female gamete can find a male a lot more easily, even without binary assistance. When you are a very tiny gamete in a lot of sea-water, you need to do something to improve your chances, and I don’t mean fashionable dress or makeup (yes, there are many animals which use both).

Perfume is very different matter, as I will explain. Now, not only is this a question “will the gametes get lucky in so much sea-water,” but also this is for many polychaetes a once in a life-time opportunity. You see, the gametes, male or female, are released into the fluid filled cavity (the coelom) of each segment. This is the polychaete version of “gender-fluid” and it can become full to the edge of bursting. Indeed, some polychaetes are closer to humans than most of us realize. They become nothing more than one big gonad. We’ve all met people just like that. Oh, and while I never heard of any blue ones, females are indeed often pink or orange.

There is a serious problem, though, for many of these species. They’re full to near bursting with eggs or sperm in the fluid-filled coelom in the middle of them . . . with no outlet for their desires. Yes. No way to release the gametes . . . except to have a last frantic romantic wriggle in a too-tight skin, and yes, explode.

The best bang since the big one has a whole new meaning here.

The trouble is, of course, that there’s no point in exploding alone. While this may well be pleasure for the individual polychaete: You’re dead and your gametes are wasted. And in the wide open sea, well, the more explosions, the more chances your gametes of getting lucky. This takes “polyamorous” to whole new level, because for a number of polychaetes, when the moon is right, and they are full of . . . desire, they leave their hiding places, and in a night of romance and rapturous rupture, go out together with a bang.

Even if the polychaete species don’t actually die, but manages to shed the gametes through some kind of gonoduct, synchronizing these things may depend on the moon, or the tide . . . or on “perfume”—well, gamones—hormones released by a spawning female, chemical trails through the water, that cause males to join in the blast. And their gamones stimulate females to spawn . . . it is, believe it or not, termed “hysterical spawning.” In other cases, the spawning animals bio-luminesce, to let the partners know. Just think how useful that could be for humans.

Imagine an alien species who had something of the same pattern (and with variations it has plainly evolved several times in the annelids alone) having to deal with humans and the way the two societies would differ (well, I did. It is the basis for one of my short stories, “The War, Me, 17 Million Dollars and a Stripper”—Front Lines, Baen, edited by Denise Little 2008).

Now, if all of this is too much for you, you should stop reading right now—because our iridescent bristle-worms take it quite a lot further.

Epitokes . . . well the best explanation might be that an epitoke is either to turn the whole body into a new creature entirely designed for reproduction, or part of it, which then snaps off and becomes a free-swimming organism in its own right. They change shape and form, and often develop oar-like paddles to swim (many of them are sedentary feeders or live in the mud or rocks. They appear so different that some were originally thought to be a separate species. What’s more, they evolve an eye-spot. Think of it as your testes and ova developing an eye and fins and then deciding to go off to an orgy without you.

A polychaete budding epitokes for the purpose of sexual reproduction.

Photo by Megan McCuller via Wikimedia Commons

I mean an orgy. The best known of these polychaete orgies is that of the Samoan Palolo worm—Palolo fucata (synonymous with Eunice fucata) a large bristle-worm that lives a secretive life hidden in the coral and rocks . . . until the last lunar quarter in October (or November) when the epikotes are released and swarm, swimming in a spiral toward the surface. The Samoans consider them a great delicacy and collect buckets of them—the sea is seething with them . . . until, at sunrise, they rupture together. There are so many that they turn the sea-water in the area into a glutinous slurry of gametes doing what gametes do. The result is acres and acres of fertilized eggs, floating, which fairly rapidly develop into larvae, and settle to the bottom.

Of course some kind of internal fertilization is less wasteful, and inevitably there are species of polychaete that do just this. Now, to put it bluntly, internal fertilization requires an internal ‘container’ to keep the egg or eggs in, and possibly some kind of organ—or multiples of the same (yes. Indeed. Humans are under-equipped, comparatively.) designed for making sure male gametes get in there. We know the human analogues. But there are other possibilities. The female Platynereis megalops apparently has her gut undergo regression . . . and her whole body becomes that “container.” It doesn’t end there, however. Well, the male end does end there. The male Platynereis megalops has special anal apertures to allow the gametes to be released from his coelom. While entwined about his partner in a passionate worm-embrace . . . yes. You guessed. In her mouth. Biology is strange. Bizarre though this may be, it’s a working strategy for that species.

Into the current fuss about which bathroom people ought to use let us add a number of the fan-worms, who would have the anterior half enter the “ladies” and posterior enter the “gents.” There are some of the genus Branchiomma who have both male and female gametes in the same body-segment, however. I have no idea if or how they prevent incest.

Of course what happens immediately after fertilization is just as varied—ranging from eggs floating in rafts or dropping to the bottom, being imbedded into a mucous coated egg-mass and attached to things, or even attached externally to the back of the animal like sticky confetti, or kept in a ball of eggs, around which the parent is rolled. There is even reported vivipary (live birth) where the young larvae of Ctenodrilus are reported to be nourished by maternal blood vessels.

The biology of a barely known family of invertebrates is stranger than many science fiction aliens. How strange will the real thing turn out to be?

Stranger than we can imagine, I suspect.

*which if it is about to lay eggs it may need to do. Newly hatched alien grubs need grub . . . well, food, if they’re to grow into healthy young interstellar space-travelers. Don’t take them to meet your leader, and especially not the UN unless the dietary requirements of young alien grubs are toxic to human life. It’s quite possible such a diet may shape them evil hordes of ravaging alien planetary conquistadors, or worse, politicians.)

The Science of Dr. Gribbleflotz

by Rick Boatright

Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz was born on a Saturday afternoon in the upstairs board room of Mannington Main Street, the Mannington West Virginia chamber of commerce during the first 1632 minicon. Ultimately, he’s Virginia DeMarce’s fault.

We were sitting around after lunch, waiting for our afternoon guest, the mayor of Mannington, and discussing the social effects of being transported to the seventeenth century on the residents of Grantville. Virginia looked around and spoke in her mild, inoffensive voice. She had a lilt that I came to recognize over the years as provocative, but at the time sounded as though she was just speaking off the cuff, spontaneously.

“You know, these southern women are going to be most upset when their supply of baking powder runs out. How are they to make biscuits?”

Then, she looked me squarely in the eye and said, “Surely there’s a way to make baking powder in Grantville.” and paused. . . .

I floundered, and began coming up with excuses . . . Other chemistry is more urgent. There is a restricted number of chemists. We can’t do everything at once. We’ve already agreed we can’t make primers, how could we divert resources to baking powder?

Virginia replied in that same lilt, “Surely there’s a down-timer you could give the recipe to?”

A few minutes later, Herr Doctor Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz took up residence in the back of my mind. Kerryn Offord summarizes our working relationship as “Dr. Gribbleflotz is yours, Dr. Phil is mine.” Since that Saturday afternoon, Dr. Gribbleflotz has been a co-resident of my mind, occasionally invoked and wakened from slumber by a poke, an idea, a question, usually from Virginia but with occasional participation by Paula Goodlett and David Carrico and Laura Runkle. The first character description of Herr Doctor Gribbleflotz (HDG) had something of his background and character and an outline of the “Cheat Sheet” that he was supplied with to make the first supply of baking soda for the ladies of Grantville. Not long after, Kerryn Offord took that outline and produced the first story: “Calling Dr. Phil” that detailed the problem, the search and the finding of the technician. That set the pattern. Someone would call HDG out of the dungeon I had locked him in. I would channel him long enough to create the technical background for the story, the problems, the solution and the issues and Kerryn would take that and wrap dialog, plot and humanity around my cardboard. The new book 1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz continues that tradition with about 65 percent new material.

Each of the stories turns on a scientific detail and frequently on a pseudo-scientific detail. Because the rule of storytelling is that the story comes first, the science behind the story is generally glossed over. For those of you who are interested, this article will fill you in on the science behind some of the stories and some of our decisions about what could, and could not be used.

Calling Dr. Phil

The first challenge that faced us was Virginia’s demand for baking powder. Modern “double acting” baking powder is a mixture of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) and cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate) and sodium aluminum sulfate. Single acting baking powder is nothing more than the first two ingredients mixed together. When the cream of tartar is dissolved in water it becomes tartaric acid and reacts with the baking soda to make bubbles just like what happens if you drop lemon juice or vinegar into baking soda. In double acting powder, the sodium aluminum sulfate doesn’t go into solution until it’s heated, so you get a second puff of bubbles when the biscuit or cake batter gets warm. Single acting powder makes its bubbles pretty much as soon as the water hits it, which is why it’s important not to over knead biscuits or overmix cake batter.

Cream of tartar is easy to get. It precipitates out on the side of wine casks as the wine ages, and on the underside of wine corks in bottles. You merely have to scrape it off. If you want the pure white powder you have to dissolve and filter it and then boil off the water, but the material makes itself.

Baking soda, on the other hand, does not appear in nature. It is not to be confused with washing soda—sodium carbonate—note the lack of “bi” in that name. Sodium carbonate does appear in nature. In Europe it was imported from the Middle East or from the coast of Spain where it was produced by burning seaweed until the LeBlanc process was developed just before the French revolution. You do not want to eat washing soda.

Fortunately for the cooks of Grantville, baking soda is simple to make and the process for making it is well known. It is one of the first labs that a chemistry student will do. Dr. Phil can be handed a “cheat sheet” with the recipe after little more than a few minutes of work by any of the people in Grantville with chemistry education. The reaction is straightforward:

NaCl(aq) + NH_3(aq) + CO_2 + H_2O → NH_4Cl(aq) + NaHCO_3(s)

Let’s put that in English. Take plain old table salt dissolved in water, ammonia also dissolved in water, and bubble carbon dioxide through it, and you’ll get “Ammonium chloride” in solution, and sodium bicarbonate precipitating out as a solid. Now, that really only works if the solution is cold, otherwise the baking soda stays in solution too, but when you cool it, you get the baking soda on your filter paper and the ammonium chloride left behind in the water. One problem. Phil can’t go out and buy ammonia. No problem. Phil knows how to get “Spirits of Hartshorn.” Classically, alchemists generated both solid ammonium bicarbonate and a 30% solution of ammonia in water by the destructive distillation of the antlers and hooves of red deer—the horn of the hart—but the supply of red deer antler is both seasonal and limited in seventeenth-century Europe.

The solid hartshorn can even substitute for baking powder in recipes for thin cookies. When heated, the ammonium bicarbonate breaks down into ammonia and carbon dioxide. In a thin cookie, the ammonia can escape as a gas and the whole thing works. In biscuits and cakes, not so much. It can still be found in gourmet cooking shops although it is no longer extracted from red deer horn.

By the 1630s another technique was known both to up-timers and down-timers for getting ammonia. Human urine contains fairly large amounts of urea—note the derivation of the name—which bacteria will rapidly break down into ammonia. After aging the urine and allowing it to ferment for a while, you can distill off the ammonia. Dr. Phil and the Kubiaks worked out deals with every bar in Grantville and Jena to divert the collection from their urinals into holding tanks

It’s frequently been suggested that HDG should make a deal to install urine collection drains in the local livery stables, but equine urine contains less than a fifth the urea of human urine, so processing is even more arduous. In any event, the urine is a temporary step until other methods of ammonia production are in place. Still, Dr. Phil was lucky that he quickly became known as the “Aspirin King” instead of “The Master of Piss.”

One last point. Phil does not at all like the idea of the world’s greatest alchemist being confused with someone who makes stuff for cooks. Therefore the term “baking soda” is right out. But baking soda is a salt. It’s the salt of sodium and carbonate. Carbonate is mostly carbon dioxide, the stuff that comes out in bubbles when you mix baking soda with an acid. Alchemists referred to carbon dioxide as “fixed air”—air that was no longer useful for combustion, it was used up or fixed—and so, logically, baking soda is the salt of fixed air; Sal Aer Fixus. See? It makes perfect sense.

Dr. Phil’s Amazing Lightning Crystals

Crystal radios are very easy to make, except for one bit. Earphones are theoretically easy, but physically difficult. To hand-make an earphone for a crystal radio, you have to make a thin drum head, and glue a magnet to it. Then, you have to wind a coil of very thin wire, the best such earphones require coils made from wire no thicker than a typical human hair. If you don’t have commercially made magnet wire with flexible enamel coatings you wrap a single loop, paint it with shellac, wait for that to dry, wrap another loop, repeat 200 to 500 times. It’s difficult. It’s very easy to accidentally get a short between one layer of loops and another and waste all of your work. It’s also easy to break the hair-thin wires when attempting to affix them and solder them to the leads.

The job can be done by any patient competent person for very little cost, but making many of them takes a long time and is therefore expensive. Many who try will fail due to lack of care at one point or another.

Rochelle Salt

Fortunately for us, there is a simple, cheap workaround. Rochelle salts were first synthesized in 1675 by an apothecary, Pierre Seignette, of La Rochelle, France. Thus, “Rochelle” salt. They were also among the first substances discovered that exhibit piezoelectric action.

What’s that? Piezoelectric materials do two very cool things. If you bend or compress them, they generate a voltage difference between the top and bottom sides of the bend. This was extensively used in phonograph pickups to play records. A phonograph pickup could, for example, generate as much as two volts from being jostled by the needle moving up and down in the record’s groove.

The other action is this: if you apply a voltage to opposite sides of the same crystal the crystal itself bends. Because Rochelle salt bends a lot when you apply a voltage, it’s perfect for earphones. All you have to do is attach wires to opposite sides of the salt and contain it between two diaphragms so that you can hear it.

The only problem would be if they were hard to produce. Luckily, as the Kubiaks recalled, Rochelle salt is a common science fair project. It uses two ingredients you might have heard of: sodium carbonate (washing soda) added to a hot solution of potassium bitartrate (Cream of Tartar). After you add them together, you allow the crystals of Rochelle salt (sodium potassium tartrate) to crystallize out of the solution. As mentioned, Tartar can be found deposited on the inside of the barrels used to age wine.

For earphones, you don’t want thick beautiful crystals, although those can be grown. You want a thin layer of flat crystals that you can place between two diaphragms to make an earphone. If you have a flat plate of thin copper, you can cut the plate up into earphone sized pieces and then run the hot solution across the plates in a thin layer making many components at once.

Oddly, Phil has a substantial supply of both soda and highly refined Cream of Tartar. Isn’t that convenient?

Pyramid Power

Meanwhile Phil has been reading. He was introduced to the idea of the “Fifth Essence,” the “Quinta Essentia” by a Jewish alchemist he met years before. In his forays into the Grantville libraries, he encountered books that mentioned that same phrase, proof positive to him that his long studies about activating the fifth essence of the human spirit were known and understood to up-time science. Sadly, the books that he was reading were from the “new age” section of the library and comprised an odd collection of bits about pyramid power, crystal healing, and reflexology. Phil spent weeks and months attempting to put together a coherent theory of operation from these bits and pieces. Each failure was attributed to his own failing to properly understand the up-time publications or to correctly synthesize the compound theory that he was extracting from various sources.

