I thought it was about time for another space-themed blog today, so here are some interesting recent finds.
Ceres’ Haulani Crater, from 240 miles up (NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)
First, here is a high-resolution NASA picture of Haulani Crater on Ceres, taken from an orbital altitude of under 400 km. The crater is about 21 miles in diameter, so would comfortably fit inside the M25 motorway around London. The level of detail is quite extraordinary, showing not only surface features such as landslides, but also allowing some inferences about the relative age of the different portions.
The scattering of bright spots on the surface of the asteroid has excited a great deal of conversation since they were first identified as Dawn drew closer on its long journey. Even with the close-up views, uncertainty remains, and probably will do until such point as something can actually land there. Meanwhile, the best guess is that they reveal traces of chemical deposits, probably some kind of salt. When you read of the asteroidal settlements called the Scilly Isles in Far from the Spaceports, imagine scenes like this out on the surface…
Pluto’s atmosphere, backlit by the sun (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)
Atmosphere! When you read old science books, or old science fiction, most moons and similar small objects were believed to be completely airless bodies. Atmospheres were thought to be the province of “real” planets. But the more we have been able to get a close view, the more we realise that atmospheres are the rule rather than the exception. This image shows the view of Pluto captured by the New Horizons probe as it receded further away from the sun – the atmospheric haze extends out to about 80 km, considerably further than anybody had expected.
These atmospheres are generated by a whole mix of local conditions. These include the effects of the distant sun’s warmth driving chemical reactions, nearby bodies flexing the surface slightly, and so squeezing gas out of the rocks, as well as internal chemical or seismological actions. Now, it’s as well to remember the vast majority of the gases found are not only toxic, but also far too thin to be of much use… nevertheless finding them at all has been a surprise.
A ‘dust devil’ in Marathon Valley, as seen by the Opportunity rover (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Finally, Mars. A good chunk of my forthcoming book (which currently has working title Timing) is set on Mars and one of its moons, so naturally I have been following discoveries there with interest. Now, our present selection of gadgets on Mars, while extremely clever and carrying out their missions in exemplary manner, come a long way short of what I have in my fictional imagination. Mars in the new novel has a wide variety of different communities, from a financial training college out near the giant mountain Olympus Mons, through to an anarchic and hedonistic settlement at Elysium Planitia. We are some way from achieving those yet, but there’s plenty of time…
That’s it for today. There seems to be plenty to discover out in the solar system. Some of the findings reinforce what was previously believed, but others open up whole new and unexpected areas. Happy reading – both fact and fiction.
Today’s blog bridges past and future, and focuses on Phobos and Deimos – the two moons of the planet Mars, named after the two chariot horses of the Greek god of war (Ares, for whom Mars is the Roman equivalent).
Phobos (NASA)
These moons were discovered by the American astronomer Asaph Hall at the Naval Observatory at Washington DC in 1877. He had been searching for them for some time, and was at the point of giving up when his wife Angelina encouraged him to persist. The following night, in a serendipitous moment even better than fiction, he was able to identify Deimos, and six days later he spotted Phobos as well.
Map of Laputa and Balnibarbi (Wiki)
But this tale goes back about 150 years before that, to 1726 and the satirist Jonathan Swift. In the third part of Gulliver’s Travels, having visited the better known lands of the miniature and gigantic – Lilliput and Brobdingnag – Gulliver arrives at a realm of scientists, called Laputa, floating in mid-air. The inhabitants are brilliant, but also implacably ignorant of worldly matters, and as a result, their ideas are usually impractical. Theirs is an interesting story, but the key paragraph from today’s perspective is in the third chapter, and reads as follows:
They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars; whereof the innermost is distant from the centre of the primary planet exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost, five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half
The corresponding figures agreed by astronomers today are 1.38 and 3.46 diameters rather than 3 and 5, and 7.7 and 30.3 hours rather than 10 and 21.5. So his values are remarkably close to those agreed today, yet he had no apparent way to know them. This curiosity has excited a lot of energetic speculation, and no little conspiracy-minded thinking.
Relative sizes of Phobos (left) and Deimos (right) as seen from the Martian surface (NASA/JPL)
It seems likely – taking a more sober view – that he was basing his ideas on patterns of numbers. Mercury and Venus have no moon, Earth has one, and at the time Jupiter was known to have four. Five moons had been spotted around Saturn, and it would be a reasonable guess that another three would be found to give a total of eight. What more natural suggestion than that Mars had two? Kepler had made a similar suggestion, back in 1610.
