Far from the Spaceports, Historical fiction, History, Scenes from a Life, Science, Science fiction

Basic elements – Communication

February 24, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 — 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)

Far from the Spaceports, Historical fiction, History, In a Milk and Honeyed Land, Science

Basic elements – Celebrations

February 16, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

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.

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.

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 — 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.

More next time, probably on communications.

History, Science

Egyptian multiplication

February 10, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

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.

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.

Extract, Far from the Spaceports, Historical fiction, History, Science, Science fiction

Basic elements – Food

February 3, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Cover - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe — Cover – The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

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 — 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.

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.

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.

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.

“I should like the chicken tonight, Mrs Riley.”

That’s it until next time!

book copies, Book promotion, Far from the Spaceports, In a Milk and Honeyed Land, Scenes from a Life, The Flame Before Us

Samples and downloads

January 29, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Over the last few weeks I have been working to get all my books into a place where free sample downloads are available in a variety of formats. So for downloads of all different kinds you can check out the downloads area of the Kephrath site, or Goodreads, or Leanpub, or Kobo books – everything on Kobo is at 50% off until Jan 31st, so long as you use the discount code JAN1650, which in my case includes In a Milk and Honeyed Land and The Flame Before Us – or Google Play, or the iBook store. To read online check out my Issuu listings – also there are links to the individual publications from several of the pages on this blog or the Kephrath web site. All in all, I have put out sample material in a lot of different places and formats!

Along with that, I have widened the distribution of The Flame Before Us to include several ebook stores as well as just Amazon, and for simplicity am in the process of making the Kindle and ePub price of all of my historical fiction books the same. That is not quite finished yet, but will be before too long.

In a Milk and Honeyed Land - new cover — In a Milk and Honeyed Land – new cover

Finally, I have released In a Milk and Honeyed Land under the Matteh Publications banner now, so after a suitable pause you can expect to see the listings change slightly at various online bookshops.

Oh yes, there’s also a short radio advert going out for Far from the Spaceports on the Christian radio station KATZ – here’s a link to the ad, at offset 33 minutes and 46 seconds.

Exciting times for a new year!

Far from the Spaceports, Science

Otherworlds, and other things

January 27, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

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.

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.

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.

Far from the Spaceports, Science

A possible ninth planet?

January 23, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Orbits of several Kuiper Belt objects, with proposed new orbit - Caltech diagram — 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 -Caltech diagram — 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 - Caltech — Artist’s impression of Planet 9, looking back towards the sun

Far from the Spaceports, Historical fiction, History, Science, Science fiction

Basic elements – Energy

January 19, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Campfire image - The Guardian — Campfire

Today’s element is energy – a simple word that contains a wide variety of meanings. Long ago, energy meant simply getting enough heat to keep a human community warm through winter. Although humans may well have originated from Africa, they scattered across the face of the Earth at an early stage. A Russian paper just this week in Science strongly suggests that humans were hunting well north of the Arctic Circle around 45,000 years ago – seems we can adapt ourselves to all manner of inhospitable climates!

But as time went by, energy meant other things. We needed energy not just to keep warm or cook food, but also for metal work. The required temperatures steadily rose – around 1000° C or so for copper and bronze, or about 1500° for iron. And as well as that, we wanted energy to extend the day length by giving light to continue tasks past sunset – increasingly important the further we strayed from the equator. All this energy had to come from somewhere, and human societies devoted an increasing proportion of their time to extracting the raw materials – wood, coal, oil and so on, all ultimately from long-dead living things. And at different times and places we have also derived energy from the effort of animals and slaves, the movements of water or wind, steam, the sun, chemical and radioactive changes in matter, and so on.

All of these things have an impact on the environment. We often think about the impact of manufacturing use – like England’s New Forest being cut down to provide raw material for the Royal Navy – but simple generation of energy soaks up a very large amount. We switched from wood to coal here in England partly because it is a more efficient source of heat, but partly also because we were burning trees way faster than they could grow, and were running short of them. Here’s a visual way of looking at our use of energy – this chart tells us that the consumption per person of energy for all purposes is over 100 times what it was for our remote ancestors. When you also factor in the huge numerical increase in the human population, it is clear that we are extremely energy hungry.

