My flash story UFO, about a close encounter with something, is now live at:
https://antisf.com.au/the-stories/ufo
UFO is based on my personal experience flying helicopters off aircraft carriers at night in bad weather. Sort of. I changed how it ended.
https://phys.org/news/2021-03-insight-reveals-size-mars-core.html
The more we learn about Mars, the better an idea we’ll have about whether and how we can settle there.
Perseverance has landed on Mars. Autoland diagrams
First Images
Perseverance has a helicopter, Ingenuity, as part of its sensor package.
Welcome to 2021. Last year (I don’t mention names of criminals lest they get publicity for their evil deeds) was, to be charitable, difficult. The Year of House Arrest will forever go down in infamy. 2021 will be better. How can it not?
I did manage to use my time at home to publish a novel and four short stories on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. The novel, Asteroid Gambit, and two of the stories are set win the World of Sol future, where humanity has moved mining and heavy manufacturing into space. Needless to say, conflict has followed. You can find my author page and links to my stories here.
This year I plan to publish a short story and a novel set in a future in which environmental deterioration and war leads to a deliberate genocide. A millennium later Ignatius Ryan, a Jesuit banished to the future by his church awakes from cryosleep in a spaceship to find a pristine environment on Earth. The only evidence of human civilization he can see is a constellation of military satellites in unstable orbits. He learns that a tiny remnant of humans have survived – and they have no use for his antiquated ideas.
Over the last few months Inigo Press has published the following Amazon Kindle Stories, all available on Kindle Unlimited. Asteroid Gambit and Terraformed Earth – New Millennium are also available in paperback
If you read one of these stories, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. It’s very helpful in attracting more readers.
I just got word that my story Whale’s Tale has been accepted by Flash in a Flash. They plan to publish it in an episode coming soon.
I almost deleted the acceptance email. I’ve gotten so used to rejections that I had teed it up for deletion when I saw the subject line: ACCEPTANCE. What a narrow escape!
Time travel is a staple of science fiction. The most accepted model of physics merges time with distance in a spacetime continuum, and gives no preference to the direction of time. Yet the observable universe, everything we see and are familiar with, definitely prefers one direction of time, toward what we call the future. The direction from past to future was referred to as the arrow of time by Ludwig von Boltzmann, who defined entropy as the disorder of an isolated system. He stated that the entropy of an isolated system always increases or remains constant. Simply put, the arrow of time points from a glass vase falling off of a tabletop toward the shattered vase on the floor in a puddle of water. It’s easy to see a whole vase can become shattered shards, not so easy to envision how the shattered shards on the floor spontaneously reassemble into the whole vase full of water on top of the table and a dry floor given only the passage of time. In the macroscopic world time definitely only flows one direction.
The problem is that the mathematical description of the paths of the individual particles that make up the vase from table to floor to shards in a puddle works equally well as a description of the paths of the individual particles from shards in a puddle to vase hitting the floor to vase on the table. You only need to reverse the time coordinate. We’ve all seen movies run backwards, which shows how that would work. But if you watch a movie of the vase falling it’s easy to tell which is the actual real-world choice of time coordinates. If you walked into a room and saw a vase spontaneously reassemble and jump from floor to table you’d be astonished. If you saw the vase fall and break you would perhaps be disappointed but not shocked.
In the standard model of quantum physics in relativistic spacetime, space and time are both reversible. Despite its nonintuitive nature, quantum physics makes many predictions that are easy to test and that support its validity. It is eerily correct in a multitude of ways. So there’s a conundrum. Most physicists postulate that the reversibility of time is fundamental and the growth of entropy is not. So we seem to have an illusion of the passage of time in only one direction, toward greater entropy, greater disorder. The important aspect of illusions is that they point out problems with the underlying model.
The standard model also includes the “Big Bang”, an explosion about 14 billion years ago when the protouniverse was in an extremely low entropy state, with everything in the universe tightly packed into an extremely small space. Sean Carroll is one of the most well-known physicists who have wrestled with the nature of time and its arrow. He says the question is not why does entropy increase, but rather why was the entropy ever extremely low to begin with?
The way Carroll and most physicists deal with the peculiarities of our universe is to state that the universe is just one of an infinite number of possible universes, each with its own arrow of time and other properties. Since these universes are by definition outside of our own, it’s not clear how we could ever test this hypothesis. But physicists are unwilling to make predictions based on an otherwise spectacularly successful theory unless the predictions can be falsified.
Carroll puts this into the context of the missing quantum theory of gravity. The standard model of physics provides a unified theory for three of the four forces that govern the rules of particle motion. The strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force and electromagnetic force all have very successful quantum descriptions; gravity does not. If we can develop a good theory of quantum gravity so all the forces are part of a single, self-consistent description, Carroll believes we could more confidently predict things we cannot observe.
