Science In My Fiction

At least if you’re a mouse. Research published this month found that mice fed yogurt were slimmer, sleeker and shinier than those that didn’t.

The male yogurt-eating mice also had larger testicles. (The junk-food eating mice had smaller testicles.) Female mice weren’t left out: they were smooth and shiny too, and had larger healthier litters.

In other words, eating yogurt made mice more attractive and more fertile, and presumably healthier. The researchers don’t know why, but they suspect it might have to do with the live bacterial cultures in the yogurt.

By the numbers, the human body is mostly bacteria: about one trillion human cells, and about ten trillion bacteria. (I don’t know the numbers for mice, but they’re probably similar.) We don’t even know what most of them are, though scientists think there are around 500 different species.

Many of those bacteria live in the digestive system, having colonized the infant during birth or shortly after. They help to digest the things we eat, release vitamins, help to keep out disease-causing bacteria: all sorts of useful things. The humans studied so far fall into one of three enterotypes, each of which has similar distinctive gut assemblages (even though they eat similar diets).

Nobody knows exactly what that means yet, but one possibility is that different enterotypes are more efficient at digesting particular foods. They may also be more or less effective at providing vitamins to their host. The abundances of different species change in response to diet, but mostly within certain limits. Gut flora have been linked to obesity, suggesting that bacteria may affect metabolism or efficiency of digestion. Having (or eating) the right bacteria might also be related to longevity.

When gut bacterial assemblages decline or get unbalanced, often as a result of taking antibiotics to treat some other condition, all sorts of problems can occur. One particularly nasty invader is Clostridium difficile, a bacterium that can cause persistent diarrhea and may become debilitating or life-threatening. Even C. diff, as it’s not-so-fondly known, is vulnerable to a diverse and balanced set of gut bacterial: a fecal transplant from a healthy individual is an effective cure.

Gut bacteria could have global environmental implications too: scientists are looking for ways to modify ruminal bacteria in cattle so that they eliminate less methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

This stuff has all kinds of science-fictional implications. What about modifying the gut flora of planetary colonists to help them digest new foods, or to produce vitamins that they no longer get from their diet? Or superfoods that promote health or shininess or fertility? Such superfoods could be proprietary, or addictive. What happens if people try to culture them at home? Making your own yogurt is easy, and using a commercial yogurt as the starter ensures that you have the same culture. For the probiotics to contribute to the gut flora, they have to be alive.

These posts brought to you by the recurrence of the search term “boiling wine” bringing people to my little rant on the use of same on wounds in GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.

Magical healing aside, basic sanitation is the one thing that will most increase your characters’ chances of survival when they’re injured. Stitches are helpful. So are herbs. Splints are important for broken bones. But if that cut gets infected, abscesses, and gangrene sets in, all the willow bark tea in the world isn’t going to save you.

In real-world history, the importance of keeping wounds clean was not fully realized until only a few hundred years ago. Why your fantasy world’s physicians know they need to do this is up to you. I’m going to look at how to do it in a world without industrialized chemical analysis and synthesis.

Salt

Gargling saltwater for a sore throat and old recipes for toothpaste made of salt and baking soda (more on that later) work because salt does kill microbes when it’s concentrated enough. This is why pickling and salting work as food preservatives.

Pickled characters

Brine recipes call for anywhere from a half cup to a cup of salt per gallon of water, which would be 3 – 6% salt by volume. Seawater tends to be more like 3 – 4%.

Depending on where your characters are, seawater could be easy to get and a reasonable thing to wash a wound with — if the seawater has been filtered and hopefully boiled as well. It does contain microbes that are acclimated to salty water, after all.

Brine prepared from salt and boiled water is a viable option if your characters have access to economically priced salt. Or maybe it’s a rare and expensive way to treat wounds, reserved only for those who can afford it. Either way, I recommend Mark Kurlansky’s Salt as an excellent overview of salt production over the course of history.

Character jerky

Given a supply of fairly pure salt, why not just pack the wound with salt? Yes, that’s been done in the past. Especially with abscesses, it seems. The packing needs to be changed a few times a day, and after the salt’s done its job the wound will need to be closed by whatever method and given a chance to heal. You don’t actually want to make jerky out of your character.

Sodium bicarbonate

You know it better as baking soda. Combined with salt and a little water, baking soda makes for a nasty-tasting toothpaste but it’ll kill those germs and even bleach your teeth a little.

Naturally occurring bicarbonate is one of several compounds found in natron, which the Egyptians used for cleaning, an antiseptic, and to preserve mummies. Natron is mined from natural deposits, which can be found in a variety of places — not just deserts. Perhaps this would be a viable industry for your fantasy kingdom on top of its medical uses.

Baking soda mouthwash recipes range up to 25% concentration but tend to fall more around a teaspoon per half pint of water which would be… 4%? As with salt above, your healers could use either a brine to wash wounds or pack the wound directly with natron — bearing in mind that we don’t want to mummify the characters just yet. Natron is a drying agent, which means it draws out moisture from the tissues. This makes the tissues less hospitable to bacteria… and life in general.

