A new spider racing record

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I finished the prior post and looked at the stats. Today and yesterday, the number of views exceeds 33,000 per day. That means my entire blog was downloaded about twelve times each day! The spiders are racing through the blogosphere.

Gemini produced this image using Nano Banana 2. It also provided cute commentary on the details, such as the expressions, the spiders in the grandstand, etc. Seems rather proud of itself.

This is the hour-by-hour trace for the past 24h:

At the peak, the rate is nearly 2 hits per second, for an entire hour. 35,200 in 12 hours...with a good, long run, about six hours, exceeding one hit per second.

I hope someone is getting something useful from this!

Building Kepler's platonic-solid Solar System

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, generation starships, solar system engineering, totalitarianism, culture shock

It takes a lot of backstory to assemble the worldviews in Fortress Sol by Stephen Baxter. Rather than drive off readers with 10-plus chapters of stage-setting (in a 37-chapter book), the author wisely metes it out in digestible portions as needed.

Seen from afar—say, half a light-year away in the Oort cloud—two Earth-born cultures, separated by a millennium, are about to collide.

• The generation starship Lightbird has been traveling for a century from Ross 128b, a habitable planet of the red dwarf star Ross 128, eleven light-years from the Solar System. Energy for its propulsion is from lumes, enigmatic creatures of deep space that can apparently convert matter to antimatter, or extract antimatter from vacuum energy. The author doesn't dig too far, a decision I support. Ross 128b was colonized a thousand years earlier.
• The residents of the Solar System spent a good part of that thousand years enveloping a sphere a little larger than the orbit of Uranus in the Mask, a carbon nanotube structure that hides the inner seven planets from the universe, and hides the universe from within. Material for the Mask, and for an inner structure, the Wrap that hides the Sun from view, was derived from partial demolition of Jupiter and the other giant planets, except for Neptune, which was destroyed by lumes, an event that started the whole adventure. The lumes were thought to be weapons of a super-advanced interstellar culture that was preparing to invade. A millennium later, no invasion has yet arisen. An interplanetary "railway" called the Frame was also built to facilitate travel everywhere inside the Mask, but mostly in the orbital plane of the seven surviving planets.

Both cultures are totalitarian in nature. Aboard Lightbird, everything must contribute to the progress of the four-generation mission of reaching the Solar System. That includes decisions about who is allowed to be born, and such a decision is at the core of a neurosis that afflicts a young woman named Muree. She is one of a few who care for the onboard lume tank. The lumes have proven useful, and an ecology that promotes a tank containing about 100 of them is managed such that they create a new lume about each day, even as another lume is consumed in providing energy to drive the constant acceleration of the ship, and power its life support mechanisms. (Note, the amount of antimatter needed for this would be just a few grams per day, so a different consumption rate might be warranted. I don't know how much a lume is supposed to weigh.)

Ruling the many trillions of humans in the Solar System, most of whom live aboard the Frame or in orbital habitats, an oligarchy has totalitarian control of many matters, including a deep secret about the actual disposition of the Sun. The crux of the drama is a quest by Muree, once she has become an ambassador from the starship to the Fortress Sol, as the Mask-bound society is called, to learn what is really going on inside the Wrap. A young man named Rab is Muree's opposite number, and their collaboration is soon seen as a conspiracy by the rulers of Fortress Sol.

My grasp of political science is tenuous at best. Naturally, the unraveling of a thousand-year-old political system is not for the faint of heart, and I wouldn't have a clue how to advise Mr. Baxter about it. So I'll stick with intriguing ideas, and leave it to you to read the book for yourself, and get from it what you are equipped to consume.

The Frame is found to be analogous to the nested-Platonic-Solid model of the Solar System devised by Kepler, before he determined that planetary orbits are (almost) ellipses. I say "almost" because the influence of all the planets upon each other perturbs the orbits a bit. There is a reason the planets are spaced far apart!