What is often neglected is that the universe has enormous numbers of islands of low entropy in a sea of steadily increasing entropy. We call them stars. Local inhomogeneities in the density of a uniform cloud of interstellar gas lead to gravitational clumping. The entropy of a gas cloud increases as it collapses into a star, the star itself is a location of low entropy, i.e., a high degree of order. On a larger scale, galaxies like the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy represent clusters of low entropy objects within a universe of increasing entropy. All of these low entropy objects exist because of gravity. Within the nearest such locale, the solar system, entropy is increasing in the system as a whole but the system was brought into a much lower entropy initial state by gravity.
So what does this mean for time travel? Conceptually time travel is consistent with the Standard Model, although causality takes a hit if the future can cause actions in the past. Without causality the assemblage of shards into a vase would be interesting but not impossible. With causality, all the familiar paradoxes occur. Only if the time traveler’s actions are taken into account (i.e., already known in some sense) do both time travel and causality coexist. So, if a mysterious stranger got your grandparents together, you could be that mysterious stranger, but from your perspective, once you arrived in the past your actions would be constrained in some way.
Ignatius López de Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, was a soldier wounded in the Battle of Pamplona in 1521. During his convalescence he became devoted to the service of God. Despite this conviction it took him a while to understand what it meant, as an incident in his autobiography shows.
In 1522 Ignatius was riding on the road to Monserrat and met a Muslim going the same way. As they rode together they started talking about the Blessed Virgin. The Muslim said he couldn’t believe she remained a virgin after conceiving a child. Ignatius argued that she did. After the Muslim rode on ahead. Ignatius reviewed their conversation, becoming increasingly agitated that he had not convinced the Muslim, whose words Ignatius took as an insult to Mary. Ignatius became so upset that he felt he should catch up to the Muslim and stab him for the insult. After a protracted internal struggle he could not decide what he should do.
Finally, unable to make a clear decision, he decided to give free rein to his mule as he passed the point where the Muslim had said he intended to leave the high road. If the mule turned off the road toward the town indicated, Ignatius would seek out the Muslim and stab him. If the mule stayed don the high road, avoiding the town, he would let him be.
As he reached the fork in the road, the mule stayed on the main road, even though the town stood was only thirty or forty yards off the highway and the road to it was very wide and easy. Ignatius himself told this story to Father Louis Gonzalez many years later to illustrate how easily one might go astray.
In IX New Millennium, Ignatius Xavier Ryan has reason to recall this story.
Excerpted from The Autobiography of St. Ignatius Loyola
Not long ago I took an online course titled Advanced Fiction Writing. In the first two sections I found an important notion. To really understand where you’re going with a story, you reduce it, after a bit of process, into What if…
What if an artificial intelligence system were built into a centuries-old mansion that happened to be haunted ?
We were coming home from the grocery store and as I pulled out the house key my wife remarked “Some day houses won’t have keys.” Since our current vehicle has no key it wasn’t an outlandish thought, and home computer systems are becoming more powerful. Why not?
As I carried in a bag of groceries I was musing one of my favorite ideas: combining old and new. As in new high technology and old infrastructure. A gleaming laptop inside an antique roll-top desk. A home computer system in a nineteenth century house. Aluminum and silicon and copper that bespeak industrial methods embedded in lovingly finished casework inside a mansion that flaunted its hand-made decoration. A contrast. A creative clash.
So if someone put a state of the art AI home computer system into a haunted house and the ghost took over its communication channels how could the programmer tell? Neither is likely to pass a Turing test. The AI because the technology isn’t (may never be?) up to the challenge. The ghost because in most ghost stories the ghost obsesses about whatever binds it to the living. A ghost’s answers to questions may be non-sequiturs but more likely are nonresponsive, soliloquys about its obsession. It won’t sound like a rational human any more than an AI. But the ghost may fail the test in different ways that an AI.
So suppose you are the programmer and you begin to suspect that something about your AI seems off. How are you going to troubleshoot that and eventually find out that the AI has lost control to a ghost? Most programmers, like most scientists, aren’t going to believe in ghosts and are likely to believe in strong AI. But if they’ve heard that the house is haunted and the AI is behaving more and more erratically…
An AI can be reprogrammed, tweaked to behave. A ghost is beyond being influenced by the living. Unless the living give the ghost what it wants. So the Inigo test to distinguish between a ghost and an AI is to give it something close to what it wants but not quite. An AI might moderate its behavior. A ghost may become enraged. The Turing test doesn’t usually put the tester in danger. Or does it?
My short story, Boudreau’s Ghost, explores this interesting contrast. Buy it here.
This morning I received payment for my first professional science fiction sale. Amazing Stories magazine bought my short story November Skies. I’ll provide details about the upcoming issue when they’re available.