Consider a sharpened pencil balanced on its delicate tip. Most observers will, with confidence, predict that the pencil will topple. Few would undertake to predict the direction in which that pencil will fall. Why? Because how the pencil falls will depend on the molecular minutiae of the pencil point, the molecular minutiae of the surface on which the pencil balances, and the countless randomly jostling gas molecules in the surrounding air.
Are those molecular-level details knowable? And then, knowing them, cannot an accurate solution be calculated? Perhaps in theory. But in practice?
And that teetering pencil is a comparatively simple forecasting problem. What about the variables within a system of people?
Ponder the number of neurons in the human brain (about one hundred billion), synapses in the human brain (tens of trillions, varying with age), and humans now living (about seven billion). Even barring mutations like the Mule, predicting the consequences of human behavior seems impractical.
And that's before factoring in our interactions with our environment. What chaotic systems might affect human behavior? As a surrogate for the number of networked computers, we'll take the set of assigned Internet Protocol addresses. About five billion IP addresses have been assigned, their number growing daily. Then there are the myriad factors that impact weather and climate. There's the chance meeting of gametes to produce new individuals. There's the health of the food chain, down to plankton. There are cosmic rays influencing not only our present health and unborn offspring but also the formation of clouds.
It's a long list....
Consider the many pathogenic organisms always around us, and the vagaries of wind and human interaction that distribute those pathogens, and the vagaries of environmental stimuli that activates (or doesn't) one's unique genetic susceptibility to a particular pathogen. Consider the countless factors that influence the availability of disease treatments, from researchers' personal interests to patients' financial conditions, from Big Pharma's research funding priorities to the legislation to steer funding to rare/orphan diseases.
Because who knows when a particular microbe will rewrite the future?
The Great Plague of 1665 shuttered Cambridge University, dispatching an undistinguished science student into the countryside. For two years of self-study the young man puzzled over what were to become the calculus and a theory of gravitation. Matters might easily have gone another way: 15% of London's population died in that outbreak of bubonic plague. A chance encounter in the streets or even a cough borne on a slightly different wind pattern might have cut short that young man's career.
The future of that time (aka, our history) would have been very different if Isaac Newton had succumbed to the plague.
(Despite the world's inherent messiness, some predictions do pan out. Take Cleve Cartmill's 1944 Astounding story, "Deadline." Cartmill's extrapolations of atomic-bomb technology were accurate enough to set the FBI to investigating both author and editor (John W. Campbell) for leaks from the very secret Manhattan project. 4 Or take Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, whose shadowy hackers so presciently anticipated modern hacktivist/anarchic groups like Anonymous and LulzSec. 5)
In our guts, we know how unpredictable the world is. Then why do SF fans often feel shortchanged?
Because something deeper is at work than our denial that writers—or scientists, or the most powerful supercomputers—can forecast the future. Recalling the many dystopias, apocalypses, post-apocalypses, and existential crises we encounter in science fiction, the average reader is probably glad to be missing out on many of the look-aheads.
Then what is the thing that we do miss?
I'll assert it's something subliminal.
Let's look closer at oft-mentioned inventions associated with the yet-to-arrive science-fictional future:
•Robot servants responsive to our every command. Instead we have Siri 6 to place our calls, make our appointments, and run Internet searches—if our wireless connection to remote servers doesn't hiccough. If we overlook her penchant for sharing our utterances with Apple. If we don't confuse her with homonyms, talk with an unsupported accent, have a speech impediment, or object to her preprogrammed, canned humorous responses. And while she may find a recipe for us, she still can't cook.
•Limitless fusion power, too cheaply generated to bother metering. Instead, we obtain our electrical power from an ever-changing mix of fossil fuels, nuclear fission, solar farms, wind farms, and other. None of that power comes cheaply, even the forms subsidized by our taxes. The electrical grid to distribute our power becomes by the day more antiquated, fragile, and overloaded. As consumers, we're invited to choose among power-generating companies, prodded by time-and load-sensitive pricing schemes to alter our power consumption by season and time of day, urged to cede to our power company permission to switch off our appliances whenever demand peaks, and nagged to conserve.
