Important Or Unimportant?

Are Earth and humanity important or unimportant on a cosmic or even just a galactic scale? Obviously they can be either or in some intermediate position. Sf in general and Poul Anderson in particular show us both. Anderson has a collection, The Gods Laughed, about superior aliens. On glancing through this volume just now, I had no recollection of having read "When Half-Gods Go." (That phrase, "Half Gods," is hyphenated on the opening page of the story although not on the contents page of the book.)

Here is an intermediate position. Aycharaych, when it has not yet been disclosed that he himself is of the species known as "the Ancients," admires human variety:

"'Your versatility approaches miracle.'"

-The Day Of Their Return, 3, p. 90.

Some aliens in some sf say this but surely any intelligent species would have to be versatile? Intelligence is versatility. Aycharaych is dishonest and is saying whatever will evoke the response that he wants to get from Chunderban Desai who thanks him but adds:

"'I don't believe, myself, we are unique. It merely happened we were the first into space - in our immediate volume and point in history - and our dominant civilization of the time happened to be dynamically expansive. So we spread into many different environments, often isolated, and underwent cultural radiation...or fragmentation.'" (ibid.)

That would explain the "'...wonderful variety...'" (ibid.) that Aycharaych claims to have found while travelling through the Terran Empire.

What is the probable reality in our universe? Brian Cox has persuaded me that even multicellular organisms might be rare. We already know that consciousness, manipulation, intelligence, civilization, technology, space technology and lasting civilizations with all of these attributes might be rare. What does that leave us with? Our uniqueness? Or spacefaring civilizations so few and so far apart in space and time that they never even detect each others' existence let alone communicate or meet physically?

In either of those two scenarios, we are very important indeed. It is our responsibility to survive, to develop and to make contact if that is remotely possible. (Meanwhile, there remains a continued motivation to destroy what has already been built.)

In the universe of Anderson's Technic History:

"We are one more-or-less intelligent species in a universe that produces sophonts as casually as it produces snowflakes."

-Poul Anderson, "Outpost of Empire" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 1-72 AT p. 7.

Even in that scenario, every single species and every single sophont would have immense value and significance although less obviously so.

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.

Moving Space

Years ago, in his New Maps Of Hell, Kingsley Amis explained the sf "hyperdrive" as follows: although a spaceship cannot move through space faster than light, if a volume of space were somehow to be moved through the surrounding space, then it would be able to carry along with it a spaceship that remained stationary within it. I thought that that made some sort of sense at the time. 

Observations

I have never encountered that explanation of hyperspace in sf;

we do encounter many different explanations;

the cleverest is Poul Anderson's quantum hyperdrive with which a spaceship makes many short quantum jumps without traversing the intervening spaces, therefore without running up against the relativistic light speed limit;

the speculative Alcubierre drive does involve moving space insofar as expansion and contraction are forms of motion.

We have discussed Anderson's several faster than light (FTL) drives. See blog search result.

I am fairly sure that Anderson said somewhere that he devised a different scientific rationale for FTL every time that he used the concept. (His physics degree enabled him to do this.) However, searching for this quotation, I found James Blish saying it of Lester del Rey!

Brian Cox argues that future theories should not contradict but incorporate relativity just as the latter incorporates Newtonian physics. Yes, but that might allow for some way around instead of against the light speed limit which is what sf writers try to imagine. But will any warp drive require impossible quantities of energy? Some ideas work in theory but only in theory like a T-machine would have to have infinite length or something?

What Is Possible?

Some lines of thought have come up and might take some time to develop so I might start into something, then break off and return to it later - one of the beauties of blogging. It will be seen that everything written below is relevant to sf in general and to Poul Anderson's works in particular.

As a philosopher, I make a big deal out of two kinds of impossibility. Some people might either not understand this distinction, at least initially, or not see why it matters. In any case, both kinds of impossibility are kinds of impossibility. Let us just stay with that for the time being. 

