The Stars Also

 

In Genesis 1:16, God makes the Sun and the Moon and:

"...he made the stars also."

In Genesis by Poul Anderson, PART ONE ends:

"Consciousness spread ever more widely among the stars. Self-evolved, it gained even greater heights.

"The stars were also evolving." 

-Poul Anderson, Genesis (New York, 2001), PART ONE, IX, p. 97.

I think that Anderson's phrase about the stars "also evolving" echoes, just as it also contrasts with, the Biblical phrase about the stars being made also.

Each member of the galactic brain is a complex of organisms operating mostly on the quantum level and their machines. These "nodes" drift through the spiral arms, the halo and the Magellanic Clouds and some have reached the Andromeda galaxy. Clearly, nodes are immune to the cosmic rays which are lethal to protoplasmic organisms and which therefore are a barrier to interstellar travel by such organisms. Has Anderson imagined a possible future for intelligence?

To respond to obstacles to interstellar travel, we have appealed to Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains and to his Genesis.

A Mobile World

Anyone who crosses an interstellar distance has to take an environment with him and therefore is not dependent on finding, let alone colonizing or conquering, a habitable environment on arrival. Although the interstellar travellers in Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains do not have a faster than light drive, they do have both a Bussard ramjet and technological control of gravity and therefore are able to move a terraformed asteroid with an atmosphere, parks, grass, flowerbeds, trees, pools, buildings and lamps replacing the Sun on the surface as well as a large inhabited interior with a closed ecology where everything can be recycled for millions of years. It is imperative to escape from the paradox of enclosure in a metal hull surrounded by infinite space.

But, if all of that is in place, then the voyage need never end. Some people on (or in) a mobile planetoid can continue to do whatever they would have been doing on their planet of origin while others take the opportunity to explore the universe as they pass through it. The spaceship Astra will take over forty years to reach the triple system, Alpha Centauri. Information beamed back from probes indicates that lifetimes will be insufficient to study the Centaurian planets and the Astra crew might well decide to travel further. Maser contact will keep them informed of changes in the Solar System.

Among some of the crew, decades of previous interplanetary travel have made their:

"...skins dark and leathery..."

-Poul Anderson, Tales Of The Flying Mountains (New York, 1984), Prologue, p. 10.

When the Advisory Council discusses educational policy, a Biblical question is asked:

"'What is truth?'" (p. 15)

No Convergence?

inanimate matter

unicellular life

multicellular life

consciousness

manipulation

intelligence

civilization

technology

space technology

For how long must energized complex molecules change randomly until one becomes self-replicating, i.e., unicellular life? After that, matter must evolve through seven further difficult stages before it can become a space-travelling civilization which spatiotemporal vastness might then prevent from meeting any other civilization.

Imagine a galactic history in which only a few of the many intelligent species imagined by Poul Anderson, Terrans, Ythrians, Merseians, Wodenites, Cynthians etc, exist and eventually achieve local interplanetary spaceflight: a separate history for each with no convergence. It is taking us longer to get into space than we had expected and we might destroy ourselves before we get much further.

Does this seem to resemble the universe that we inhabit?

The Highest Adventure

Focus on the differences between The First Men In The Moon and the Apollo landings. Wells got it right that human beings would be able to land on the Moon but the speculative fiction was bound to differ in every conceivable detail from the eventual reality.

Robert Heinlein wrote three alternative first men on the Moon stories. In his Future History, the first rocket to the Moon is in 1978. Poul Anderson's equivalent story is "The Saturn Game," about exploration further into the Solar System. James Blish's is Welcome To Mars. Larry Niven's Known Space future history series opens with the exploration of Mercury, Venus, Pluto and Mars. 

If the human race survives, then our descendants will do great things on and off Earth and will make unpredictable and unimaginable discoveries about the universe by either close or remote observation.

John W. Campbell, introducing Volume I of Heinlein's Future History, wrote:

"These are a window on tomorrow; a television set tuned to the future. But we lack the key to the door that would let us walk through into that future; we must only watch and listen to the highest of all adventures - the conquest of the stars!"

-John W. Campbell, Jr., INTRODUCTION IN Robert Heinlein, The Man Who Sold The Moon (London, 1963), pp. 11-14 AT p. 14. 

Some of us who read the Future History have walked some distance into the future. The highest adventure will be whatever human beings do accomplish in the further future. The conquest of the stars? I doubt conquest in any sense. Interstellar travel is a symbol of freedom in American sf, maybe only a symbol. Our descendants will either be interested that we imagined them as DD Harriman, Nicholas van Rijn, Dominic Flandry etc or will have forgotten such imaginings.

We refer to:

Wells

Heinlein

Blish

Niven

Campbell

Anderson

Wells is a Homer and Anderson is a culmination.

Planets So Remote

 

When the Terran Emperor's birthday is celebrated:

"On planets so remote that the unaided eye could not see their suns among those twinkling to life over Oceania, men turned dark and leathery, or thick and weary, by strange weathers lifted glasses in salute. The light waves carrying their pledge would lap on his tomb."

-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, January 2010), pp. 1-192 AT CHAPTER ONE, p. 5.

Despite the quantum hyperdrive, the universe of the Technic History remains relativistic. Therefore, simultaneity is relative. So the dark and leathery or thick and weary men cannot be said to drink the Emperor's health at the same time as Birthday is being celebrated on Terra. Nevertheless, the Terrans can measure how long it would take them to travel back and forth on hyperdrive and therefore must have some way to calculate a simultaneity of events for practical purposes.

Having returned from a sandwich lunch in a country pub, I must now eat again before walking across town in a cold wind to an important public meeting.

We are building a future now although not the future of the Technic History.