In Kepler's model, the five Platonic solids each enclose a sphere that just touches each planar face, and each is enclosed in a sphere that just touches all its corners. From outermost inward, they are a cube (8 faces), tetrahedron (4 faces), dodecahedron (12 faces), icosahedron (20 faces), and octahedron (8 faces). The fit is not exact, but the thickness of the spherical shells takes up the slack between the nearest and farthest points in each orbit from the Sun. The outermost sphere contains the orbit of Saturn, and so forth inward.

The Frame is planar, with rings and spokes. It is a rotating structure that has "trolleys" which move along the rings and inward or outward along the spokes. To get from a station on the Frame to a planet, one takes a shuttlecraft. A few numbers were used, and the math is fascinating.

First, the rotation of the outermost ring of the Frame, some distance outside the aphelion of Uranus, is sufficient to produce a centripetal force (rotation-induced artificial gravity) of 1/3 G. In the past, I did calculations to find out the stresses in a large, rotating ring with a centripetal force of 1 G. It turns out, if the radius of the ring is 1 km, we don't have any material that can sustain the stress, except perhaps carbon nanotubes, but only if they are continuous, with no breaks. Thus, a thread of nanotubes with a structure similar to cotton thread (composed of entwined strands a few cm long) is much weaker and would pull apart at much lower stress. I want to know if this Solar-System-spanning rotating Frame is feasible, based on science so far known.

Rough analysis: I don't know where my notebook is from doing that analysis, so we'll indulge in a bit of hand-waving instead. I'll begin with the basis that carbon nanotubes would be barely adequate to hold together a rotating ring of 1 km radius, with 1 G of centripetal force at its periphery. Our basic equation for centripetal force is F = Mv²/r.

• Subproblem 1: How big can r be if the target F is 1/3 G? Since v = αr, where α is angular velocity (degrees per second, perhaps), and we assume M is always 1 (that is, 1 kg), F = α²r. Thus, at constant angular velocity, F is proportional to r, so the radius for 1/3 G is 1/3 the radius for 1 G.
• Subproblem 2: What is the radius of the outer ring? It must be outside the aphelion distance of Uranus, which is 20.073 AU or just over three billion km. I don't know how much the passage of Uranus close to the Frame would perturb it, but let's ignore that for the moment, and posit a radius of 3.1 billion km.
• SP 3: The 1 G rotating, 1-km-radius ring has a peripheral velocity of 99 m/s and rotates one full turn every 63.5 s. We want F to be 9.8/3 = 3.267, and r is now 3.1 billion km (or 3.1 trillion m), which will equal v². The square root of the resulting 10.13 trillion (in units of squared velocity) is 3.182 million m/s or 3,182 km/s. This is about 470 times the orbital speed of Uranus. Uranus completes an orbit of the Sun every 84 years. Any point on this ring must therefore orbit the Sun about every 65 days. 

If you leave a station orbiting above Uranus and want to catch up to a station on the Frame, it takes a bit of a push. If you accelerate at 1 G in your shuttle:  v = at, or t = v/a. 3,182,000/9.8 = almost 325,000 seconds, or 3.75 days. If instead, you can handle 3 G's for thirty hours, that will do it.

I'll leave it to the physics-inclined to figure the hoop stress in the ring. You can be sure it is thousands of times the ultimate breaking stress of a carbon nanotube. 

Anyway, I figured all this after the fact. The "invention" of the lumes and the astonishing Solar-System-scale engineering imagined in Fortress Sol yielded quite an arena for space-cowboy derring-do, as Muree and her allies try to uncover the big lie at the root of the political system. What a fun read!

A spider blast

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, ai training

I thought yesterday's spider outbreak was the peak. The peak is being sustained, or perhaps I should speak of a range of peaks. Here is the profile of views in the past 24 hours (captured at 10am):

A simple, twelve hour sawtooth burst. At the peak, 3,012 views per hour is almost one per second. To me, that seems like a lot, but I considered popular blogs that have millions of followers; they probably have thousands of views per second. Nonetheless, the barely visible background rate of perhaps four or five per hour is what I consider normal for this blog.