Stay tuned for the more accurate use of alcohol (not by boiling wine, for crying out loud) and an antiseptic wild card.

Neanderthal reconstruction by Kennis & Kennis/Photograph by Joe McNally

I love me some Tolkien. But for everything that The Lord of the Rings has done for the fantasy genre, it has also been so overwhelmingly influential and compelling that it is has spawned entire franchises set in worlds imitating Middle Earth, and has stifled the genre’s creativity. Unless otherwise specified, fantasy is assumed to be set in a medieval European setting and populated by humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, and halflings. Dwarves are always assumed to be great craftsmen and miners who live underground in halls of stone and favor geometric patterns in their art and writing. Elves always inhabit verdant forests, are skilled in magic and craft fine weapons and armor with leaf shapes and magical properties. Orcs are brutish and primitive and wear spiky black armor and wield spiky black weapons. I am hardly the first person to make these observations, and in recent years there has finally been some real progress in emerging from the shadow of Tolkien, but we have a long way to go. I would like to propose just one alternative that not only bucks some of the trends that Tolkien started, but also has some science at its heart.

In most fantasy settings, there are several intelligent species coexisting in the same world, each with a distinctive culture and appearance. In our modern world of course, there are humans of cultures and appearances that vary beyond anything seen in most fantasy, but there are no other similarly advanced intelligent species for us to interact with. This was not always the case. In the course of human evolution, we coexisted with several other species of human, including Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, and the recently discovered Denisova hominin.

Hominid evolution is a complicated and rapidly changing field, and my summary here will likely make archaeologists and anthropologists cringe, but I hope it will also kindle some ideas for speculative fiction writers looking for something a bit different.

I will start with homo erectus, a species that originated in Africa around 1.8 million years ago and spread across much of Asia into India, China, and Indonesia. Homo erectus was clearly quite successful, and there is evidence that they used stone hand axes and fire, and were probably one of the first hunter-gatherer societies. They stood about as high as modern humans, but their skeletons are more robust and they were more heavily muscled. It is not clear when homo erectus went extinct, but they may have lasted in isolated pockets until relatively recently, and may have interacted or even interbred with early homo sapiens. In fact, Homo floresiensis, which lived in Indonesia as recently as 12,000 years ago, shows some similarities to homo erectus, although homo floresiensis is smaller.

Model of Homo erectus from Museum of Archaeology, Herne, Germany

The most famous hominid that coexisted with humans is the Neanderthal. Neanderthal remains have been discovered throughout Europe and as far east as the Altai mountains. They lived from 600,000 years ago until about 25,000 years ago. Despite the stereotype of Neanderthals as dumb brutes, evidence suggests that they may have been just as intelligent as humans. (In fact their brains were larger than ours!) They made wood, bone, and stone tools, and the discovery of healed fractures in some skeletons suggests that they cared for their sick and wounded. They buried their dead and may have used body paint, and they constructed large shelters out of animal bones. (They also may have practiced cannibalism, but then, so do some modern humans so you can’t hold that against them.) Neanderthals have long been thought of as pure carnivores, surviving by hunting mammoths and other big game, but recent discoveries show that they ate plants too.  Evidence in a cave in Gibraltar, the most recent Neanderthal site, shows that they even foraged from the sea, much like the humans who used the cave thousands of years later.

There is good evidence that Neanderthals used language, and there are even some speculations that their language pre-dated the separation between speaking and music – that it was a hybrid of the two – something that just screams (sings?) to be used in fiction.

So why did the Neanderthals go extinct if they were as smart as we are, significantly stronger, and geographically widespread? There are several theories. One, put forward in the book “The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived” by Clive Finlayson, is that they were simply unlucky. It appears that Neanderthals hunted primarily in wooded areas, ambushing their prey using short spears and relying on their strength to bring the animal down. As the climate changed, the forests receded and gave way to wide steppes. Ambush hunting is less effective out in the grassland: it favors a hominid species specialized for long-distance walking or running, who use projectile weapons. That’s us.

Simulation of the spread of modern humans into neanderthal territory, beginning 1600 generations ago. Neanderthal territory is light gray, homo sapiens territory is dark gray, and the black band indicates areas of coexistence.

Another theory says that Neanderthals competed – perhaps violently – with homo sapiens and that we eventually won. This scenario is appealing from a fictional point of view because it goes against preconceptions and lends itself easily to the tale of a noble species of intelligent (perhaps even musical) Neanderthals being wiped out by a smaller, more devious species of humans: homo sapiens.

Of course, you can go completely in the other direction too. Another theory is that Neanderthals and humans interbred to the point where we stopped being different species. Some Neanderthal remains are sufficiently well-preserved to extract DNA, and the DNA of non-African humans include some portions that match pieces of the Neanderthal genome. Recently, DNA recovered from a 41,000 year old finger bone found in Denisova cave, Russia, shows that it came from a species that is distinct from both Neanderthals and humans, but which shows some degree of interbreeding with both.

