A space rescue and other great ideas

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, short stories

In the past couple of days I've read five more stories in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke.

The first, and my favorite so far, is "Falling Off the Edge of the World" by Suzanne Palmer. An interstellar spacecraft has been disabled by some sort of collision in whatever subspace the author posits for FTL travel. After about thirty years it is found by a crew searching along the ship's known line of travel. However, the story is revealed little by little, with many flashbacks and flash-forwards that sometimes confused me. The "light javelin" that speared the craft, it turns out, was peopled by enigmatic, benevolent aliens called "The E", and it is apparently their technology that enabled the human craft, and surviving crew, to live thirty years until rescue. They are either invisible in some way or too small to be seen. Rather than reveal (spoil) more, I'll mention a couple of unique ideas. Part of the spacecraft's hull has been re-formed into a kind of cocoon that protects it from random impacts and preserves the atmosphere. From outside it looks like a silkworm cocoon. Something The E put into tea preserves the health of Gabe, the man at one end of the ship, who cannot go to the other end because of the damage. The story is bittersweet, heartwarming and heart-wrenching.

Another story with an extension of current technology, and a political throwback (hardly unlikely, actually) to a more feudal age, is "When the Tide Rises" by Sarah Gailey. The main character (never named, as I recall) works to gather sea urchins in a kelp farm. Sea urchins eat the holdfasts and stalks of kelp, thus ruining the crop. 

Urchin harvesting is being done now, partly by professionals and partly by volunteers, at a number of natural kelp forests, to restore them. The sea urchins are multiplying because the sea otters that prey on them are a threatened species and may go extinct. Hardly anything else preys on the sea urchins. Nothing fast enough to stay ahead of their powers of multiplication, at any rate.

The kelp farm is a "company town," with all the evils that historical reference implies. An old song about mining goes, "Sixteen tons, what do you get? / Another day older and deeper in debt. / St. Peter, don't call me, 'cause I can't go, / I owe my soul to the company store." The urchin picker of the story is in a similar pickle. The story ends with a possible out, but we don't know if she will take it.

One story is about "past life reconstruction", which is something I can't bring myself to take seriously. No trace of Hinduism in my soul, folks.

The story "A Brief History of Beinakan Disasters as Told in a Sinitic Language" by Nian Yu is a fresh take on alien invasion. Beinakans are tiny aliens from a water world similar to Europa but larger, with an ocean several thousand km deep, with an ice cover. They have a symbiotic relationship with another sentient species, the Ilian, which are a hundred times as large. Together, the two species, after 40,000 years of co-existence, find a way to penetrate the ice cap and discover the rest of the universe. Almost immediately, they find that a not-too-distant star is about to explode as a supernova. The star is called Rigel in the story, but I suspect the author was thinking of Betelgeuse and just doesn't know a lot of astronomy. Spaceships can be produced for the Beinakans to use to flee, but the Ilians can't go.

The story is told as "capsule memories", which refers to a way the Beinakans and Ilians pass on knowledge and history from generation to generation. In their fleeing, a Beinakan ship finds Earth, which has also been devastated by the supernova, but small numbers of humans are found to have survived. Naturally, the Beinakans take over. The result isn't pretty. I'll leave it at that.

Finally, "Quandary Aminu vs The Butterfly Man" by Rich Larson is an ugly but effective story of a manufactured assassin and its target. This "butterfly" has nothing positive about it! The author's expertise is crafting highly convoluted plotlines. That, and being a potty mouth. This story is unusual in that I didn't like it but I was driven to complete reading it. The idea of some kind of crystal mind and memory, such that each successive butterfly man has all the memories of prior ones, is rather unsettling.

We're doing pretty well so far. A good number of stories that I am glad I read, and very few that I either skipped or was chagrined to have read.

SI struggling to get cats right

 kw: generative art, experiments, cats, simulated intelligence

I spent an interesting hour several days ago "persuading" a few generative art programs to make an illustration for a story I planned to review. In the story, a ship cat (on a spaceship) in patrolling, as cats do, and sees someone (a saboteur, but the cat doesn't know that) release many tiny spiderlike robots from a bag. They are intended to disable the ship. The cat hunts them down and destroys every one (there's other things that happen to the saboteur). I tested various prompts, and settled on this one:

A white-and-black cat fiercely pouncing on small mechanical spiders in a spaceship cargo bay

My first tests were with Dall-E3 in Bing ("Bing Image Creator"). This image, the best of twenty or more images, was the closest to what I was looking for, up to this point.

There is just a one significant problem: The cat appears to be allied with the spiderbots, not attacking them.

Other than that, it's a very good image.

I usually find that Dall-E3 adheres most closely to the prompt. I wasn't satisfied, so I went on to Gemini, which uses Imagen 3 when you ask for an image. 

Imagen 3 produces only a single image, and that image is always square. If you ask Gemini how to ask for a wide format image, it gives instructions, but they don't work. If you just ask, "Please create the same image in a wider format," it will respond, "Sure, here you are," but it will produce another square image, usually very similar. Oh, well.

Here is the image Gemini offered. It was square, but with enough freeboard above and below that I could crop it to a 4:3 aspect ratio. It is the one I ended up using. There are a couple of anomalies, however. Take a close look at the paws. The left paw, that is the one raised, has the dewclaw much too far forward, like a thumb, and there is a sixth digit. Also, one of the digits on that paw, and the corresponding digit on the right paw, have double claws.

An image of a barefoot man that Dall-E2 produced for me a couple of years ago has six toes on one foot and seven on the other. These sorts of errors show that the programs aren't just modifying images of real cats or cartoon humans, but doing something deeper. However, they demonstrate that there is no understanding of the actual nature of cats or humans…or anything else, for that matter.

I went on to ImageFX, part of Google Labs, which I understand uses Imagen 3 also, but it seems to have more flexibility, including settings for aspect ratios. A slip of the mouse set the aspect ratio to Portrait for this one. I kind of like the tiny screens on the spiderbots. As with the Dall-E3 image, it isn't clear whose side the cat is on.

I tried again with a wide aspect ratio setting. This one came out 10:7. This is the only image of the entire set that has the cat in mid-pounce. But is it pouncing on the spiders?

If you look carefully you can see a number of flying spiders.

Hoping to get the cat attacking spiders without ambiguity (though the Gemini image is quite good), I turned to Leonardo AI. Bingo!

This image used the Leonardo Phoenix preset and the Moody style. The cat is not exactly pouncing, but at least it is looking at its prey. I almost used this image, but there is distortion in the hip area, and the even moodier tone of the Gemini image led me to choose that one.

In all, I generated about 100 images to get one I could happily use, and these few others that are "almost there," and interesting in their own right.

Post-Apocalypticism prevails

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, short stories

In three days I've read seven more stories in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke. I'll point out the interesting ideas and comment just a bit extra on the stories I liked the best. Among the seven, four are explicitly post-apocalyptic and two are post-modern dystopian.

The most openly post-apocalyptic is "If We Make it Through This Alive" by A.T. Greenblatt. Three women have entered a cross-continent rally contest, from the abandoned King of Prussia Mall near Philadelphia to an unnamed location in Sacramento, 2,800 road miles away. With a dramatically modified, electrified, ruggedized Jeep they expect to make the journey in 10-11 days. I couldn't get ImageFX to add the solar panels and other accoutrements to the Jeep for this image, but the mood is about right.

For reference, on present-day Interstate highways, the driving time estimate is 40 hours. The fact that average speeds are expected to be in the 25-30 mph range indicates that the author posits a not-totally-annihilated road system. The three each have their own hidden traumas to re-overcome, and each her reasons for being in Philadelphia in the first place, when city living has become much more fraught than rural life.