It’s an on-going theme in the stories. Phil comes up with a plan for revitalizing the “quinta essentia” of the human spirit, it fails, he reworks his theory, and tries again. It’s very similar to people who compulsively develop systems to beat the odds at horse racing or to extract profit from a roulette table. The fault is always some minor flaw in their system, not that no such system can work.

Fortunately, the same meticulous attention to detail, hypothesis and testing that takes him ever deeper into dysfunctional alchemy also takes him further into effective chemistry, and the same techniques used by those he’s trained as his laborants help make their industrial processes ever more efficient both in terms of time and cost.

Aspirin

After the success with baking soda, the Kubiaks were confronted with what was, in many ways, a far more important challenge. The supply of up-time aspirin and other anti-inflammatories had run out. For pain, for arthritics, for the control of fever, and countless other uses, aspirin is a cornerstone of the modern pharmacopeia. Luckily, once again, aspirin is easy to synthesize and is one of the earliest labs done in any organic chemistry course.

The action of salicylic acid, in the form of a tea made from the inner bark of almost all species of willow, has been known since antiquity. Hippocrates, Galen, Pliny the Elder mention it for pain and fever, as do texts from ancient China, Egypt, Sumer, and Assyria. In the Americas, archeologists have found traces of salicylic acid on seventh-century pottery in eastern Colorado and in historical times the Cherokee and other Native Americans used willow tea for fever and other medicinal purposes. But willow bark tea tastes terrible, the concentration of salicylate is low, and the supply of willow is somewhat limited. In modern times the WHO estimates worldwide consumption of aspirin at 40,000 tons.

The solution turns out to be fairly simple. Salicylic acid can be synthesized from oil of wintergreen—methyl salicylate—by the action of strong acids. Oddly, the production of strong acids was how Phil made his living before meeting the Kubiaks, so this isn’t much of a stretch for him. Oil of wintergreen is extracted by distillation from the twigs and bark of sweet birch (Betula lenta), teaberry, or wintergreen (Galtheria Procumbens ).

Structural Diagrams via Wikimedia Commons

So, you distill oil of wintergreen from a widely available source, react that with a strong acid to get salicylic acid, then react that with acetic acid produced by distilling it from vinegar to get acetic anhydride (acetic acid with no water in it). After you’ve let it react for a bit in a warm bath, you add water to decompose the remainder of the acetic anhydride, and aspirin crystallizes out and can be filtered.

Now, Dr. Phil can’t just call that aspirin. What kind of name is that? No, he’s making “the salt of the essence of vinegar and the essence of sweet birch. Or, as it’s marketed by HDG, Sal Vin Betula. Oh my, how the money rolls in.”

The Lightning Generator

Phil's fascination with electricity comes early in his contacts with the up-timers. Two different technologies are mentioned when trying to figure out how to get a lightning generator for him. The first is probably more familiar to people. The tall column with a silvery sphere on top that can cause people’s hair to stand up or pull large sparks is a classic image in science fiction and is called the “Van de Graaff generator.” The problem is, that upper dome is generally spun from aluminum plate and it requires a very high-speed motor in the base, a belt to separate the charges, and a system of rollers to carry the belt. They’re very fussy to make by hand and they break easily.

On the other hand, while not as well known, the Wimshurst machine is more complex looking, but is easier to build. That’s what Phil gets.

Traditionally, dating back to the Greeks, and doubtless before, people made static electricity by rubbing two dissimilar objects together. Amber and wool, sulfur and silk, etc. This was always somewhat problematic. Humidity, dirt on the surfaces, whatever material the person trying to generate the field is standing on—one or all of these could influence the success or failure of a particular attempt to generate the static electric field and the desired spark.

In the late 1800s, a series of inventors began to develop what they called “influence” machines that could separate charges without needing brushes or cloth or friction.

Wimshurst Electric Machine. Image by N. Hawkins via Wikimedia Commons

Two insulating disks, plastic or glass or similar materials, are arranged so that as the crank is turned, they spin in opposite directions. Arrayed around each disk is a set of thin metal ovals, generally made from copper or aluminum foil. Across the center is a metal bar that trails a brush that wipes the sectors as they pass called the “neutralizer.” As you can see in the drawing, the two neutralizers (X and Y) are crossed. On each side of the disks are a pair of “pick ups” which have sharp points that do not quite touch the disk. (Z) When you turn the crank large sparks up to several inches long can jump between the electrodes attached to the pickups.

They work in an interesting way. When any two different conducting metals touch each other there is a small voltage and a small current transfer between the two because no two materials have the same number of electrons in their atoms and electron bonding forces are also different.

So, when one of the foil sectors passes under one of the neutralizers, a small charge is imposed on the sector. As that sector passes by a sector in the other side of the disk, it induces an equal but opposite charge on that sector on the other side.

If the front disk has a positive charge on its sectors, then as it spins it will induce a negative charge on the back disk. The same thing happens to the lower part of the disks, but in reverse, so when a sector passes by the neutralizer bar it becomes neutral and therefore ready to be charged again. This sets up low opposite charges on the top and bottom and high equal charges on the sides. These high charges are then picked up and transferred to the Leyden jars, which, in turn, are connected to the discharge terminals. When the voltage is high enough across the terminals, a spark occurs and the cycle restarts.

If you didn’t follow that, don’t feel bad. Without one in front of you, or good animations, the working of the machine is very hard to picture. Come to the 1632 minicon and we’ll show you one.

Phil’s Wimshurst machine is special. It was made by someone in Grantville with quite a sense of humor. His disks are composed of two 78 RPM records, one of “Stormy Weather” and the other of the Spike Jones classic “That Old Black Magic.” It probably wasn’t the best idea that Ted Kubiak ever had.

The Creamed Madonna

Phil was insistent that he would not make aspirin tablets that were white. Aspirin is supposed to reduce pain, cure headaches and make someone feel better. Phil’s aspirin tablets were colored with indigo and were blue. This resulted in some up-timers referring to them as “Dr. Phil’s little blue pills of happiness.” Since some people are humor impaired, a few folks became convinced that Phil and Co. were making Viagra, which is also blue. As Phil explains to his wife, that’s just not happening.

Sildenafil structural diagram via Wikimedia Commons

The synthesis of Viagra (generic name sildenafil) is challenging.

The demand, however, is enormous, so Phil agrees to research alternatives. In his research he encounters a classic problem with science in the public media. Journalists aren’t scientists, and often make mistakes. In the case of Viagra, it’s a mistake in the discussion of how it works.

Normal erections happen when the smooth muscles around the arteries that lead to the spongy tissue in the penis relax, allowing more blood to flow in, resulting in an erection. This happens when nitric oxide and a protein called cGMP bind to the smooth muscle cells receptors causing them to relax. Sildenafil blocks the action of a protein that breaks down the cGMP, and thus makes erections easier to obtain and stronger.

The problem with press accounts is that sometimes the term “nitric oxide” is replaced with the term “nitrous oxide” which the journalists have presumably heard of. The two chemicals are very different.

Nitric oxide is just one nitrogen triple bonded to one oxygen. NO.

Nitrous oxide is two nitrogens bonded together and then with an oxygen. NNO.

Very different. NO is an important signaling chemical in neurochemistry. NNO is laughing gas.

Unlike sildenafil, the synthesis of nitrous oxide is straightforward. You react urea, nitric acid and sulfuric acid.

2 (NH_2)2CO + 2 HNO_3+ H_2SO_4 → 2 N_2O + 2 CO_2 + (NH_4)2SO_4 + 2H_2O

Phil—owner of the urine from every bar in Grantville and Jena—has plenty of access to urea, and making nitric and sulphuric acid was how he made his living prior to the Ring of Fire. The nitrous oxide comes off as a gas, mixed one-to-one with carbon dioxide, which turns out to be a good thing for Phil’s second attempt at a marital revitalization aid. But more about that in a moment. First things first.

Thinking that increasing the concentration of NNO in the tissues of the groin will enable erections, Phil has the bright idea to simply apply the gas directly to the affected area. He commissions a pair of rubber pants with a tube that can be connected to a pressurized cylinder of nitrous oxide. If you’ve ever used a “can of air” to blow the dust out of your computer, you know what’s coming. As the gas expands out of the cylinder into Phil’s rubber pants it cools from room temperature to well below freezing. This does not assist Phil in getting an erection, and shortly thereafter the pants, acting like an overfilled balloon, burst.

Oh, well. Science is never a tale of success after success. One learns from one’s failures.

Phil’s second idea for a revitalization product is less catastrophic. Upon seeing an up-timer acquaintance drinking a carbonated lemon soda, he thinks of dissolving the NNO in a liquid. Nitrous oxide does dissolve in water. A half-liter of water will take on seven grams of nitrous oxide, which if extracted (by shaking) produces about four liters of gas. Additionally, Phil’s nitrous oxide production line also produces carbon dioxide mixed with the nitrous oxide and approximately a liter of CO_2 will also dissolve in the water along with the NNO.

Generally, these flavored nitrous oxide infused liquids are used topically. At first glance you wouldn’t think that the flavor would be important. You would be wrong.

It was tempting to stop there, but I can’t quite. At about the time the money waterfall started at HDG Industries from the sale of nitrous oxide soda, a group of grandmothers in Grantville needed to raise money for the Red Cross sanitation committee. One of them recalled that she had an old whipped cream charger. She knew that those used nitrous oxide cylinders to aerate the cream, then saw her husband’s copy of Herb Alpert’s album Whipped Cream & Other Delights. She immediately thought of a way for the committee to embarrass all of their children.

The Creamed Madonna, story banner by Garrett Vance from the Grantville Gazette. Used by permission.

Dr. Phil for President

Don’t panic. Phil is president of the European Society of Kirlian Aura Interpreters. This is in itself funny because Phil doesn’t believe in aura interpretation. The “science” of the interpretation of Kirlian Auras was developed by the second of Phil’s assistants named Kurt. Phil called him “Beta” to distinguish from the Kurt he already knew. Beta started a Europe-wide fashion for the “science” and Phil was invited to Prague to become the aural interpreter for the king. It is pointed out that he doesn’t have to believe in aural interpretation in order to do it.

But what is this Kirlian aura? In 1939 a Russian electrical equipment repairman, Semyon Kirlian, discovered that if an object on a photographic plate is connected to a high-voltage source, an image is produced on the photographic plate. In Russian literature this is called "Kirlianography."

When a Kirlian photograph is taken, the subject is connected to a very high voltage, but low current, electric source, such as the above mentioned Wimshurst machine, a Tesla coil or an automobile spark coil. The subject, or a part of it, such as a hand or foot, is placed in contact with a photographic plate, which is itself placed over a grounded surface. The electricity then sparks from the subject, through the plate, and into the ground. Along the way, the sparks give off light that exposes the photo.

Here is a Kirlian photo of a fingertip.

Kirlian image of a fingertip. Photo by “Island Wiki” via Wikipedia.org

I assure you that taking that photo involved a substantial “ouchey.” During the first effort to get a photo of his entire hand, Kirlian gave himself a bad electrical burn.

Much has been made of Kirlian’s discovery by various pseudoscience writers. The Kirlians themselves claimed that Kirlian photography could provide an index of a person's physical health, and could illuminate the acupuncture points of the human body. Of course, it’s not just humans that produce Kirlian images. This Coleus leaf is far more interesting than the fingertip.

Kirlian image of Coleus leaf. Photo by “Mr X” via Wikimedia Commons

The Society of Kirlian Aural Interpreters that Phil heads has several functions. From the point of view of the practitioners, the society trains and certifies new practitioners. The society’s journals provide the latest research and designs for equipment, calculations and ways to effect the aura through diet, exercise, the wearing of copper and silver jewelry, etc. From the point of view of Europe as a whole, the society provides critical safety standards and practices without which untrained quacks would likely kill or severely injure their clients attempting to get whole-body photos or photos of the aura of the head. Additionally, the practitioners provide both pressure and funding for the development of ever more sensitive photo films, color photography and compact electrical equipment. They are by far the largest market for the early “aqualators,” to help them with the mass of calculations involved in reading an aural photograph.

It’s quackery, but under Phil’s guidance of the society, it’s quackery turned to a useful social purpose.

The Theremin

In the last story in the collection, a young woman who trained in Grantville is hired by Radio Prague because she built a theremin as her senior project in the electrical certification course. Her theremin features a small, hand operated Alexanderson alternator, much like the larger ones that provide the radio power for the Voice of Luther, Loyola University of the North, and soon, Radio Prague.

“What’s a theremin?” you may ask.

A theremin is the instrument on the soundtrack of The Day the Earth Stood Still among many other places. It made the “Dooo Weeee Dooo Weee Oooooo Weeeee” refrain in the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” It’s the eerie sound of many a bad horror movie’s soundtrack. It’s the instrument Jimmy Paige played in “Whole Lotta Love.” It’s an electronic instrument that varies both the pitch and the loudness as the player moves their hands in the air near the instrument, but without touching it. It was invented by the Russian Lev Sergeyevich Termen (known in the West as Léon Theremin). The only other instrument with a similar range and tone is the musical saw.

In the story, Mags' theremin uses two unfamiliar electronic components, the Alexanderson alternator and the flame triode. The alternator is something 1632 fans know from several stories about broadcast radio stations starting with “Canst Thou Send Lightnings?” They’re a solution to the problem that Grantville just can’t build “normal” radio transmitters for broadcast stations due to a lack of tubes or transistors. The giant, steam and electricity driven alternators produce radio signals mechanically. How can that be?

As cool as the alternators are, and as neat as it is that they can produce radio signals using rotating disks of iron, ultimately, they’re just an electric guitar writ large.

In an electric guitar, the pickup has six magnets, one placed under each string, and a coil of hair-thin wire wound round the group of them hundreds and hundreds of times. When the steel string over the magnet wiggles back and forth from being plucked, it disturbs the magnetic field, and changing magnetic fields make electric currents in wires.

In an Alexanderson alternator, the slots in the spinning disk substitute for the plucked wire, and as it spins it disturbs the magnetic field in the pickup and makes a signal. One pickup doesn’t create much electricity, but in an alternator, dozens or hundreds of pickups are connected together and produce a very serious current of, in the case of Mags' foot treadle driven disk, tens of watts, or in the case of the radio stations, hundreds or thousands of watts.

The other component in Mags' theremin are the flame triodes.

Since the early 2000s the 1632 authors and editors have been saying that making vacuum tubes will take time. The first hand-crafted lab samples of down-time vacuum tubes were produced in late 1635 and early 1636. Transistors are worse. No one will be making high power transistors any time soon. Small fragile point-contact transistors that can be cobbled from available materials are interesting, but offer nothing to someone building a thousand-watt radio station.