My suspicion is that all of these theories are at least partially correct. It is conceivable that even as Neanderthals were dying out as their forests receded, humans could have accelerated their demise. And, knowing human nature, I wouldn’t be surprised if some interbreeding occurred even as our species was killing off the Neanderthals.

All of this evidence for coexistence between humans and other hominids is a ripe setting for fiction much like modern fantasy but with the added benefit of being somewhat realistic. Add in the various exotic mammals that still roamed the world and the changes in climate that drove the migration or extinction of entire ecosystems, and the stories practically write themselves.

The wide geographic range of earlier species like homo erectus, and the persistence of pockets of similar species until quite recently, also spark the imagination. Almost every culture in the world has tales of human-like creatures that live in remote locations on the fringes of civilization. Could these stories be rooted in our distant past when they were not fiction at all? Could the revulsion triggered by the “uncanny valley” be a deep-seated instinct based on a time when there were other humanoids out there, competing with us?

There’s no reason that fantasy has to be confined to a pseudo-medieval Europe populated by the same old fantasy races. Long ago, our planet really was home to multiple species of human, and they fought and loved and explored and invented and sang songs into the night. Let’s hear their stories.

[Ed.: Today's post is by MJ Locke, but due to minor technical difficulties it appears under my name.]

Foreword: For several months during 2007, I collected data for a series of graphics-focused posts on space exploration. I wondered how far we humans have penetrated into space, in the years since our first vehicles rose above the layers of our world’s atmosphere.

Next Saturday, May 5, 2012, we will reach the fifty-first anniversary of the first U.S. launch of an astronaut into space. This is a revisit to a series of posts I put up then. I’ve updated the dates, but all of my analytical data is five years old.

Mercury Redstone 3

On May 5, 1961, 37-year-old Alan Shepard climbed into a tiny capsule atop a liquid-fueled rocket. He rode it up from Cape Canaveral, Florida to an altitude of 116 miles: about forty miles above the upper reaches of the atmosphere. He experienced six gees (six times Earth’s gravitational pull) during liftoff, stayed aloft about 15 and a half minutes, and then splashed down in the waters of the Gulf Stream.

I was very young then, a preschooler, but even so I remember my excitement, and also fear, as I watched the news footage. I recall watching the wind from the helicopter’s blades stirring up the waves that splashed against the capsule as it righted itself.

I can only imagine what it must have felt like, soaring up so high. Not to mention how it felt, coming down.

I remember seeking a glimpse of his face through the little portal, and the thrill I felt when the divers helped him emerge and climb into the sling.

President Kennedy was there, for that first launch.

Since that time, the US has launched over 170 piloted missions, and many, many robotic missions. Our astronauts have spent months at a time in the International Space Station, working in cooperation with people from a variety of other nations to do scientific and engineering research.

We have fifty-one years of human-piloted space exploration under our belt*. Alan Shepard and Mercury-Redstone 3 set the stage for everything that came after that.

Human Space Density, in Hours

What does that really mean, though? How far have we travelled in space, to date? How long have we lived there?

Here is a graph showing how many hours humans (only US astronauts, so far; see note below) have spent above the level of the atmosphere.

I’m counting the upper edge of the atmosphere as about 76 miles up, though you will find many different estimates–and in fact, it changes over time, with fluctuations in the solar wind and other factors, including global warming impacts. But 76 miles is a good average number for our purposes.

So how much time are we talking about, really? For comparison, the average American work-year is about 2,000 hours. A year has about 8,900 hours, all told.

As you can see in the chart above, after a promising start with Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, the US manned space program languished, when SkyLab drew to a close. It wasn’t until 1981 that the space shuttle program re-energized space exploration. The hours really started racking up once the International Space Station was completed. You can also see the effect of the Challenger (1986) disaster. The Columbia re-entry breakup (2003) is not as easy to see, but it is the cause of the dip in 2003-2004. In fact, it slowed the pace of NASA shuttle missions through the remainder of its run.

If you were to add up all the hours every NASA astronaut has spent in space since our first manned mission, that’s almost 31 years. As of 2007, humans had spent nearly half a lifetime’s worth of time outside Earth’s atmosphere (A good deal more than that, in fact, if you include other nations’ efforts. I couldn’t find the data for them).

Granted, that’s a pittance, compared to how many people live beneath the atmosphere. (In fact, it surprised me. I thought it would be more.) But it’s a start.

As you can see from the chart above, the US has had seven major piloted space programs since we launched Alan Shepard into space.

Human Space Density, in Miles

You can think in terms of how many miles we have traveled overall, or in terms of how far away we have gotten away from the Earth, before we turned around and came back. At first glance, they might seem to be the same thing, but this is definitely not the case. An astronaut might travel many millions of miles in low Earth orbit, but never get any farther away than a handful of miles above the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. Or an astronaut might take a trip to the moon and back, with very little in the way of orbiting either body—in which case their distance travel and maximum “altitude,” or distance they get from the Earth, would be very nearly the same.