A story that seems post-apocalyptic, but maybe that's because the middle of a forest fire is apocalyptic enough for most of us, is "All The Burns Unseen" by Premee Mohamed. Fire may cleanse a landscape, but the protagonist, on a mission to find and possibly rescue her parents, finds that it reveals her fractured family relationships, healing nothing.

Producing a colony in the atmosphere of Venus was supposed to yield a utopia. In "We Built This City" by Marie Vibbert, the daughter of "the woman who built the city" has a much more lowly job, but one that provides her with a few perquisites in the dystopia that the city has become. Like many post-apocalyptic and dystopian stories, the cynicism of "the elite" and despair of almost everyone else sits right on the surface. Although the protagonist's heroism earns her mother's respect and "saves the day", the story ends without resolution. Presumably the cynics who run things will make at most token concessions.

In "Mender of Sparrows" by Ray Naylor it gradually becomes clear that the protagonist is a sort of Android. That is, his continued existence is because in an emergency his personality was ported into the body of an Android, whereas "ordinary" Androids have a scripted or manufactured persona. A key concept is the Connectome, the totality of connections between the nervous system and the body, whether human or mechanical. A secondary concept is that humans can detect an Android instantly; one presumes that the "uncanny valley" has not been fully crossed. Both these matters emphasize the point that true artificial intelligence requires embodiment, while demonstrating that such embodiment is no easy conundrum to crack.

Other ideas of interest:

• Being in a simulation already, and experiencing meta-simulations ("Forty-Eight Minutes at the Trainview Café" by M. Bennardo; otherwise rather boring).
• Reification of an old photo (and presumably a lot of other stuff, hardly mentioned) into a simulation of a deceased person or pet ("The Historiography of Loss" by Julianna Baggott; puzzling and moderately sad without inculcating care for the protagonist or anyone else).
• Those left behind on Earth when all the rich escaped into orbiting habitats, such as "Erewhon", the home of the rich losers the story centers on, have been modified to digest plastic, because there is so much of it left ("The Plastic People" by Tobias S. Buckell; point made, the story goes nowhere and the people learn nothing).

So far, the book is holding up well. The least interesting of the stories I have read so far is better than the best to be found in the volume of mainstream short stories I panned a month ago.

Of dragons and an amazing cat

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, science fiction, anthologies, collections, short stories

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke, is big, 581 pages. If I wait until I have read it all to produce any reviews, it could be a couple of weeks. Instead, I'll review a few stories every day or two.

In marked contrast to a collection of "mainstream fiction" that I aborted and panned, just in the first five stories there are three that made me think, "I'm glad I read that," one that I give a guarded "+", and the fifth is at least so-so, but too puzzling to be enjoyable. Here I'll focus on two favorites. Remember, I am an idea guy, but I also like deft craftsmanship.

In "The Dragon Project" by Naomi Kritzer, the core idea is 3D printing of living animals, an offshoot of the trade in 3D printed organs for transplanting. It takes three iterations to produce a dragon that a rich customer will accept; shades of Goldilocks! The three are, respectively, akin to a house cat, a dog, and a pony. But they are dragons, and the "satisfactory" one can even spit fire. That's already giving away a bit too much, but this story is tremendous fun to read. We'll move on…

"The Ship Cat of the Suzaku Maru" by S.L. Huang is named Toshi, and of course he saves the day. The story is told almost from Toshi's point of view by a narrator that knows the cat's mind. The picture is a bit of a spoiler, but I couldn't let the climactic image go un-illustrated. I fiddled with four image generators, and this offering from Gemini (Imagen 3) is the best of a hundred or so (there is a fine line between under- and over-prompting such software).

I think it worthwhile to mention something from "Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu" by Grace Chan. An atypical story of corrupt Haves vs downtrodden Have-nots, it culminates in a hacking-as-justice climax. Would that things were so simple, but it's great fun to read anyway. Interesting fight scene also.

Five down, 29 to go. I note that the lengths of the stories ranges from 5 to 49 pages (a novelette). Buckle up!

Peeking under the skin of the Earth

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, geology, volcanology, volcanoes, scientists, memoirs

My uncle was a professor of geology, and during the summer season he consulted for mining companies. He had a "volcano fund", and when there was a report of a new eruption, if he could get someone to cover his classes, he would go. I don't know whether he went to study the volcano, or if he just wanted to see it. The new book I have in hand is by and about someone who goes, and goes frequently, to study these volcanoes: Adventures in Volcanoland: What Volcanoes Tell Us About the World and Ourselves, by Tamsin Mather. Dr Mather's particular expertise is geochemistry, and much of what she does involves collecting and studying the gases that emanate from volcanic vents; talk about bearding the dragon in its own den!

Fear not for our intrepid scientist. Gathering volcanic emissions can indeed be hazardous, but it is rare these days to be required to carry fragile glassware up a mountainside to the edge of doom. Many gases can be gathered by fly-through drones, and hand-sampling equipment is now longer-reaching and safer to use. Though losing a drone can be costly, it beats losing life or health. In other cases, such as a survey described in Chapter 6, "All in the Balance", the gases of interest were known to be emitted over a wide area at a volcano in Ethiopia named Aluto; the author and another scientist took hundreds of samples laid out in a grid covering one square kilometer. This provided a measure of the point-to-point variability in that square, and a rough statistical value for total gas emission in the whole caldera.

The book surveys the progressive understanding of volcanoes as it developed over the past two-and-a-half millennia (or longer). Current knowledge has two broad branches: present day volcanism and Earth's volcanic history. The total recorded history seems long to us, being something like 80 generations. But the geologic record—written not in documents but in the layout of rocks and their arrangements—can be read with reasonable clarity back to 100 to 200 million years, and with less and less resolution over the rest of Earth's four-plus billion year history. The author relates a powerful illustration: A lecturer held out his arm and said, "Imagine that all the time that Earth has existed is represented by the length of my arm." He went on to say that multicellular life arose about where his hand meets the wrist, and that the demise of the dinosaurs occurred at the base of a fingernail. And how much of this length would all of humanity's existence take up? Just the shavings from a single, quite light, stroke of a fingernail file! So "current knowledge" and "deep time knowledge" have very different scales.

One thing we learn from the deep history that has been discerned is that the absolute extremes of present-day volcanism are a fraction of what has happened in the past. A tool for scaling the magnitude of an eruption has been developed: VEI, the Volcano Explosivity Index, which ranges from zero to eight. The boundary between 0 and 1 is an erupted volume of 10,000 cubic meters. Each step is ten times the size of the one before, except VEI-1 covers a range of 100:1, from 10,000 cubic meters to one million. A few examples will give the idea:

• Kilauea in Hawaii erupts constantly for weeks or months at a time, but at a low daily volume, so it is the prime example of VEI-0. Few are the days that it rises to VEI-1.
• Mt. Etna in Sicily erupts from time to time, and a recent eruption produced more than a million cubic meters, or something over 0.001 cubic km; it is VEI-2.
• The devastating eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79BC is considered VE-5. It ejected several cubic km of tephra (the general word for volcanic "stuff"), as did Mt. Saint Helens in 1980.
• The largest eruption in recorded history is probably that of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia in 1815. Estimates of ejecta volume range from 35 cubic km to more than 100, putting it near the VEI-6/VEI-7 boundary. No undisputed VEI-7 or larger eruptions have occurred in recorded history.
• If a "supervolcano" such as that under Yellowstone erupts, it is expected to be VEI-8, yielding more than 1,000 cubic km. There are 20 known supervolcano calderas on Earth, but none has done much more than fuel groups of geysers more recently than a few hundred thousand years ago. Will there be a next time?