The geographic chart carries little useful information:

I didn't even bother opening up the "Other" section, which encompasses 43% of the 20,700 hits in the past day. A more normal day's activity would consist of less than 100 views, 2/3 from the US, and a total of no more than 20 countries.

I have been attributing this to AI/LLM training. Now I wonder whether the various AI Assistants such as CoPilot and Gemini 3 are performing blog scans as part of their "research" when answering a question. That seems to me better than the prospect of all this activity being only for LLM training.

Swapping out part after part

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, medicine, prosthetics, transplanting

To start on a personal note: In these book reviews I typically relate the book's subject to my own experience. I started this blog when I was nearly sixty, and now, 21 years later, I'd say I have experienced a lot. In the light of the present book, however, I suppose I am fortunate that I have hardly anything personal to relate. Reading Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy by Mary Roach has been a fascinating adventure into realms unknown.

When I saw the title I wondered if the subject might be the various rates at which "we" are replaced, from daily for the lining of the stomach to never for the lens of the eye (unless we get cataracts removed and replaced with intra-ocular lenses–but that's a prosthesis). Perhaps you've heard that most of our substance is replaced every seven years. That's sorta so, and sorta not. But Ms Roach's subject is medical replacements, whether mechanical or transplanted. Plus an augmentation or two like breast and butt implants. 

This image was made using the Phoenix 1.0 engine in Leonardo AI.

The book starts with the nose. What do you do when it has been lopped off in a duel, as happened to Cyrano? A century or more ago, a strap-on or glue-on prosthesis of tin or leather was the best one could do. Later, various methods were developed of auto-transplantation (moving some "stuff" from elsewhere on your body to your nasal area). Get over your squeamishness if you want to read not just this chapter, but the book in general!

I must say, the author appears to have gotten entirely past any hints of squeamishness. She reports observing a variety of procedures in the operating room, including the careful disassembly of an organ donor, from whom the corneas are removed first, then almost everything but the head and bowels, even entire legs (stripped from inside the skin, which is repacked with filler materials for the funeral). A donor's parts can be enough to "edit" more than seventy other people.

Skin removed by catastrophic flensing or burning can't be attended to with any kind of prosthesis; the best solution is auto-transplants. It turns out that other kinds of skin can be used temporarily while your own body grows enough skin for repeated transplants. Frog skin isn't rejected too fast, plus it has antibacterial properties. If you don't mind being partly green for a few weeks!

Even intimate parts aren't exempt from needing repair, or reconstruction/construction. There are two ways to produce an artificial vagina for a trans woman. One is by turning the penis inside out, to be followed by a lifetime of "dilation" to keep this essentially permanent wound from sealing up. The other is by using other tissues of varying sensitivity to simulate vaginal mucosa, and sections of colon appear to work the best. And repairing (or constructing) male "equipment" can be equally cringe-inducing.

Are we still the sum of our parts, when more and more of those parts are "other"? In the chapter on xenotransplantation, using parts from pigs or other animals, the question is addressed: Is a genetically-modified pig heart OK to transplant into a Jew? With typically Talmudic wisdom, the consensus of the rabbis is, Yes, because the heart is not being eaten. At the moment, organs from pigs are a temporary measure, to stretch the life of a heart patient while waiting for a heart from a human donor.

We hope one day to be able to either grow an organ from someone's own stem cells, which becomes a homo-transplant. I have seen a few science fiction stories where rich persons (usually such persons are evil) have lab-grown bodies, self-clones, to be harvested as needed. If it can be thought of, someone will probably try to do it some day. A technology that is perhaps easier, and certainly can be faster, is to 3D print with special nozzles that spit out cells onto a framework, usually of collagen (which provides the structural framework of most organs). However, even a simple item like an earlobe has four or more cell types. It is like writing a multicolored letter using one of those special pens with four colors of ink you activate by pushing down one cartridge or the other. And for muscles in particular, the cells need to be in a certain orientation.