•Flying cars. Rather than effortlessly flying over obstructions ("free as the birds," as the idiom would have it), each year we spend more of our time creeping about in earthbound traffic. We need a GPS to navigate, and it needs real-time updates to route us around congestion. Rather than choosing our own way through the limitless sky, we take toll roads for the chance to move; then, absent a transponder and periodic funds replenishment, we still queue up at—if there is one—a toll plaza.
•Colonies in space. Far from settling more spacious (no pun intended) environs, we pack ourselves into ever more crowded coastal strips and urban areas. Instead of enjoying gleaming new cities, we rely upon aging, ill-maintained infrastructure—like the Interstate bridge recently sent crashing into a river by the nudge of an errant truck. Rather than soar into space, our travels are disrupted by an antiquated and overloaded air-traffic-control system, the eruption of an Icelandic volcano, a Nor'easter, and the latest federal budget squabble.
What much classic science fiction hinted at—and hence, the future that we often sorely miss—was not technology as much as simplification. Setting aside whatever twists and traumas drove exciting plots, science fiction once gave us a glimpse of a future made easier through new technology.
And the future that did arrive? No one can say we've been shortchanged with regard to amazing new technology—but it's not simple:
•We've got the Internet—and with it, updates, upgrades, and once popular services gone obsolete; a torrent of malware and phishing attacks; digital rights management and piracy; endless ways to distract ourselves—and waste our time.
•We have wireless almost everything— hobbled by spectrum shortages, vendor near monopolies, and near religious wars over mobile operating systems.
•Liberated from network schedules, we stream video when we choose—while that entertainment is splintered across an ever-changing set of websites, reliant on sometimes competing software, requiring individual memberships and purchases.
•We carry a thousand books or dozens of movies in the palm of a hand—and as part of the entertainment-from-the-cloud bargain, come to rely on mysterious recommendation algorithms ("readers who liked X also liked Y") to find our next diversion.
•We take more pictures than ever with cameras becoming digital—only to face the semi-Herculean undertaking of editing, arranging, and backing up thousands of images.
Don't get me wrong. I like those gadgets and systems. I believe that most people do— suspecting that they, too, resent the amount of time consumed by the tech; and the many choices the tech demands of us; and the realization there will never be enough time to choose in an informed manner among our many options; and that after we make our choice—often on the basis of the mysterious aggregation of opinion in a social network or strangers' reviews on an etail site—we'll soon be faced with re making our choice.
Because the future will keep coming....
Psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote in 2004 about The Paradox of Choice:Why More Is Less. His critique worried more about choices among jeans and types of coffee than such moder
n conundrums as committing to a cell network or to a particular e-content ecosystem (e.g., iTunes vs. Amazon). Schwartz's thesis nonetheless applies: at some point, an increase in our number of options elicits overload and stress rather than improved outcomes. Rather than satisfaction.
In the future that we once glimpsed as background to SF stories, I don't recall that anyone struggled with their choice of cell-phone provider. They weren't locked into one e-reader over another by incompatible file formats.
In that bygone, beckoning future, technology was going to simplify our lives.
And that is why—deferring once more to Yogi Berra—"The future ain't what it used to be."
Footnotes:
1 But not the only place to explore such possibilities, as alternate histories and time-travel tales demonstrate.
2 Much of that series first appeared (in prebook form) as stories in this magazine (in its Astounding incarnation).
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_jobs
4 See "Reflections: The Cleve Cartmill Affair," by Robert Silverberg, http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0310/ref.shtml
5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_%28 group%29 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LulzSec
6 Siri is Apple's voice-recognition service for use with iPhones and iPads.
Edward M. Lerner worked in high tech and aerospace for thirty years, including stints contracting for NASA, the DoD, and the FBI, before becoming a full-time author in 2004. He writes science fiction, technothrillers, and technology articles.
