Von Neumann

OK. Poul Anderson quotes Whitehead. I referred to Whitehead's student, Russell, and to Russell's student, Wittgenstein, because both seemed relevant. Now a fourth relevant name comes up in Logicomix: von Neumann. See here.

There are Dirac-von Neumann axioms. See here. Dirac is a name known to readers of James Blish's works. See here and here.

Thus, Blish and Anderson wrote not only science fiction but also science fiction: fiction that was based on knowledge of the work of the foremost scientists of the twentieth century. We appreciate Blish and Anderson much more by learning a little more about the theories and theoreticians that they mention and imaginatively elaborate.

The Connection Between The Double Star And The Robotic Predators

Poul Anderson, Starfarers (New York, 1999).

Captain Nansen hypothesizes that a von Neumann machine, comprising a central computer carrier with several independently mobile observers and constructors, was sent to the double star soon after a nova. The post-nova star would be worth exploring and planetary debris could be used for building material. Such a machine and its duplicates would need both complex hardware and sophisticated software to:

learn;
solve new problems;
exploit opportunities;
improve efficiency.

Post-nova radiation mutated some of the programs. As a first step, the constructors would use parts of immobilized machines in the construction of new ones. However, one mutation acquired parts and materials by attacking and processing any other machines that it found, then returned to its home system where it preyed on the space industries, causing famine among the creators of the von Neumann machines.

The problem with such machines is that they must be complex enough to be vulnerable to mutation even just from cosmic radiation in the absence of novae. Thus, no line of von Neumanns ever penetrates very far into the galaxy. This remains speculation but, in a work of fiction, such speculation is to be accepted as an adequate explanation unless and until the author revises it in a sequel.

High Tech Conflict

Poul Anderson, Starfarers (New York, 1999).

I think that the following arguments are valid to a high degree of probability.

A high technology civilization that has existed for a long time:

must have overcome its internal conflicts, otherwise it would have destroyed itself long ago;

possesses abundant energy, resources and technology, therefore has no need to -

hoard or compete for wealth;
attack, rule or exploit anyone else;
formulate ideas of social or racial superiority because such ideas arise only to legitimize subordination and there is no reason for that to happen.

Poul Anderson imagined a partial exception. "Von Neumann machines" are interstellar robotic explorers programmed to reproduce themselves from asteroid material in each new planetary system. Such machines, their delicate software mutated by stellar or cosmic radiation, might be naturally selected to propagate themselves by attacking and cannibalizing other probes and might even destroy an inhabited planet's space industries with devastating consequences for the planetary population.

The Boat Of A Million Years presents one reason why no von Neumann machines have entered the Solar System. Starfarers presents another such reason. Anderson's "Epilogue" describes Terrestrial robotic evolution that has become conscious.

Contra von Neumann

It would be easy for an advanced technological civilisation to launch robot interstellar probes which would construct new probes from asteroidal material in each new system and launch them further while transmitting data home so that the entire galaxy would be explored at STL speeds in a manageable period so why has this not happened or has it without our knowing?

Poul Anderson thinks of two different reasons why not. In The Boat Of A Million Years, it is realised in advance that it will be impossible to assimilate so much data so no probes are sent that far. In Starfarers, von Neumann probes, as they are called, have been launched but their necessarily complex software is mutated by radiation before they have travelled very far so that they cease to function.

Anderson is to be commended for addressing this question, for thinking of different answers and for presenting them in entertaining works of fiction. This makes him, if not unique, then certainly exceptional among science fiction writers.

Epilogue

(Thirty posts in three and a half days. I meant to slow down and will have to, soon.)

Three points about Poul Anderson's introduction to his short story, "Epilogue," in his capstone collection, Going For Infinity (New York, 2002) -

(i) Anderson informs us that the self-maintaining, self-replicating sea rafts in this story were based on a suggestion, in Scientific American, by John von Neumann, which may in turn have been the first appearance of the von Neumann machine idea, later applied by its conceptualizer to the notion of interstellar probes, as discussed in Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years and, I think also, Starfarers. This is one of the many cases where a little background information enhances appreciation of a story.

(ii) John Campbell accepted the story despite arguing at length "...that things couldn't work out that way." (p. 254) I would like to read Campbell's letter. I also thought that, although self-replicating machines, left to themselves and with their programs "mutated" by radiation, would evolve, they would not exactly parallel biological evolution even down to males impregnating females and the latter giving birth. They already have a much simpler, more straightforward, mechanism for self-replication.

(iii) Anderson rightly points out that, when the story was written, "girl" was an acceptable term for "young woman." Linguistic usages change in our lifetimes. I have noticed the term "Negro" when reading a few Anderson stories recently.