Sub-Light Speeds

Anderson's Future Histories That Presuppose Only Slower Than Light Interstellar Travel

The two Kith Histories

The Rustum History

Tales Of The Flying Mountains

The Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy

The Boat Of A Million Years

Genesis (only post-organic intelligences fly between stars)

How much inter-species communication is possible at sub-light speeds? If there is a technological civilization twenty thousand light years away, then it cannot detect our present civilization because it can see Sol only as it was twenty thousand years ago. At that distance, would it be able to detect a Solar planet, then oxygen in the atmosphere, vegetation on the surface and artificial light on the night side? (Not that there would have been artificial light back then.) If there is going to be a technological civilization at that distance twenty thousand years hence, then it might with difficulty detect our present civilization. Our brief burst of radio signals - now being replaced by fibre-optic cables? - would be weak and swamped by other cosmic noise. But, if such a civilization were to launch an expedition towards Earth, then, at sub-light speeds, that expedition would arrive here well over forty thousand years in our future. Would such an expedition even be launched?

I am summarizing from memory arguments presented by Brian Cox.

Starfarers is Poul Anderson's approach to the concept of detecting an extra-solar civilization and launching a slower than light expedition to it.

New Discoveries

Sure. A faster than light drive presupposes a new paradigm but that is not why sf writers deploy FTL drives. Usually, they are just exploiting a convenient cliche to move their characters around on an otherwise impossible galactic scale. 

It is impossible to predict a new theory. If an author, pre-Einstein, had written that there was going to be a new theory called "relativity," then he would have predicted the name but not the content of that theory whereas, if he had stated the content, then he would have made, not predicted, the theory. An sf writer can convey the sense of discovery but can only guess at what new discoveries there might be. In James Blish's The Quincunx Of Time, his characters receive messages from many future periods with mutually incompatible and incomprehensible paradigms.

Poul Anderson conveys the sense of new discoveries in his fictional introduction to "The Three-Cornered Wheel" where someone called Vance Hall points out that it had been thought:

that power could not be extracted from atomic nuclei until uranium fission was discovered;

that energy projectors/ray guns were impractical until lasers were invented;

that accelerating spaceships must expel mass until artificial gravity fields were generated;

that light speed could not be surpassed until the quantum hyperjump was found.

Thus, Anderson does make anti-gravity and FTL seem like up-coming stages in a current process. 

He presents several distinct FTL scenarios, e.g.:

the quantum hyperdrive in the Technic History, of course;

the superlight drive and civilization clusters in After Doomsday;

the interstellar and intergalactic space jump in World Without Stars.

Paradigms

James Blish, "The Science in Science Fiction" IN Blish, The Tale That Wags The God, pp. 35-45.

Blish writes that:

Poul Anderson

Raymond F. Jones

Hal Clement

Arthur C. Clarke

Larry Niven

Isaac Asimov

- are scientifically accurate but nevertheless write about:

telepathy;

faster than light (FTL) travel;

time travel;

anti-gravity;

force-fields or force-screens

- "...which are impossible by current standards." (p. 38)

Why?

One thing is certain:

"...the future will offer us new paradigms." (pp. 43-44)

An sf writer should not contradict known facts but should "...suggest new paradigms..." (p. 45)

We cannot know in advance what any new paradigms will be. We can only suggest them by imagining phenomena, like FTL travel, that are impossible according to current paradigms. Blish concludes that:

"...the most important scientific content in modern science fiction are the impossibilities." (p. 45)

We can look forward to a future not necessarily of FTL but certainly of unpredictable new paradigms.

Enduring Explosion

James Blish,  POUL ANDERSON: THE ENDURING EXPLOSION IN Blish, The Tale That Wags The God (Chicago, 1987), pp. 86-92.

(A posthumous non-fiction collection. This article was published in FSF, April 1971.)

Anderson was first published in an sf mag in 1944.

He was prolific and, uniquely, his work was of consistently high quality. Blish though that Anderson was the only surviving Golden Age Astounding author whose work had not gone downhill. He identifies Anderson as:

scientist

technician

stylist

bard

humanist

humorist

artist

- and immune to changes in fashion.

Blish had labelled Anderson's works as "hard copy," meaning deeply felt and carefully crafted, but was taken to mean scientifically correct, hence the term "hard sf" - which Anderson also wrote. His electrons were not miniature planets and his asteroids did not have jungles. Blish praises Tau Zero, The Day After Doomsday, "Sister Planet," The High Crusade and "A Bicycle Built for Brew," but was not so keen on "Hoka."

He points out yet another Biblical quotation, this one in "Sister Planet": Ezekiel 7: 3-4.

Anderson's works were not just adventures, tragedies etc but wholes. He deliberately appealed to at least three senses in every scene. He appealed for "unitary" sf combining every aspect of life which is a good prescription for any kind of fiction.

What We Do Not Know

Years ago, at an sf con, there was Fran, me and another guy. The other guy thought that the light speed limit was frustrating: so many things that we can see from a distance but cannot explore close up. I was not so sure. At any stage of transportation technology, we will be able to see further than we can travel. That is part of the deal. We are at least in the universe and can surely travel at least to the limits of the Solar System and improve telescopes to see much further than we can now. Other galaxies remain as mysterious to Poul Anderson's Technic Historians as they are to us. A few of his characters go further but they cannot see everything.

Fran said that there are so many things that we do not know, that maybe among the things that we do not know is a way to travel faster than light. Not if the light speed limit really is a fundamental physical feature of this universe. Science is always provisional. The vastness of the unknown is a reason to continue learning, not to hope for a particular outcome. Whatever we learn will be unexpected. We will return this point from another direction later.