There is little element of time in this scale; it refers primarily to single events. If we consider really persistent eruptions that play out over thousands to millions of years, we get a different scale of beast entirely. Total long-term volumes can exceed VEI-8 by a factor of 1,000 or more! Consider this map:

This is a map of the known Large Igneous Provinces on Earth, for the past 330 million years. They number 24. It isn't known where particular eruptive events are on the VEI scale. But they just kept at it for so long that the typical total is between 1 million cubic km and 100 million! So a mid-range one of these could have covered all of the "lower 48" USA to a depth of about a mile, 1.5 km or more.

The "lesser" eruptions of historic times outline an amazing picture. You may have heard of the "ring of fire", that the Pacific Ocean has volcanoes along all its boundaries. There are other chains of volcanism, but this is the largest. This was a mystery before the understanding of Plate Tectonics was developed in the 1960's, just when I began to study geology in college! The knowledge was so new that the only "textbook" was a little (~200pp) paperback titled The New View of the Earth: Moving Continents and Moving Oceans. I don't recall the author.

The crust of the Earth has two varieties: Continental crust is mostly granite and related "light" rocks ranging between 15 and 50 km thick. Oceanic crust is mostly basalt or gabbro and related "dark" rocks ranging between 4 and 10 km thick. Each patch of crust is "riding" on a "lithospheric plate" 100-200 km thick. Beneath that, the hot mantle is in very slow motion, dragging these plates about. Where they collide, one usually slides underneath the other, and the portion going downward gets "cooked", producing upwelling magma, and a line of volcanoes is the result. Where two continental plates collide, they both get squeezed, and one such area is the Himalayas, which are still rising. The Appalachian mountains of North America are the roots of a former Himalaya of 450 million years ago, now worn to just nubbins.

The really big volcanic areas, and the supervolcanoes that they eclipse, come late in the book. The much less powerful volcanoes that abound all over the planet provide plenty of opportunity for scientists to gather data, whether up-close-and-personal (collecting gases or lava samples, etc.) or more remotely, such as by seismic monitoring. There are 38 volcanoes erupting at this moment; this can be monitored here. About 60 others are grumbling and rumbling and "offering to erupt". So, my uncle could actually have found somewhere to go any particular day, if there had been an Internet in the 1950's!

The author has spent half her life visiting volcanoes and studying them, and in particular their chemistry. I think perhaps my uncle longed for such a life, but the life of a college professor was his lot. I also wanted to be a field geologist, but I found that writing software for scientists was more lucrative (and safer! and I didn't have to live in a tent.). I really appreciate a good scientist who is a good writer, who can bring the stories of the Earth to those of us who don't have as much opportunity to "go where nature is". Even more, here and there a youngster could be inspired to embrace a life of natural history.

Collapsing Schwarzschild 's Cat

 kw: article reactions, black holes, primordial black holes, musings

A recent article at Space.com is titled, "Are planet-killing black holes hiding inside your cat?" I suppose the meme behind the title is Schrödinger's dead/not dead cat. The author, Robert Lea, quotes researcher Dejan Stojkovic as saying,

"But don't worry about a primordial black hole shooting through your cat, or you, for that matter. The team behind these findings says such an event would be non-lethal!"

The article includes an illustration of several sizes of black holes, from supermassive (a billion suns) to sub-proton size, which is in the range of theorized primordial black holes. In particular, a black hole with the "mass of an asteroid" is stated to be smaller than a proton. I suppose that depends on the asteroid; the term "asteroid" covers material ranging in size from a sand grain to a few hundred km.

It is stated that primordial black holes, if they exist, would be zipping about at near-light speed (nobody ever says why), so one would pass through you, or your cat, or Earth, very quickly; about a nanosecond, on your case. I thought of two ways a tiny black hole can cause harm. Firstly, the intense gravitational field "nearby" (we'll try to define that soon) could disrupt tissue; and the Hawking radiation that, we have learned, will eventually result in any black hole "evaporating" by emitting radiation and thus losing mass, could cook (or evaporate!) tissue it passes through.

I would expect these two phenomena to be significant in different regimes, viz:

1. A really small black hole, weighing, say less than a million metric tons (tonnes), will have a smaller reach, gravitationally, but its Hawking radiation will be stronger. If you are "near" such an object long enough, you may not suffer damage from the gravity, but you could get cooked.
2. A larger black hole will have much less Hawking radiation, but its gravitation reach will be greater. If you are "near" such an object long enough, its gravity can do great damage, but its radiation could be beneath notice.

Calculation time! I made much use of Victor T. Toth's Hawking Radiation Calculator. Here are relevant parameters for three possible black holes, one the size of a proton, one 100 times larger, and one 100 times smaller (in radius). The proton's radius is about 0.84 fm (femtometers), or 0.84x10^-15 m; we'll call this Rp.

• Radius in Rp:              100   1.0     0.01
• Mass, Million Tonnes:   56,600   566     5.66
• Temperature, Billion K:   2.17   217   21,700
• Heat, Billion Watts:  0.000111  1.11   11,100

Note that these all are really, really hot! To get a feel for their masses: Iron has a density of 7.9 Tonne/cubic m. A cube of iron weighing 5.66 million Tonnes would be 89.5 meters on a side; for 566 Tonnes, the size is 415 m, and for 56,600 million Tonnes, the size is 1,930 m, or more than a mile. That's getting to substantial asteroid size.

To illustrate how small a proton is in relation to a typical atom, atom radii are in the range of a tenth of a nanometer, or 100,000 fm. A black hole with a radius or 100,000 fm (a little smaller than an iron atom, for example) has these parameters:

• Mass, Million Tonnes:   67 million → 67 trillion Tonnes
• Temperature, K:        1.8 million
• Heat, Watts:               0.079

Note that this "bigger" black hole may be super-hot, but its radiation is negligible. Let's first focus on Gravity. For reference, "1 G" is 9.8 Nt/kg (Newtons per kilogram) at the surface of the Earth. The proton-sized black hole, weighing 566 million Tonnes, would exert a force of 378 Nt on a mass of one gram (such as a BB) at a distance of 1 cm. That's 38,600 G. Gravity scales as the square of 1/r, so within 1 mm of the black hole, anything there (cells in your body as it passes through?) would experience a force of 3.86 million G. Here, duration is everything. If the black hole's velocity is, say a third of the speed of light (or roughly 0.1 m per nanosecond), the time it takes to move one millimeter is about 10 picoseconds. That means that a random cell that is 1 mm off the center of the black hole's path will "see" a spike in force that rapidly changes direction through a 180° arc in the space of about 0.1 nanosecond, reaching nearly four billion G's.

I don't know how to describe the effect on the cell. It is unlikely to survive. It probably doesn't have time to be sucked into the black hole, but a cell that is "brushed by" (say, 1/100th mm) most certainly will be. The result will be a thin "soda straw" hole through the body, much less than 1 mm in diameter, but I don't know how much less.

How about the mass with a size of 100 proton radii? At 1 cm distance, the force would be 3.86 million G's. It is very likely that such a mass passing through you (or your cat) will leave a hole a substantial fraction of a cm across. It is similar to being hit by a 30 caliber rifle bullet, just much, much faster. If either of these masses were moving a lot more slowly, such as an orbital speed in the range of 30 km/sec, rather than 100,000 km/sec (1/3 of light speed), the breadth of destroyed tissue would be dozens to hundreds of times greater, and the diameter of the "soda straw" …? It's hard to comprehend. So let's not bother checking the atom-sized black hole, weighing in at 67 trillion Tonnes! If any exist, they could explain rare cases of disappearance, perhaps.