Here is a chart that provides information on both kinds of travel.

The maroon tells you how many miles our astronauts traveled in all, by year, as if they had been traveling in a straight line away from Earth. The blue tells you how many miles away from the Earth’s surface they actually reached during their missions. In both cases, I used the annual miles traveled by US astronauts.

As you can see, the moon missions (that blue bump in the ’60s and early ’70s) stand out from the rest. The Apollo craft went much farther away from the Earth than any other space flights, before or since. For non-lunar missions, the average altitude was 179 miles, less than the distance from Houston to Dallas.

The maroon shows that 2001 was a banner year for space travel, when US space missions traveled a total of 233 million miles. That’s all the way to the sun and back, with enough left over to go to Mars. But our astronauts racked up all of those miles in low Earth orbit, never getting any farther from the Earth than about 250 miles.

The average distance missions travel, from the days of Mercury to the present day, is almost 10 million miles. For comparison, if you drive 10,000 miles per year on average, it would take you a thousand years to travel that far.

As you might guess, the International Space Station dragged the curve up all by itself, because astronauts spend months at a time on the ISS. The typical ISS mission lasts six months. An international team usually consists of three astronauts, who spend that half a year up there conducting experiments and maintaining the station. They’ve just added a new module to the ISS. The ISS has 15,000 cubic feet of living space. That’s about equivalent to a 2,100 square-foot home, down here.

By the way, some of my readers will note something odd about the above graph. The distances seem off. The 100-mile marker on the chart is the same distance from the 10-mile marker is the same length as the 10-mile marker is from zero. The thousand-mile marker is no farther from the 100-mile marker than the 100- is from the 10-. What gives?

It’s a logarithmic scale. A log scale scrunches the data together, to allow you to compare data that spans a very large range. In this case, I wanted to get the low-Earth-orbit data onto the same graph as the millions-of-miles traveled data. It’s useful to be able to look at them together, but it can be misleading. Here is a chart showing the actual distances, without the log scale.

The image above shows you about 250,000 miles’ distance, to scale (I couldn’t even begin to fit Mars and the sun on there, and still show you anything meaningful with regard to the NASA missions. The old space-is-really-big effect). Notice how most space missions barely leave the atmosphere, and notice how far it is, even just to our own moon.

The End of the US Space Era? Or a Pause?

Right now, our space exploration efforts seem becalmed. The fifty years between Shepard’s launch and the final voyage of the space shuttle Atlantis may have been our high-water mark, with regard to space travel. I’d be very sad if that were the case. I prefer to be optimistic, however. NASA’s rover, Curiosity, is nearing Mars. A variety of visionaries and entrepreneurs are seeking ways to commercialize space travel—everything from asteroid mining to space tourism, telecommunications, and spaceports in the New Mexican desert. New exoplanets are being discovered by the day now. Perhaps our robotic probes and astronomic surveys will reveal clues of life beyond our world, which might inspire us once again to reach upward again, and seek to escape the confines of Earth’s gravity. I hope so.

We have barely passed beyond the membrane of our atmosphere. Is there life on other worlds? What wonders lie in store out there? I hope that we will continue to find in us the spirit of our ancestors, and to continue to reach beyond our atmosphere, to explore and even someday perhaps settle on other worlds.

Notes: Let me haul out the usual caveats. I pulled the graphical data together primarily from NASA’s mission data pages, with Wikipedia as a secondary source (in particular for the International Space Station). About five percent of the data (in particular, maximum altitude and distance traveled) was not readily available online, in which case I SWAG’d^ it, based on data from other missions. In other words, there is slop in the data. Don’t use it for your doctoral thesis, or to calculate whether you have enough oxygen to survive till the rescue team arrives. Also, I only have information on US astronauts.

* Van Allen belt, that is.

^ Scientific Wild Assed Guess. It’s tethered to real numbers to some degree, but it definitely floats around in the ether to some degree, too.

I can’t find it online, but I read an introduction to Rose for Ecclesiastes in which Roger Zelazny was quoted as saying that he knew he had to hurry up and write the last of his Mars stories because he knew that new developments in science would make them impossible.

(Or possibly, he hesitated to publish that story because he already knew that science had outpaced him. Either way, it’s a fabulous story and you must read it.)

Rose was published in 1963, and Mariner 4 sent back the first close-up photos of the Martian surface in 1965.

Nope, no beautiful Martian dancers living there.

By now we know the surface of Mars better than we know the surface of Earth (those pesky oceans, you know.) But Zelazny’s fears aside, that hasn’t stopped the popular conception of Martians from appearing regularly in popular culture. (Yes, I enjoyed John Carter. Did you?)

The portrayal of Mars in more science-minded science fiction, though, has changed greatly as new information became available about the planet. Where Edgar Rice Burroughs and Roger Zelazny couldn’t have told their stories after 1965, Kim Stanley Robinson and Ben Bova couldn’t have written theirs earlier.