Where is the line between possible and impossible?

interplanetary travel

slower than light interstellar travel

faster than light interstellar travel

inter-galactic travel, same differences

inter-universal travel

time travel (by this, I mean travel into the real past among events that really happened, not events that look like the past but are malleable by the traveller)

It will be seen that Anderson's works are all over this list. How confident do you feel about proceeding down the list? We know that interplanetary travel is possible because it has been done, albeit on the meanest scale, but what is next?

Brian Cox has mounted a powerful argument that we should draw the line under interplanetary travel, that even STL interstellar travel will not happen and is not happening. I was going to share a video exposition of Cox's argument but it has become unavailable. I very inadequately summarized the argument in Not To Be Pessimistic But. I have more to say about this and will not be alone in that.

The Improbability Of Complex Organisms

On TV last night, we saw Brian Cox interview one of his heroes, Frank Drake, and discuss Drake's equation. 

Drake showed Cox an orchid that flowers for only two days a year. Anyone who observed that orchid on any of the wrong 363 days would miss the flowers. Communicating civilizations might be rarer than those flowers so we have to keep looking.

Cox explained that complex, multi-cellular organisms are composed of complex cells. It is thought that two simple cells fused to form the first complex cell which then reproduced as complex. However, such fusion would usually result in one cell eating the other or both dying. Fusion to complexity must be rare and is believed to have happened only once on Earth. How often elsewhere? Cox guesstimated one civilization per galaxy which would make us effectively alone and also very valuable.

This is not Poul Anderson's Technic History where sapient species are as common as snowflakes but the universe of his later future histories. Next we will recapitulate what Anderson wrote about hyperspace in Is There Life On Other Worlds?

The Cosmic Web

Last night, in the first episode of a new TV series about the universe, Brian Cox said that the early universe was a void filled with a web of filaments of dark matter and that atoms of hydrogen and helium gathered at the intersections of the filaments where they condensed into galaxies. I never heard that before. The void sounds like the beginning of Norse mythology.

Cox described the nova and supernova process, recalling Poul Anderson's "Lodestar" and Mirkheim. He also said that, after all the stars are extinguished, the dark, dead universe will continue to expand forever. Nothing was said of any grandiose schemes for consciousness to survive within slow energy processes in that epoch. But I think that Anderson's Danellians might import energy and set up bases or habitats in an expanding quiescent universe.

Multiple Reality

From where I am sitting now, I can see:

objects in the room;

open books by Poul Anderson and Stieg Larsson that I am currently rereading;

the street and the sky through the window;

this computer screen;

a TV screen showing a Brian Cox program about discoveries made by probes to Mercury, Venus and Mars.

It is thought that Mercury was formed near the orbit of Mars but that something moved it closer to the Sun. Apparently, Venus was an oceanic planet before its greenhouse effect took over. Now it is hotter than Mercury. Poul Anderson, while alive, would have watched such a program to update his background knowledge. Can an sf writer keep a series consistent throughout his career despite changing scientific information? Ingenuity can save the appearances to a certain extent.

Interlude

I had expected to reread and post more about Poul Anderson's The People Of The Wind this evening. However, BBC 5 re-showed the first episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Then Brian Cox, a sort of British Carl Sagan, introduced a re-showing of the first (only?) episode of Gerry Anderson's Into Infinity, starring Brian Blessed - who spoke to Cox on TV earlier this evening about his real life training for space travel. Into Infinity, a sort of improved Lost In Space meets 2001, is showing now but meanwhile I am tired from a late night last night and planning an early start tomorrow.

Cosmos, about galaxies and the history of science, is where Poul Anderson is at. Sagan's sf novel, Contact, answered the questions:

Might faster than light travel be possible according to current scientific understanding?

If this universe was designed, where could the designers have left a message that would  unequivocally be from them?

Posting about The People Of The Wind will resume soon.