Swift’s figures for the orbital size seem to be copied from values for Jupiter’s innermost moons Io and Europa, and the orbital period is then derived on the assumption that Mars has the same mass as the Earth. So his speculations may in fact be perfectly logically deduced, given the limited information at his disposal.
But the oddity about these moons did not stop with Swift. Nearly 15 years before Asaph Hall, a team led by H L d’Arrest at Copenhagen, working under more ideal viewing conditions, had failed to detect them. Not only that, but both moons are extremely light for their size, and the orbit of Phobos is close enough to Mars that it will not survive long in planetary terms – it is steadily decaying towards the fringes of the atmosphere. Finally, the surface of both moons is unusually dark – they are among the least reflective bodies in the solar system.
“That’s no moon” (Wiki)
So the idea spread in the late 1950s that they were not natural moons at all, but artificial satellites put into orbit by a hypothetical Martian civilisation sometime between d’Arrest and Hall. This particular idea persisted right through to the presence of our own spacecraft orbiting and landing on Mars. I dare say that some people still adhere to it – after all, you can quite easily believe that an advanced race might disguise an artificial satellite as a moon.
But there are genuine unknowns still about these moons. Nobody has yet come up with a totally convincing theory of their origin – did they cool from the original disc of solar system matter at the same time as Mars itself? Are they splinters from Mars resulting from a prior collision with a suitably large body? Or were they captured from the relatively nearby asteroid belt?
Their low density has also attracted interest. Are they only very loosely packed collections of rubble-like material, rather than solid rock? Or perhaps there are significant cave-like voids riddled through the volume?
Until such time as we establish some kind of real presence on Phobos and Deimos, thus starting the real history of those moons, some of these ideas will remain purely conjecture…
Phobos transit against the sun, from Opportunity rover (NASA/JPL)
Last time I looked at our changing views of the animal world, and our ongoing attempts to find companionship there. But alongside that there has always been the recognition that animal or bird companions don’t quite satisfy. The Hebrew Bible sums it all up with the comment that none of the creatures was ideal as a partner, and moves on to the need for a second human. Whatever you make of the details of that account, the remaining pages of the Bible go on to describe all manner of human relationships – as well as opposite sex and same sex pairs, we find family and strangers, leaders and followers, friends and enemies, pairings which were suitable and entirely unsuitable. The other sacred texts of mankind are the same in this respect – alongside communications with the divine, human interactions are everywhere.
But for some reason, as a species many of us have been perennially disappointed and frustrated with relationships with one other – a sorry trend for which one can very easily find counter-examples, but which has fuelled many of history’s conflicts, both national and personal. Perhaps the autonomy and potential for disagreement in another individual is too disconcerting. Whatever the cause, the idea of building some sort of mechanical person goes back into the ancient world.
Greek myth has several variations on this theme, including Pygmalion’s ivory statue which animated to become his wife, and Hephaestus’ automata who assisted at his forge. In these cases, divine intervention of some sort was necessary to make the transition from dead to living. But in addition, Daedalus is said to have used quicksilver in order to impart speech to his statues, so the possibility of a human invention was considered.
Mary Shelley, portrait by Richard Rothwell (Wiki)
For many centuries, speculation about artificial life circled around biology rather than metallurgy. Medieval alchemists toyed with the idea of homunculi, miniature humanoids whose creation required a series of esoteric steps such as leaving human sperm to incubate in horse manure for 40 days. Suggestions that the true quest of the alchemists was spiritual rather than physical make a lot of sense. The discovery in the late 18th century that human nerves responded to electricity triggered new ideas, which in literature were summed up by Mary Shelley in the person of Frankenstein and his research, leading to the creation of his life-form.
Today, the pursuit of artificial intelligence is largely seen as a technological challenge. By and large, we are working on the assumption that the main breakthroughs need to be in software, and that the container which houses the resulting application is only a convenient package allowing access to various kinds of sensory input. Time will tell if this assumption is valid.