How about temperature? The hottest black hole is the smallest, and has an incredibly tiny surface area to radiate heat, but radiates 10,000 times as much heat as the proton-sized one. It can do so for a quarter of a million years. Its radiation, mostly X- and gamma rays, amounts to 11 trillion watts. If any of these were anywhere within a few light-years, we'd see them. Let's back off to the 100 Rp radius black hole, which radiates (still in X-rays and higher) 111,000 watts. If it is traveling at 1/3 c, it passes through you in 3-4 ns, leaving behind about 4 milliJoules, or some 4,000 ergs. Spread that out along the length of the path through your body, and it isn't much heat.

Now consider the middle mass, the proton-sized one. It radiates 1.11 billion watts. In the time given, it deposits around 4 Joules, or close to one calorie. Again, not much heating. So there is little "cooking" expected from really fast-moving primordial black holes. However, if their speed is closer to orbital speeds, the "dwell time" is several thousand times greater, and 4 joules becomes more than 10,000 joules, equal to a kilowatt for ten seconds. That'll burn a hole through you! It's not quite as powerful as a lightning strike, but it's getting in that range.

I started out thinking I could debunk the idea that primordial black holes aren't much danger. In certain circumstances they aren't, that's true, but what grounds to we have to assume they are going fast enough to pass through you, or me, or the nearest cat, without swallowing up a hurtful amount of stuff, and cooking much of what isn't sucked in?

Whatever speed they are moving, the smaller ones ought to be visible as sky-blue items that emit lots of X- and gamma radiation. With current instrumentation, we'd be hard pressed to determine their actual temperature. "Millions of degrees" just begins to describe it. So, I've actually presented a challenge to the idea that primordial black holes weighing less than about a half billion Tonnes exist at all.

Troglodyte fantasy

 kw: generated images, ai experiments, caves, cave dwellings, underground living

I have been experimenting with image generation "AI" software for just over two years, having first tried out Dall-E2 on November 11, 2022. I frequently use the software to produce various kinds of backgrounds for Zoom meetings, to use with a green screen. Some are forest glades, some are mountain scenes, some are desert scenes, some are views of alien planets, and some that are intended for "business"  sessions are laboratories or offices.

I had the idea to make images of an office in a cave. I love caves. Preferred vacation destinations are places such as Carlsbad Caverns, Mammoth Cave, Luray Caves and the several caves along the Blue Ridge Parkway. I had several art generators produce hundreds of images, and kept about thirty of them. Two are standouts:

This is from Leonardo AI, using the Preset "Illustrative Albedo" and Style "Stylized Illustration", which produced this colorful result. It's a bit fanciful, which appealed to me.

To see an image full size, click on it. Click next to the image to return to this page.

This is from ImageFX (in Google Labs), which does things differently, having an option to choose from numerous adjectives, which then are appended to the prompt. I appended "Cinematic". This looks more like a natural, though dry, cave (I wouldn't want an office in a drippy, living cave!).

A week or two later I decided to generate the rest of the rooms of a cave dwelling, one I might like to live in.

The original prompt for the Cave Office was an extra-long 50-word prompt, about 275 characters. Several of the art generators put the first 32 characters of the prompt in the file name, in addition to the name of the program and, often, the "seed" number (The seed is supposed to allow you to regenerate an image and then modify it in a later session). I keep a text file of long prompts so I can re-use them. This helps with product comparisons. I change the file name to a prompt identifier plus a program ID, the date, and a serial number.

I eventually prepared twelve more "Trog" series prompts, ranging from 17 to 48 words. Note that most of these programs take in no more than 77 "tokens" (an unusual number...), and a "token" can be a word, a syllable, or a punctuation-space combination, so I don't let prompts go much beyond 50 words.

Is Troglodyte a new word to you? It means a person or animal that lives underground. In old literature it was used in a derogatory way to refer to, for example, underground-dwelling "dwarves".

I won't dig deeper into the technicalities. Here I want to showcase the different rooms I dreamed up, and the way each of these two programs responded to the prompt. I present them four rooms at a time, and each "room" is my favorite from 4, or 8, or more images offered up by the art generator. I start with all the Leonardo AI offerings:

Clockwise from upper left: 

• Entryway. An arch has been built into the cave mouth, and case of shelves full of pots stands nearby. I asked for a coat closet; this is the only "closet" I was offered! Note that this combination of product and its presets has every room adjacent to a skylight or a cave exit.
• Living Room. The floor is paved. I'd have asked for Grow Lights for the houseplants if I'd realized the program would create some.
• Kitchen, complete with a window to outside. The prompt included "refrigerator" but none was offered.
• Formal Dining Room with a chandelier. The pool is a bonus.

• Sitting Room and Library. It takes a dry cave to be a safe place to shelve books.
• TV Room. I debated asking for theater-style seating, but opted for this look instead.
• Office. The original cave room, which inspired all the others.
• Game Room. What's a grand home without a billiards table and some board games?

• Hallway to Bedrooms. This was as close as I could come, in the Leonardo offerings. The floor is close to natural. I asked for wall sconces, and got lots of them.
• Master Bedroom. I asked for a canopy bed, but never received one.
• Utility Room and Laundry. The most natural floor of all the rooms. The tool bench is minimal. Though no stairs are evident, this is clearly a "basement" area.
• Walk-in Closet. This is intended to be attached to the Master Bedroom. One presumes the view is from an archway in the bedroom.

OK, let's compare the ImageFX offerings, in the same order:

As before, clockwise from top left:

• Entryway. Here, the entry is apparently around a bend. Coat closets and a chair make it inviting.
• Living Room.
• Kitchen. Complete with refrigerator! IFX is more compliant to details in the prompt.
• Formal Dining Room with chandelier. The buffet off to the side, with warming pans, is a nice touch.

• Sitting Room and Library. I didn't ask for the Oriental rug, but I'm glad it was included.
• TV Room. Here the seating is facing the screen, in an informal arrangement.
• Office. Of all the rooms, this looks the most like the cave is a backdrop rather than integral.
• Game Room.

• Hall to Bedrooms. This is what I had in mind.
• Master Bedroom. With canopy bed! The knitted rug is as I asked for every time; here it is most evident.
• Utility Room and Laundry. A better work bench.
• Walk-in Closet. The central dresser is nice. I had asked for both men's and women's clothing to be shown. IFX did so.
  

The big lesson for me is that tremendous variety is available; it takes lots of experimentation to learn the uses and limitations of each tool. The IFX images tend to be low key. To make a presentable image, I'll raise the lightness with the Gamma tool in IrfanView, which I use to trim an image and add a signature (as any artist would!). I use Upscayl to double the x- and y- pixel count.

If you have a sharp eye, you may note that the aspect ratio of the images differs between the two programs. Both Leonardo AI and ImageFX have various aspect ratios available. I always asked for 16:9, the same as HDTV, which also matches the screens of my computer setup. However, Leonardo AI images, for all its Presets except "Phoenix", yields images that are 1368x768, or 1.78125 or 57:32. ImageFX images are even wider, 1408x768, or 1.8333... or 11:6.

When I make a Zoom background, or a wallpaper for my Screen Saver, I want exactly 16:9, so images must be trimmed. I'll prepare an essay about that later on.

Art generators don't know physics

 kw: generated art, scientific errors, comparisons, stock image websites

Reading a book of science for a popular audience, in a section about the use of spectroscopy to learn the compositions of stars, I encountered this illustration. Can you see what is (dramatically!) wrong with it?