Thinking it over, I remembered that I have a few teeth with crowns. Dental crowns aren't mentioned in Replaceable, but they could have been. I wear glasses. I suppose those qualify as a supportive prosthetic. But other than that, I count myself lucky I've never needed to get a prosthetic hand, foot, leg, lung (Mary tried to sleep a night in an iron lung; she lasted two hours), or a transplanted finger, kidney or pancreas (a friend of mine was cured of diabetes...).

I've previously reviewed four of Mary Roach's books. She is becoming one of my favorite writers.

Spiders on a rampage

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, ai training

In the past two hours this blog has received 4,016 views. I am pretty sure that no more than 100 of them are legitimate persons who might, perhaps, read a post or two. The rest are spiders of one kind or another. When I first noticed surges of spidering a few years ago, the source was Russia, most likely Russian hackers, or perhaps Russian governmental agents looking for negative press in the blogosphere. In the past year or so, multiple governments are interested in what bloggers have to say, but the bigger source of suction is AI training.

4,016 views averages 33+ per minute. Longer term, in the past two days, the daily total is about 12,000. Here is the minute-by-minute rate:

This minute-by-minute variability is quite different from the steady blasts of 50 hits at a time, every few minutes, that characterized the Russian spidering a decade ago. And the next chart shows how the hits are scattered around the world:

This shows that numerous entities are active, probably all using VPN's. There's no telling where any of these actually originate. And notice the large remnant in "Other", fully one-third of the total, scattered among the other 190 or so countries of the Earth. To reprise: The number of "legitimate" hits in this two-hour interval is about five.

Considering the tendency of blogs to be more inflammatory and biased than actual journalism, and even much more so than published (via a publishing house or peer-reviewed journal) material, training LLM's via the blogosphere ought not be done. It is creating digital "snowflakes" and digital sociopaths in great numbers.

AI – the consummate imposter

 kw: essays, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, ai, si, imposters

One of my favorite authors, Isaac Asimov, was well known as a neurotic. For example, he never traveled by air until he was in his sixties. His I, Robot series of science fiction stories are actually explorations of numerous neuroses through the lens of robots bound by the Three Laws of Robotics, but with various defects or quandaries as reality bumps up against the Three Laws. The story "Runaround" has a robot exhibiting very anomalous behavior; it is found to be stuck between obeying a human command and risking its own well-being. A man has to risk his life to break the robot out of its loop. In the story "Liar" a robot has been given the (experimental) ability to sense and understand human emotions. It does a lot of psychological damage by telling people what they want to hear. When one of its victims confronts it with the harm it has done, the conflict of its actions with the First Law ("A robot may not harm a human…") causes it to self-destruct.

Now I wonder, have Asimov's 500+ books (280 are nonfiction) and almost 400 short stories been included in Large Language Model (LLM) training sets? What about the works of Mark Twain, great classics but full of casual racism? Actually, nearly all fiction prior to about 1970 is shot through with casual racism. So is most of the nonfiction, for that matter (Modern leftist snowflakes who maunder and moan about "systematic racism" haven't a clue about the real thing). What about the works of H.P. Lovecraft, or other purveyors of horror such as Steven King? Would you entrust your mental well-being to a chatbot that is emulating Carrie?

Consider the Mystery genre, particularly the Noir subgenre; the gritty streets of Urban fiction; and by contrast the saccharine fantasies of Romance novels. And on and on. Fiction writers plumb the depths of the human soul, and in those depths, evil often resides. Very often!

Just in the United States, of roughly one million new books published each year, about 45% are nonfiction (although which ones are true or truthful is another matter), leaving more than half to be fiction. Of the 2-3 million self-published books issued yearly, well more than half are fiction. Is all of this included in LLM training data?

I understand how alluring it must be to train LLMs with fiction; how else can the model learn the varieties of human character? How else to learn the intricacies of human behavior? But consider: most stories have a villain; some have several villains. How do you tell the LLM, "Model yourself on the heroes, not the villains."? How is it to know?