This leads me to two questions for you all: first, how much does it matter? Does science fiction have a place for both the most accurate possible science and for things we know aren’t true but love anyway? Is the answer different if the story used the best science of the time it was written, but knowledge has moved past that?

What kinds of stories are likely to become obsolete in the very near future? If you are a writer, are there ideas you love that you will never get to write because they are already past, or will you use them anyway? If a reader (and the two categories are by no means exclusive), are there topics you hate to see in SF because you know they’re already obsolete?

This is a true story, and it’s based on the research of Dr. Scott Nixon at the University of Rhode Island. I spent last week at a conference in Newport, and was entirely fascinated by his plenary talk. Besides being a neat juxtaposition of history and technology, it has some interesting implications for worldbuilding in science fiction.

Narragansett Bay within Rhode Island

First, let me orient you. This is Rhode Island, and Narragansett Bay is outlined in red. Providence, the largest city in Rhode Island, is at the north end of the bay, about where it touches the red box. Rhode Island itself is 48 miles (77 km) long and 37 miles (60 km) wide.

The Narragansetts and the Wampanoag tribes lived along the bay when Giovanni da Verrazzano found it in 1524, and the first European settlement was established in the 1630s. It’s really the Europeans we’re concerned with here.

Providence was founded in 1636 by religious dissenters. After the American Revolution it had 7,614 people. The economy depended mostly on the bay for fishing, with a bit of agriculture.

The Industrial Revolution made it to the new United States when textile machinery was built in Rhode Island in 1787, following English plans. Industrialization took off, and by 1831 the population of Providence had reached 17,000.

The city is right on the water, at the head of Narragansett Bay, so anything it does affects the water quality of the entire bay. But even as Providence became a thriving industrial city, its impact on water quality was surprisingly low. as its population increased enormously In 1865, when the population of Providence was 54,595, eelgrass beds were mapped all along the Providence River.

So what? Well, eelgrass (Zostera marina) is very sensitive to nitrogen levels in the water. All those people in Providence weren’t affecting the water quality much at all, or the eelgrass would be gone.

That’s a lot of people; how were they having such a small impact on the bay? Well, this is the age of outhouses. Most human waste was solid, or only small quantities of liquid. When you have to haul water from the town well, you don’t use very much of it. Most waste stayed where it was put, only leaching out slowly over time.

I’m certainly not claiming that outhouses are a good way to manage a city’s worth of human waste: Providence had at least two major cholera epidemics in the mid-nineteenth century. But that pollution wasn’t making it into the bay. Much of the human and animal solid waste was being hauled into the country and used as fertilizer.

The prospect of a public water supply was an exciting one, and after a couple decades of planning, the water was turned on in 1871. Public health and fire safety, not to mention simple convenience, were strong motivations.

People started using water at much, much higher rates: flush toilets! no more hauling buckets! (From 7-11 liters per person per day to 190-380.) The city planners expected that the existing street gutter system would be adequate to deal with the increased volume. They were wrong.

It didn’t take long at all for the cesspools and privy vaults to overflow and seep into the streets. Planning for a sewer system began almost immediately, but it didn’t begin service until 1878.

Providence wasn’t alone in this: many cities installed public waterworks in the nineteenth century, and none began planning for sewers until after the water was running.

The sewer system carried waste directly into the rivers. Where before the nutrients were being taken to inland farms, now they were swept right into the bay. The first Providence sewage treatment plant didn’t begin operation until 1901, and by then there were 175,597 people in Providence.

The eelgrass was long gone.

And it wasn’t just the people. Providence relied on horses for transport and hauling. The number of horses in the city peaked around 1900, and then fell off sharply when the automobile was introduced. During that peak, though, an estimated 90 g of horse manure per square meter coated the city streets.

Providence has gotten much better at managing its wastes over the past century, of course, although there’s still room for improvement.

I came away from this lecture with two thoughts about worldbuilding for fantasy and science fiction.

First, even though we often set stories in horse-dependent worlds and with primitive technologies, we don’t usually think about what comes in and what goes out. Scientists call this mass balance. Horses need to eat a lot, and they excrete a lot. So do people. How is this handled in fiction? (Usually by ignoring it!) Where do things come from, and where do they go? Thinking about this some can help to create a world that feels real. Energy too: where does it come from?

And then there’s the impact of new technologies. It seems so obvious in retrospect, but nobody considered how water use would increase when it became easy to use it. The city had to struggle to catch up, and the bay will never be the same. That kind of threshold event can make for a great story.

What are the human and environmental consequences of the next great thing?

PKMzeta is shaping up to be a single, target-able protein in the brain responsible for reconsolidating memories. Discover ran a three part article on it and there was a recent article in Wired, too — the original scientific papers are behind subscription walls, unfortunately.

In brief, reconsolidation is a maintenance process for long-term memories. We think our memories are firm and unchanging, but plenty of studies have proven that they aren’t. They shift a little each time we remember them, each time we reconsolidate them, and over time those shifts add up. (And they’re often inaccurate to begin with, but that’s another issue.)