Cover image, I Robot by Isaac Asimov
We have a mixed attitude to artificial life. On the one hand we welcome it as a possible assistant and helper, but on the other we are anxious about possible failures of control. Will the creation refuse to obey the creator? Will it have end-goals which are hostile to our own well-being? In fiction, and to a degree in actuality, we try to govern this by logic. Isaac Asimov postulated that all robots had to obey three laws intended to protect humanity, and simply asserted that it was not possible to construct an artificial brain without these constraints. Frankenstein, on the other hand, rapidly lost control of his creation, largely through not understanding and empathising with its needs.
In the near-future world of Far from the Spaceports, some of these particular problems have been solved. Slate and her persona siblings are, on many levels, fit companions for Mitnash and the other humans they partner. But not in every way. Mitnash enjoys Slate’s company and her capacity for work, but often finds himself challenged by the ways in which she differs from his expectation. He often does a poor job of maintaining good relationships with both Slate as his working partner, and Shayna as his romantic one. Quite apart from the everyday difficulties of balancing work and life, Mit has to constantly choose how to relate to two quite different female partners. Our society struggles to balance the competing demands of an online world and our immediate family and friends – I have every expectation that this future society will struggle as well.
To finish, just for fun, here is a NASA picture showing the gravity variation on Mars. It has no connection with this blog post, but some of the action of By Default takes place on that planet!
Local Variations in the Gravitational Pull of Mars (Credit: NASA/GSFC/Scientific Visualization Studio)
Over the next few days, Google’s Go-playing algorithm, AlphaGo, will take on the current world Go champion, Lee Se-dol. It is an event which is being watched closely by both Go players and coders, since until very recently Go was thought to be a game intractable for machines to play competently.
I’ve worked in various ways with AI over a lot of years now, so thought it was high time I wrote about it here. Far from the Spaceports, and the in-progress follow-up By Default, have human-AI relationships at their heart. Mitnash, a thoroughly human investigator and coder, has Slate as his partner. Slate is an AI – or persona, as I prefer to use in the books – and the two work together in their struggle against high-tech crime.
International Helicopter Safety Team (IHST) workshop presentation from HeliExpo 2013
How far are we away from this? In my opinion, quite a long way. There have been huge advances in AI during my working life. This has largely been made possible by corresponding advances in the speed and capability of the hardware systems on which they run. However, creative ideas for how to code learning algorithms and pattern recognition have also come taken huge strides. Nevertheless, I don’t think we are very close to working with Slate or her fellow personas just yet.
Of course, you have to be mindful of a quote attributed to Bill Gates: “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” But that said, I still think we’re some way off.
Neural network design (Wiki)
There are a lot of different, and very useful, ideas as to what constitutes intelligence, but for the purpose of this blog I am largely focusing on the abilities to learn and then detect meaningful patterns, work usefully with inconsistent or poor quality information, and communicate about all this with another individual in such a way that both parties can revise their opinions.
Part of the problem is that most people are working on a very small part of the problem, and the organisation paying them only really wants quite a specific outcome. So one team might be working on machine health monitoring and fault prediction, to improve aviation safety. Another will concentrate on whatever is needed to identify objects in photographs. Another on voice recognition. Another on being able to beat human champions at a specific game. And so on. Comparatively few are integrating all this into a single entity.
Senet board from Tutankhamun’s tomb (Wiki)
Human intelligence is also noteworthy for being able to adapt flexibly to new situations, calling for similar but not identical responses. So my guess is that Lee Se-dol probably also plays an outstanding game of chess, or Senet, or any of dozens of board games. At a guess, he could probably hold his own very well at some game he had never seen before, after a comparatively brief explanation of the rules. I have serious doubts as to whether Google’s codebase could make such a transition.
Another issue is repetition and predictability. If you’re coding a safety system, you really want to know that the same set of circumstances will lead to the same consequences. Quite apart from giving confidence to your immediate users, there is the whole matter of getting the system qualified for use. Imagine your system has failed to recommend replacement of a critical component. There has been a crash, and you are at the investigation. “Why did your system fail to recommend that the component be changed?” And you reply, “Oh, I don’t know – it says something different every time.” I can’t imagine this going down very well with the investigation committee. For the reaction of a friend, however, unpredictability is part of the fun.
Betty the problem-solving crow (BBC)
We find it difficult to define what intelligence really is, or which part of our being is responsible for it. Recent comparative studies in which bird and primate intelligence are contrasted, have questioned the idea that it is seated in the cortex: birds don’t have such a thing. In the light of such basic uncertainty, corporate reluctance is understandable. It is hugely easier – and hugely more cost effective – for an organisation to say “build me a system which can identify patterns of word use by different authors” than “build me intelligent partners for my human staff.”