The principle of refraction is this: when light enters a transparent material, such as glass, from the air, at an angle, it is bent closer to a line perpendicular to the material's surface. That means that the beam of white light entering from the left, should be refracted into a narrow spectrum that proceeds down and to the right. Then, when it encounters the other side of the prism, which is at a different angle, it will be bent downward again. 

Here, the first refraction is in the wrong direction. That implies that the glass prism has a refractive index less than 1, which is impossible. But the second refraction has the correct sense, which just adds confusion. This illustration is from Getty Images, a source of much stock artwork and photography. The author of the book in which I saw this image must not have been paying attention.

This is a more accurate illustration; it is from Britannica online. It shows the refraction angles correctly. One small matter is not accurate: Real prisms produce a spectrum with a dispersion angle of less than one degree. This illustration shows the spectrum, at the right, spreading across fifteen degrees. This is OK for the sake of illustration.

I got curious about such illustrations, and investigated a bit. First, I entered the prompt "prism spectrum" in Google Images. I looked through a few hundred images. There were all kinds of results. More than half of them were somewhere between wrong and incredibly wrong!

Not only Getty Images had it wrong; the following sites were consistently wrong or worse:

• Shutterstock
• DepositPhotos
• Pixers
• Freepix
• Pugtree
• Big Stock

The following had it right some of the time:

• Adobe Stock
• iStock
• Vector Stock
• KaiserScience

Finally, these sites had no errors that I found:

• Britannica
• Cyberphysics
• CK12-Foundation
• Dreamstime
• Australia Telescope National Facility
• LabXChange
• Science Photo Gallery
• Hyperphysics
• Urban Pro

Many of the images had the look of generated artwork. So I put various prompts in four image generation products. After much experimentation with the text, the prompt used for these images was

A triangular prism in the center, a narrow light beam from the lower left upwards to halfway up the left side of the prism, continuing as a narrow spectrum across the middle inside the prism, and exiting the prism to descend toward the lower right as a wider spectrum.

Here are the best of each:

Even with very explicit instructions as to the direction of each section of the light beam, these are the best among numerous offerings that were pretty, but nonsensical. None came close.

One would think, among the billions of images used to train these programs, there would be some accurate scientific diagrams. However, spectroscopy is a "small market" in the scientific arena. If an author wants good scientific illustrations, it's still, not just "best", but imperative to use a human graphic artist, and to examine the results with a critical scientific eye.

Stepstones to infinity

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, astronomy, space science, popular treatments

My favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, published a new book last year in collaboration with Lindsey Nyx Walker, in the Startalk series: To Infinity and Beyond: A Journey of Cosmic Discovery. With apologies to Buzz Lightyear, the title makes it clear this is no scientific treatise.

As one might expect, the book is fun to read, pitched at just the right level for a popular audience, and copiously illustrated. Rather than chapters, the book has four sections, with a subtitle every couple of pages. The sections are titled "Leaving Earth", "Touring the Sun's Backyard", "Into Outer Space", and "To Infinity and Beyond". Broadly speaking, the sections are like layers of an onion, starting at the center.

The second section, on the planets and their satellites and asteroids and other denizens of the solar system, is the longest, as befits the greater knowledge we have "in the Sun's back yard", where at least we have sent instruments to pass by or even orbit the planets and selected objects. The book went to press before the capsule of material returned from Asteroid Bennu was opened, so that's not mentioned. What is mentioned is the quest to colonize Mars, which cannot realistically be done without terraforming it. Engineering solutions, including carpet bombing the polar ice caps with nuclear weapons, have been proposed. Dr. Tyson has this to say:

"In any case, if humanity ever develops enough geoengineering know-how to terraform Mars as our escape plan after we trash Earth, then we should certainly be able to use that intelligence to make Earth livable again and save ourselves from requiring a planet B in the first place." (p. 135)

To which I add a strong, "Amen!"

The fourth section, after treating what we know of the distant cosmos in a general way, gets a bit philosophical. The authors have this to say about "beyond", that is, about the many-worlds interpretation of quantum uncertainty: "The many-worlds solution may not be simple, but it is the simplest explanation for the oddities at quantum scales." I must contend with that:

Consider sunlight shining through an ordinary window. When the light encounters the glass, ~4% is reflected from the outer surface and ~96% passes into the glass. Then about another 4% is reflected from the second surface and the rest, ~92%, continues onward. Interestingly, the light that reflected back into the glass pane is partly reflected and then most passes through. Some smaller and smaller fraction of the original light bounces back and forth inside the glass pane. Glass is not 100% transparent, to soon whatever has not escaped is absorbed. Considering only visible light, sunlight has an intensity of around 500 watts per square meter, or 0.05 watt (50 mw) per square centimeter. Skipping the math, the number of photons of visible light that encounter the glass each second is about 1.4x10¹⁷, or 140 quadrillion (140 million billion). Each photon "decides" whether to reflect or pass through, twice because the glass has two surfaces. According to the many-worlds interpretation, 280 quadrillion entire universes are created every second, because of sunlight shining through one square centimeter of glass. I have a picture window in my family room that has an area of two square meters. On a sunny morning, every second, about 5.6x10²¹ universes spring into existence, along what dimensions we have know way to discern. Five and a half sextillion. Every second.

Folks, that's just silly. Whatever photons and other quanta are, they are doing something we fundamentally don't understand, and interpretations such as many-worlds reveal how immensely far we are from achieving such understanding.

We are like the pilgrim in this famous engraving from an 1888 book by Flammarion, trying to see beyond our own horizon. Our imagination falls short. Newton imagined himself as a beach comber being fascinated by this shell or that pretty pebble, being ignorant of the expanse of the ocean that tossed them up.

All that aside, and aside from a few errata I'll get into shortly, the book is as entertaining as it is comprehensive. I strongly recommend it.

---------------------------

I have to bring out a few matters where the authors, or a copy editor, ought to have known better:

1. On p. 22, about warming by infrared light, "…once they absorb the various wavelengths of radiation, molecules on Earth's surface are transformed into infrared and are reemitted by the ground." This is a rather dramatic blunder. The molecules are not transformed into infrared! The relevant phrase should read, "…molecules on Earth's surface emit infrared radiation." All the wavelengths of sunlight that reach the ground warm its substance, and it then emits some of this energy as infrared.
2. On p. 119, about the slowing of Earth's rotation, mostly by its interaction with the Moon, it is stated, "After two centuries, days are four milliseconds faster." In this context, the word "faster" is misused. The days are "four milliseconds longer." Gah!
3. On p. 131, "Today, Mars is a frigid tundra." The word "tundra" implies a cold landscape with cold-resistant plant cover. There are no plants on Mars. I don't know what word to use, but the word "tundra" is wrong.
4. On p. 206, on relationships between the intrinsic brightness of stars and their apparent brightness because of their varying distances, "Sirius, the brightest star in our night sky, is smaller than Earth and 8.6 light-years away,…" Siriusly?!?!? As it happens, Sirius is 1.7 times the size of the Sun. Its companion, the white dwarf designated Sirius B, which is much too faint to see without a large telescope, is indeed smaller than Earth.
5. Finally, look carefully at this illustration of a prism producing a spectrum:

This is found on p. 212, where spectroscopy is being discussed. The illustration is from Getty Images. The way the beam of light bends upward as it enters the prism implies that the prism has a refractive index less than 1, which is impossible. Such a material would require the light to go "faster than light" within it.