(Words change and new coinages are included in every new edition of any comprehensive dictionary. I was amused this week by news coverage of a new coinage: "selfie.")

Explanations

Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991).

Sometimes a work of science fiction ends by explaining why the world remains unchanged despite a fictional invention or discovery.

Thus:

time travel has not been confirmed because the Time Traveler never returned;

there is no interplanetary travel because Cavor remained on the Moon and the Cavorite sphere was lost;

the Mongols did not conquer North America because the Time Patrol prevented them;

Boat presents an excellent example -

"There is simply a radius, on the order of a light-century or two, beyond which it is unprofitable to search farther. Having foreseen this, you have never built self-multiplying von Neumann machines." (p. 596)

So, yes, there are extrasolar intelligences but, no, no robotic explorers from their civilizations have ever entered the Solar System. Starfarers, to which I will return shortly, describes von Neumanns mutating and thus never completing their missions.

Tahirians And Holont

I am rereading Starfarers by Poul Anderson. In this novel, human beings interact with Tahirians and Holont. Since I summarized information about these two kinds of beings nearly three years ago, it is convenient to link to those posts now.

Other relevant posts are:

Starfarers and Time Travelers
Starfarers And Yonderfolk
Starfarers And Seladorians
Starfarers And Kith
Contra Von Neumann
Starfarer Economics
STL And Social Change

I think that there is a post summarizing information about the planet that the Tahirians are transforming but I cannot find that one right now. However, some blog readers might also like to search the blog?

The Kith Village On Harbor

Starfarers.

Chapter 16 explains that the hostile robotic spacecraft encountered in 15 were probably mutated von Neumann machines.

17 returns us to the Kith but in the Kith village on Harbor at Tau Ceti instead of in Kith Town on Earth at Sol. Three or more ships in port at the same time means a Fair as when Fleetwing arrives to find Argosy and Eagle in orbit and this delays Argosy's departure. This reminds Poul Anderson's readers of the Nomads in his Psychotechnic History although the Nomads' ships are conventional sf faster than light hyperdrive spaceships. Many fictional futures parallel each other in some respects but not in others. We can imagine alternative futurians comparing their experiences in Anderson's inter-cosmic inn, the Old Phoenix.

Ormer Shaun, second mate of Fleetwing, and Haki Tensaro, textile dealer from Eagle, have a beer at the Orion and Bull, another fictional inn although this one is merely named. The surname, Shaughnessy, has been shortened to Shauny and now to Shaun. Confusing Kith with Nomads, I thought at first that "Ormer" was a surname and that "Shaun" was a personal name. In fact, it can be an alternative spelling of "Sean." Nomads and others in the Stellar Union period of the Psychotechnic History place their personal name after their surname but Kith do not.

17 and 21 are Kith short stories adapted as chapters of Starfarers. 10 and some other chapters expand the Kith history and the whole novel presents more than that history.

Hail, Poul Anderson.

Forerunner Activity

For Love And Glory, XLVI.

On the Mars-like planet:

three slim gleaming helices;
delicate, intricate 3D webs;
smaller moving shapes;
mirror-flat rock.

Lissa and Hebo speculate:

continuing construction;

preparing for the wave front from the black hole collision;

maybe mostly forces, subatomic or vacuum energy;

a von Neumann seed growing machines for three million years;

probes near the event but also here for long-range study.

Response:

a gleaming, shimmering complex of coils and strands centered on an iridescent sphere flies to a position three hundred meters from their ship, Hulda, with no visible propulsive force or deceleration stress;

a radio voice, speaking first in Anglay, then in other spacefarer languages, warns them off and informs them that their hyperwave communicator has been disabled.

There is now a "...fragrance of summery meadows..." (p. 259) in Hulda. See In Space.

Then a Susaian ship arrives and destroys the Forerunner sentry craft.

The warning voice resembles similar voices from unknown aliens in Anderson's The Avatar and in Arthur C. Clarke's 2010.

Yvonne POV

The first passage of the Dalmady on Suleiman story is on pp. 524-526 of The Van Rijn Method. There is an unexpected change of pov in the last paragraph. Dalmady has been speaking with Yvonne Vaillancourt and the narration has been from his pov. We were told how her hair smelled to him. However, when he leaves, she watches him until he is out of sight. Thus, we are now in her pov.

We learn that she is both secretary and treasurer of the trade post but that she spends most of her time using the computers to seek patterns in scientific data gathered by her colleagues. The post is maintained only because of commerce but staffed mainly by those who want to do research and managed by Dalmady who wants to move on from this outpost of a base.