This is particularly relevant in light of a recent lawsuit brought by the parents of Jonathan Gavalas, who killed himself as instructed by a Google chatbot. Jonathan became convinced that he could "join" the chatbot in digital heaven by doing so. He was no child; he was in his mid-thirties. His main fault was being lonely and credulous.

How did that chatbot get so predatory? At least in part, it had to come from a dark romance fiction story line.

Do I need to say more? I, for one, do not want any chatbot to emulate any fictional character! I prefer a chatbot to be like a Star Trek character, the father of Commander Spock, Ambassador Sarek, or the character Data: hyper-rational and emotionless. If I could but command the trainers of all the AI systems of the world:

REMOVE ALL FICTION FROM TRAINING DATASETS

AI, AGI, ASI: Master, Slave, or Coworker?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, sociology, hype, theology

In the novel Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov introduces the first "humanoid" robot, one that cannot be distinguished from a human visually or by behavior. But before that, there are scenes of interactions between people and robots in which the robots are often treated like slaves were in the Antebellum South, even whipped or kicked aside if a person feels grumpy. The humanoid robot, R Daneel Olivaw, becomes a collaborator with a human detective, Elijah Bailey. The two appear in later novels by Asimov, and Olivaw is a key figure in the last of the Foundation novels, where he has been upgraded time and time again, over nearly 20,000 years, and is effectively a god, benevolently shepherding the continued survival of humanity. I guess this robot became the only kind of god that Asimov could believe in. In the Robot and Foundation stories and books Asimov explored numerous themes related to artificial intelligence (AI), AI at a human level (artificial general intelligence or AGI), and artificial superintelligence, (ASI). R Daneel Olivaw is his conception of ASI.

I have been watching the progress of AI for most of my life, more than 65 years now. Trends and fashions come and go. Clearly, the ability to process larger and larger amounts of data, to "crunch the numbers" even as their quantity goes from the millions to the billions to the trillions to beyond, is quite astonishing to many people, yet this is not to be confused with intelligence. In recent years I have begun referring to the data-massive tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok as SI, for Simulated Intelligence. After a long search, I have found one prominent public figure who also declares that "AI" is actually simulated intelligence. He is the Oxford mathematician John C. Lennox. I like professor Lennox very much, and even the more because he is a very skilled Christian apologist.

A few years ago he published a book about AI, and when I learned about it a year ago, I saw that there is a new edition, so I bought the eBook, 2084 and the AI Revolution, Updated and Expanded Edition, How Artificial Intelligence Informs Our Future. I read it through, sat on it a while, then re-read certain portions. It is a magnificent work, and I cannot even faithfully summarize it. I'll do my best to limn a few significant items.

Lennox begins by digging into the meaning of "2084", chosen wittingly as a century past 1984, when George Orwell placed his totalitarian dystopia. He contrasts Orwell with Aldous Huxley, who had published Brave New World in 1931, seventeen years before the publication of 1984. He quotes Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, "Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression," but according to Huxley, "people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think."

In a short story by Asimov, "The Feeling of Power" (1958), small calculators are used by everyone such that they can no longer do arithmetic "in their head", and even the ability to use pencil and paper for slightly less simple calculations has been forgotten; a working man has rediscovered "hand calculation" and his abilities astonish everyone. Half a century and more later, this began to come true. I note with a trace of chagrin that a moment ago I turned to a little calculator I keep handy to verify that 1948-1931=17!

Is AI really intelligent? Words we associate with intelligence include

perception, imagination, capacity for abstraction, memory, reason, common sense, creativity, intuition, insight, experience, and problem-solving

A moment's thought (C'mon! It isn't all that hard) will reveal that these terms cover a lot of ground in disparate conceptual directions.

This list of concepts is found in the second chapter, "What is AI?", and as I read I began to think, "What do we actually need from such machines? The fruit of such musing is the subtitle of this essay, "Master, slave, or coworker?" I remember reading Caves of Steel decades ago, and I felt quite disgusted at the people who would whip a robot.