Compare with this illustration:

This is from Britannica online. It is more correct, showing the light entering being refracted toward the perpendicular to the glass surface as it passes into the prism, and then refracted away from the perpendicular of the second glass surface as it exits. P.S. I was a spectroscopist for a few years…

This illustration isn't totally accurate, however. The best spectroscopic glass disperses the spectrum by a little less than one degree. The spectrum at the right is being dispersed about 15°. However, this bit of scientific license is needed to make the principle more clear.

I put the query "prism spectrum" into a Google Images search. I found that a great many repositories of stock photos have it wrong; only about one-third have it right! Don't Getty and all the others have anyone with scientific understanding on their staffs?

What is the opposite of ennoble?

 kw: book nonreview, philosophical musings

I was sad to find that I could not in good conscience finish reading two books in a row. I wrote a very rare pan of the first book a few days ago. The second one, I won't even mention the title, but only say it was a collection of short stories, one of the many "best of" anthologies. If it does represent the best, the stories are a far cry from the poor-to-middlin' stories of just a few years ago.

Out of about ten stories I attempted to read, I read the entirety of only six. The other four are degrading. The six I did finish had no conclusions worth mentioning. The lead characters got nowhere. Most of them I could call the epitome of people whose lives "don't matter", in recent parlance.

What has happened to authors who might write about a total loser, yet either uplift the loser in some way, or show why not (think of classics such as Grapes of Wrath), or, as a tragedy, make it clear how the person engineered his or her own downfall (Shakespeare was a master of this). Instead, what did I see? Depictions of losers who start nowhere, go nowhere, learn nothing, waste my time as a reader, and leave me feeling sad.

A writer is an entertainer. Do you think "entertainment" should make you feel bad? Where are the entertainers who ennoble their audiences? Even knowing that some of the folks "out there" are total losers, can you give such persons hope that, if a shred of virtue remains, improvement is possible? The writers of this collection apparently assume that such total losers are the norm, so "When in Rome…" I assure you, they are not the norm!

In the realm of one of the best known of Aesop's Fables, the industrious Ant stores provisions for the winter, while the indolent Grasshopper sings away the summer and starves when autumn comes. Aesop stopped his story short. In actuality, all of us Ants wind up taking care of numerous Grasshoppers, so some at least will survive the winters of life. If Ants didn't outnumber Grasshoppers, eventually nobody would survive.

The book of Proverbs in the Bible speaks of someone so indolent he starves because he can't summon the will to bring food to his mouth. The food is available, even within reach. Grasshopper is too kind a word… And I remember a story of a prophet who fell into despair, and wandered into the desert to die. God would have none of it, and sent an angel. How did the angel wake the prophet from slumber? It kicked him in the ribs!

So, authors, either ennoble your audiences or kick them in the ribs. But don't demean and degrade them or wear them down with depictions of unnaturally clueless folk who are wasting the space they take up.

Mathematics and wokeness don't mix

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, mathematics, education, polemics

When education becomes indoctrination, genuine learning vanishes. I had high hopes for this book when I saw it: Is Math Real? How Simple Questions Lead Us to Mathematics' Deepest Truths by Eugenia Cheng. As I read, I soon found my thinking sidetracked by hints of lunacy. Then on page 33 the text swerved into a sudden diatribe against white supremacy. Barely a dozen pages later the author, writing of logical reasoning and logical arguments, takes on the "straw man fallacy" (which she retitles the "straw person fallacy") by decrying sundry arguments against the notion of "white privilege". Hmm.

I looked at the profile photo and thought a while. Dr. Cheng is a British-born Chinese, rather young-looking (she's not yet 50, so a generation younger than I am). I lived Jim Crow before she was born; I know genuine white supremacy and white privilege. They hardly exist any more. The constant barrage of accusations regarding these things began during the Obama Presidential campaign in 2007, and continues to this day (it continues despite the fact that this Black activist was elected twice to the Presidency…or maybe because it's him behind the scenes egging it on). Then, along with many other false allegations, they were braided together into "wokeness", which is a slew of anti-white, anti-tradition, anti-family, anti-liberty trends that culminated in "cancel culture."

Muffling my discomfort, I continued reading. In the next chapter a similar tirade erupted, and I had had enough, not even a quarter of the way though the book. Either this math wizard is utterly suborned by leftism, or she's afraid if she doesn't kowtow to woke dictates she'll also get canceled. Either way, she fits the prompt that generated this image: "Defeated female wizard"

Here is my definition of WOKE: Wicked, Obfuscating, Kleptocratic Extortioners. And while we are at it, two of the left's favorite acronyms also belong on the chopping block: DEI = Devilish, Elitist Inversion of truth; and ESG is a total inversion, Environmental mismanagement + Social repression + utter misGovernance.

To be quite clear: Every element of wokeness is evil. The recent election is in part a mandate by a clear majority of the electorate to de-wokify America. Let's laugh the Leftocrats off the stage!!

When I decide not to finish reading a book it is my usual practice to not mention it; just to set it aside and read the next book and review it here. This time I have to pan it. The writing is mediocre but tolerable, the puppyish enthusiasm for topics hardly anyone has heard of is cute but distracting, and while the author's wish to calm the fears of mathophobes is laudable, her methods are off-putting. Far too many times, on rather simple subjects, she urges us to "think really hard about" something or other. Talks about tone deaf! There are many better books about math for those who fear math. This book is most likely to turn math-fearing folks into math-haters.

Is life everywhere or nearly nowhere?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, exobiology, astrobiology, seti, exoplanets, origins of life

The title of a recent book by Nathalie A. Cabrol is astonishing: The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist's Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life. Why astonishing? First, let us consider the limits of what is known.

• In our solar system, until recently, only three planets have been considered habitable at least part of the time since the solar system was formed about 4.6 billion years ago (hereafter Ga): Venus, Earth, and Mars. Both Venus and Mars are considered "almost certainly dead", but hints of continued habitability are discovered from time to time.
• Many "ice moons", such as three of the Galilean moons of Jupiter, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto; Enceladus, a moon of Saturn; and Oberon, a moon of Uranus—all appear to have large subsurface oceans of liquid water, or actually brine, which could sustain life.
• Beyond the solar system, thousands of exoplanets have now been detected. A few hundred of these are at an appropriate distance from their host stars to be habitable, at least at present, if not for the long term.
• Most of the exoplanets so far detected and confirmed are less than 5,000 light years from Earth. A handful (so far) are at distances ranging up to 33,000 light years.

Further interesting information is found in the List of Exoplanet Extremes. 

What do these facts imply? As much as we might like to speculate about life (almost certainly bacterial or some analog thereof) on various solar system bodies, the confirmed occurrence of life in the solar system is found only on Earth. N=1.

Outside the solar system, we have partially probed a volume of space totaling about 80 billion cubic light years (considering the thickness of the galactic disk to be 1,000 light years). That's not bad; it is 1% of the volume of the Milky Way galaxy. However our galaxy is one of at least 200 billion, and probably more than a trillion, galaxies in the visible universe. We don't know how much universe lies beyond our visible horizon. Again, in all that space, known life: N=1.

From a numerical standpoint, the data we have relate to between a quintillionth and a quadrillionth of the known universe. That makes the book's title an astonishingly extreme overstatement.

On the other hand: The author, the director of the Carl Sagan center at the SETI institute, presents the principles by which life is likely to have arisen, and the evidence from all around the universe that the right chemistry to kick-start life exist nearly everywhere. This makes the book's title almost banally obvious! Isn't that great?

Rather than survey all of the author's points, I'll focus on a few of interest, that may be little known. Firstly, note that word "Origins" in the book's subtitle. Life may have started on Earth more than once. It may have arisen, been snuffed out, and arisen again, perhaps several times. Earlier incidences of life may not have been totally snuffed out, and still exist alongside "us".