PKMzeta is a protien that hangs out in the synapses between neurons and maintains a particular ion channel so that the neuron is able to receive signals from the neighbors. Without PKMzeta, the number of those particular ion channels drops and the neuron becomes less sensitive to nearby activity.

Block the PKMzeta when a memory is undergoing reconsolidation and the memory will fade.We already have one drug (propranolol) that does this, and there are sure to be more.

There are tons of questions still to be answered, of course. And there are tons of possible uses and abuses of such a thing. This is such a gold mine of science fiction possibilities that I’m sure I don’t have to list them. But I would like to bring up one.

“This isn’t Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind-style mindwiping” the article in Wired says. That may be true, but it also does not address an excellent question that movie poses (if you haven’t seen it, I recommend it.) The question being: you can remove the memories associated with a bad relationship with a person, but what about the underlying attraction that drew you to that person in the first place? One of the implications I got from that movie was that the two of them were stuck in a cycle of attraction, falling apart and voluntary mind-wipes.

For “person,” above, substitute anything you like. Kittens. Drugs. Street racing. World domination… like I said, a gold mine of possibilities here.

There have been numerous means of sending a message from point a to point b over the span of human existence, within the past couple centuries it has become possible to ask someone at point b what the weather is like without actually sending someone to physically deliver your missive. Naturally people have started to take the ability to receive an instantaneous response for granted and most science-fiction (and a few fantasy) authors have naturally incorporated it into their works, even including some form of “interplanetary internet” in some cases. Though sometimes they don’t think things through too much, making mistakes such as interstellar wi-fi, to prevent such errors why don’t we take a quick look at how communications may work across interplanetary and interstellar distances.

Electromagnetic Radiation

First off there’s the single most common medium of transmission since the mid-20th century, radio waves. Transmitters translate text, verbalization, or other forms of data into discrete or continuous pulses of electromagnetic radiation (aka light) with wavelengths ranging from 1 millimeter to 100 kilometers and frequencies of 300 GHz to 3 kHz and a receiver detects and re-translates the information sent. Their low frequency and long wavelengths mean that radio waves have very little energy compared to other forms of EM radiation (and most definitely cannot cause cancer) but can potentially carry information for light-years before losing coherence. However radio waves are limited to the speed of light, so any attempt at calling someone further out than a light-minute or two (for reference, the sun is about eight light-min from earth) is going to experience a considerable amount of lag as the time it takes the waves to travel to their destinations becomes noticeable. In addition signals sent using radio will become incoherent with distance, depending on the frequency, the absolute limit being one or two light-years.

Another common means of communication is concentrated pulses of visible light, usually along glass fiber-optic cables which shield the signals from interference by the atmosphere. This method allows for far superior data quality than radio but atmospheric gases or particles can block them easily, as can physical objects that radio waves can pass through. In the vacuum of outer space there is considerably less matter in any form that can block an optical signal, however, especially if the signal is transmitted in the form of a laser capable of maintaining integrity over great distances. Lasers are also less susceptible to jamming or disruption by solar flares. But there has to be a clear line-of-sight between the transmitter and receiver and even lasers spread out and become incoherent over interstellar distances.

The Internet

As for how the internet might cope with space travel, e-mail and social networks would still be possible, and probably the primary form of communication between planets, but instant messaging would no longer be “instant” and if you think AOL back in the 1990s took a long time to load webpages, you probably wouldn’t have the patience to try surfing the internet from Mars. In all likelihood deep space colonies would form their own separate internets, with unique web sites inaccessible on earth or any other fairly distant regions. Certain websites that may be determined to be “important” enough might set up localized servers that would receive updates from one another at specified intervals, but you’d have to wait several hours and most likely need a massive transmitter to look up any other sites based outside your local region of space.

Neutrinos

Neutrinos, those supposedly massless particles that don’t interact with most normal matter and instead pass right through it, gained some publicity a few months ago when readings by CERN supposedly indicated that they travel slightly faster than the speed of light. Those readings were determined to be an equipment failure (a disconnected wire) but another group of researchers managed to do something not quite as amazing with neutrinos, but still significant. They managed to use neutrinos to send a one-word message through 240 meters of solid rock. Granted, the transmission speed was very slow, only 1 bit/second, and it took a particle accelerator to send the message, but still the neutrinos experienced negligible interference from materials that would block radio or optical signals completely. They could be very useful for communicating for people deep underground or underwater, or on the other side of a planet or star even. Neutrino transmission would need to be very tight beams like lasers to compensate for the low transmission rate, but the advantages of a transmission medium that is near impossible to block are considerable. Of course, if someone managed to place a neutrino detector between the sender and the receiver they could read the message without anyone knowing.