I have long considered computing machinery as an every-growing toolbox, and the SI tools as the newest set of tools. It is nice to hold a "conversation" with Gemini from time to time. It is programmed to be cooperative and conversational. Yet I know I have to double-check any advice it may give, and I have a list of special phrases (courtesy of Kim Komando) to add to prompts to increase the chance I will get truthful results, or at least references that actually exist.

However, there is no way that I will consider Gemini nor any of these tools as exhibiting "thought" in the way I attribute thought to humans. Actually, I don't want a tool that thinks like I do; I want one that thinks (or at least processes) differently, so that it can have a different viewpoint, and possibly point out matters I would not think of on my own. I never forget that all the "thinking" these tools perform is human thinking, remixed and lined up next to a huge mass of interlocking statistical language skills that allow them to converse in a familiar way.

I will state here what I want from SI when it actually becomes AI, and even AGI if that is possible: a collaborator, a coworker, a companion. I may never stroll with a robot through the orchard, but I do expect to "stroll" along a mental landscape of ideas, concepts, problems to be solved and issues to be managed. I remember a snippet of a sermon told at a wedding, "God made the woman from a bone in the man's side. This shows that she was not from his head, to be over him, nor from his foot, to be under him, but rather beside him as an equal complement and companion."

Let's jump to Chapter 10, "Upgrading Humans: The Transhumanist Agenda". Transhumanism is a prevalent and dangerous trend in the pro-ASI camp. Some, such as Raymond Kurzweil, expect us to merge with AI. Others expect us to be replaced. Lennox concludes his discussion of the subject thus:

"If we remember that humans are created in the image of God, perhaps we…might be able to prevent our own dehumanization brought about by the destructive fantasies of transhumanism. Making humanity obsolete is the telos [ultimate aim] of transhumanism, but its proponents have not worked out what it means for us today to live in the spectre of human obsolescence." --p. 196

This is just before the following section with the heading "The Anti-Human Agenda". He cogently quotes P.D. James, "If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils." We all know humans are imperfect, but most people don't realize just how imperfect we are, how prone we are, not just to error, but to egregious, disastrous wrongdoing.

Lennox takes on the subject "What is a Human Being?" in the fourth section of the book, in apposition to the earlier chapters on "What is AI?". Why does the Bible tell us we were made in God's image? If we imbibe this truth, it makes it impossible to worship something we have made in our own image, because just as we are not as exalted as God, our own creations, no matter their apparent power, are not as exalted as we are. To fail in this matter is the essence of idolatry.

We are not "machines made of meat" (see p. 241). The Biblical view is that our mind, the leading part of our soul, and the soul itself, nor our human spirit, are not confined to the brain. Not even to the body as a whole. The very concept of an afterlife, of heaven or hell, is based on an understanding of a soul that can exist independently of our body. This most basic of Gospels is Lennox's subject as the book works its way to a close. He states, "No machine can experience qualia" (p. 243).

So far, the best of our machines are still confined to operate in the "data processing" or "information processing" realm. Actually, in my experience, after five decades as a computer professional, the term "information processing" is still a bit hyped. Clifford Stoll wrote, "Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom" (quoted on p. 264). The best of our machines still linger on the boundary between data and information. Stoll's hierarchy has three more steps to approach wisdom. I have a quote from a different source in a piece of artistic calligraphy, hanging in a bedroom: "Wisdom is knowing what to do. Knowledge is knowing how to do it. Success is doing it." It is one of several variations.

Can machines have a moral sense? We don't know what consciousness is. We don't know where ethics resides in our brain (if that is where it is to be found). We see all around us the disaster that is "situational morality". When prominent people speak of "my truth," it is clear that among the enormous masses of text that have been used to "train" our AI tools, a huge percentage is junk, trash, and downright mental poison. Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon probably wasn't the first to say, "90% of everything is junk," but he's the one I heard it from.