* * *
KARL SCHROEDER
BIOLOG Richard A. Lovett | 489 words
Karl Schroeder, whose novel Lockstep concludes this issue, always knew he wanted to be a writer. "My mother published a couple of novels when I was very young," he says. "I grew up with books on the shelf with the name Schroeder on the spine."
This taught him early what he wanted to do. "I started writing when I was 14," he says, "and never looked back"—so much so that he never bothered to finish traditional studies. "I am a proud high school dropout. I was already writing my first novel when I got into high school and didn't pay much attention to anything else."
By 16, he'd sold his first story. After that, "I went the way of the starving artist and did the usual things, living in a garret, eating Kraft dinners, and supporting myself however I could." By the time he was in his early thirties, he was selling short stories on a regular basis. A few years later he sold the first of what are now ten novels.
Serializing them in Analog, he adds, is fun. "It's like getting the book published four times." But also, he says, Analog readers "are kind of my tribe. I've always liked hard science fiction. For me, the game is to imagine the most fantastical, amazing futures, while obeying all the laws [of nature]."
Others might find the exotic in fantasy, but Schroeder prefers more-possible worlds. "The Universe is more fantastical than we can imagine," he says.
Like many other Analog writers, he also likes to do his bit to steer the world toward a hopeful future. "That's the great task for our generation," he says. "I want to see my fiction contributing in some tiny way."
Fiction writing, however, is no longer what occupies most of Schroeder's time. For years, he's been consulting as a "foresight analyst"— essentially a type of futurist. Not that he sees himself as a conventional futurist. "I [can't] say I can make predictions. In strategic foresight, you try to develop strategies for dealing with what you can't predict." His clients have included the Canadian government, the Canadian army, and large corporations, which he now serves through his daytime employer, Idea Couture.
Central to all of this is Canadian. "I'm from a southern Manitoba Mennonite community," Schroeder says. The Mennonite background tends to show up in themes of nonviolence in his works, but it also contributes to his science fiction roots. "It's the same community A.E. van Vogt came from," he says. "My mother knew his family when she was growing up."
There's also a subtle difference between his Canadian perspective and the U.S. one of most Analog readers. From his side of the border, he says, "it looks like a much bigger, much more complicated world—and a much messier future constructed of compromises, ad hoc solutions, and misunderstandings." Perhaps that's part of why his stories bring a breath of fresh (northern) air to his more southerly readers, resonating not only with "fantastical" futures, but also thought-provokingly different perspectives on the world we know.
* * *
WHEN WIMPS COLLIDE
THE ALTERNATE VIEW John G. Cramer | 1687 words
The standard model of cosmology tells us that some 26.8% of the mass in the Universe is in the form of dark matter, while only about 4.9% is the normal "baryonic" matter that forms all the atoms, stars, planets, and us. The dark matter clumps around galaxies, promoting their formation, and shows itself by making stars orbit faster around the galactic center and by its gravitational-lensing effects on starlight. The nature of dark matter is one of the leading unsolved mysteries of contemporary physics, a secret that Nature has not yet revealed to us.
Physicists have developed several ways of searching for dark matter and trying to understand its properties: (1) by looking for direct production of previously unknown particle species at accelerators like the LHC; (2) by attempting to detect dark matter particles when they scatter from normal matter as the Earth and the Solar System move through the galactic dark-matter halo at about 0.1% of the velocity of light; and (3) by searching for the products of annihilation as the matter and antimatter forms of dark matter find each other, collide, and annihilate. My December 2009 Alternate View column (AV 150) provided a snapshot of the state of dark matter searches at the time. Today there is still no conclusive solution to the dark matter mystery, but I want to review the current evidence, considering the states of the three lines of investigation.