Still, Mags needed a way to create an audio oscillator for her theremin, and the rules of a senior project state that it has to be made from all down-time material. To make an oscillator, you need a device that will operate like a vacuum tube, or like a transistor. For many years, both down-time and among the 1632 writers and editors, nothing came to mind. Then, we stumbled upon one of those “Oh, yeah, I never thought of that” moments that the 1632 crew call “Sometimes whipping a dead horse works.”

There was a conversation about natural gas furnaces, water heaters and boilers, asking how the circuit that controls the gas valve and the spark that lights the furnace work. Those of us without an HVAC background assumed that some sort of thermometer or thermocouple or such was used. We were surprised to learn that no, the flame was sensed directly using something called a “flame diode.” It turns out that the ionized gases in a flame can substitute for the vacuum in a vacuum tube and can rectify an AC current using a cathode and an anode both inside the flame. No flame, no current. Flame, current.

That set us to thinking. Could you put a control grid in there and make a flame triode just like a vacuum tube?

A flame triode in action. Photo by Nyle Steiner. Used by permission.

As it turns out, yes, you can. Nyle Steiner (K7NS) published a description, a circuit and a Youtube video of such a circuit in 2008. The HVAC industry has talked about them in journals since the late 1950s. No one thought to look to furnace control circuits for a key to down-time electronics until Mags heard the lecture on flame diodes in her electric certificate class.

The flame triode doesn’t make much signal, but it does work, and can, as Nyle Steiner showed in a series of YouTube videos, run as an oscillator or as an amplifier. In the theremin, Mags uses it as an oscillator to provide the pitch and volume control. The Alexanderson Alternator is the power supply for the amplifier that makes the sound loud enough to play in a band.

In a turn of events that should surprise no one, the theremin is avidly adopted by the Society of Aura Interpreters, since it provides immediate feedback about a person’s aura without having to subject them to sparks and electric shock and without the on-going cost of photographic supplies. Of course the theremin—oh I’m sorry, the Gribbleflotz Aural Aura Explicator—can provide only an approximate reading. Detailed calculations still require the Kirlian photograph.

The Future

We see no end to the stories of Dr. Phil and his companions. Mags' boyfriend builds model airplanes using small glow plug engines. Mags makes alternators. Dr. Phil is Dr. Phil. There’s more science out there, and more odd and wonderful ways for both down- and up-timers to understand and misunderstand, to use, and to misuse it. Kerryn and I will keep bringing you updates.

Note: You can see the flame triode in action, both with stills and video, at Nyle Steiner’s page: http://sparkbangbuzz.com/

A Quantum of Consciousness

by John Lambshead

Every so often a new development in digital hardware or software is heralded as the beginning of artificial intelligence. And every time, I look at it and see a machine - a machine designed to store and manipulate symbols (data) according to a set of rules - that works a little faster and more efficiently than its predecessors. What I don’t see is intelligence. The desk-top on which I am writing this article can’t do anything that the Apple II I used in the 70s couldn’t do. It just does it a whole lot faster and more effectively.

The problem, I think, is that the word “intelligence” is tossed around without much thought into what it means. Partly that is because we can’t decide what it means. The definition of intelligence includes aspects like the ability to learn, be creative, apply logic, think abstractly, communicate efficiently, remember information, or merely to be educated.

When we talk about human beings, intelligence usually in practice simply means academic ability. When applied more broadly in Zoology, it tends to mean complexity or flexibility of behaviour, particularly in response to novel stimuli. But intelligence also implies something else, something more fundamental, an awareness of self and consciousness. All vertebrates seem to have a well-developed sense of self, other organisms less so, computers never. It may be possible to simulate consciousness using computer software. Equally one can simulate rain—but no one gets wet.

So in summary, there appears to be qualitative differences between vertebrates and complex machines, notably self-awareness and consciousness.

Broadly speaking, suggestions about the mechanisms that might cause consciousness can be grouped into three: (i) the vital spark of life, (ii) an emergent property from basic control functions of the central nervous system and (iii) a special relationship between spooky quantum interactions and life.

Let’s start with category (i). Nowadays, “vital spark” concepts of consciousness tend to fall into the supernatural realm and so are outside the scope of this article—but that wasn’t always true. The mechanistic “clockwork” view of the universe devised by scientists such as Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton, and engineers like Jacques de Vaucanson with ingenious automata like the Flute Player, gave rise to a mechanistic model for living organisms. After all, had not William Harvey shown that the heart was simply an organic version of a mechanical pump?

However, there still seemed to be some qualitative difference between the animate and the inanimate, not matter how cleverly the latter was fashioned, some vital essence that only life possessed that was forever denied to objects constructed solely from the mineral.

Science soon provided a candidate for this vital spark. The concept of energy was one of the great triumphs of classical physics. Energy clearly interacted with material objects, doing things like keeping the planets in their orbits and powering steam trains, so it was not too great a jump to envisage some sort of bioenergy powering living organisms.

In 1845, Baron Carl von Reichenbach, no relation to the famous Falls as far as I know, introduced the concept of Odic Force, named after the Norse God, which was supposed to be the biological equivalent to energy. It still lives on in various mystical and pseudo-science philosophies such as “auras”—and in a couple of stories I wrote for Baen, “Storming Hell” and “Storming Venus.”

Electricity itself came close to replacing Odic Force as the vital spark of life, and it at least had the advantage of being demonstrably real. Back in the eighteenth century, Luigi Galvani discovered he could make frogs’ legs twitch by applying an electric current to the muscles. His nephew, Giovanni Aldini, applied the same technique to an executed criminal at London’s Newgate, appearing to at least partly reinstall the corpse with life. Horrified accounts from the time refer to quivering jaws, twitching legs, clenching fists and, most horrible of all, the corpse opening one of its eyes.

(As an aside, I always seem to hear clashing atonal chords when I write something like that.)

This was a period where medical techniques were apparently raising people from the dead. The drowned could be reanimated by resuscitation and skilled doctoring could bring someone back from a condition at least indistinguishable from death. Dictionaries of the period divided death into two types, incomplete and absolute, and the nervous began to be buried in graves equipped with little bells that could be rung from inside the coffin.

All of which brings us to science fiction and Mary Shelley’s famous book, Frankenstein, published in 1818. We all know the story. Igor winds up the rod from the castle tower, lightning flashes all about while the mad baron cackles dementedly.

(More clashing atonal chords.)

Frankenstein, the kitsch gothic horror story, was actually cutting edge hardcore SF when it was written, tackling the science of the vital spark behind death and resuscitation. It was also a cautionary tale about the moral issues involved with artificial intelligence; issues that we still haven’t resolved in the modern world. The baron is doing way more than resuscitating a corpse; he is creating a new self-aware life where none had existed before.

Putting to one side moral considerations about A.I., which thankfully are a problem for another day, we are left with the fact that extensive research has failed to find anything resembling a unique bioenergy in biological organisms—notwithstanding any perceived qualitative difference between the living and the inert.

To turn to our second mechanism, the hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent property of the central nervous system has been a mainstream scientific concept since the vital spark fell out of favour. The idea of emergent properties goes all the way back to Aristotle. Essentially, it’s where a set of interacting processes produces a new property that is not found in any of the component bits. For example, life itself could be described as an emergent property of organic chemistry.

In this model, while the central nervous system evolved to coordinate internal body physiology (and the response of the organism as a whole to external stimuli), consciousness and self-awareness emerged as a by-product of the central nervous system becoming more complex as organisms became larger and more structured.

The processes producing a complex emergent property like life do not have to in themselves be particularly complex. All that is needed is a historical system (one that is not reversible—where the past governs possible outcomes in the future) and plenty of time. With enough time, a complex universe can be created by a few simple physical laws and a human being can arise from the limited chemical properties of carbon-based molecules.

Simple processes can also create complex emergent properties by replication—a sort of horizontal iteration through space rather than vertical integration through time. Plants, animals and fungi are made by replicating the basic building block of the single cell, large animals from smaller by simply replicating their bodies as repeated segments. The segmentation of ragworm bodies is obvious but actually insects and vertebrates also evolved larger bodies by similar replication—it’s not so visible but it’s still there.

The great Robert Heinlein explored the idea of a computer becoming self-aware in his 1966 novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The novel runs with an idea that was mainstream in computer cybernetics at the time which is that that more and more processes would be controlled by larger and larger centralised mainframe computers. Eventually whole cities, countries or even the world would be run by a single giant computer. The Soviet state, which with Japan and West Germany was one of the three fastest growing economies in the world after World War II, ran into severe problems when it tried to shift from a war-emergency economy that was mono-focussed onto defence and industrial production to one based on consumer industries that would provide the material rewards of the promised communist society.

Without the feedbacks and decentralisation associated with the consumer demand-led Western economies, the supply-led Soviet economy became increasingly out of kilter with demand. Shortages were followed by gluts in ever more extreme swings. The Soviet solution was to predict demand by cybernetics using “large” computers—actually IMB 360s—rather than introduce an ideologically unpalatable feedback system using market forces.

It didn’t work: the computers just weren’t capable of the massive calculations required within anything approximating to real time.

In Robert Heinlein’s novel the computer, Mike, becomes sentient because it has so many peripherals attached and it “dies,” becomes nonsentient again, when many of these peripherals are disconnected by damage during a war. But a giant computer is nothing like a vertebrate central nervous system. There are similarities in that both appear to reduce information to digital on/off (neuron fires or not) codes but there is no equivalent to a central processor in your head.

Nevertheless, the idea that a bigger brain is a more “intelligent” brain keeps resurfacing despite all the modern evidence to the contrary. It usually takes the form in the modern world that the more neurons or synapses a brain has the more intelligent it is. Human beings have a thousand times more neurons than a mouse so maybe that is why they are more intelligent than a mouse.

The problem is that brain size is largely a function of body mass and human brains are not statistically oversized for a mammal of our body mass. Also, accidental consciousness appears to be not a property of the central nervous system as a whole but of specific parts of the brain, notably the frontal lobes. Architecture rather than size appears to be the key factor.

Nevertheless, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was cutting edge hard SF for its time and a worthy successor to Frankenstein, albeit with a more positive theme.

Updating the idea, one can postulate that an interconnected net of digital systems might be the place to look for the accidental emergence of an artificial intelligence but we have had telephones and now the internet for some time and so far no ghost in the machine has been detected. Animal life didn’t jump from nothing to the sophistication of human consciousness. Consciousness gradually builds up through the vertebrates. Of course, the internet still has considerably fewer connections than a human brain but nothing appears to be emerging and we would have expected to see signs by now if this hypothesis was correct.

As an aside, perhaps this is just as well when we consider the end result of the emergence of self-awareness in the Terminator movies’ Skynet.

To conclude we have no evidence that consciousness and self-awareness are caused by the number of links in a digital system.

So with a shudder, and the image of Frankenstein’s monster as robotic human-extermination machines fresh in our minds, we turn to our third mechanism—quantum interactions as the source of consciousness. When we speak of quantum mechanics applications to biology we specifically mean a direct effect of those spooky parts of quantum theory such as superposition and quantum tunnelling.

The idea that quantum spookiness might explain some of the more puzzling properties of living organisms goes all the way back to the birth of quantum theory itself. Pascaul Jordan began exploring the idea in 1929, suggesting that life was different from most physical systems in that a very few molecules seem to have a wholly disproportionate control of the organism as a whole. Unfortunately, Jordan’s ideas became discredited by his claims that they proved the superiority of the Nazi Führerprinzip—not a wildly popular view by 1945.

Schrödinger, who had to flee Germany because his wife was considered a subhuman, published a book in 1944 called What Is Life? This work is probably the real start of quantum biology. He suggested that the units of heredity (their composition unknown at the time) replicated too efficiently to be obeying classical science and so must be molecular and subject to the laws of quantum mechanics. In doing so he predicted some of the characteristics of the theoretical units of heredity before DNA’s structure became known.

Schrödinger’s key insight is that living material displays one fundamental difference to nonliving material, namely that living materials are highly structured right down to the molecular level. The reason this is important is that spooky quantum effects only occur at the smallest level of organisation. The fact that living organisms are structured from the molecular level upwards means that quantum mechanics potentially can have impacts right up to the macro-level. DNA itself is an obvious example of how a highly structured molecule influences the whole organism.

However, there are good practical reasons why quantum processes should not apply to large, warm objects like a living organism. And these reasons are connected with superposition and decoherence.

I am not going to try to explain these terms in detail in this short essay but essentially superposition is the idea that a particle exists solely as an unlimited number of simultaneous probability waves. When our particle is touched by another particle it undergoes decoherence into an actual place where it has actual properties. The place the particle turns out to be could be on the other side of a barrier that it lacks the energy to surmount by normal classical physics.

This apparently “magical” leap through an obstacle is called quantum tunnelling—the particle tunnels through the barrier rather than jumping over it. Hydrogen fusion only occurs because of quantum tunnelling. There is a huge energy barrier to be surmounted for two positively charged hydrogen nuclei to get close enough to fuse.

Spooky quantum effects which depend on superposition do not apply to large, warm objects which have lots of particles buzzing around quickly because decoherence is very fast in such a situation. The only way around this is for the object to be very small, so have few particles, and/or be very cold, so they move slowly. Spooky effects therefore cannot apply to living organisms because such effects would be way too transient in such large, warm objects to be of any impact.

All efforts to explain the spooky properties of life by invoking spooky quantum effects foundered on this fact.

And then in 2007 the world changed.

Picture this scene. The prof’s office in a research lab where our science team leader has been rewarded for a lifetime’s achievement in research by making him sit in an office filling in grant applications and trying to decipher the latest insane communication from HR. In dashes a young post-doc declaring that they have worked out the efficiency of electron transfer in photosynthesis.

“Really,” says our hero, while struggling to grasp the implications of being allocated a zero-based budget.

“Yes, to the nearest round figure it’s one hundred percent.”

And that is where the solids hit the climate control dispenser. Nothing in biology involving energy transfer is one hundred percent. Ten percent is good going and even one percent is usable. But repeated experiments have shown that electron transfer in photosynthesis has an efficiency greater than ninety-nine percent, probably because of superposition and electron tunnelling.

And evidence is gathering that many enzymes may use spookiness for electron transfer. Enzymes are the classic controlling agents for the body’s biochemistry: the hierarchy is that DNA makes RNA makes enzymes, which then go on to regulate everything else. Many other biological systems are currently being investigated for quantum influences such as vision, olfaction, magnetoreception (detecting magnetic fields) and Brownian motors (typically nano-scale engines in a cell that convert chemical into mechanical energy).

All of which brings us to the final conundrum. If life really is full of spooky quantum interactions that potentially affect the macro as well as the micro level then is the conscious mind to be found in superposition, tunnelling and quantum entanglement? Are quantum mechanics effects the missing hidden ingredient behind intelligence? Roger Penrose in his 1989 book, The Emperor's New Mind, certainly thought so.

The weakness in Penrose’s work was that this was purely theoretical without a known mechanism for the transfer of quantum effects from the world of molecules to the macro world of the brain. He suggested cellular tubules as the site of the quantum interactions but that is not convincing.