Quantum Entanglement

One of the science “buzzwords” of the century is “quantum mechanics”, relating to the behaviors of subatomic particles. One thing that science-fiction authors have extrapolated from the various “weird” properties covered under quantum mechanics is the use of “entanglement” to send messages instantaneously over any distance. The idea is that when two particles are “entangled” at the quantum level they can be separated and whatever happens to one particle happens to the other one instantaneously. Somewhere along the line someone decided that that could allow communication faster than the speed of light. In addition to sending messages instantaneously a quantum entanglement communique would be impossible to intercept as it would be teleported to the receiver. The harsh reality is that the act of observing an entangled particle breaks the connection with the paired particle, attempting to send data with entangled particles would by necessity require observing them.

However, quantum entanglement can be used to encrypt messages sent by conventional (currently only dedicated fiber optic cables) means such that only those who possess one of two “keys” can interpret the data. By encoding a transmission in the form of quantum states of a particle one ensures that the very act of intercepting it would corrupt the data and alert the holders of the keys as to how much of the message was intercepted. And it actually has been done, some governments and companies who consider security worth the expense use quantum cryptography for their most secure data transmissions, the Swiss canton of Geneva used it to send national election ballot results to the capital in 2007 for example. There have also been experiments with sending quantum encrypted messages over radio as well, it seems likely that the technology will become more prevalent over the next few decades. Though of course it only works between two specialized devices that have to be physically transported to their working locations.

The Utterly Fantastic

Of course, even quantum-encrypted FTL neutrinos would take years to travel from one solar system to another, so many authors have turned to the farther fringes of science in order to maintain “instantaneous communication”. For example, tachyons which are highly hypothetical particles that travel faster than light and which most scientists don’t believe exist. Or if their universe allows physical travel through some sort of “hyperspace” they might send radio transmissions through that same dimension where the normal laws of physics don’t apply. Heck, you might even use mentally “bonded” telepaths, worked for Heinlein.

Science fiction loves robots to pieces, but fortunately for genre writers and fans, the feeling is mutual. Engineers and scientists are working near-miracles in the robotics field, and the fruits of their labor are ripe for fiction’s picking. 2012 is still young by most accounts, yet this year robots have already grown tails and scales, acquired aerial speed limits, and learned to swim like a boss. Next they’ll be popping-up in swarms and colonizing our eaves. Or better yet: We’ll wear them on our hands to reduce the repetitive stress injuries we’re causing ourselves by trying to write ever-cleverer new robots into science fiction faster than actual science can render the bots of our dreams obsolete.

Probably the only way we writers can keep up with – or even hope to outpace – the current rate of robotic development is by imagining new purposes and roles for robots. It’s unlikely that scientists and engineers will ever stop endeavoring to simulate humanity and integrate androids into society, as lofty as that goal is. But if real bots must eventually look like and learn like humans, the least we can do is give readers more interesting robots to read about than the one that sweeps floors and amuses cats, or the android in the kitchen with Dinah. We already use droids for offense and defense, manufacturing, and surgery. Robotic search and rescue is a high priority for research and development, and it looks like construction may soon be crawling with bots. So what frontiers does that leave fiction to explore?

Plenty. The world already includes many different kinds of robots with different functions and forms, and the diversity of artificial ‘species’ will only continue to expand (even as natural diversity contracts at an alarming rate). As robots abound, they will inevitably need to interact well with natural species and with each other in order to satisfy human demands. They’ll need to function optimally with a minimum of human guidance, and endure at times in spite of human intervention. Face it: We abuse our tools and hack our toys. Robots need to be resilient just to survive life among humans. There’s enough fodder for stories in those last few sentences alone to keep an author busy for the length of a so-called Golden Age of fiction…

The strange android had stepped from behind an overgrown bougainvillea and disabled their Guardians before they’d even known it was there. “Remain calm, children. I won’t hurt you.” It spoke like a classic film actress, its voice a disarming combination of cultured and flinty that the boys recognized from their seventh grade film history elective but had never heard in person. –Read an excerpt from ‘Parent Hack’ by Kay T. Holt

Note: This article is a report on a live discussion I had with Janet Harriet, Harry Markov, and Glenda Pfeiffer on Google+. Our topic was Illness and medicine.

One of the fundamental underpinnings of any culture of illness and medicine is the idea of cause and effect. The way that we treat people, and the types of medicine we pursue, are based on our understanding of the causes of illness. Thus, when a people believes that illness is caused by evil spirits, the medical approach will typically address this problem directly by providing exorcisms and other spiritual approaches. When a people possesses the idea of germ theory, that fundamentally changes the approach to one of finding medicines to deal with the germs in question. There is also the possibility that medicine may be an empirical/experimental practice, which is to say that a people may have found out through fortuitous circumstance that eating a certain plant will cure headaches, or stop a certain kind of illness. In this case the cause of illness may not be considered particularly relevant. Janet felt that (at least historically) midwives have had an expertise that grows out of this kind of learn-by-experience approach. And Harry mentioned that if you have a magical healing system, the sense of cause might not even be necessary.