Changes in energy use through time - Western Oregon University data — Changes in energy use through time

My historical novels are set about half way along this chart – energy was being used for all kinds of purposes, but could be met largely from local sources without need for major imports. Environmental impact was largely for other reasons – for example the hill country of Canaan used to be heavily wooded, but almost all of it was cleared in the early Iron Age to make way for larger settlements.

It’s no secret that managing our demand for energy, and the consequences of that demand in terms of unwanted heat, pollution, exhaustion of natural resources, and so on, is a major problem facing us today. Not only that, but the volumes of raw materials we need, and the limited parts of the earth’s surface which hold them, mean that large parts of our transport network have to be given over just to transporting energy-making materials.

City lights and starry nights - photo by Tim Peake - space.com — City lights and starry nights – photo by Tim Peake

When you look out into space, and the speculative colonisation of the solar system of Far from the Spaceports, we face a different set of problems, By now, we are all used to the sight of solar panels capturing the sun’s radiation and powering probes and satellites. But as you travel further away from the sun, the quantity of light drops off rapidly. At the orbit of Mars, there is rather less than half the intensity as there is close to Earth. At Jupiter, there is less than 4%. At Pluto’s closest approach, the figure is under 0.1%.

Juno mission to Jupiter - NASA - artist's impression — Juno mission to Jupiter

So, even with perfect capture, the area needed increases to rather ridiculous proportions as you travel further from the sun. The current record-holder for most distant spacecraft still using solar power is NASAs Juno vessel, in its closing stages of approaching Jupiter. Juno has 3 massive solar panels, with a combined area of about 50 square meters (roughly the front face of a house) which in Jupiter orbit will generate a mere 400 watts – a handful of light bulbs. The same area in Earth’s orbit would generate about 14 kilowatts. Further out – Saturn and the still more distant planets – we would have to rely on other kinds of generator since the intensity of sunlight is too weak. Or, to put the same matter a different way, the area of solar panels required would be prohibitively large. Right now, the favoured method is a nifty gadget called an RTG, which uses the heat generated by radioactive decay (quite different from a nuclear power plant, which uses the decay products themselves). The RTG units on Voyager 1 and 2 started life in 1977 at just short of 40kg (about what you might carry onto a plane), and are expected to drop below feasible operating levels by about 2025.

Basically, energy is always going to be a problem, wherever we go. The things we like, and that we like to do, are hungry for energy. Another of those top-of-the-list items, as and when we settle out among the asteroids, the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, or anywhere else, will be to secure a reliable source of energy.

Next time… food

Voyager in flight - NASA - Artist's impression — Voyager in flight

Far from the Spaceports, History, Science, Science fiction

Basic elements – Air

January 13, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Shu holding up Nut to keep her separate from Geb - http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk/gods/explore/shu.html — Shu holding up Nut to keep her separate from Geb

Today’s basic element is Air. Totally necessary for life, but invisible in its natural state, air is easy to forget until you suddenly feel the lack of it. Human societies in the past have by and large recognised air by means of its effects – the refreshing breath of wind on a still day, the almost-living force in the sails of a boat, or the abrupt violence of a storm. John’s Gospel records Jesus saying, “The wind blows where it wants to. You hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going“. In ancient Egypt, the god Shu was the personified layer of air which separated earth and sky, and was one of the first two gods, along with his sister Tefnut, moisture, to be created from the breath of the original creator.

The perceived link between wind, breath, and spirituality has fascinated people for millennia. From Hebrew ruach to Taoist ch’i, the movement of air in and out of the body has often been considered to be a mirror to the mysterious movement of the divine around the things of the world.

Pollution around Delhi's India Gate - NY Times — India Gate in Delhi’s pollution

But for all these more esoteric interpretations, air has also shaped human society in very concrete ways. We cannot comfortably live too high up a mountain without generations of adaptation. We cannot survive underwater for more than a few minutes without carrying a portable air supply. Air pollution causes ill health, demoralisation, and death. The polluting agent may be visible, like the London smogs of a century ago, or Delhi or Beijing today. Or it may be invisible, like the chemical agents which still degrade London’s air quality to unacceptable levels. Allegedly, NO2 and other particulate pollutants in London alone cause several thousand additional deaths, and cost the economy billions every year. The city has a plan to systematically reduce pollution to safe quantities, but it will take some 15 years to achieve this – always assuming that the political will to do so remains. For the meantime, most global cities struggle with issues of air quality.