Apart from other problems such as size (too many particles involved), microtubules have no particular connection with the firing of the neuron’s action potential (the electrochemical wave that passes along the neuron to a synapse where it may or may not cause an action potential in another cell) which is the one thing we know is connected with thinking and brain function.

But there is another potential mechanism that might fit the bill. Neuron action potentials are mediated by the movement of sodium and potassium ions along voltage-gated ion channels in cell membranes. Ion channels are tiny, about 1-2 nanometres long and 0.6 nanometres wide so ions can only pass along them in single file. In addition, Austrian scientists have shown using simulations that such ions should show superposition and that the system works to slow decoherence. So all the ingredients exist for a quantum effect on a molecular mechanism that is directly connected with brain function.

The brain generates an electromagnetic field as it functions—this is what brain scanners detect—which can influence the voltage-gated ion channels in the brain, thus tying the whole system together. Recent research has shown that the brain’s electromagnetic field is strong enough to influence whether a neuron fires, presumably through an impact on the ion channels.

We therefore have the possibility—one could put it no higher—that we are looking for consciousness in the wrong place when we try to see it as the direct result of a digital web of interconnected neurons like an internet linking millions of classical computers.

Maybe, just maybe, consciousness is an emergent property of the positive and negative feedbacks between quantum mechanics effects at the level of single ions and an overarching electromagnetic field around the brain.

In some ways we are back where we started if this hypothesis proves to be correct. Consciousness is an emergent property, albeit in a rather strange place, and it does depend on quantum mechanics spookiness in very small but highly structured constructs in living tissue to give the “vital spark” that distinguishes the living from the inanimate.

This would certainly explain why no classical computer, no matter how powerful or cleverly programmed, has ever shown the slightest sign of self-awareness or consciousness.

But hang on a mo. Aren’t all those clever geeks currently in the process of designing quantum computers?

Skynet, anyone?

NOTE: Anyone wishing to follow this up could do a lot worse than looking at Life on the Edge, a popular science book by Jim Al-Khalili & Johnjow Mc Fadden.

Radium Girls of Science and Science Fiction

by Jim Beall

Arguably, the two most famous women nuclear scientists are Marie Curie and Dr. Christmas Jones. The former was born Maria Salomea Skłodowska and won two Nobel prizes. The latter was a "Bond Girl," a nuclear physicist played by Denise Richards in "The World Is Not Enough."

Figure 1 - Marie Curie

(Official Nobel portrait)

Figure 2 - "Christmas Jones" (Denise Richards)

(MGM publicity still, editorial use only)

There have always been far more women in the fields of nuclear science and energy in real life than in fiction. Indeed, women have been major figures in the field since the very beginning. Madame Curie was even the one to coin the term, "radioactive." Ironically, as the Bond movie was being filmed, the Chairman post of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) passed from nuclear physicist Shirley Ann Jackson[1] (Figure 3) to radiation biologist Greta Joy Dicus[2] (Figure 4).

Figure 3 - Shirley Ann Jackson

(USNRC official photo)

Figure 4 - Greta Joy Dicus

(USNRC official photo)

Nor was Dr. Jackson the first woman top nuclear regulator. Dr. Dixy Lee Ray headed the Atomic Energy Commission (the forerunner to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) from 1973 - 1975. Going even further back in time reveals another historical footnote. Nuclear reactions release energy in accordance with Albert Einstein's famous:

e = mc^2 (e = energy, m = mass, andc = speed of light)

That equation, however, is but a genius-level extrapolation of an earlier one:

kinetic energy = 1/2 mv^2 (m = mass and v = velocity)

Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil (1706 - 1749) was one of the first champions of differentiating momentum (mv) from kinetic energy by using the square of the velocity in its calculations. Her translation (and commentary explaining those views) of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica containing Newton's "Laws of Motion" remains the standard French translation. Thus, a woman played a major role in the derivation of the basic equation explaining nuclear energy.

Fiction, however, lagged badly in featuring women in the roles of scientists or engineers. In the early years, there were more women science fiction (SF) authors than fictional scientists. For example, two of the earliest SF novels were Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827) and both were written by women[3]. Sadly, the societal norms were so rigid[4] that not even those woman authors included woman scientists among those in their stories.

Throughout the Victorian era, the number of women being educated in the sciences steadily increased in Britain.[5] This had the effect of preparing readers for women performing scientific tasks, instead of simply household and romantic roles. One early example is Andre Laurie's The Conquest of the Moon (1889), which involved a number of scientists and engineers being inadvertently transported to the Moon. While none of the professionals were women, the spouse of the protagonist takes on a full share of the astronomical observations and contributes to the scientific success of the mission. The 1890s saw the first women written into "mad scientist" roles, beginning in 1893 with Olga Romanoff (Figure 5), written by George Griffith.[6]

Figure 5 - Olga Romanoff

(Image courtesy of L.W. Currey, Inc.)

Others stories with evil woman scientists soon followed, but the 1899 The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (Figure 6) by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace is especially notable for two reasons. First, the character uses nuclear-generated X-rays as one murder method. The second reason is that "L.T. Meade" was a pen name for Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith[7], making that book perhaps the first work written by a woman that featured a woman scientist.[8]

Figure 6 - The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings

(Image courtesy of L.W. Currey, Inc.)

On the American side of the Atlantic, perhaps the first published science fiction stories by a woman were by Gertrude Barrows Bennett, beginning with her 1904 "The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar."[9] Bennett wrote those stories under the pseudonym "Francis Stevens," though this would not be generally known until decades later. Clare Winger Harris was the first to publish her stories in an SF magazine under her own name. Many of her pieces (written in the 1920s) received critical acclaim[10], and her "The Fate of the Poseidonia" was one of the first to feature an heroic female protagonist.

During this same period, Marie Curie won her second Nobel Prize. Her first had been in physics (1903); this one was in chemistry (1911). She remains the only individual to be awarded two Nobel Prizes in the sciences.[11] During World War I, Madame Curie used her Nobel prize money (she also offered her gold medals but the French National Bank declined) to organize a fleet of mobile X-ray ambulances to assist battlefield surgeons by imaging bullets, shrapnel, etc. Among those helping her was her teenage daughter Irène (Figure 7). The ambulances were so successful that they became known as "Petites Curies"(Figure 8), and she was made the director of the newly formed Red Cross Radiology Service. She also developed hollow glass needles to allow the radiation[12] from radon gas (she provided the radium) to sterilize infected tissues. Her efforts have been estimated to have saved one million lives![13]

Figure 7 - Marie and Irène Curie

(Wikipedia, public domain)

Figure 8 - Marie Curie driving a "Petite Curie"

(Wikipedia, public domain)

After World War I, women SF authors continued to increase in numbers and, unlike their male peers, often included technology being used in domestic applications.[14] Food production was one common aspect, whether it be by eating "meat tablets" (1926, "A Runaway World" by Claire Winger Harris), imbibing food "essences" (1929, "Moon Woman" by Minnie Odell Michiner under the pen name "Minna Irving"), or "chemical nourishment" (1930, "Creatures of the Light" by Sophie Wenzel Ellis). Leslie Stone[15] wrote "When the Sun Went Out" (1929) which includes clothing scientifically designed to deal with the dropping temperatures. In that same year, Stone would publish "Out of the Void," which deserves special mention because radium was used to generate light, heat, and refrigeration, while radium "treated" bathing water imparted a feeling of well-being.

"Out of the Void" was hardly the first to use radium as "handwavium." In fact, ever since its well-publicized discovery, radium had achieved something of a cult status. Among the ways it was used in real-life included being a "physic" in heavily advertised products from toothpaste to chocolate to impotency cures. Below (Figure 9) is just a sample[16] of the products:

Figure 9 - Radium Health and Beauty Products

(Image courtesy of Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Museum Collection)

Stone's 1929 story, however, would be among the last to use radium in such a role. A tragedy had been slowly building since 1917, when clock manufacturers began using radium for "glow in the dark" dial faces. The women workers who applied the radioactive substance used small camel hair paintbrushes. Even as radium laboratory workers were wearing protective clothing and taking other precautions, the factory women were being encouraged to use their lips and tongue to moisten and shape their brushes after dipping them in that same radium.[17] The first of the lawsuits brought by the dying women was filed in 1927 and soon newspapers were filled with gruesome stories and grisly photographs. A legal settlement was reached in mid-1928, and Surgeon General Hugh Cumming of the U.S. Public Health Service would convene a high level public conference on December 20, 1928, to draw attention to the need for radium factory safety standards. Radium—once touted as an ingestible cure-all—had been revealed to be a dangerous poison, and it quickly disappeared from SF.

John W. Campbell took over as editor of Astounding in 1937 and soon significantly changed science fiction. He rejected stories with what he considered bogus science, and demanded that authors have scientists act like scientists and engineers act like engineers. Many established writers found themselves unable to sell anything to Campbell (now the science fiction standard setter).[18] In particular, romance stories in SF settings[19] were often no longer saleable. One of the casualties was reportedly Leslie Stone, when Campbell rejected her “Death Dallies Awhile." Though she did eventually sell it to Weird Tales, Stone would publish only one other story ("Gravity Off!" in Future Fiction, 1940).[20]

New women authors appeared, including Leigh Brackett, Judith Merril, and Katherine MacLean. Many of them had backgrounds that helped them fit their stories into the changed marketplace. Brackett not only wrote SF, but also wrote mysteries and screen plays. Among her many credits were The Big Sleep (with William Faulkner and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall), Rio Bravo (starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, and Ricky Nelson), and The Empire Strikes Back. Merril was a member of the famous SF fan and author group, the "Futurians." She would later marry one of them, SF author (and future member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame) Frederik Pohl. MacLean did postgraduate work in psychology and worked as a quality control technician in a food factory, both of which helped her apply soft sciences to hard SF.

In the years leading up to World War II, women remained prominent in nuclear science. One of these was Marie Curie's daughter who had helped her mother with the X-ray ambulances in World War I. Now married, Irène Joliot-Curie was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work in natural and artificial radioactivity including the study of polonium, which her mother had discovered. Austrian-born nuclear physicist Lise Meitner also operated hospital X-ray equipment during World War I. She did not win the Nobel Prize, but should have. She faced both the same gender bias as did Marie Curie (her first Nobel Prize was almost awarded solely to her husband despite it being primarily her work until he threatened to decline it), but additional biases as well.[21] The result was Meitner's long-time collaborator Otto Hahn was alone awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission. Praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie," Meitner's case was deemed by a 1997 Physics Today study to be "a rare instance in which personal negative opinions apparently led to the exclusion of a deserving scientist."

During World War II, the U.S. created an entirely new group of "Radium Girls." Part of the massive Manhattan Project was the transformation of sixty thousand acres of Tennessee farmland into what is now known as Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Seventy-five thousand people would inhabit a city dug out of pastures and fields and work in the numerous laboratories and production facilities, and a great number of them were women (Figure 10). Many of their jobs were clerical, but many others were technical, including operating highly advanced scientific equipment like mass spectrometer calutrons (Figure 11) for enriching uranium.[22]

Figure 10 - Shift Change at WWII Oak Ridge

(National Archives, public domain)

Figure 11 - Calutron Operators

(National Archives, public domain)

A new SF genre of sorts had begun with the creation of Superman in 1938, whose backstory was that he had escaped to Earth as a child from the planet Krypton before it was destroyed, and who gained various superpowers due to his extra-terrestrial origin. Other superheroes soon followed, with powers gained by science experiments, inventions, or other methods. Months before the United States entered World War II, the fight against the Nazis had already been taken up by many of those same comics superheroes.

Just as the Manhattan Project brought large numbers of women into the real-life fight against the Axis powers, so too did superhero comics bring more women into the war in fiction. Debuting in August 1941 were at least six such female superheroes. "The Black Cat" was a starlet who used agility powers to break up a Nazi spy ring. "Phantom Lady" was a senator's daughter who used a secret invention to stop political assassination intended to cause political strife on the eve of war. "Wildfire" used her flame powers to stop saboteurs. "Pat Patriot" foiled an operation that was stealing airplane motors and sending them to the Axis powers. "Nelvana of the Northern Lights" was an Inuit character who used super powers to fight super-powered Nazis in Canada. "Miss America" fought anti-democratic forces.

Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the U.S. into World war II only increased the tempo. "Wonder Woman" was created in December 1941 and joined the male superheroes in fighting the Axis. The original "Black Widow" character had been an occult anti-hero but now she, too, turned her attention to fighting Nazis. "Invisible Scarlet O'Neil" was a scientist's daughter who had gained an invisibility power. Her early adventures had been to save children but, once the U.S. was at war, she faced Nazi spies. "Liberty Belle" and "Miss Victory" also soon joined the patriotic fight against the Axis. "Miss Victory" merits a special note, because her alter ego was initially a stenographer but was rewritten to be a woman scientist.

After the war ended, the number of woman scientists grew rapidly in both real life and popular SF, as the wartime and post-war expansions in science curricula and facilities meant more opportunities. The author's own mother-in-law is just one example; June Oakley graduated in 1948 with degrees in math and physics, and went to work at The Franklin Institute's Biochemical Foundation and did research using its cyclotron (the first built outside of Berkley). She retired after a long career that included researcher, physics teacher, math teacher, and vice-principal.[23] Women authors like C. L. Moore and Andre Norton stepped up their output (the latter alone would publish at least fifteen SF novels in the 1950s). Woman characters also came increasingly to the fore. One example is Isaac Asimov's Dr. Susan Calvin—"robopsychologist"—who had been introduced as a character just months before the Pearl Harbor attack. Dr. Calvin did not appear in print again until the war ended, but she then essentially took over that story and all of subsequent Asimov's robot stories of that type.

As science became increasingly accessible in schools and facilities, so did interest in writing and reading SF. The 1960s saw authors such as Anne McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Ursula Le Guin all become prolific with more female characters. Each decade since has seen more women join their ranks, including Octavia Butler, Jo Walton, Connie Willis, and Lois McMaster Bujold. Scientists such as Catherine Asaro (herself the daughter of nuclear chemist) have ensured that even the hardest of hard SF features women authors.

