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Appendix B

NOTES


Notes for Thread 1

Part of the genesis of this series came from listening to people who’d smoked DMT. I’ve never taken the drug myself, and I probably never will, even though it’s now legal in my home state of Colorado. Psychedelics in general are a bit too profound for my taste. Many of them, like LSD and ketamine, provide the sensation of “going” somewhere outside the 4D spacetime we normally experience, which is already something I don’t care to do. However, DMT adds a very specific wrinkle, in that a majority of people taking high doses report contact with “entities” of some sort, who are generally seen as benevolent or even divine. So my thought was, okay, well, what if that’s actually real? What if it’s an authentic experience of alien contact? People often describe “little people” of various kinds, including “self-transforming machine elves” (see https://www.iflscience.com/why-do-people-see-elves-and-other-entities-when-they-smoke-dmt-62234). So in that sense, the Beings are rooted in actual science. My thought was that these “elves” may not be the Beings themselves, but constructs that allow them to speak with us. However, since time and space (at least as we understand them) don’t seem to apply in the realm of the DMT entities, the experience seems very difficult to put into words. It also becomes an interesting question, what we and the Beings could possibly have in common. So, it seemed to me, from the earliest stages of the project, that the only way to describe the Beings would be through multiple fragmentary accounts of people with different kinds of preconceptions. I hope I’ve done justice to that vision here.

For what it’s worth, my own conception of the Beings is that they’re basically software (specifically, cellular automata) running directly on the “spin networks” of loop quantum gravity. As such, they’re not made of matter or energy, and do not occupy a volume of spacetime per se. If we think of spacetime as a holographic movie display, the Beings exist on the processor that’s generating the image, not in the image itself. However, they can “look at” (i.e., receive information from) portions of the hologram, within certain conserved limits. They can also influence events within the spacetime they’re looking at, although as we’ve seen, their signals are both weak and noisy. This works both ways, as the Beings are only able to “see” or “hear” the minds of human beings when those minds are forced into a non-4D context. The “DMT elves” are images the Beings have learned to inject into the human brain under these very specific conditions. So there. You now know what a hundred Intercession passengers could only see fragmentary glimpses of.

Regarding “the dismal science,” some nexuses (nexi?) of economics (looking at you, Austria, Chicago, and Virginia!) object to the term, even when it’s used ironically. The term apparently may have pro-slavery origins, as well as allusions to theories of Malthus that have simply not panned out. However, “dismal” is a good and evocative description, and I believe most economists still use it.


Notes for Thread 2

Orlov’s beloved 101955 Bennu is a real, Earth-crossing asteroid, with a definitely nonzero chance of someday slamming into the Earth, generating a crater 10 kilometers wide and laying waste to everything within 50+ kilometers. More, if it landed in the ocean. However, to put that in perspective, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was probably about 25,000 times larger, so we are not talking about an extinction-level event. Just a really, really bad one.


Notes for Thread 3

Exploding one kilogram of TNT releases about 4 million joules of energy, equivalent to a 0.1 milligram object moving at 9 million meters per second. A bullet fired from a standard 7.62 mm cartridge carries roughly 3,500 joules of kinetic energy, so when Intercession’s particle shield collides with a 0.1 milligram particle, it releases the energy of roughly 1,142 machine-gun bullets.

The most likely solid material in interstellar space would be water ice, and a 0.1 milligram particle of it would be very approximately half a millimeter in diameter. For comparison, “sand” is defined as particles between 0.065 and 2.0 millimeters, all of which are readily visible to the naked eye. So we’re talking about a fairly large object.

The spot cast by a laser pointer can indeed travel faster than light. If you wave it back and forth by one meter every second, you are moving through an arc of atan(1/10)= 5.71 degrees. That same arc, over a range of ten million kilometers, makes the spot travel a distance of 1 million kilometers in a second, which is more than three times the speed of light.

Yes, this book was written before the release of GPT4, and yes, it could be argued that after thirty-five years of additional progress, the AI concierges in this story should be a lot more advanced. However, what GPT4 and its brethren are good at is sounding like a human. They are basically a very advanced version of the predictive text feature on your smartphone keyboard. They don’t actually understand what they’re saying, or what you’re saying. That’s a much harder problem. Also, how smart and self-aware do you want your concierge to be, exactly? Enough to destroy the Earth? Get off my back, man.