The “hacked” CO2 scrubber in the Apollo 13 module - hobbyspace.com — The “hacked” CO2 scrubber in the Apollo 13 module

What of the hypothetical future of Far from the Spaceports? Air in its natural state is a very scarce resource in the solar system at large. If and when we colonise other places, one of the first tasks will be to ensure adequate breathable air is available. Now, it is a routine task to remove things like carbon dioxide and monoxide from air – after all, green plants have been doing it pretty well for a long time, and imitating this is an obvious thing to do. I’m sure many of us remember the improvised CO2 scrubber that helped save the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts.

But any recycling tool like this relies on some sort of chemical transfer, and eventually the chemicals will need replacement. And any system is going to be less than 100% efficient, and what with occasional leakage from airlocks and other seams, the air and oxygen levels will decrease… and need replacing.

Rosetta probe image of water being discharged from comet 67P - ESA — Rosetta probe image of water being discharged from comet 67P

Fortunately, oxygen is the third most abundant element in the solar system (after hydrogen and helium). It can be found bound up in various rocks, as well as wherever water ice can be found – which as we saw last time is pretty much everywhere we look. One of the many surprises of the ESA Rosetta mission to comet 67P was the realisation that it was spewing considerable volumes of water – and hence oxygen – into space as it warmed up.

So acquiring an oxygen supply is not a major problem, at least for many of the locations I hypothesise in the book. But nevertheless, finding, securing and keeping fresh a reliable air supply would be near the top of the task list of the first settlers.

Next time – Light

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Back in the past – the first known use of end-rhyme

January 5, 2016 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Horus in Roman Costume - British Museum picture — Horus in Roman Costume – British Museum picture

I thought for today I would jump back into the past, and in particular writing. I recently visited the British Museum’s “Faith after the Pharaohs” exhibition. This is well worth a trip if you get the opportunity – it is on display until February 7th, so there’s a bit of time left yet.

Now, among other things I noticed a fragment on display from the Cairo Genizah. This is regarded as the world’s most important and comprehensive store of historical Jewish documents, and consists of around 300,000 fragments. It is a vast and perplexing mix of overtly religious material, together with secular works and everyday documents, and so has illuminated many different aspects of Jewish middle eastern life.

Now, some of the fragments – and in particular the one I saw – were written by a Jewish poet called Yannai. He is variously said to have lived in the 5th, 6th or 7th centuries CE (AD) and was a highly creative innovator in the field of piyyut – Hebrew or Aramaic poetry composed either in place of or as adornments to Jewish statutory prayers. His innovations include:

He was the first Hebrew poet to sign his works (albeit with an acrostic rather than direct name)
He was one of the first to write for regular weekly services rather than specific religious events
He took the practice of payyetan from a very broad-based set of loose constraints into a tightly structure art-form in several innovative ways, and

– the thing I found most immediately interesting –

he was the first to use end-rhyme as a poetic device.

Lieber on Yannai - Hebrew Union Monograph cover image — Lieber on Yannai – Hebrew Union Monograph cover

So he not only used traditional devices like alliteration, parallel word pairs, and the like, but also introduced end-rhyme to help structure the poem as a whole. His rhymes were frequently not just the final syllable, but extended over complete words at line ends, and added the possibility of word-play in addition to the rhyme. Laura S. Lieber, one of the major authorities on Yannai, says “As literary works, his poems are as dazzling as they are complex, rich with sound and play, allusion and linguistic beauty.”

Unsurprisingly, his work influenced Hebrew poetry for generations after his death, starting in the Middle East but eventually shaping the way Hebrew poets in Spain created their work as well. So it was very pleasing to see this fragment of his writing on display!

Also back in the world of ancient writing, it’s the time of Scenes from a Life and The Flame Before Us to have Goodreads giveaways. At the time of writing they are pending approval by the Goodreads team, but check out the page links above to find out more, or navigate to the Goodreads listings at Scenes from a Life and The Flame Before Us to enter, once they go live on January 11th.

Scenes from a Life cover The Flame Before Us cover

Covers – Scenes from a Life and The Flame Before Us

Next week – back to the theme of elements necessary for life, and the subject of Air.

Writing Slate