"Radium Girls" took a startlingly different turn in 1964 with the publication in France of "Madame Atomos" (by André Caroff, pseudonym of André Carpouzis). In that story, the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki also killed Kanoto Yoshimuta's family, driving the middle-aged scientist to adopt her new name and seek vengeance on the United States. For eighteen novels (see Figures 12 and 13 for two examples), Mdm. Atomos launched an startling variety of attacks using radioactive zombies, giant mutated spiders, freeze rays, nuclear weapons, and more.[24]

Figure 12 - La Sinistre Madame Atomos

Figure 13 - The Terror of Madame Atomos

(Images courtesy of Black Coat Press:http://www.blackcoatpress.com/)

Shortly before Mdm. Atomos reached print in France, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova reached outer space! She was the first woman to do so and her three day June 1963 mission included forty-eight Earth orbits. Although she had been selected mostly based on her skydiving experience, she later went on to gain degrees in engineering. Her career has an interesting parallel in fiction with Jocelyn Peabody from the British Dan Dare comic strip that was running while Ms. Tereshkova was in space. In that strip (which ran from 1950 to 1967) Peabody was a problem-solving professor, but she would later become the spaceship's chief engineer.[25]

Women as engineers aboard fusion or anti-matter powered spaceships have become far more common in SF. The Star Trek "universe" alone has several, including B'Elanna Torres (chief engineer of Voyager), Sonya Gomez (junior engineer aboard Captain Picard's Enterprise and captain of da Vinci in later novels), and Leah Brahms (warp drive design engineer and author of engineering manuals for Picard's Enterprise).

Star Trek canon suggests that Brahms may not have gotten full credit for her early work[26], a theme that shows up elsewhere, as well. For example, Norma Cenva was introduced in God Emperor of Dune (1981) as having designed the first space-folding ships but having never gotten the credit for it. Even Kaywinnet Lee Frye ("Kaylee") of the Firefly series initially did not get credit as an engineer. It was only after Serenity's captain realized that it was "Kaylee" who was able to fix the engines—and not the titular-engineer who kept her as a lover—that she got the credit (and the job, with the other booted off the ship!). Remembering that similar gender discrimination nearly caused Marie Curie not to receive her first Nobel Prize and helped cause Lise Meitner not to receive one at all, this is an understandable but lamentable reprise of history.

Marie Curie did get her initial Nobel Prize, however, because her husband refused to tolerate gender discrimination. This action also has a happy reprise in real life. The movie Real Genius (1985) included a brilliant female character named "Jordan" who kept up with the boy geniuses, did not conform to any feminine stereotype, rescued others, was nice, and still ended up as the romantic interest. "Jordan" was somewhat patterned after Phyllis Rostykus, a Caltech engineering student who had been interviewed by the movie director and producers. Ms. Rostykus recounted that during her career the small company she and her engineer husband worked for was bought and the new owner attempted to fire her. His decision was based on his personal experience of engineers getting their wives paychecks without the wives actually doing the work. The entire engineering team stood up for her, telling the new owner that she had one-third of the entire system in her head and that they would resign if she were fired. She kept her job, and has recently stated that she felt she had been supported by male teachers, co-workers, and managers all her life who held her to the same standards as they did males.

Our society may have more progress to make in the area of gender discrimination, but Rostykus' experience shows how far we have come. Witness this excerpt from Harriet Brooks' 1907 resignation letter to the Dean of Barnard College:

“I think it is a duty I owe to my profession and to my sex to show that a woman has a right to the practice of her profession and cannot be condemned to abandon it merely because she marries. I cannot conceive how women’s colleges, inviting and encouraging women to enter professions can be justly founded or maintained denying such a principle.”[27]

In conclusion, women have been important in the nuclear field since its very beginning, and remain prominent, as evidenced by the fact that the current senior President-nominated, U.S. Senate-approved NRC Commissioner is Kristine Svinicki (the author's former boss!). Women scientists abound in science fiction today, from authors like Catharine Asaro, to cartoon inventor genius Gadget Hackwrench, to television geniuses "Abby" Sciuto (forensic scientist in NCIS series), Dr. Temperance Brennan (forensic anthropologist in Bones series), and Amy Farrah Fowler (neuroscientist in The Big Bang Theory series). Most fittingly, the actress who portrays neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler is Mayim Chaya Bialik, who is also a neuroscientist in real life.

Footnotes:

1 From Dr. Jackson's USNRC official biography: "She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1968 and a Ph.D. in the field of theoretical elementary particle physics in 1973, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "The complete document can be found here: http://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/organization/commission/former-commissioners/jackson.html↩

2 From Ms. Dicus' USNRC official biography: "Ms. Dicus conducted research in radiation health effects at Harvard Medical School, Rice University, and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School." The complete document can be found here: http://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/organization/commission/former-commissioners/dicus.html↩

3 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Jane Wells Webb, respectively. Shelly wrote at least one more SF novel—The Last Man (1826). Webb wrote her only SF novel as a near-penniless, single teenager. Editor John Claudius Loudon was so impressed by the story that he tracked down the author. He was surprised to learn the author was a woman, and the two married a year later. The result is that the author of The Mummy! is often listed as "Jane C. Loudon," even though that was not her legal name when she published it.↩

4 The Royal Society was founded in 1660 but did not allow women to become fellows until 1945, though apparently an exception was made for Queen Victoria.↩

5 Women's schools in Britain began to increase in size and educational scope in the late 1840s with the founding of Queen's College and Bedford College. The Education Acts of 1870 and 1876 made the education of girls compulsory. By the 1890s some universities, including the University of London and Victoria University in Manchester, were granting women degrees.↩

6 First published as The Syren of the Skies in Pearson's Magazine. Fred T. Jane was the illustrator, and his aerial warships clearly foreshadow the dreadnoughts he would soon draw in his All the World's Warships (more commonly known as Jane's Fighting Ships). See: https://www.lwcurrey.com/pages/books/143268/george-griffith-george-chetwynd-griffith-jones/olga-romanoff-or-the-syren-of-the-skies-a-sequel-to-the-angel-of-the-revolution↩

7 Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith began writing at age seventeen and would produce over three hundred stories, some with male coauthors. She was most well known for her children's literature, but also wrote mysteries, religious stories, romances, and historical novels. Robert Eustace was also a pseudonym, for Eustace Robert Barton.↩

8 A case might also be made that American author Mary Griffith was first, as her "Three Hundred Years Hence" was published in 1836. In that story, a key part of the far future society is an energy source credited to a woman. It is unclear, however, just what part the woman (she is not named in the story) played. She could have researched it as a scientist, created it as an inventor, or simply found something in a hole in her backyard! The only attribution is the line, "The world owes this blessed invention to a female!" See: http://www.lwcurrey.com/pages/books/137123/l-t-meade-eustace-robert-barton-elizabeth-thomasina-meade-smith-robert-eustace/the-brotherhood-of-the-seven-kings↩

9 In that tale, the injured narrator inadvertently gains enormous strength from exposure a new element ("stellarite"), much the same way many superheroes like Spiderman, Flash, and the Hulk would gain their powers many decades later. Thus, Bennett's piece might be the first superhero "origins" story! Bennett also published one of the very early dystopian future novels with her 1919 The Heads of Cerberus, in which anyone who breathes in the fumes of a phial is transported two hundred years into the future to a dark and totalitarian Philadelphia.↩

10 Almost all of Harris' approximately a dozen stories have been reprinted multiple times. Writer and editor Richard Lupoff has been quoted as saying that Harris' 1928 "Miracle of the Lily" would have "won the Hugo Award for best short story, if the award had existed then."↩

11 Linus Pauling is the only other person to win two Nobel Prizes. However, only one of his was in the sciences (Chemistry, 1954). The other was the Peace Prize (1962) for his peace activism.↩

12 This precise form of radiation was originally called "radium emanation"—a phrase coined by Harriet Brooks in 1902 in letters to Ernest Rutherford. Brooks, the first Canadian female nuclear physicist, was then a young research assistant and was unaware that Madame Curie had used the term "emissions" for similar phenomena. Rutherford adopted Brooks' term and consequently both competing terms saw extensive use and can still be found in period texts. See the Rutherford Museum image here: http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/museum/emanations.htm Brooks would become a classic example of the gender discrimination so common in that age when, upon her engagement four years later, she was told by the Barnard College Dean that she would have to resign her post there.↩

13 See: http://theinstitute.ieee.org/tech-history/technology-history/how-marie-curie-helped-save-a-million-soldiers-during-world-war-i and http://livebooklet.com/publish.php?wpKey=VeVPXuUMAOL0q0gde1vi1D↩

14 Several of the early works, like Man's Rights (1870, by Annie Denton Cridge) and Herland (1915, Charlotte Perkins Gilman), involve all-female societies who reproduce by parthenogenesis.↩

15 Leslie Stone was a pseudonym of Leslie F. Silberberg (born Leslie F. Rubenstein).↩

16 Additional products and their histories can be found at: http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/quackcures.htm↩

17 One excellent source is Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935, by Claudia Clark, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 1997.↩

18 Isaac Asimov wrote, "the carnage was as great as it had been in Hollywood a decade before, while silent movies had given way to the talkies" ("Introduction: The Father of Science Fiction," in Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology (1973), edited by Harry Harrison).↩

19 This SF subgenre had become known as "Planetary Romance." The pulp romance adventures previously set in exotic "lost world" settings of "darkest" Africa or the Far East that had been so popular in the 19th Century had simply shifted their locales to other planets such as Mars or Venus. Similarly, indigenous natives had become aliens or other-world humans. Some of these stories, like the swashbuckling Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, continued to sell hugely and have endured, but most others did not.↩

20 Although Stone recounted that Campbell gave her a curt rejection in person in 1938, some of the dates may not quite line up, as the Weird Tales publication date is just a few months after Campbell's Astounding rejection date. Given the lag times between acceptance and print publications, it might have already been accepted when she said she met with Campbell.↩

21 Lise Meitner received many other awards throughout her lifetime, including Leibniz Medal by the Berlin Academy of Sciences and the Max Planck Medal. After the Anschluss in March 1938, Nazi anti-Semitism forced her to flee first to the Netherlands and then to Sweden during the fission research efforts, leaving her able to continue to contribute only by calculations and correspondence. Many scholars who have studied the records of the Nobel Committee records have proclaimed Meitner's exclusion to be a miscarriage of justice.↩

22 For a wonderfully readable account of these women, read The Girls of Atomic City, by Denise Kiernan (2013). One of the anecdotes Kiernan relates is how high school educated women calutron operators outperformed highly trained and better educated male technicians, because the men had less patience and kept trying to tweak the equipment to improve performance (and failing).↩

23 June Oakley Bertram currently resides in Virginia with her husband, Jack Bertram, who was recently awarded the French Legion of Honor for his wartime service that included thirty-six missions as a B-17 pilot over France and Germany.↩

24 All of the Madame Atomos stories are now available in English as translated by Brian Stableford (Volume 1) and Michael Shreve (Volumes 2 - 10) at: http://www.blackcoatpress.com/e-books-madame-atomos-1-1-the-sinister-madame-atomos.html#63b45f62be7a5c9dfa850295c6fd5ccd and http://www.blackcoatpress.com/e-books-madame-atomos-1-2-the-terror-of-madame-atomos.html#dac76fecb265941e76dc9e6dcc9cc748↩

25 Peabody's role change was part of the recasting done when the series was rebooted for television in 2002.↩

26 One source: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Leah_Brahms↩

27 Harriet Brooks: Pioneer Nuclear Scientist, Mcgill-Queens University Press, 1992.↩

Dark Matter of the Human Genome

by Dan Koboldt

Since the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2001, we've uncovered a great deal about the so-called Book of Life. The completed (draft) sequence of the human genome represents one of the foremost scientific achievements of our time. It also raised just as many questions as it did answers. Perhaps the most-debated of these was simply, where did all the genes go?

Disappearing Genes

In the 1990s, around when the HGP was first getting under way, scientists estimated that our genome might contain as many as 100,000 protein-coding genes. They derived this number from early surveys of “expressed sequences” (RNA transcripts) isolated from different organs and tissues. Over time, as technologies improved, the estimated number of human genes moved ever downward. In 2000, most estimates were below 50,000. A year later, the HGP published its landmark findings, which included their prediction of up to 40,000 protein-coding genes.

After three years of detailed “finishing” work, a much-improved draft of the human genome was released in 2004. With it came a new estimate: 20,000 to 25,000 protein-coding genes. Now, in 2016, the most popular view favors an estimate at the low end: 19,950 protein-coding genes.

Figure 1. Number of predicted human protein-coding genes by year, 1995-2016.

Adapted from M. Pertea and S.L. Salzberg, Genome Biology 2010;11(5):206..

This modest number of genes surprised many scientists, particularly because we’ve sequenced the genomes of many other organisms that have more than 20,000 genes. As Pertea and Salzberg wrote in a wonderful 2007 review, the current gene count puts humans “between chicken and grape.”

Figure 2. Gene counts in a variety of species (M. Pertea and S.L. Salzberg, Genome Biology 2010;11(5):206.).

Although the number of genes surprised many, the completion of the HGP shed light on a deeper and more troubling fact: the human genome encompasses 3.2 billion base pairs—equivalent to 1,600 copies of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy—and scientists had little idea what most of it does.

The Genome’s Dark Matter

Around 35 million bases in our genome encode known proteins. That seems like a lot, but remember, the genome itself is 3.2 billion base pairs. All of the coding bases combined represent around 1% of the total. We certainly don’t understand the functions of all human genes, but at a minimum, we can say that the function of coding bases is to make proteins. The function of the other 99%—the “dark matter” of the human genome—is less obvious.

We know that some of it is functional, too. If you compare the sequence of the human genome to that of other vertebrates (mouse, rat, bird, etc), around 5-10% of the sequences are “evolutionarily conserved,” meaning that they’re >90% identical in species that diverged from one another millions of years ago. This suggests that they serve some vital purpose; otherwise, the process of random mutation and genetic drift would have altered them long ago.

In 2004, researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, reported almost 500 regions of our genome that were 100% identical between human, mouse, and rat. Many of them were millions of base pairs long, and located in regions of the genome that don’t have any known protein-coding genes. For three years, there was a lot of excitement (in the research community, at least) about these “ultra-conserved elements” and what their vital function might be. In 2007, however, a follow-up study found that gene knockouts of four ultra-conserved elements in mice still produced viable offspring that were otherwise healthy.

Nevertheless, the fact that evolutionary pressures have maintained many noncoding sequences in distantly related species suggests that they play an important role. This, along with a surprisingly modest number of human protein-coding genes, would suggest that noncoding parts of the genome regulate the coding part, thereby giving rise to the complex organism that we claim to be. For the last fifteen years, genomic scientists have worked to understand the nature of that regulation. Shedding light on the dark matter, as it were.

Regulatory Elements

In 2003, the NIH funded an ambitious effort to identify regulatory elements of the genome and figure out what they do. The ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project consortium used a variety of new genomic technologies to interrogate DNA from various tissue types, with the goal of capturing regulatory machinery in action. They sequenced RNA transcripts (an indicator of which parts of the genome are being transcribed), searched for DNA-protein interactions, measured “epigenetic” alterations, like methylation of cytosine, etc.

So what have ENCODE and other research groups uncovered in the dark matter of the human genome? All kinds of interesting things. Perhaps the most famous of these was the phenomenon of widespread transcription, in which RNA polymerase enzymes copy a DNA sequence into its complementary RNA form. In high school biology, you probably learned about three types of RNA:

- Ribosomal RNA (rRNA), which aids in protein synthesis as a component of ribosomes, A.K.A. the protein factories of a cell.