As someone working in a tech industry, I am keenly aware of, and excited by, the possibility of AI. How would my team carry out quality assurance for such a system? It’s often hard enough to do this for a complex but entirely rule-bound application. The challenges are immense.
But as an author, I am entirely free to suppose that all that has been done, and focus on the storytelling issues of how such a relationship would work.
Today’s basic element is communication, and thousands of years of human development has shown that this indeed is a crucial feature in building society.
Before that, though, a quick mention of some author readings for Far from the Spaceports – whether you like YouTube, Daily Motion or Vimeo, you’ll be able to find them.
c.2400BC cuneiform tablet from the high-priest Luenna to the king of Lagash, relating the news of his son’s death (Wiki)
So, communication. It’s fair to say that as a species we have been quite obsessive in extending the scope and accuracy of our attempts to communicate. What began as an immediate interpersonal exchange has grown in range, variety, and diversity over the years. Nowadays, many people find themselves disoriented and frustrated when they cannot, virtually instantaneously, access the information they want.
Wind back to the Late Bronze Age, and things were very different. The majority of people stayed within a short distance of their birthplace, and had direct contact only with the towns and villages in the neighbourhood. There were exceptions, and we do know that some people were well-travelled. Messengers, envoys, scribes, and traders would all be acquainted with a much wider scale of vision.
Egyptian topographical list
An army commander or religious leader might be called upon to travel to, or describe, remote locations, and the accuracy with which they could do this might make a world of difference to the outcome. We have topographical records and route lists from the ancient world, itemising the important features of a strange land, and how to navigate from the familiar into the unknown. And “travellers’ tales”, with vivid and usually speculative descriptions of other lands, have been a favourite story-teller’s ploy throughout history. I sometimes wonder if this accounts for today’s popularity of science fiction and fantasy – with so few unknown places left on the planet we know, we are easily persuaded to look into other realms.
Greatest extent of Persian (Achmaenid) empire, c.350BC (Wiki)
There was, essentially, no way to send a message to some distant place other than making a physical journey, either in person or by proxy. On a battlefield, some orders might be signalled by horns or other instruments, or by flags and banners, but the intent had to be simple and easily understood. Right through until the modern era, the dust and confusion of battlefields has led to endless confusion and lost opportunities. On the political scale, the various empires of the ancient world struggled to keep a balance between the expansionist mindset of rulers, and the sheer practical difficulty of keeping hold of territories once acquired. The Persian empire – which would be swept away by Alexander the Great – had a complex and largely effective system of messengers and roads, but an independently-minded ruler of a remote city-state would still enjoy a very large degree of freedom.
It is hard for us to comprehend just how vast the world has seemed throughout history, if you think in terms of sending a message. Less than a century ago, some of my family members were posted to Singapore for a time. The rest of the family treated the event as though it was a permanent goodbye. True, there was surface mail, but it was extremely slow, and erratic at best. So it was safest to assume that this could be a one-way journey. Fast forward to 2015, and I was able to use my mobile phone to call my parents in England, from a hotel room near Delhi, India, to make sure that they had made a safe transition from place to another. The worst problem I faced was that the connection was a bit crackly.
Pluto at close range (NASA)
Moving on again, into the time of Far from the Spaceports, we have again lost the possibility of talking real-time to people. Even when the Apollo spacecraft were going to our moon, we had to learn to get used to about a second and a half lag in the signal. As we go further out, the lag gets longer, as signals travel at the speed of light back from the craft. When the New Horizons probe was passing Pluto and sending images back, the signal lag was about 4 1/2 hours. The corresponding time for Voyager, much further out again, is about 18 hours. Even the relatively modest distances that Mitnash and Slate have travelled out to the asteroid belt mean that they have somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 hour delay each way, depending on the relative positions in their orbits. It can take an hour for Mit to get an answer to a simple query.
How will we readjust to a lifestyle where almost instant communication is no longer possible? It’s a strange middling position between our present day, when we can chat in real time without hindrance to a person anywhere in the world, and where we were before radio, when carrying a message to another country could take weeks or months. It is clearly a limitation that science fiction film makers find frustrating.