Yvonne inwardly makes the point, to which I alluded here, that Suleiman is "...an entire, infinitely varied world..." (p. 526) and hopes that a few scientists elsewhere will notice this one planet among thousands of others. But why should they? Information overload would be a very real issue. In The Boat Of A Million Years, Anderson cites this issue as a reason for not launching von Neumann probes. See here.

Starfarers and Yonderfolk

Yes! In Starfarers, Poul Anderson imagined two kinds of alienness:

first, organic beings with a different kind of language, a different means of reproduction and the technological ability and collective motivation to spend millions of years remaking an artificially enclosed planet from molten core to atmosphere and hydrosphere so that their descendants will be able to inhabit it when their home planet, closer to its sun, has become uninhabitable;

secondly, matter and energy falling into a black hole interact with vacuum virtualities to generate quasi-stable quantum states mutated by uncertainty, perceiving sets of tensors as objects, in some cases intelligent and able to send information-bearing modulated photons past-wards through space-time warps caused by artificially large spinning nuclei, thus able to communicate with newly arrived human explorers because instructed by their future selves, possibly also imposing permanent traces on the vacuum, thus surviving death.

Finally, as an auctorial joke, the physical description of another starfaring race encountered by the Yonderfolk exactly corresponds to that of the Merseians, although with a different biology and sociology: this new race is thought to be descended from communal burrowing creatures with large numbers but few females.

I am rereading Starfarers to extract interesting details like these. Since I am about half way through, there should be more. In particular, the changed terrestrial society later in the novel should be compared with such societies in The Boat Of A Million Years and Brain Wave. But there are also fascinating surprises like the ingenious explanations for why von Neumann probes would not work.

I advise sf fans and anyone else who is interested in scientific and social extrapolation to reread Anderson.

Summarizing Starfarers

Summarizing the content of successive chapters of Poul Anderson's Starfarers makes us realize how much content there is:

future Terrestrial history

Envoy

the Kith

the planet, Harbor

the planet, Aerie

the planet, Brent

malfunctioning von Neumann machines

Tahirians

another starfaring race

virtual particles in the vacuum

Seladorianism

the Venture League

the zero-zero drive

the Tahirian field drive

This reads like a summary of several volumes. Starfarers is an extremely condensed future historical work, like the same author's Genesis.

Fermi

Poul Anderson suggests two solutions to the Fermi Paradox. See Contra von Neumann. Anderson discusses specifically robotic explorers but organisms are less likely to traverse interstellar distances at sub-light speeds.

In The Council Of Shadows, SM Stirling suggests another solution. If intelligent beings can access the psychic "Power," then they will never develop science or technology.

The Fermi Paradox is also mentioned in Stirling's Emberverse series but can anyone remember its relevance there? No way can I dig it out at this time of night.

Power And Civilization

Harvest Of Stars, 41.

The World President tells download Guthrie:

"'...your standards, your whole raison d'etre are no longer admissible in civilization as it has developed. Such a concentration of powers in so few hands, devoid of every social control, is no more tolerable than a pathogen in the bloodstream.'" (p. 393)

I agree with her but because I want power to be democratized, not simply transferred from corporations like Fireball to a World Federation or, after that, to post-organic intelligences. Does Guthrie's response make sense? If he is unable to continue to operate as before, then he will invest all his remaining wealth in leaving the Solar System forever and in colonizing a doomed Centaurian planet. We are used to such responses in American sf - although a colony planet is not usually doomed - but would it make sense in reality? Would these be the only two alternatives? Would it not have been possible to stay and to help to build a future for human freedom within the Solar System? Guthrie's idea of freedom is him or someone like him wielding unlimited economic power. That is a major conceptual limitation.

The technicalities of the interstellar crossing are of interest. There is a limit to how long human beings can survive in suspended animation so a minimum of one-tenth light-speed will be necessary but braking at the destination will not be necessary because von Neumann machines can be sent ahead and will construct sun-powered lasers to slow the arriving ships.

Centaurian Colonization

Poul Anderson, Harvest Of Stars, 41.

Small von Neumann machines will be sent;

at the destination, they will multiply and build an industrial plant;

the industrial plant will build a sun-powered laser powerful enough to decelerate arriving spaceships;

the spaceships, traveling at one tenth light speed, will carry equipment, supplies and a thousand people who can remain in suspended animation for at most fifty years before suffering irreversible damage from radiation and quantum effects;

the exhaustion of Fireball's energy supply will not matter for a one-way journey;

special circumstances have made this a feasible project.

Very late in the novel, we re-encounter Poul Anderson's familiar solution: misfits can leave the Solar System and might start something new. See also Orbit Unlimited, The Boat Of A Million Years and the Technic History.