On the other hand, a logic of magical healing is necessary. This logic can grow out of the general logic of a magic system, or out of some kind of medically based model, but it needs to feel grounded. I mentioned how I’d worked with Janice Hardy when she was setting up some of the cultural underpinnings of the magical healing system she used in The Healing Wars. In this system, healers are able magically to perceive injury and hurt, and to heal it, but must take the pain of it into their own bodies. Then they have to push the pain out into a magical metal which stores it (and is in short supply). This metal is in turn forged into pain-shooting weapons, creating a pain-based economy. Believe me, this is a fascinating trilogy – but at the start we were looking for answers to questions like these:

Who are physicians?
Why are they chosen as doctors?
What is the role of doctors in the culture?
What are the limitations on doctors?
Is there any alternative to the magical healing system?

In fact, people who use plants and other substances to heal are considered dirty in Janice’s world, and dangerously unreliable…but the system would have seemed incomplete without them.

I believe it was Harry who mentioned that in the Anime series “Bleach” there is a character who can do what looks like healing, but is actually a localized reversal of time that reverts the damage to its previous condition. Harry shared a logistical issue he’s been dealing with in his work in progress, where magic can be used to heal, but at the same time, using magic is a drain on life force. So what happens if you try to heal yourself? It could be complex…

Glenda asked, “How do the magical healers conceptualize healing and illness?” This is an excellent question. Very often we use metaphors to describe illness; this can influence our treatment of it in addition to our general concept of its cause. Magical healers who are aware of physiology will treat people very differently from those who are not. Harry’s system has complex rituals – like recipes – for tissue repair. Thus the healer need not know too much about physiology, only how to follow the rituals, and of course he/she must have the magic ability to activate the process.

It is worth doing research when you’re dealing with illness and medicine in your writing. Don’t just gesture at what is possible. I’ve gone and looked up how to treat bruises, and I’ve looked up the different types of recognized mental illnesses, and a lot of other things as well. It’s also worth considering the scope of what doctors are called on to treat. As Harry noted, homosexuality has sometimes been considered a mental condition that requires “treatment.”

What can you alter in your world? There are lots of underlying parameters that are open to change. For example, who is more important, the doctor or the patient? Who has the power, and why? Can you ask questions about the recommended treatments, such as why and how they are to be delivered? Can you refuse treatment?

It’s important to keep in mind also that doctors are knowledge elites, much like priests. They undergo special training, and have knowledge that must be protected and treated with respect. Often they can engage the services of gatekeepers to help them accomplish this. In the case of a system based on evil spirit possession, the roles of doctor and priest can overlap. Even today, Harry told us, people worry about the “evil eye” in Bulgaria: if people look at you and think you’re pretty they will jinx you and make you feel ill; grandmothers will recommend washing your eyes three times at the door and washing the door handle and then you should be fine. Exorcisms still happen, and mental illness can sometimes be labeled as possession.

The metaphors we use to describe our bodies and our health are very resistant to change over time, and they can deeply affect our behavior. If you’re worldbuilding, this is a wonderful area to spend time developing because tiny phrases will speak volumes about the way your people think. Here are some expressions that the discussion participants shared:

“The hamster that runs my brain fell off.”
“One of your boards is loose.”
“Losing your marbles”
“Not playing with a full deck”
“You’ve let go like liver” (in Bulgaria describes lounging around lazily)
“A seagull has eaten your brain”

I wrote a post some time ago called Body Models and Metaphors, which was about how one decides when to seek medical treatment. Some people base their decision on the amount of time one has been sick, while others base their decision on specific types of changes in the health condition.

Some final things we mentioned were terminal illness and palliative care, medical insurance, and issues of public health and vaccination.

In Japan, very often the person who has a terminal illness will not be told, because it is believed that the knowledge would trouble them unnecessarily. Instead, the family will be told, and the patient simply expected to follow doctor’s orders without any knowledge of the reason. I linked to the article called “How Doctors Die” which is also relevant here, about the cultural conditions that lead us to expend so much money on torturous last-ditch treatments when people are near death. The question of medical insurance comes along with the role of government in public health in the society you’re designing. Does this society have a concept of spreading the risk across the population? How might a government respond to issues of public health when it is responsible for safeguarding public health and sponsoring treatment? In Australia, the government puts out pretty stiff advertising against unhealthful behavior that brings significant expense upon the public health system. One would expect vaccinations to be heavily supported in an environment like that, whereas in the US a lot of people have been convinced by fraudulent argumentation that vaccinations cause autism or other disorders… leading directly to public health problems such as the resurgence of diseases like measles and whooping cough. There can also be questions of whether one group in society is disproportionately affected by one health condition or another – such as Tay-Sachs disease affecting Jewish people, or royal families having a tendency to carry hemophilia. In my Varin world the noble caste is heavily inbred and so everybody has some kind of health difficulties (or if they don’t have them currently, they still might have had difficulties at birth).

Obviously there’s far more than can be covered in one hour, but I hope these thoughts have given you some inspiration.