Firstly, consider that the "standard DNA coding table" doesn't apply everywhere. For example, there are variations in the encoding of certain DNA codons (3-base groups) to amino acids (or to Stop) that are found in mitochondria. Various classes of eukaryotic organisms have different mitochondria, as revealed by their coding tables. Other microscopic critters, not all of them bacteria, have alternate coding tables. So far, 30 alternative coding tables are known, with the "standard table" bringing the total to 31. See List of Genetic Codes for more details.

Let's step back and consider the situation. There are 64 possible DNA codons. All known life on Earth uses 20 amino acids (one bacterial genus may use a 21st amino acid; I can't find out much information about it). There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, more possible amino acids. The 64-to-20 conversion involves numerous duplicate codes, which makes for a robust system. Many single-codon variations (micromutations, which are common), make no change in the protein being produced. How many possible coding tables are there? I am good at many kinds of math, but not the details of "permutations and combinations". The best I can figure, the number is at least 48x10³³ (a 35-digit number), but it could actually be an 84-digit number. Either way, it is a lot!

Is it safe to assume that life elsewhere in the universe also uses DNA and RNA and ribosome decoding to produce proteins from some 20 amino acids? Not really. It is not even safe to assume faraway life requires water. Dr. Cabrol mentions "life as we don't know it" from time to time. She considers places like the Saturnian moon Titan, where water ice is a rock and the primary liquid is methane. What kind of life could arise there? Water (our solvent!) is polar, but methane is nonpolar; perhaps the abundance of ammonia, which is polar, could make methane plus ammonia an appropriate solvent for generating life-as-we-don't-know-it.

I am reminded of the Lensman series of space opera novels by E.E. "Doc" Smith from 1948 to 1954. It concerns intergalactic warfare between water/oxygen-based life and methane/chlorine-based life. I am also reminded of what the character Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, "Life will find a way." I am further reminded of Vital Dust by Christian deDuve, who calls life "inevitable" and "a cosmic imperative." There could be a lot of different kinds of life in the universe, and it's unlikely that we could eat any of it, nor that it could eat us!

Dr. Cabrol points out that planets seem to outnumber stars. Perhaps many stars have no planets, but many more stars have at least one planet, and usually more than one. What proportion of these are rocky (not gaseous like Jupiter, which may have no solid surface) and in the habitable zone of their host stars? Is it a percent or so? Exoplanet data so far indicates between two and three percent. A further constraint is that, as a Main Sequence star heats up during its existence, the shift of the habitable zone shouldn't move beyond the planet in less than 5 billion years or so. This is just based on the fact that life on Earth required about 4.5 billion years to produce us. We are still left with several billion possible planets in our galaxy alone that have the potential to produce life that can become "civilized" and sufficiently technological to send signals via radio or laser or something that we could possibly detect if we are close enough. "Close enough" keeps getting farther away as our own technology improves.

Let's consider that 5 billion year figure. Our Sun is a star of type G2, a little larger than average. Something like 75%-80% of all stars are smaller and lighter. The lighter a star is, the longer it burns hydrogen on the Main Sequence. During that period, it gradually gets hotter and brighter as helium accumulates in the core. I am interested in the larger half of the K series of stars. Their mass is between 0.75 and 0.9 solar masses, and they burn hydrogen for between 17 and 35 billion years, compared to the Sun's expected hydrogen burning life of about 10 billion years. Stars lighter than 0.75 solar mass have even longer "lifetimes," but they are more likely to produce large flares, which can damage or extinguish life from the surfaces of any planets in their habitable zones. So I favor focusing efforts such as SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) on stars in the range K5 to G2. Even a G3 star probably would have begun to burn us off its surface by now, as our Sun is expected to do starting about a billion years from now.

The author also considers the Drake Equation, which is a thought experiment that helps us consider the likelihood or prevalence of life in our galaxy (or the universe). It consists of a bunch of factors that are multiplied together to produce N, a possible quantity of detectable civilizations "out there". An important factor is, "How long does civilization Z emit a signal that we could detect, if we are close enough and have sufficient technological sensitivity?" Consider Earth. The first radio transmission that reached beyond "local" was in December 1901. Just about 124 years ago. 

At present, there are a few dozen "clear channel" AM radio stations that emit 50,000 watt signals 24/7, a larger number of FM radio stations of similar or even greater power, and many TV stations, mostly below 10,000 watts. However, more and more of our TV watching is moving to cable (including fiber optics), and digital signals are more efficient, so stations that do broadcast are using lower power. I have an in-attic antenna that presently receives more than 60 digital TV stations, so I don't use (expensive!) cable. Radio is beginning to go digital also. I predict that Earth will be largely "radio silent" before the 200th anniversary of Marconi's transatlantic radio transmission.

If an exo-civilization is typically detectable for only 100-200 years, even without extincting themselves, that cuts a big hole in all our speculations using the Drake equation. I'll have to think more about this…

The last chapter deals at length with our own danger of extincting ourselves. The author considers pollution, particularly CO₂ buildup plus methane buildup, an existential threat; she states clearly that our window of opportunity for ensuring long-term survival is small, a matter of decades at most. I agree in part, but my expectation is not so dire. I won't encroach on her thesis, though.

I will close this part with a hearty recommendation of the book. It is full of great ideas and great information, and very well written. A pleasure!

------------------------------------

If you aren't interested in errata, you can stop here. I ran across a few items, equally the fault of the author and the copy editor, that need to be corrected.

Tidal Locking is mentioned just a few times. It is not clearly explained, and I found this on page 97: "Callisto is tidally locked to Jupiter, orbiting around it in the same amount of time it takes Jupiter to rotate." Not so. Callisto takes 17 days to revolve about Jupiter, while Jupiter takes 10 hours to rotate on its axis. Callisto's rotation period is 17 days, so it always presents the same hemisphere to Jupiter. This is the same in principle as our Moon, which both rotates and revolves in 27.5 days (sidereal periods), so we always see the same hemisphere. In the quoted sentence, the second instance of "Jupiter" should be "Callisto". A second instance where the numbers are correct is on page 141: Pluto and its moon Charon are mutually tidal locked, always facing each other the same way, both rotating and revolving in 153 days.

An egregious typo, minor misspelling of a homonym on page 142: "pour" rather than "pore". To study a document is to pore over it, not "pour."

Information Mastery, a la Carl Sagan, is a proposed scale of technological advancement. It is mentioned on page 215, where it is stated that Level A represents 106 "unique bits of information" and Level Z represents 1,031 bits. This is a formatting error, compounded by the insertion of the comma. The two numbers ought to be 10⁶, or one million, and 10³¹, or ten million trillion trillion (a 32-digit number). I suspect a dumb copy-paste removed the exponent formatting. Anyway, the concept is fascinating.

Let us consider where we are as a civilization on Sagan's scale. The venerable Encyclopedia Britannica contains about half a million topics in 40 million words. I suspect that Sagan would consider a "unique bit of information" to represent about a paragraph. These half million topics then are each stated in an average of 80 words, which comes to a smallish paragraph. Worldwide, there are several printed encyclopedias, but they overlap. Thousands, nay, millions of articles and books and journals are published yearly. Then there's Wikipedia, which has (today) 62 million pages, and about 1/8 of that is in 6.9 million formal articles. All told, that puts us in the realm of a Level C or Level D civilization.

There are a couple other typos, but they have less import. I'll leave it at that.

SF is as SF does

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, short stories, collections

I use the term "SF" in the title rather than "SciFi" because Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie includes three categories: science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy.