The Space-Travel Argument

The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.

I am having to skip through this book because I do not understand the mathematics. I will try, but fail, to understand the Final Anthropic Principle.

The penultimate chapter asks why von Neumann probes have not already reached the Solar System. The simplest answer is that there is no one to send any but Poul Anderson offers alternative answers in The Boat of a Million Years and Starfarers. The truth, I think, is that we just do not know enough yet. New data falsifies current theories and there is currently a surplus of new data. Our main hope has to be that our scientific/technological/data-gathering civilization will live long enough to learn more.

"...the epitaph for Man: We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know."

-James Blish, The Triumph of Time IN Blish, Cities in Flight (London, 1981), pp. 467-596 AT p. 596.

Scientific Speculations II

Poul Anderson, "Wellspring of Dreams," see here.

The absence of von Neumann machines is one argument towards the uniqueness of intelligence to Earth. However, Anderson has conceived of different explanations for their absence.

"The nonexistence or extreme rarity of alien minds also has cosmological implications, ruling out certain models, which provides a separate test of the statement. I don't have room to go into that..." (p. 245)

How can the nonexistence or rarity of aliens have cosmological implications? I would have appreciated one sentence on that.

"From [these concepts] can spring some grand science fiction." (p. 247)

It has done, in Anderson's works. But the concepts have got me more interested in the real future. Can it be as herein described? We only ever have present fiction, not the real future. Or do we? We are now living in 2016, well after George Orwell's 1984 and Arthur C Clarke's 2001 and not long before James Blish's 2018. To our younger selves, we are living in the future.

The 1980's

Larry Niven's Medea story, "Flare Time," and his berserker story, "A Teardrop Falls," are both in his collection, Limits, published by Ballantine Books in 1985.

Poul Anderson's Medea story, "Hunter's Moon," and his berserker story, "Deathwomb," are both in his collection, Space Folk, published by Baen Books in 1989.

The 1980's was the decade of shared universes. Niven's Introduction to Limits also mentions the James Baen-inspired sharing of Niven's own Warlock's Era series.

Fred Saberhagen, creator of the berserker series, asked half a dozen other authors each to write a human-berserker encounter story so that he would then be able to amalgamate them into a novel by deciding on the order of the stories before adding a beginning and an ending. Anderson's story is potentially a turning point for the series because, in it, human beings capture an intact berserker computer - which might enable them to design von Neumann machines programmed to kill berserkers.

If that number of "...half a dozen..." other authors to write berserker stories is accurate (Limits, p. viii), then I have read one third of this novel/sub-series.

As the berserker that is to be captured flies into the trap that has been prepared for it, it:

calculates orbits;
adjusts vectors;
receives cosmic noise;
detects human vessels scrambling from the planets that it is approaching;
tracks them;
considers withdrawal;
computes that its optimum course is to proceed because, at worst, a single unit will perish;
considers dispatching a courier back to base but calculates that the human beings would destroy it and refrains;
decides to seek engagement, to establish orbit and to begin sterilizing the inhabited planet;
sliced by an energy beam, becomes "...blind, deaf, dumb, helpless." (Space Folk, p. 232)

Can all of these calculations, considerations and decisions be unconscious computations? Some of them certainly can. A book on the philosophy of mind suggested that the test of whether an entity is conscious is whether we can fully account for its properties and behavior without attributing consciousness to it. Thus, a child can imagine a conversation between a doll, a toy soldier and a teddy bear but we can fully account for every datum about the toys without attributing consciousness to any of them whereas by far the simplest if not indeed the only way to account for the child's behavior is to assume that s/he is conscious.

So is the berserker like one of the toys or like the child? Earlier in the story there is a conversation between a human being and a berserker. At one point, the human being says:

"'Were ye human - were ye e'en alive, conscious, insultable, ye metal abomination - I'd ask ye to stop playing games wi' me.'" (p. 205)

"'Afterward think...Ah, but ye do no' really think, do ye?'" (p. 206)

- so Mary accepts that she is not conversing with a conscious being even though she speaks exactly as if she were. This strains credibility. Ability to conduct a conversation is the criterion for the Turing Test.

When she tells the berserker that "'...a red dwarf star...has a life-bearing planet...," the omniscient narrator comments:

"An organic being would have registered surprise." (p. 213)

- whereas "The machine...said merely: 'That is not believed possible.'" (ibid.)

So here we are being made aware of some difference between two kinds of conversation: that between two conscious beings and that between a conscious being and an unconscious computer.

Consistently with her remarks about the berserker's lack of consciousness and of real thought, Mary thinks of its computer as a "...pseudo-brain...," not as an artificial brain. (p. 214)