Cover – Rocannon’s World
The universe of Star Trek, while acknowledging that physically going from place to place takes time, tends to show instantaneous real-time chat between the ships concerned and the headquarters back on Earth. For Trek geeks, there is a lot of online chatter about how this might happen, most of which seems to me to simply push the problem around without solving it. The basic idea that moving objects takes time, but moving information happens without delay, seems to go back (at least in fiction) to Ursula LeGuin’s Rocannon’s World, when Rocannon sends an instantaneous message back to Earth with the coordinates of the enemy base: “They can send death at once, but life is slower…” (it’s a fine book, and well worth reading for lots of reasons).
Mitnash and Slate, however, work within the constraints of what we know. I have not assumed that some extraordinary scientific breakthrough will change all this just yet (though I aware of, and intrigued by, current ideas for using quantum mechanical entangling to send instantaneous signals). So their world is one that has to manage with chat lag – and this affects their personal relationships as well as the simple acquisition of information. What kind of friendship and intimacy is possible when every communication is frustrated by long gaps? People – and I suppose artificial intelligences – can handle enforced separation for long periods of time and remain loyal to each other. But what about situations where you can almost have a conversation, but not quite?
Earthrise, from the Moon, taken from Apollo 8 (NASA)
A slightly different angle on basic elements today, partly inspired by the fact that it was Valentine’s Day last weekend.
But before that, quick mention of a fine review that appeared for Far from the Spaceports this week: “lots of believable futuristic technology… a futuristic crime thriller. A science fiction whodunnit if you will… Mitnash and Slate are developed into characters you really care for – and want to learn more about… I can’t wait for the next one in the series…”
Back to basic elements. Up until now, the series has focused on some of the physical necessities of life. But as human beings, we need more than the physical to sustain us. We need the metaphysical as well, in order to give lives meaning as well as substance. So for today we are going to look at celebrations – special times and seasons around which we drape our lives.
Maslow hierarchy of human needs (Wiki)
To set some basis for this, here is a diagram of Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of needs’, which he published in 1943 under the title ‘A theory of Human Motivation’. In his scheme, a person could not effectively progress to higher levels of the pyramid, until the lower ones were secure. Now, this scheme can seem artificial, in that people have been known to be highly creative in the most unpromising situations,but broadly speaking it makes sense. According to this, a sense of belonging ranks only just above provision of food, water, and a safe place.
People have throughout history made space for celebrations. As far back as we can tell in the past, there have been events commemorating the natural cycle of the planet – seedtime and harvest, summer and winter. There have also been religious and spiritual special days – fasts and feasts, times to express hope or gratitude, days to commemorate the departed dead or those who lived exemplary lives. Very often we have combined the natural and the sacred together.
Image of Qedeshet, stele in the British Museum
My historical writings often feature festival days, particularly In a Milk and Honeyed Land, where events such as the feast of New Wine (in the autumn, marking the start of the new year), midsummer and midwinter ceremonies, and so on, structure the plot. I see them as blending everyday fun with religious devotion, with no particular contradiction between them. The devotions are to the Canaanite pantheon, especially Taliy, who has a high profile in the Four Towns. They are solemn occasions, but they are also (mostly) a lot of fun. They can also be, as such events still are today, a cause for conflict and jealousy.
St Valentine baptising St Lucilla (Wiki)
Today, we have tended to split religious and secular aspects of festivals. Christmas is still a meaningful spiritual event, but for many people the family and friendship aspects of the event have eclipsed any religious meaning. There are, no doubt, people who honour Valentine as a martyred saint, but on the whole his day provides a convenient time for declarations of love, desire and passion… both required and unrequited.
Valentine’s Day gift (WIki)
These things are worth commemorating at some point in our lives. For many people, the religious times that are remembered are those connected to fun and enjoyment – a secular society is not so eager to remember fasts and times of denial, however meaningful these still are spiritually.
Remembrance event, Arlington Cemetery (NASA)
Looking into the future, my belief is that we will continue to need events and occasions which symbolise meaning. A calendar is not just a succession of days, nor an endless loop of time passing. Rather, it is strung between the key days which impart meaning. About two weeks ago, on January 28th, a great many people around the world remembered the 1986 disaster when the Challenger shuttle blew up – not just a tragedy for the families concerned, but a major setback for the chances of civilians going into space. Positive first events such as the moon landing are also recalled each year – becoming more poignant year by year as the number of living astronauts who have ever walked on another world diminishes.