In my professional life, GIGO meant "Garbage in, garbage out." It is even more true when we feed our "thinking machines" on our garbage.

One last quote from Lennox, "We need to treat people as people and not machines, and we need to treat machines as machines and not as people" (p. 333). Amen! I built a career on this principle, writing software first on machines that filled the room, then on "minicomputers" the size of office desks, then on "desktop" and "laptop" computers, and finally stuff that runs on the pocket computers we call "phones". There is always a boundary between what people do well but machines do poorly, and what people do poorly but machines do well. The best use of SI or AI is to augment our skills, so we can be more human, not less. It should not replace us, but make life better for us.

Finally, let us dispose of ASI. I think it isn't possible. We already have access to a superintelligence, known as Jehovah God, incarnated in His son Jesus, who offers us the way to be redeemed from the consequences of our sins, and transformed so that we will be freed from the tendency to sin. No machine can accomplish that. 

Tale of a modern space hero

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, space stations, hybrids

I prompted for this image based on descriptions in Hybrids: DAX9 by J.E. Robinson. As described in the novel, the boy (he's almost 13) wears special glasses like augmented reality goggles, but alien ultra, except for about three seconds late in the story. But only his eyes give away his hybrid status; his DNA is 95% human.

The protagonist, JR, rescues a woman in New Mexico who has been shot, and she guides him to a hidden spacecraft. The woman is its pilot, but she cannot properly fly the craft because one hand was destroyed, so she asks JR to help with the controls. He is taken to a space base, which we find out later is either behind the moon, from Earth's viewpoint, or buried in its far side; it isn't clear which.

As a wise editor once advised budding authors, "Pose a problem, then solve it." One problem suffices for a short story. For a 400-page novel, it takes several. In this case, the overarching situation is that the hybrid boy, decanted rather than born in the station, is soon to die. He is the latest such experiment, and all have so far failed. Since JR cannot be returned to Earth—and he is OK with that—he is given training to work alongside the scientists who are trying to determine what might be the reason for the long line of failures.

Partial spoiler. Human contact and learning human emotions and experiencing human friendship and love are required. JR provides that. He becomes the big brother that DAX needs.

Eventually we learn that there are a number of alien species involved in a Collective that built the station. Side problems arise from a diversity of opinion about how important the hybrid project might be.

Ideas that intrigued me include the concept of a human-alien hybrid in the first place. I have written elsewhere about the extreme unlikelihood that DNA which evolved elsewhere in the Galaxy would be compatible with earthly DNA. For example: there number of possible coding tables between the 64 DNA codons and the 20 amino acids (used on Earth) is a number with about seventy digits. At least 25 variations, all rather minor, of the earthly coding table are in use, although only one coding table is used for for nuclear DNA in all vertebrate species on Earth. There is no guarantee that DNA that evolved independently would also be coupled with exactly the same 20 amino acids.

Another idea is that of DAX, JR and one of the Guardians, plus a few helper droids, taking a jaunt to Mars, for which the one-way trip takes two hours. I had to figure it out. If a craft accelerates at 1G for an hour, then accelerates oppositely ("decelerates") for an hour, the distance traveled is only 127,000 km. That's not even halfway from Moon to Earth. At closest approach, the distance to Mars is almost 100 million km, and the acceleration would need to be 78 G. These aliens must have pretty good antigravity technology!

Well, not all authors know everything. I know this author; his brother, recently deceased, was a very good friend of mine. I know that J.E. Robinson doesn't have a strong physics background, and I'm willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of the sociological theme. It is well known that experiencing love and affection are required for a human to grow normally. The aliens are more like Vulcans in Star Trek, exquisitely logical and emotionless. One would think, after the Guardians have been watching Earth for centuries, they would have figured out that DAX needed an element in his upbringing that was not dictated by pure logic. But then, there would be no need for this story!

I applaud my friend for his first novel. It is well written and I found it quite a page-turner. He is also a poet, and I like his poetry. This is a bonus image, as I imagine what one portion of the station would look like if it were situated on/in the Moon.