Direct production of dark matter candidate particles has so far produced no results. The LHC has been in operation since 2009, and one of the missions of the major detectors there is to search for new weakly interacting massive particle species (WIMPs) that might constitute dark matter. Of particular interest are particles associated with the extension of the standard model called supersymmetry (SUSY), which predicts that every known fermion particle (having half-integer spin like electrons, neutrinos, and quarks) has a yet-tobe-discovered SUSY twin with integer spin. Similarly, every known boson particle (having integer spin like photons, gluons, and W and Z bosons) should have a SUSY twin with half-integer spin. Thus, SUSY predicts that quarks should have "squark" twins, leptons should have "slepton" twins, a photon should have a "photino" twin, and so on. None of these particles have yet been observed in collisions at the LHC, meaning that (1) they have more mass than can be produced in LHC p+p collisions; (2) interactions with them are suppressed for some unknown reason; or (3) they do not exist at all. In any case, no new dark matter candidate particles have turned up at the LHC or other accelerators.
Attempts to detect the scattering of dark matter particles streaming by the Earth has proved a bit more promising. The one element of the search is the idea that the Earth should move faster through the galactic dark matter halo when its orbital velocity around the Sun adds to the orbital velocity of the Solar System around the galactic center, than when the two velocities subtract, making collisions with dark matter particles more likely in June than in December. My December 2009 column described the DAMA/LIBRA observation, results of June/December seasonal variation in the just-above-threshold counting rate of well-shielded sodium iodide detectors placed in the Grand Sasso tunnel east of Rome. Since that time, another Grand Sasso experiment, CRESST–II, has reported observation of similar apparent seasonal variations. The germanium-detector-based CoGeNT experiment, located in an underground facility in the USA, has also provided some support for the observation of seasonal variations. On the other hand, the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment, using 368 kilograms of cryogenically cooled liquid xenon and located in the newly recommissioned Sanford un
derground facility in Lead, South Dakota, has recently reported that they see no evidence of dark matter collisions. The observing and non-observing experiments are now attempting to reconcile their differences. If the Grand Sasso dark matter scattering observations are to be taken seriously, they imply a significant scattering probability (a cross section of about 10-41 cm 2 ) for dark matter interacting with normal matter.
This brings us to the third approach, the search for evidence of WIMP + anti-WIMP annihilation products. Since we do not know what kind of particles are annihilating or what forces and interactions may be involved, the details of such annihilation events must be modeled based on theoretical assumptions. As the "weak" part of WIMP implies, it is assumed that WIMP particles, like neutrinos, are electrically neutral and are not affected by the strong or electromagnetic forces. They must be affected by gravity and possibly by the weak force, and they are presumed to come in matter and antimatter forms so that pairs can annihilate. The products of the annihilation depend on the masses of the WIMPs, but the ultimate result of the annihilation and possible subsequent decays should be to create fairly energetic photons (i.e., gamma rays), electrons, positrons, and neutrinos. The likelihood of WIMP annihilation depends of their concentration, and they should be most concentrated in deep gravity wells like the center of our galaxy and perhaps the center of the Sun.
There are some observations that are consistent with WIMP annihilation. First, there is evidence from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope of energetic gamma rays coming from the center of our galaxy and also from the Virgo Cluster. The measured energy distribution can be fitted with models based on WIMP annihilation (see below). Second, a byproduct of the measurement of the cosmic microwave background radiation by the WMAP and Planck satellite experiments was the observation of a radio "haze" and a filamentary radio-wave structure near the galactic center. These radio waves can be explained as synchrotron radiation produced by electrons and positrons from WIMP annihilation. Analysis by Hooper, Weiner, and Xue (HWX) indicates that the annihilation rate implied by the gamma and radio radiation matches the thermal inverse annihilation rate (the rate of dark matter pair production by heat) required to produce the observed quantity of dark matter in the early Universe.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact - March 2014 Page 20