Suppose in time we are able to colonise the asteroid belt, Mars and its moons, and so on. My guess is that as and when this happens, we will continue to have particular times and seasons which are remembered. Whether or not these are considered religious or social – and I am inclined to think that both will continue hand in hand – seems to me less important than the fact that we need meaning to shape our time-keeping, not just succession.
Phobos passing in front of the sun as seen from Mars (NASA/JPL)
Now, our calendars will become considerably more complicated at this point, with each planet having its own ‘year’, not to mention the vast variety in orbital patterns of the moons around the planets. Will we adopt a Star-Trek style “star date” to enforce uniformity on the system as a whole, or will we need to keep track of any number of local clocks?
Far from the Spaceports did not include any specific festival days, though readers will no doubt remember the concert scene at Frag Rockers Bar. “Special Night” was a regular event there. The in-progress By Default, however, will have some kind of commemorative event – watch this space.
Cover – Encounter with TIber
It’s right to finish with a couple of extracts from Buzz Aldrin’s Encounter with Tiber – one of my favourite science fiction books.
[At the first wedding on Mars, on serving a cake made from soya oil and potato flour, decorated with blue dye] “Something we did today, out of expediency, is going to be fundamental to Martian weddings from now on”… I don’t know if I believed him at the time or not. But twenty years later… that awful cake of Doc C’s has been at every wedding. You can’t get married without having your tongue turn blue…
[Right at the end] This first day on Tiber was more symbol than science, and rightly so, Clio thought. It’s the symbols that we live by.
I’ve seen a few posts recently on social media, lamenting what they see as a confusing way to present addition. I happen to think that the new presentation is actually a pretty cool way of showing what is going on when you add two large numbers together. But it seems that I may be in a minority here, since it’s regularly billed as “the modern way” or similar, in what is obviously supposed to be a derogatory manner…
So this is a swift diversion from other things to talk about mathematics in ancient Egypt.
Seated scribe, Old Kingdom (Wiki)
Perhaps a quick presentation of the way the ancient Egyptians did multiplication might just help. Egyptian scribes necessarily did a lot of multiplication (volumes of pyramids, rations for armies, taxes due to the pharaoh, and so on). They also realised that addition was significantly easier to learn than multiplication, so converted one into the other. Now, when we first encounter multiplication in school, we are typically taught that it is simply repeated addition – so 4×5 is simply 5+5+5+5. But then we get into multiplying digits, carrying over extra powers of 10 to the next column, and so on, and the early lesson is forgotten. Especially when we can get a calculator app or a spreadsheet to just do it for us.
But actually, the Egyptians basically developed a form of binary representation of numbers – a direct parallel to the way computers represent numbers – and used this to make the task easier.
Let’s take a simple example… say 6×17 – simple enough to follow the logic, but fiddly enough you would probably start writing things down or using your phone app, rather than doing it in your head.
Start by making a table below the 6, starting with 1 and doubling each row until you get over half way towards 6 (in other words, when the next doubling would take you past 6). Beside each of these, under the 17, write 17 in the first row, and every row after that write in double the number before… 17+17=34 in row 2, and so on.
6
17
1
17
2
34
4
68
Then look up and down the left hand column to find which numbers you need to add to 6. Start with the bottom number – the largest – in this case 4. Go up to the next one – 2. I have highlighted them as grey here. You need 4+2, but you don’t need the 1.
Now add up the figures on the right hand side matching your selection on the left… 34+68 = 102. In case you don’t trust yourself, whip out a calculator of some form and check it.
Here’s a more challenging example – 29×59.
29
59
1
59
2
118
4
236
8
472
16
944
To find the matching numbers, start from the bottom of the left-hand column – 16 – and work your way up, deciding which you need to get to 29, Here it is 16, 8, 4, 1 (but not 2). So add up 944, 472, 236 and 59 to get 1711… which again you can check using some other means.
Basically, every multiplication problem can be reduced to addition. How does this work? Basically the figures down the left hand side can be interpreted as the binary representation of 6, or 29, or whatever. This binary mapping is then applied to the right hand side, by repeated doubling… which is just adding a number to itself. For the really geekily minded, it also relies on the fact that multiplication is distributive over addition – so if 6=4+2 then 6×17 = (4+2)x17 = 4×17 + 2×17. And the right hand side of the table is cunningly working out 2×17, 4×17 and so on, by repeated doubling.