- Transfer RNA (tRNA), which transports amino acids to the ribosome so that they can be incorporated into proteins.

- Messenger RNA (mRNA), which is transcribed in the nucleus and provides the template for building those proteins.

Previously, scientists expected that most of the RNA molecules in a cell were messenger RNAs that originated from genes. Surprisingly, the ENCODE project revealed that transcription was happening all over the place. Around 70% of the human genome produces RNA at some point in some cell type. Most of these RNAs are not classic ribosomal, transfer, or messenger RNAs, but likely perform a different kind of regulatory function.

MicroRNAs, for example, are short (18-24 nucleotide) sequences that participate in a process called RNA silencing. The first of these was discovered in the 1990s, but it took years for us to recognize their importance in cell function. MicroRNA genes encode a somewhat longer precursor molecule of about 80-100 nucleotides with a palindromic sequence that causes it to fold back on itself in a hairpinlike structure. These are recognized and cleaved by Argonaute proteins, which use the microRNA sequence to attach to complementary sequences in messenger RNAs to prevent their translation into amino acids. In other words, microRNAs “silence” specific mRNAs before they can make proteins.

The behavior of microRNAs helped explain a strange phenomenon called RNA interference, in which the injection of double-stranded RNA into a cell causes suppression of messenger RNAs that have a corresponding sequence. It only takes a few molecules of double-stranded RNA to trigger complete suppression of the target mRNA, no matter how many copies the cell makes. Furthermore, the suppressive effect can spread between cells. RNA interference represented a new type of regulation in the cell (post-transcriptional regulation), and the discovery of its underlying mechanism won the Nobel prize in 2006.

Other types of regulatory “dark matter” are not transcribed, but perform their function by binding to specific proteins. In the promoter of most genes, for example, is a certain base sequence (TATAAA) that serves as the binding site for RNA polymerase II—the enzyme that makes messenger RNA from DNA. Noncoding regions also contain binding sites for other regulatory players: transcription factors, which control gene activity, and splicing factors, which ensure that messenger RNA is processed correctly.

Many regions of the genome bind to histone proteins, which package and order DNA so that it can fit into a relatively small space (the nucleus) in an organized fashion. Think of histones as spools around which you wrap a bunch of thread (DNA) to keep it nice and orderly. This packaged DNA is called chromatin, and it generally has two states.

1. Heterochromatin, which is tightly packed, inaccessible to regulatory proteins, and thus not actively producing transcripts.

2. Euchromatin, which is more loosely packed and where most of the action happens.

Heterochromatin is essentially the default state. Open chromatin (euchromatin) requires proteins to bind and protect it from being wrapped up into heterochromatin. Undoubtedly, many noncoding regions of the genome serve to bind these protective proteins, thereby ensuring that nearby genes can be activated as necessary.

The ENCODE Project and other efforts have identified thousands of large genomic regions that actively regulate protein-coding genes. Enhancer regions, for example, are big stretches of noncoding DNA that help drive the activity of certain genes. These regions are believed to have binding sites for transcription factors and other proteins. Often, they are near the genes whose activity they enhance, but they can also be located thousands of base pairs away. Repressors are elements that do the opposite: they prevent genes from being transcribed. Usually, this is accomplished by recruiting proteins that either bind or make chemical modifications to DNA so that it's inaccessible to the transcription machinery.

Structural Elements

Of course, not all of the genome’s 3.2 billion bases can be vitally important. Like the old imperial starships that Rey salvages in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, our genome contains a lot of junk. Around two-thirds of it is highly repetitive, serving little known purpose for biology. In fairness, some of these repetitive regions exist simply as a buffer for more important regions.

For example, at both ends of our chromosomes are special structures called telomeres. These are stretches of a six-letter sequence (TTAGGG, in humans) repeated over and over again. They're essentially disposable bases that shorten over time due to a quirk of DNA replication. At birth, our telomeres are about 11,000 bases long; by old age, they’ve shortened to around 4,000 bases. This gradual shortening occurs because DNA replication machinery can’t copy all the way to the end. It needs a place to hold on, similar to how the slider can’t open the last few teeth on a zipper, without falling off the zipper.

Thus, chromosomes become a little bit shorter every time they’re copied for cell division. The telomeric repeats ensure that they don’t lose anything important. Similarly, there’s a repetitive structure in the middle of the chromosome where sister chromatids (the original chromosome and its freshly-made copy) are connected during cell division. Again, that’s not a place where you want to store the vital genes.

Conclusion

In summary, our genome is a huge, complex thing that we don’t completely understand. The parts that we’ve studied the most—the protein-coding regions—represent just 1% of it. Yet our initial forays into studying the noncoding portions, the “dark matter” of the genome, have shown that they play important roles as well. As technologies continue to improve, we’ll unlock even more secrets about the fundamental code of life.

The only consistent fact about our genome is that the more we study it, the more complicated it becomes. This calls for caution when we consider altering the human genome, which has become increasingly feasible with the development of new genetic engineering technologies like CRISPR/Cas9. Within a decade, I think it’ll be possible to correct a disease-causing mutation in a human embryo to prevent a future genetic disease. But I expect it will be a much longer time—a century, perhaps, before we can engineering a genetically superior human like they do in Gattaca. And once we can, we’ll have to think about whether or not we really should.

Of Dragons and Valkyries: Helicopters in Fiction

by Kacey Ezell

On the night that changed my life, I was smoking a cigar on the old smoking deck at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta. It was DragonCon, so I was naturally wearing an extremely short skirt and knee high boots, because that’s what one does at Dragon.

No? Not everyone? Huh. Weird.

In any case, whether it was the cigar or the short skirt, I quickly found myself talking to a guy who introduced himself as John Ringo. (Actually, I think one of his friends introduced us.) John was “holding court” as he occasionally does at DragonCon. He made a comment about not seeing a lot of women with interest in cigars, and then proceed to tell me about this “goddess” (his word, emphasis not added, it was already there) he’d seen two years prior who had been smoking a cigar and wearing a red leather bikini shaped like demon hands.

At that point, John got very alarmed, because my eyes filled with tears.

“Are you okay?” he asked. His face went a bit pale with concern, if I recall correctly.

I nodded and smiled through my tears.

“That girl?” I asked, still smiling. “Her name was Tammy Archuleta. She was a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Air Force, and my best friend. We went through pilot training together. She was killed in March of 2003 in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. Her fiancé is one of my friends here with me tonight.”

John actually staggered. And sympathized with my loss. And bought me and all of my friends a drink, and spent the rest of the night hanging out and talking with us. As military vets will do, we shared quite a few war stories that night, and on the nights that followed during that con.

In particular, we talked a lot about helicopters. John was fascinated by them. Now, this doesn’t strike me at all as odd, since I talk about helicopters all the time anyway. Because, let’s face it, helicopters are badass. There’s something so intriguing about a machine that can fly low enough to hide behind trees and terrain, can hover over one spot long enough to pluck someone off the side of a mountain cliff, can rain fire and fury down on ground-based threats, and can land and take off from a pad small enough to fit on a rooftop.

So, shortly after John and I met, he e-mailed me to ask a few questions about helicopters and helicopter operations. He was writing the Paladin of Shadows series, and honored me with a tuckerization as Kacey Bathlick, aka Dragon. The “Dragon” moniker is a joke about my childhood ambition to be a dragonrider à la Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, but there’s more to it than that. Because in addition to the character of Kacey “Dragon” Bathlick, John also wrote about another pilot named Tammy Wilson. And her callsign was “Valkyrie.”

To paraphrase Norse mythology, the Valkyries were Odin’s representatives who would visit the fields of battle and escort the fallen warrior spirits home to Odin’s hall, where they would feast until the final battle of Ragnarok. They were sometimes called the “choosers of the slain.”

In writing the two pilots, John juxtaposes two sides of the helicopter “identity,” if you will: that of the “Dragon” or force of destruction, and that of the “Valkyrie,” or force of mercy. In John’s books, Dragon flies a highly modified gunship, which she employs with devastating effect to neutralize a threat in a particular mountain pass. In the meantime, Valkyrie flies the “dustoff” mission, in which she collects the dead and wounded from the battlefield and flies them to where they can be safely treated or mourned. This dichotomy of destructor vs. savior is part of what makes helicopters so interesting to audiences. We can light your world on fire, or we can find you when you’re lost. The story potential is unlimited along that spectrum. Especially when you consider the helicopter as a metaphor for humankind . . . because humans can do those things, too.

Literary metaphors aside, part of John’s concern when writing about helicopters was that he wanted to get it right. To John’s credit, he wants to get most details, particularly about military subjects, right. Considering his target audience, this is a smart move. Few things throw someone out of a story fast enough than a glaring error in the technical details of a profession with which they’re familiar. Aviation in general is a pretty technical profession. Military aviation is more so. Military rotary-wing aviation? Man, we damn near speak a different language. This is far from unique, by the way. Most military technical professions have their own language, and to a certain extent, their own culture. I suspect that it’s the same on the civilian side.

So if you’re going to write about helicopters, how do you get it right?

Well, like John, you ask a lot of questions. But in order to know what to ask, it’s helpful to understand a few basic premises:

1. Helicopters do not “beat the air into submission.” Nor are we “so ugly the earth repels us.” Rotary-wing aerodynamics are based on the same physical principles as fixed-wing aerodynamics. They’re just complicated by the fact that our “wings” spin around. The science is confusing and difficult to understand at first, but it’s out there. It might (or might not, depending on the story) be helpful to understand (or at least be familiar with) it.

Just as with a fixed wing aircraft, a helicopter flies because of the interaction of four basic forces: lift, drag, thrust, and weight. Collectively, these four forces are known as the “Four Aerodynamic Forces.” Personally, I like to add a fifth aerodynamic force: caffeine, but that’s probably just me. In a fixed-wing aircraft, lift is produced by the movement of air across the specifically shaped wing, or airfoil. Helicopter rotors are airfoils, too. Put simply, helicopters can hover because our “wings” are in motion, thus generating lift, even if the body of the aircraft is not. In order to fly or hover, the lift generated by our rotors (I’m not calling them wings anymore. I’m rebelling . . . ) has to be enough to counteract the weight of the helicopter. In order to fly in any particular direction, our thrust (which is also generated by our turning rotors) in that direction must be great enough to counteract the drag, or friction between the air and the helicopter, in that direction. (That’s a gross simplification of drag, but it will do for the purposes of this essay.)

So how do we do that? Basically, we tilt stuff. The higher the angle between an airfoil and the movement of the air current (also known as angle of attack or AOA), the more lift is generated. If we generate more lift to the right side of our turning rotor disc, the lift vector ends up being greater than the lift vector on the opposite side of the disc. The difference between the two becomes a force vector on its own; one which “pulls” the helicopter away from the greater lift vector. So the helicopter turns (or slides, if it’s in a hover) to the left. Again, this is a gross simplification. There’s a lot more going on, aerodynamically speaking, than I’ve got room to relay here. If you’re really interested in understanding these concepts, I highly recommend the FAA’s Helicopter Flying Handbook chapter 2. You can find it here. It has really pretty pictures that explain this much better than I ever could.

2. That brings me to controls. There are a few weirdo exceptions out there, but by and large, helicopter pilots have three interfaces with which to control their aircraft.

1. The cyclic stick, which sits between the pilot’s knees, controls the lateral movement of the aircraft by means of “tilting” the blades on one side or the other as I discussed above.

2. The collective lever, which usually sits on the pilot’s left side, controls the vertical movement of the aircraft by means of tilting the blades collectively, so that the lift vector is increased or decreased across the entire surface of the rotor disc. This results in a climb or descent.

3. The tail rotor or antitorque pedals. Remember Newton’s Third Law? For every force, there is an equal and opposite force? Well, I’m telling you that it takes a lot of force to spin the two twenty-five foot long rotor blades that keep my Huey in the air. And the equal and opposite force would twirl me like a ball on a string if not for the grace of Igor Sikorsky and his invention of the antitorque tail rotor. Basically, my tail rotor is another rotor that has one job: it produces a lift force that is applied sideways to the tail of my aircraft. This force counterbalances the “equal and opposite” coming from my main rotor, and allows me to keep my nose straight. A fun feature of this design is that I can, by changing the AOA of my tail rotor blades, change the magnitude of the antitorque lift vector and twist my nose from side to side -- thus controlling my yaw. I change the angle of my tail rotor AOA by use of my tail rotor pedals. Step on the right pedal, my nose goes to the right. Step on the left, it goes to the left. (Note: that’s the way it works for Hueys and all Western-designed aircraft. The Soviet designed Mi-17 I flew in Iraq was the opposite, because the main rotor blades turned the other way.)

3. As you see from my discussion so far, not every model of helicopter is the same. I’m currently qualified to fly the UH-1N Twin Huey. This is not the same Huey as you see in old Vietnam movies. For one thing, I have two engines. Does that mean that I couldn’t fly an old-school F- or H-model Huey? No. I probably could fly it. I might not, however, be able to start it. Starting any aircraft (but particularly a helicopter) is worlds more complicated than starting a car. (Which is one reason why it’s a lot harder to steal a helicopter than it is to steal a car.) And that’s just talking about different models of the same helicopter that I already fly! If I were in the back of a Chinook and both pilots suddenly had simultaneous heart attacks, could I safely fly the Chinook? Well, if I had time to get to the controls, I promise you that I could safely get the aircraft to the site of the crash. There might even be some survivors. Maybe. Helicopters aren’t even close to standardized.

1. Fixed wing flying is roughly eighty percent science and twenty percent art. Helicopter flying, particularly hovering, is more like fifty-fifty. It takes time and practice to be able to hover a helicopter without spinning wildly out of control and crashing. Some newer helicopters have state-of-the-art hover augmentation systems that will assist, but you’re still not going to have someone walk in off the street, get a couple of hours of instruction, and be a competent helicopter pilot. It just takes longer than that to get the appropriate muscle memory locked in.

2. Helicopter flying is hard work. I’m literally using both hands and both feet on separate control surfaces to keep my aircraft in coordinated flight. Unlike in a fixed-wing airplane, I can’t take my hands off the controls to get a drink or something. Not unless I have someone else to take the controls for me. Again, newer helicopters sometimes have some kind of autopilot system, but our methods of control are just so much more complicated than that of a fixed-wing platform that by and large, what I’m telling you is true across most of the board. My autopilot’s name is “copilot.”

3. Helicopters don’t have propellers. We have rotors. Admittedly, this is queep, but you wouldn’t believe how often I see this. A rotor is a lifting surface, not just a means of generating thrust. If you’re going to write about helicopters, please don’t make this mistake. You’ll alienate every helicopter pilot in your audience. Oh, and also . . . a chopper? That’s a motorcycle. We fly helicopters.

4. Contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, helicopters, particularly military helicopters, are actually fairly robust. In other words, a single small arms round is highly unlikely to cause an aircraft to burst into flame and explode. Could it happen? Maybe. Depends on the round and the helicopter. But if you’re writing about small arms vs. helicopters and you need to make the helicopter crash, your best bet is to shoot the pilots.

There are many, many more ways in which fiction uses and abuses helicopters, but my intent is to give you some things to think about when writing (or reading) about helicopters. If nothing else, these principles should at least help you frame some questions for better targeted research.

The other piece to writing about helicopters is writing about helicopter crews. Anyone who’s interacted with aircrew in the military can tell you that we’re a subculture unto ourselves. That subculture is further divided according to our specific platform or weapon system. Helicopter aircrews (and I include civilian crews in this, because most civilian helicopter pilots are, or were, taught by military or military veteran pilots) are often stereotyped as being a little bit crazy. Flying is inherently risky. Helicopter flying is more so. Helicopter aircrews are trained to assess and mitigate risk to the max extent possible while still getting the job done. Sometimes, that means accepting a high degree of risk, simply because the mission dictates demand it. Does that mean that we’re all clones of H.M. Murdock from the 1980s action series The A-Team? Not at all, (although that would be awesome!) but the idea of accepting risk when the mission demands it may help you to form the character of your fictional crews. You may wish to google “Harry Reasoner’s Helicopter Pilots Are Different” for a further illustration of this idea. Or just go here.

Similarly, if you’re writing about helicopter crews, you should understand that flying with someone creates a bond and requires a high degree of trust. John alluded to that in Unto the Breach, when he showed us the extent of Dragon’s anger at her crew chief’s death. In the air, we keep each other alive as much as infantrymen fighting side by side do. Neglecting that depth of connection can lead to the character coming across as inauthentic, even if the characters are not, themselves, military.

Whether savior or destroyer, Dragon or Valkyrie, helicopters and those who fly them occupy a niche role in our imaginations. This is probably fair, as they occupy a niche role in real world operations, too. No other platform can do everything that a helicopter can, and that makes them perfect for use in fiction. There is an inherent drama in the idea of flying through the night to rescue a lost hiker, or taking to the skies to destroy those who would do us harm. And as I said before, helicopters are just inherently badass. But in fiction, they’re even more badass when they’re done right.

Homo Stellaris: Becoming the People of the Stars

by Robert E. Hampson, Ph.D.

At the end of February, beginning of March 2016, the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop 2016 Symposium was held at the Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel in Chattanooga, Tennessee. TVIW (pronounced "tee-view") holds symposia roughly every eighteen months and rotates locations throughout the Tennessee Valley, from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to Huntsville, Alabama. Recent symposia have featured working tracks that allow participants several hours to discuss problems that need to be solved before the Human Race is ready to take a leap to interstellar exploration and colonization. For 2016, I was privileged to lead the “Homo Stellaris” working track which discussed the physiological, sociological and psychological adaptation that humans may undergo to sustain a dream of going to the stars. This article includes a report of that working track. That’s followed by a more free-form discussion of the main space-based hazards to human life, some adaptations that may be necessary to facilitate space travel, and the author’s reflection on how science fiction participates in the conceptualization—and even the implementation—of many of these concepts.

Homo Stellaris Report, TVIW 2016.

One of the charges presented to the Homo Stellaris working track was the formation of a synergy group of select participants who would combine the various discussions of biological, psychological, social and political adaptations of humans necessary to support interstellar exploration and colonization. One of the first conclusions of the synergy group was that many of the adaptations would be mission-specific. In particular, exploratory missions that do not result in colonization would have different adaptations than establishing colonies. Thus, exploratory crews would have to concentrate on adapting humans to space conditions—low gravity, low atmospheric pressure, confinement, isolation, small crew military or mission-oriented social structure, well-defined mission objectives. In contrast, colonists would need to adapt to a specific planetary environment, community-based social structure, a growing population and high flexibility in tasks and goals supporting colony growth.

More important, however, was a key conclusion of the synergy group—that human engineering should be naturally and organically evolved rather than imposed externally. Thus, rather than imposing these changes on a group of interstellar explorers and colonists, humanity as a whole needs to practice these changes via a vibrant, self-sustaining space culture with a multigenerational presence at least out to the orbit of Jupiter before mission design can enter the serious phase. This is both for purposes of handling the inevitable tech advancements that must be achieved to create and sustain this, and for adapting to social structures intrinsic to off-Earth permanent habitation to have evolved on their own.

Local Proving Ground

One of the assumptions of the synergy group was that the physiological issues of long-duration space missions would already be solved prior to launching an interstellar mission. One means of ensuring that humans adapt to space is to get out and live there! However, this also assumes that psychological and sociological adaptations to long-duration existence in space have also evolved naturally along with many of the technological precursors for the mission. Unfortunately, this is by no means guaranteed, and there we humans must be prepared for failures—of habitat, of health, and of isolated social groups—along the way.

On the other hand, multigenerational isolated community missions (i.e. colonization) represent a social engineering challenge that cannot be adequately duplicated by a strictly Solar System-based civilization. The Homo Stellaris group was charged with projecting the factors necessary for anticipated missions one hundred years in advance of the present. However, the synergy group felt that even one hundred years (assuming that we could launch a space-based society today), was not sufficient time to prove that any reasonable social framework based on current political models would be viable for a colony totally isolated from Earth. In other words, even with a vibrant Solar System society, experimenting with asteroid vs. space-station, stationary vs. nomadic, even totally isolated worldships, different colony proofs-of-concept can only be partially examined.

So the social structure of an interstellar colony constitutes a major mission risk even assuming that the challenges of propulsion and life prolongation have already been solved. To offset this risk, small crew exploratory missions would probably be better, even to the extent of allowing the crew to procreate once the initial mission objectives are completed. The added benefit would be that a small colony seed would have positive effect on the crew as well as the home (Earth) population of potential colonists.

Worldships and Generation Ships

Readers will note that the above discussion omits multigenerational ships (i.e. slow interstellar craft in which the crew is renewed via procreation during the transit) and worldships (essentially sealed colonies with a space drive). There were two reasons for this omission, first is that there was a separate working track at TVIW 2016 that was specifically charged with developing ideas for worldships. The second, and in this context, more relevant reason is that the very concept of Worldships is antithetical to interstellar colonization.

It may very well be the case that a natural component of Solar System colonization will be to build structures (or hollowed-out asteroids) which contain complete biospheres. Such a closed-loop life system will be self-sustaining, and can support humans as a compromise between wholly planet-based vs. ship or station-based lifestyles. A worldship may serve as a larger, more robust space station or may constitute a stand-alone colony in its own right.

Worldships are an end in and of themselves. If the biosphere will be viable for the projected duration of the mission, then it will most likely be viable well in excess of the mission timeline. A worldship is a colony. Once established, attaching engines or even an interstellar drive to a worldship may provide mobility, but to what end? Why send it to another star system? If it is merely a vessel to transport colony and crew, what is the guarantee that they will want to leave the habitat once the destination is reached? Certainly a worldship can be designed to last only for the duration of transit, but that requires several dangerous assumptions, mainly, that the design life is accurate and critical systems will not fail prior to reaching destination. Modern engineering is not so perfect that humanity can guarantee zero defects prior to the planned date of obsolescence.

No, worldships are not transport vessels. They are, however, important colony practice environments. The more experience we gain from engineering biospheres and ecosystems (not to mention self-contained communities), the better prepared we will be for dealing with new planetary environments.

Adapting Humans

Given a direction away from multigenerational ships, the synergy group felt that emphasis should be places on the desirability of gene selection that would extend life, provide greater intrinsic biological space radiation, and optimize the human body for a lower gravity regimen. A robust space-based society will likely already seek these genetic developments through multiple-generation communities off Earth. This also points back to the advantage of allowing space communities within the Solar System to be fundamental breeding and proving grounds for the crew composition and colony population.

In addition to intrinsic physical life extension and robustness in deep space, interstellar exploration will most likely require some form of cryogenic suspension. While such medical technology is still science fiction, advances in surgical techniques, unexplored opportunities resident in what has been called junk DNA, and lessons learned from vertebrate animals which can successfully survive 0°C temperatures without damage to cells caused by the formation of ice crystals. Thus, an optimal scenario might be one in which a crew splits into shifts such that half would be in cryogenic suspension at a time. Cycling crew in and out of hibernation would allow for sufficient crew on-watch to deal with both routine and emergency situations at any given point in the mission. Number and composition of these shifts will rely heavily on lessons learned from submarine crews, space habitat simulations (such as Antarctic bases, HI-SEAS and MARS 500), and practice in the form of future Solar System-based habitats.

Between increased lifespan, and deferred per person mission activity equal to only twenty-five to fifty percent of the total mission, great-than-fifty-year mission times would reduce the subjective passage of time to scenarios with comparatively low social engineering requirements compared to generational or world ships. As an added advantage, the percentage of the spacecraft (and colonization materials) devoted to life-support can be reduced accordingly. To further extend those resources, the synergy group suggested that smaller-scale automated cargo probes could be launched ahead of the main mission enabling rendezvous and resupply at key navigational waypoints for the crewed mission. These probes would constitute additional proof-of-concept for mission engineering as well as progressively more advanced survey and reconnaissance of target systems.

Mission Targets

The Homo Stellaris working track was additionally tasked with describing an interstellar mission based on their discussions—assuming conventional space drives (based on known physics), necessary precursors for a space-based society, and the societal will to undertake such a mission.

The track discussion concluded with a recommendation for selecting of initial target systems at the shortest possible range of not beyond eighteen to twenty light-years. Assuming about one hundred years to develop the technology for continuous thrust (allowing final velocities approaching single-digit percentages, i.e. one to nine percent of light-speed); the newly discovered rocky planet at Proxima Centauri B is only about forty to fifty years away. More likely candidate worlds for exploration such as Wolf 1061, Gliese 876, Gliese 682 and Gliese 832 would be around 150 years away. Superior drive performance and improvements in life-prolongation would allow further distance coupled to reduction of mission time, and simplification in mission logistics. Such a mission may very well be within our reach in the next century as long as we solve the problems of how to transfer Homo sapiens into Homo Stellaris.

[Acknowledgement for this report: I would like to thank Dr. Charles E. Gannon, Sarah A. Hoyt, Connie Trieber, Chris Oakley and Doug Loss for their contributions to the Homo Stellaris Synergy Report from TVIW 2016. In addition, I greatly appreciate the assistance of Philip Wohlrab, Cathe Smith and Sandra Medlock for moderating and facilitating the discussions of the Homo Stellaris working track. For more information about the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, and the TVIW 2017 Symposium, please visit http://www.tviw.us.]

Now onward to further discussion . . .

Adapting Humans to Space

Before any consideration of whether to adapt humans to new environments or adapt those environments to better suit humans, we need to examine just what the conditions, and particularly the hazards, are that would require adaptation. NASA's Human Research Roadmap currently identifies 33 identified risks—"Risks include physiological and performance effects from hazards such as radiation, altered gravity, and hostile environments, as well as unique challenges in medical support, human factors, and behavioral health support"—and 317 gaps in current scientific knowledge—"Gaps represent the critical questions that need to be answered to mitigate a risk and therefore serve to focus the areas of research work to address risk reduction milestones."

Thirty-three human "risks" associated with long-duration space habitation and exploration as listed by the NASA Human Research Roadmap here. Table by R. Hampson, ISS image © 2016 by nerthuz, licensed from Shutterstock.

Note that in the table shown above, the risks are currently grouped into four main areas:

- Altered Gravity Field

- Radiation

- Distance from Earth

- Hostile/Closed Environment (includes spacecraft and habitat)

Altered Gravity

Some of these risks are rather obvious—such as gravity. In the absence of a 1G gravity field, fluid balance in the human body is altered, the heart alters its pumping, long bones no longer bear weight and lose rigidity, muscles become weak. Lesser known effects however include disorders of vision and balance as the fluid pressure in the brain increases. One of the least known publicly, yet serious disorders for astronauts, is vision alteration as a result of reduced gravity. On Earth, gravity causes about 80% of the body's total water content (and hence, blood, lymph and other fluids) to be below the heart. So many of the conditions we humans associate with pathology—such as edema and heart failure—are the result of human adaptation to walking upright. With reduced gravity, the body's fluid redistributes evenly, even to the former "highest" points, resulting the puffy faced-look common to astronaut pictures from orbit. At the same time, fluid pressure in the brain increases, while paradoxically the pressure inside the eye decreases. The result is deformation of the eyeball, causing nearsightedness at best, and blindness at worst.

Other body fluid-related issues have been experienced by astronauts, as illustrated by the experience of Astronaut Walter M. Schirra, Jr. Mercury/Gemini/Apollo astronaut Wally Schirra was a great test pilot and one of the most expert commentators for Apollo missions, but he had a miserable time in orbit due to increased fluid retention in the head—notably, he developed a rhinovirus infection (head cold) during Apollo 7, and could get no relief from congestion and sinus pain since sinuses cannot drain in free fall.

[Note that I said "free-fall." There is a trend among SF authors and audiences to use the term "microgravity" for the perceived lack of planetary gravitational effects within an orbiting object—here's why that's not the right word . . . ] One of the complicating factors in deciphering gravitational effects on the human body is that in orbit, one is still subject to nearly the full force of Earth gravity. If it were possible for an astronaut to be absolutely unmoving at orbital height, that person would feel 1G, directed downward . . .  and soon they, too, would be directed downward at a pace described as 1G acceleration. To stay in orbit, an object requires a tangential velocity that moves the object away from Earth gravity. Since exactly canceling Earth gravity normally results in a circular orbit, the actual vectors of inward and outward force are balanced, and our theoretical astronaut feels no gravity, despite being in constant motion. In physics terms, this is "free-fall."

In contrast, as humans move out into the Solar System, they will encounter regions where the sun and planets are too far away for their gravity to be felt. Smaller bodies such as asteroids will nevertheless exert lesser forces of gravity which will affect spacecraft and humans. This is the true region of "microgravity" and will indeed complicate things for the human body.

To date, our science has no good solutions to free-fall and microgravity. We do not know whether the Moon's 0.16 G or Mars' 0.35 G will be sufficient to stop deterioration of bone and muscle. We have some medications to slow the decay, but we don't have a solution yet. Even spin-induced artificial gravity—Arthur C. Clarke's giant space wheels, or Andy Weir's rotating spacecraft—are untested. We do not know whether solving the problems of up and down via rotation will introduce other problems with the human inner ear. So far, we don't have any structures in space that are large enough to even begin testing these concepts.

Radiation

The radiation encountered on Earth bears little resemblance to the type of radiation encountered in space. X-rays, CT scans—even Gamma Radiation for cancer therapy or as a result of a nuclear incident—are photons. They produce effects by heating or ionizing the tissues of the body. The most common particulate radiation outside a cyclotron or supercollider is neutrons from a nuclear reaction, and energetic, free neutrons on Earth are quite rare. In space, however, the majority of radiation hazard is from particles. The solar wind is plasma—atomic nuclei stripped to its basic components of isolated electrons, protons, and bare helium nuclei. Neutrons are rather rare, and mainly occur inside spacecraft when external radiation interacts with the materials of the exterior, ionizing the material and releasing free neutrons.