Notes for Thread 4

The alloy I’ve named “feptaual” (Fe Pt Au Al) is somewhat speculative, although the components of it are not. If you mix aluminum with gold, you really do get a bright purple, somewhat brittle material, and mixing iron with gold really does yield a metal ranging anywhere from faint bluish-greenish to a very shockingly saturated royal blue. Platinum is denser than gold, and if you mix the two together you get a whitish metal that is nearly as wear-resistant as diamond and sapphire. So yeah, there probably is a purple-gray alloy of iron, platinum, gold, and aluminum that has properties similar to those I’ve described.

There really are backpack nukes, with explosive power of anywhere from 10 to 1,000 tons of TNT (0.001 to 1.0 kilotons), that weigh less than 30 kilograms. Most of the effects we associate with nuclear explosions—fireballs, blast waves, mushroom clouds, etc.) are actually the effects of extreme local heating of the atmosphere. In space, a nuclear explosion is basically a single burst of light, heat, gamma radiation, and neutrons, whose intensity drops off with the square of the distance. Weirdly, in space the radiation effects of a nuke are much more problematic than the heat it releases, because the atmosphere is also not there to absorb (and be ionized by) the radiation.

The self-destruct nuke of the stealth ship is around 0.01 kilotons. As shown in the graph below, this is more than enough to completely vaporize both the ship and any human beings within 20 meters of it. However, these effects drop off so rapidly that beyond 150 meters, exposed flesh (e.g., behind an unshielded glass visor) may not even be seriously burned. Unfortunately for our astronauts, the radiation effects extend much farther, so that at a range of 300 meters, an unshielded human will receive a one hundred percent lethal dose, and the chance of death remains at fifty percent even half a kilometer from the explosion.

If you’d like to learn more, check out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W54

https://history.nasa.gov/conghand/nuclear.htm


Notes for Thread 5

To be clear, the colonization of the Venusian atmosphere is not my idea. It has been well studied by NASA scientists, including my friend Geoff Landis, who has also written science fiction stories about it. At an altitude of around 55 kilometers, the average temperature of the Venusian atmosphere is around 27 degrees Celsius (81°F), with an air pressure of around 530 millibars—about what you’d get on a summer day on top of Mount Elbert in Colorado. At this pressure, even a normal air gas mix is quite breathable, and in fact it’s actually a lifting gas, like helium is on Earth. I will note that temperature, pressure, and cloud height could vary considerably with local weather conditions and time of “day,” but (except for the composition of the atmosphere) the conditions would stay well within Earthlike parameters.

The breath masks worn by the colonists work by filtering and cracking the Venusian air, which doesn’t contain much nontoxic filler gas such as nitrogen or argon. As a result, the air inside the masks is probably about 95 percent oxygen, 3.5 percent nitrogen, and 1.5 percent CO2, with assorted other gases in the parts per million. This is triple the OSHA limit for long-exposure CO2, and also a potentially unsafe amount of oxygen, and if sulfur dioxide leaked in at even 3 percent of its atmospheric concentration, that would exceed OSHA levels as well. However, this mix is “breathable” in a strict metabolic sense, and even one full breath of Actual Venus every now and then wouldn’t kill you, although it would certainly not feel good.

The “carbónespuma pavement” of Thalia is a closed-cell graphene aerogel with hydrogen gas trapped in its voids. Even on Earth this would be lighter than air, and capable of lifting about 1.2 kilograms per cubic meter. CO2 is much heavier than oxygen or nitrogen, though, and the gravity of Venus is a bit lighter, so on Venus the pavement can lift more like 2.0 kg/m3, or more if the material expands a bit when exposed to sunlight (which is twice as strong on Venus as it is on Earth).


Notes on Thread 6

Second Morning Retirement Community should be well shielded against background radiation, although the residents (even if they take their radiation pills) will still need to retreat into deeper shelters during a major solar flare. However, since many effects of radiation exposure (e.g., increased cancer rates) take years or decades to show up, the retirees have less reason to worry about it than the staff.


Additional Notes

I feel like enough has been said about the colonization of Mars, or rather that I myself didn’t have anything new to say about it that merited inclusion in this book. I might feel differently in the future. However, I would like to correct an error I made in the Mars-related chapters of a previous book: magnetic field strength drops off with the cube of the distance, not the square.


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