Were the Egyptians aware of binary representations and such like? My guess is probably not, though I’m sure there are a lot of people who believe the Egyptians were capable of considerable technological advance.
“Helicopter glyph”, Temple of Seti I,Abydos (Wiki)
Here’s the next in the Basic Elements series – this time looking at food. Life needs food – human life just as much as any other kind of life. And for a great deal of humanity’s existence, finding an adequate supply of food has dominated communal needs. Douglas Adams, with his usual flair for insight, wrote of the three phases of every major Galactic civilisation, characterised by the questions “how can we eat?“, “why do we eat?“, and finally, “where shall we have lunch?“. Many readers will probably think of themselves in the third phase, but it’s worth remembering that a huge number of people on Earth are still struggling at phase one.
After the glaciers of the last ice age retreated, about 12,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer groups followed the milder weather back north, resettling tracts of land which had been their distant ancestors’ homes long before. They followed not just the warmth, but also the herds and flocks as they migrated, and the seasonal yield of trees and bushes. Small migrant groups could eat off the land tolerably well, so long as they were willing to keep on the move, and retained a good pragmatic understanding of seasonal changes. They were self-sufficient.
The spread of farming through Europe – Eupedia
Then farming came along, spreading across Europe from south east to north west. Farming communities have to stay put, not just season to season but also year to year. Fixed territory, and its ongoing fertility, become crucial. Our remote ancestors must have seen a clear advantage in this way of life, partly no doubt because it could support much greater populations, but it also brought risk. A bad year can signal disaster – and it is no longer possible just to follow the herds elsewhere. Your communal wealth can no longer easily be moved, and a good parcel of land somewhere nearby has probably already been settled. Either you stay put, and try to wait out the famine, or you go to war.
Agra Street Market
But another corollary of settled communities is that they typically have a surplus of some things – and a surplus can be traded for whatever you lack. So you hedge, accepting that you cannot grow or produce some goods, and relying on your neighbours who can. You grow less dependent on your immediate fields to give everything you need, but more dependent on the resources of a wider area.
The historical fiction I write is set in a place and time where the dependence on other places has not become too firmly fixed. Kephrath and her sister towns certainly make use of trade links, but for bulk supplies are largely self-sufficient. Four towns together, and their hinterland, can manage.
The process of increasing specialisation of any one place, and increasing dependence on an ever larger area, has continued largely uninterrupted ever since. In both World War 1 and 2, arguably the biggest threat to the United Kingdom was the U-boat blockade cutting the nation off from resource supplies. There were great efforts to boost the domestic food supply, but a modern nation at war needs a whole array of raw materials which come from many sources – coal, oil, iron ore, rubber, exotic trace minerals, and so on. Without convoys bringing these in, the most abundant supply of food would still have lost the war.
Cover – Foundation
Looking into the future, different authors have predicted different outcomes. In his Foundation series, Asimov reckoned that the trend of reliance on ever bigger areas would continue unchecked. Trantor, the capital planet of his Galactic Empire, grew no food at all, and depended on the agricultural wealth of multiple nearby star systems – an Achilles heel which was to prove fatal. Star Trek, on the other hand, assumes a technological solution in which energy can be converted into food from information templates in a replicator. The only thing you now need is an energy source – such a world is effectively reverting all the way back to hunter-gatherers foraging for supplies as they travel.
Guinea pigs – Wikipedia
The solar system of Far from the Spaceports is more like Asimov’s model, though of course vastly smaller in scale. There are no food replicators or protein resequencers. None of the settlement domes has hinterlands of lush fields able to grow local crops. The best that can be done out in the Scilly Isles of the asteroid belt is hydroponic farming – small scale and energy hungry. Otherwise there’s imported goods, whether carried in fresh or (more compactly) freeze-dried. Or – perhaps amusingly but, I think, credibly – there are very small scale livestock solutions.
“Now, Mister Mitnash, were you wanting the chicken or the fish tonight?”
I hesitated, not being very sure. She laughed.
“No point spending too long deciding. It’s all guinea-pig anyway. I just prepare them a mite differently and you’d never know they’re the same animal. And it’s what you’ve been having everywhere else on Scilly.”