Background cosmic radiation is everywhere, and comes from every direction, consisting of heavy atomic nuclei stripped of electrons and accelerated to near light-speed by nova and supernova explosions throughout the cosmos. A common component of Galactic Cosmic Radiation (GCR) is termed an "HZE," which stands for “High Z and Energy"—Z in this case being the atomic value for valence or charge resulting from removing electrons and leaving the positive charge associated with the number of protons in the nucleus. NASA scientists studying the effects of space radiation often test the effects of the HZE Fe26+, iron atoms with Molecular Weight of 56, stripped of all electrons, leaving the highly charged 26 protons and 30 neutrons of the atomic nucleus. Fe26+ atoms are accelerated by approximately 600-to-1000 million electron volts (megaEV or MEV) to simulate just one component of GCR. At that energy and speed, the iron atoms zip right through living tissue, leaving a physical trail, as well as pulling electrons from nearby atoms. It's a good thing they keep going, though, for if the HZEs were to encounter enough tissue to slow to a stop, and recover enough electrons to reach zero charge, the resulting heat release would cause a steam explosion destroying the unlucky organism that happens to trap the HZE.

On Earth's surface, we are protected from HZEs and other components of GCRs and solar wind by a thick atmosphere and Earth's electrically and magnetically charged "magnetosphere." No human being has ever completely left the Earth's magnetosphere, which typically reaches 60,000 miles above Earth's surface. The International Space Station orbits around 400 miles altitude, and most satellites, including geostationary ones, orbit within 25,000 miles. Even the twenty-seven American astronauts who orbited or landed on the Moon were at least partially protected by the "magnetotail," a tear-drop shaped region shaped by solar wind that points outward from Earth's orbit for hundreds of millions of miles encompassing the Moon for about 4 days on either side of the Full Moon each month. [Hint, Apollo missions took place close to the full Moon in order to reduce the influence of shadows on the surface.]

A mission to Mars and any long-duration habitation of space will require solutions to the effects of space radiation on the human body. Aside from cancer risk, or the purely physical damage ala "sunburn" from solar radiation, radiation similar to that which will be encountered outside Earth's orbit will cause damage to bone, cartilage, blood vessels and brain. We can build more shielding into our ships and habitats, but can we adapt and maybe even engineer humans to be more resistant to space radiation? Again, as with models of artificial gravity, no human has truly been there, so we have no experience on which to base an answer.

Closed Environments, Isolation, and Distance from Earth

The good news is that the other risk categories can be studied here—and hopefully solved—a lot closer to Earth. ISS crews spend six-to-twelve months in cramped quarters, with small crews, crowded schedules and limits to communications. In many ways, submarine crews are models for the type of interpersonal problems that occur with crews in cramped quarters. Antarctic scientific stations, as well as space simulations such as the 180-to-500-day mission simulators HI-SEAS on the slopes of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and MARS 500 in Moscow, provide testbeds for crew interactions and self-sufficiency. Unfortunately, there has been no good simulation of the complete closed ecosystem such as will be required for permanent stations, colonies and worldships. The Biosphere 2 experiments in 1991-1993 and 1994 failed due to oxygen balance problems resulting from interactions between building materials and the air and humidity of the internal environment.

Yet again, it would appear that the best means of solving these problems will be to get out into space and try. It is guaranteed that there will be failures, which points out the final "hazard" of life in space: society's will to accept risk and explore.

We live in a risk-averse world. The original Apollo program was extremely lucky to lose only three astronauts to spacecraft complications (Apollo 1) and even there, the incident occurred on the ground. The only (publicized) potential loss-of-life incident in space (Apollo 13) was resolved successfully. On the other hand, we lost two complete crews to Space Shuttle accidents, and each time, missions resumed only after extensive hand-wringing and finger-pointing. Andy Weir's The Martian is optimistic. The more likely outcome was for astronaut Mark Watney to die (at worst) immediately following puncture of his suit, or at best to starve when food supplies ran out.

If humans are to eventually go to the stars, we will first have to go out into space, beyond the ISS, beyond the Moon, even beyond Mars. To do that, we not only have to want to go, we have to do so in the face of risk and loss.

Homo Stellaris in Science Fiction

There is hope, however, and that hope comes from Science Fiction. Speculative fiction has always been a playground of the mind, a way to explore ideas and concepts through thought experiments. The more we question and think about not only the problems, but also use our imaginations to think up solutions, the better prepared we humans will be to adapt and overcome the risks of living, working and thriving in space.

Early SF, from back in the pulp days and before, didn't worry too much about adapting humans to space or other planets—mainly because so little was known about the differences humans would encounter once they left the surface of Earth. Space was still "the ether" and either just like the atmosphere (only thinner) or simply ignored. Hence we had images of airborne ships "sailing" to the moon and Buck Rogers riding on the outside of his rocketship. Verne proposed that a large enough cannon could simply "fire" a ship to the moon, where they would be greeted by outlandish beings who breathed air and lived on human-style food. To the credit of SF writers of the time, the genre has always tolerated inaccuracies as long as the story was entertaining, and the early pulp writers did not have the extensive knowledge base of interplanetary space and exoplanetary biology that we have now.

Terraforming

Once it was generally accepted that space was a vacuum, and that both space and other planetary environments held many hazards to human health, SF turned to the idea that humans would naturally take those environments with them, and re-create a terrestrial environment on other worlds. The concept behind "terraforming" was that dry, airless worlds with sufficient gravity to hold an atmosphere could be given one, and that non-oxygen atmospheres could be converted to the 70% nitrogen/20% oxygen mix that humans require. There are many examples of terraforming in SF: Robert A. Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky, Isaac Asimov's The Martian Way, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars). Of these, Robinson probably approximated the best time-line, although current scientific conjecture is that a mere two hundred years to terraform Mars is likely 800 years short of the actual time-line. James S.A. Corey's Expanse Series (Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War, etc.) indirectly deals with terraforming via the implication that vast amounts of asteroid water would be required for the millennia-long terraforming of Mars. The concepts of terraforming have had a recent showcase in Andy Weir's The Martian, where the protagonist uses human metabolic wastes to condition a small sample of Martian soil to grow crops. While it made for a good story, a botanist of my acquaintance insists it could never work, since it did not account for the highly toxic perchlorates in Martian soil.

At its most extreme, terraforming would be extended to building worlds and ships from scratch to suit human habitation. Larry Niven's Ringworld and Arthur C. Clarke's Rama planetoid (Rendezvous with Rama) represent massive engineering feats dedicated to one purpose—building a new habitat friendly to human or humanlike life. But if creating such structures is too large to even imagine at this point, what about limiting the terraforming to smaller habitats?

From Domed Cities to Spacesuits

One of the most common book-cover images from SF is the space-suited astronaut on a hill looking over a valley of domes. This graphic image fits most perceptions of initial planetary habitats—from Heinlein's lunar domes in "The Menace from Earth" to the ARES domes of The Martian. Unlike Edgar Rice Burrough's Earth-like worlds of Barsoom (Mars) and Cosoom (Venus), most SF writers have generally assumed that humans will need to confine their terrestrial reconstruction to domed and underground cities. Given what we now know about the air, soil and radiation conditions on the Moon, Mars, Venus, those assumptions are generally correct. In fact, most extraterrestrial communities will need to be underground for maximum protection, although personally, I want to see cloud cities on Venus!

In space, the equivalent of "underground" is inside rocky asteroids and planetoids. James S.A. Corey's "Expanse" introduces readers to a (mostly) thriving community tunneled deep inside Ceres, an echo of earlier works (Asimov's "The Dying Night" and Lucky Starr novels, Pournelle's "He Fell Into A Dark Hole," High Justice, and Exiles to Glory, Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars, Red Planet and The Rolling Stones) which proposed Ceres (and Pallas, in Charles Sheffield's The Ganymede Club) as an intermediate habitation between Inner and Outer Solar System. The use of asteroids as habitats is implicit in both Niven's and Corey's "Belters" who prefer a life in space over life "in a hole" or "down the [gravity] well" on a planet.

In each of these examples, the habitats are designed to be as self-sustaining as possible. Breathable air is generated and refreshed by plants, water is recycled and mined from other asteroids, and gravity is generated by some variation on centrifugal force. These are habitats in which humans can live without adaptation, much as a spacesuit captures a small volume of terrestrial life-support and keeps a human from being exposed to the hazards of space—the key differences being size and various degrees of independence from replenishing the environment—with space suits being low independence, needing constant replenishment, and the largest habitats being totally self-sufficient.

Adapting Humans

It is important to note that simply providing a sheltering terrestrial environment will not prevent humans from adapting to the novel aspects of their new habitats. Low gravity regimes cause a reduction in bone and muscle mass, and a weakening of the heart. In Heinlein's Waldo, this was treated as a benefit, with the low gravity allowing a person to thrive who would otherwise be invalid on Earth. Niven has written probably the best examples of humans adapting to their environments over short periods of time—Belters are tall, thin and dexterous; Jinxians (heavy gravity) are short and inordinately strong (but suffer from heart disease); Crashlanders, who live underground, have a high percentage of albinos. Note that these are short-term adaptations which rely on adaptive mechanisms, and not really "evolution" of the human form. So what should adaptations to space look like? A few likely adaptations are (A) high melanin content (dark skin) as protection from radiation; (B) change in body height and shape in accordance with gravity—short for high gravity, tall for low gravity; improved heart function and circulation for dealing with fluid redistribution; (C) changes in diameter and volume of the fluid-filled spaces in the eye and brain; (D) alterations in the inner ear to allow humans to be less sensitive to vertigo and rotation.

What about actually intending to alter humans for space, or genetically designing particular traits? Probably the best SF treatment(s) of genetic alterations come from Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. The advanced Beta Colony and crime syndicate world of Jackson's Whole employ advanced genetic engineering techniques, the latter mainly to develop custom indentured servants. Many examples of gene editing and engineering are used throughout the series, such as the cloning (and editing) of Miles Vorkosigan's genome. For another example, David Weber's Honor Harrington series deals with engineered humans—appearing as both illegal gene editing in the slaves of the Mesan Alignment, and as the beneficial engineering employed by Allison Chou to decrease infant mortality on Grayson.

In Bujold's and Weber's writing, the stories advance the idea that engineering humans to novel environments was simply "helping evolution" by speeding up the process, rather than tolerating the slow pace of adaptation. The examples of low or no gravity and toxic heavy metals are precisely the types of environments humans can expect to encounter. Other examples might be low (or high) oxygen and high radiation. We actually see adaptations to low oxygen in humans living at high altitude. Resistance to radiation may very well lie in antioxidants and natural gene-repair enzymes. Thus, gene engineering for environmental tolerance may already be within our grasp since it likely simply requires "tuning" the activity of normally existing enzymes. By comparison, the "Quaddies" of Bujold's Falling Free were engineered specifically for weightless environments via replacement of normal human legs with a second pair of arms.

While not human, another example of custom gene engineering can be seen in Dr. Charles E. Gannon's Caine Riordan series. The alien Slaasriithi created specialized sub-species (sub-taxons) to fulfill various tasks in their society. While this level of gene editing is still well outside of current capabilities, the field of tissue engineering is rapidly developing, as shown by the recent announcements of lab-created simple human organs such as the bladder, human ears grown on the backs of laboratory mice ears, "paintable" skin cells for burn repair and efforts to "print" liver and kidney cells.

What other types of gene engineering might be desirable to adapt humans to space? For this question, we need look no further than our own oceans. Fish and marine mammals provide examples of pressure tolerance, maneuverability in a fluid/weightless environment, temperature extremes, oxygen extremes, sulfur-dependent organisms, alterations of circadian rhythm, and independence from sleep. "Natural antifreeze" copied from Arctic Cod may make the difference in adapting or engineering humans to cryogenic stasis during long space-flights. While we may never reach the state of total freedom to choose alternate bodies as in John Ringo's There Will Be Dragons, many examples—not to mention source materials—for engineering humans for life in space are right here on Earth already.

Social Changes

The Homo Stellaris working track pointed out that current human society very likely lacks the will to tolerate the extreme risks of long-duration space exploration. Our society has become decidedly risk-averse, and has difficulty making (and funding!) long-range and long-term investments in society and technology. Given that currently popular styles of body modification (piercing, tattoos, implants) are viewed with suspicion, how much more so would society frown on gene engineering of self and offspring in ways that produce visible differences from the perceived normal human body?

Arthur C. Clarke described a human society that had become so averse to risk and exploration that they barricaded themselves in a single city in The City and the Stars. While the story involved a clearly advanced technology society (with hints of bioengineering and advanced brain-to-computer interfaces) the human race was clearly senescent and huddled into its safe space to live out the rest of its existence. However, Clarke's City was much like the world of Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel in which Earthers rejected space and many forms of technology, becoming certainly a separate society from the Spacers, and nearly a separate species. In many ways, these two stories are somewhat prescience with respect to current-day attitudes that "there are too many problems at home to waste money in Space!"

It is a common theme in SF that space is a frontier, and in many ways only a small subset of society will embrace the necessity as well as the attraction of that frontier. Larry Niven's Known Space stories distinguish the "flatlanders" who are agoraphobic (and, to a certain extent, technophobic) from the "belters" and "spacers" who leave the home planet for space exploration. As in Jerry Pournelle's High Justice and Exiles to Glory, space may very well be colonized by the misfits or those for whom it is no longer possible to fit into earthbound society. John Ringo's Troy Rising series (Live Free or Die, Citadel, The Hot Gate) tells of individuals who decide to balance significant risk with even greater reward. Any and all of these means may be necessary to identify those individuals who will eventually build a society no longer bound to a single world. Once we do so, it is very likely that the society we build in space will be totally unlike our current experience. Much of SF extrapolates from current political status, but some notable examples of divergent politics between Earth and space colonies are seen in the corporatism of Allen Steele's Clarke County, Space, the capitalism of Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon," the libertarianism of Michael Z. Williamson's Freehold or the implicit socialism of "Star Trek."

Shaping the Future

The science fiction of today can help to shape the future of humanity in space, whether interplanetary or interstellar. We writers have a duty to entertain, but an opportunity to encourage and recruit the next generation of astronauts, scientists, engineers and explorers.

Science Fiction provides experiments of the mind, where we can dream not only about traveling to distant stars, but also of exploring those using bodies not our own. From swimming in a distant sea like dolphins under strange stars, to floating free in the absence of gravity, using all four hands to manipulate controls; from rugged individualists to collectives; SF provides the means to test ideas and gauge public acceptance. Even better, SF provides a means of desensitizing readers to their greatest fears, and encouraging the necessary changes that a truly interstellar society will bring about—the changes that will truly make us Homo stellaris—the People of the Stars!