The opening novelette and title story, "Lake of Souls" sits on the boundary between science fiction and fantasy, as does Ms Leckie. The story is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, of a crablike creature without a name, who embarks on a quest to find the fabled Lake of Souls, where it may obtain a soul and a name. Until obtaining soul and name, these creatures are called by the generic term Spawn.  This Spawn's quest differs from the usual process, where marks that appear on a being's head upon one's final molt can be read as a name. I don't use "he" or "she" for Spawn because the author studiously avoids genderizing it. The science fiction element enters with a human on the planet, the last survivor of a mass murder on his survey ship. He is on a quest of his own, to find the murderer and the communication device he brought to the planet with him. He and his shipmates had been calling Spawn's fellows "lobster dogs", and having met Spawn, he realizes that these beings are sentient, which he must communicate with "home base", and with others because of the political implications of his discovery. I'll leave it at that; I am perilously close to spoiling too much. I should mention in passing that the author is very skilled at imagining and portraying sundry sorts of non-Earthly beings.

Consider a feudal society, right here on Earth. The lords and ladies lived in splendor in their castles and manor houses, cared for by servants and surrounded by serfs who lived in penury and often misery. Aristocrats lived much longer than serfs, and soldiers typically had notoriously short lives because of the aristocratic hobby of warfare. Move that scenario to a planet on which the aristocrats are called the Justified, and live unlimited lives, though they can die, but never of "natural causes". Everyone else, the short-lived, serve the Justified. I should also mention that they are lionlike, and the Justified become many times stronger than the short-lived. This scenario plays out in "The Justified". An episode in mid-story indicates that short-lived can be promoted to Justified. This has implications for a future situation, back here on Earth again, if aging is defeated but that indefinite life extension is too costly for most to afford. In this and in nearly all of Ms Leckie's stories females are dominant.

These stories are from the first third of the book, where we find all the stories one could term "science fiction". The other two sections are taken from the author's world-building series, termed Imperial Reach and The Raven Tower. Both are based on pantheism: people interact with gods of many "sizes", some that are like feudal lords over a domain, and others that have more narrow realms of influence. Like the Justified discussed above, these gods aren't necessarily eternal, but how a god is done away with isn't made clear. They gain strength from being prayed to and sacrificed to, and the most common sacrifice is an ounce or so of one's own blood, spilled on a makeshift altar.

From all of this I conclude that the author is fascinated (obsessed?) with feudalism, with highly structured societies, and with extreme feminism. Also that she would like to be a god. Then again, who wouldn't?

Trees as old as history

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, botany, trees, ancient trees

Let me start with an old, old tree: Methuselah, a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine (Pinus longaeva) that began to grow in about 2820 BC and is (as I write) about 4,844 years old. This picture shows it and one that is probably nearly as old, on their mountainside in eastern Nevada. If I properly read the captions of the many pictures of these to trees, Methuselah is on the left. Although it looks dead, it is not. A ribbon of living tissue winds up the trunk and sprouts needles each spring.

Of nearly 75,000 known tree species, only a few typically reach ages greater than a thousand years, and just a few surpass 2,500 years. Bristlecone Pines and a few other species that can approach or exceed 5,000 years are scarce.

At the other end of the scale, the shortest-lived tree species I know of is a type of mimosa, the Persian Silk Tree, colloquially called the Balloon Tree for its flowers like rounded tufts of pink hair. They live no more than thirty years. We had four of these, two in the front yard and two in the back, in Oklahoma. They were mature, about 25 feet tall, when we moved in. Six years later all four died within a month of each other. Where we live now we have two pin oak trees (black oak). I understand that they typically live between 200 and 500 years. I know when they were planted as saplings by the former owner; they are 63 years old. Both are nearly 200 feet tall, and have probably stopped growing upward. At breast height, their trunks are more than three feet in diameter.

In early August, 2020 a tropical storm passed through our area, including northern Delaware. Powerful winds knocked over many trees, most notably a "champion tree" at Hagley Museum, a (roughly) 300-year-old Osage Orange. In 1997 I took this picture of my parents, my wife and our son at the tree. Just for its size it is a true champion!

We became acquainted with Osage Orange trees in Oklahoma. They bear woody, resiny green seed balls the size of a baseball or softball, that we called "hedge apples." With their piney smell, the fruits are sometimes used as air fresheners. Certain animals eat the seeds, which requires really strong teeth.

Retired Professor Anthony D. Fredericks traveled the US from end to end to visit ten ancient trees, the oldest of their kinds in this country. Methuselah was one of the first. He tells us the trees' stories and his enjoyment of them in his book In Search of the Old Ones: An Odyssey among Ancient Trees. The book is illustrated by Rebecca Noelle Purvis and Phyllis Disher Fredericks. I suspect they are his daughter and wife.

Each section and each chapter begins with a full-page illustration like this one, which presents the Bennett Juniper, which is a Sierra Juniper (Juniperus grandis) living in east-central California. This juniper is about 3,000 years old.

Other trees that can reach 3,000 or more years include the two species of redwood, the Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens, which means "always vital") of northern California and southern Oregon, and the Giant Sequoia (Sequoia giganteum) of central California.

None of these is the oldest of North American trees, however. Two "clonal" trees seem to have begun to grow right after the icecap melted a little after 12,000 BC. One is Pando, an aspen in Utah that covers 106 acres. The name Pando means "I spread," and it has quite a spread. To us it appears to be a huge grove of tens of thousands of trees, but all these "trees", some 50+ feet tall and 100-150 years old, are actually branches, growing off a single root system. It is hard to pin down the true age of a clone like Pando. The "sidebars" on its age are 8,000 - 12,000 years.

A second ancient clone is the Hurunga Oak of southern California, a Palmer's Oak (Quercus palmeri) that is probably quite close to 13,000 years old. Rather than the tens of thousands of branches that Pando has, the Hurunga Oak has about seventy branches spread over a root system that is under some 2,130 square feet (198 sq m) of soil.

Trees of great age grow slowly. Except for the sequoias. When young, a Coast Redwood can grow several feet yearly. As they approach heights exceeding 300 ft (90 m), they slow down and begin to spread out. The tallest one, named Hyperion, is 380 feet (116 m). Giant Redwood trees sometimes surpass 300 feet, though rarely, but they grow a thicker trunk. For a tree such as Methuselah, which is less than twenty feet tall, for most of its life it has grown no more than five inches per century.

The author begins each chapter with a semi-fictional vignette of human life somewhere on earth at the time the tree sprouted. Fortunately, these are short (not my favorite feature). It is bracing to consider trees that began to grow before the invention or writing, that have survived storms and floods and hurricanes, and now have to cope with us, the greedy primates that are making everything on this planet into commodities. 

Many of the trees presented in this book are in secret locations. When something becomes popular, it can be "loved to death". Fifty years ago my wife and I took our honeymoon in Sequoia National Park. We saw then how the forest floor around many of the huge trees was being trampled, stripping the soil cover from some of the roots. I wonder how much such damage contributed to the loss of several percent of the trees during wildfires in the 2010's and 2020's?

In a closing chapter we find information about the Old-Growth Forest Network. One significant goal of theirs is to find and designate, and arrange protection for, a patch of old-growth forest in every county in the U.S. that contains forests, about 2/3 of them. There are at present 175 designated old-growth forests, and we can find those near us at www.oldgrowthforest.net. On their searchable map I find nine such forests within an hour's drive of my home. I see day trips in our future!

If you like trees you'll love this book. If you aren't that tuned in to them, perhaps reading it will "tune you up."