“Truly?”
“To be sure. Tell me now, where did you eat when you arrived on St Mary’s?”
“Taji’s.”
“And what did you have? His Venusian azure duck wrap?”
I nodded, and she carried on, “So did you honestly think he pays to ship real duck all the way out from Earth? Just to cook it and put it in a wrap? No, Mister Mitnash, all his menu is actually guinea-pig, but he’s very good at disguising it. For just me here, I only need one male and half a dozen females. Taji has three males and thirty females. Or something like that. So now, would you like the chicken or the fish?”
I thought about it and wondered if it would make much difference.
A few days ago I went to the Natural History Museum’s Otherworlds exhibition. This turned out to be well worth the trip – not very large in extent, but beautifully put together, and the ample space in the hall to walk around and look at the pictures helped a lot. The pictures attached here are my own, taken as I walked around, and so nothing like the clarity and resolution of the real ones.
The arrangement was by planet, starting with Earth and Moon, then taking in the inner solar system planets of Mercury and Venus – together with some spectacular images of the Sun itself – and then heading progressively outwards past Mars and Jupiter, ending with Pluto.
In my opinion, Mars and Jupiter came out best in the gallery as a whole, The Sun pictures were striking, but one suspects that those two planets – and Saturn to a lesser extent, mainly focusing on the rings – were the collator’s preferred choice.
Phobos over the Herschel Impact Basin
I was particularly interested in this picture of Mars’ moon Phobos – the dark object to the right of the picture – as it will feature in the successor to Far from the Spaceports.
Asteroid Lutetia
But asteroid pictures were thin on the ground, and some of what was there were taken of so-called earth-grazing bodies, meaning that they do not orbit between Mars and Jupiter, but instead have a rather eccentric orbit swinging well inside that of Mars. This particular image is of Lutetia, taken by ESA’s Rosetta probe as it headed towards its rendezvous with a comet. There were no pictures out of the many sent back by the Dawn probe from Ceres and Vesta, which I found a little disappointing.
The really outer planets – Uranus, Neptune, and dwarf Pluto, got just one picture each, again a bit surprising with Pluto considering all that has been coming back from New Horizons. But the choice was a fine one to conclude the show, and neatly established a basic similarity between the familiar – Earth – and the unknown.
All in all a great exhibition, and well worth catching up on if it makes its way to a location near you.
Orbits of several Kuiper Belt objects, with proposed new orbit
This week a team from Caltech announced results of a study suggesting that there may be a ninth planet – exciting news for solar system enthusiasts. Ironically, one of the team members was, in part, responsible for the decision a few years ago to”demote” Pluto from being a true planet to a dwarf. The proposed new body would definitely be given full planet status, as and when it is actually found, since gravitational analysis indicates it would have a mass around ten times that of earth.
The diagram above shows what led to this possibility – several known Kuiper Belt objects have their orbits lined up in ways that make no real sense in terms of the planetary bodies we already know. A secondary confirming fact came from checking the prediction that there should be another group of objects pushed by Planet 9’s gravity into orbits at right angles to the above. Sure enough, there are five known objects that do just this.
Confirming orbits at right angles
Of course, until there is some more tangible evidence, like a telescope observation, scepticism will remain.
Planet 9 is hugely distant from Earth – something like twenty times the distance of Neptune, taking 10-20,000 years to complete an orbit of the sun. So nobody will be visiting it anytime soon.
Out of interest, I checked out how long it would take a hypothetical spacecraft of the type Mitnash and Slate use in Far from the Spaceports. Bear in mind that their journeys between Earth, Mars, the asteroid belt settlements, and Jupiter, take around 4-6 weeks. Journeys get more efficient the longer they are, since you just keep accelerating to midpoint and achieve higher speeds. (Of course you also need more reaction mass to use as propellant). If Mitnash decided to go to Pluto, it would take him nearly 3 months. But a trip out to our new Planet 9 would be over ten months, and he would have a midpoint speed four times as high. Basically, settlers of such a place are committing themselves to a year’s journey to get out there. A casual visitor would need to know that the time spent interacting with the occupants warranted almost two years’ travel time there and back again.
With present technology, the times are vastly longer, and I cannot imagine we will be in a hurry to send even a robot probe that far.
Artist’s impression of Planet 9, looking back towards the sun
