by Eric Flint
Human Life Expectancy—Reaching Escape Velocity:
Every year throughout my entire life the Average Human Life Expectancy has increased. Not once in the last fifty-two years has it gotten shorter. Not once.
But how long can science keep a record like that going? And just how long can a human being live? Is there a limit? A limit that is genuine and unbreakable? Some say yes; some say no. The most accurate answer is, of course, that we don't know yet.
Some people anticipate a future in which our medical technology becomes so good that people no longer die of old age. Not rarely; but never. Death would only come by accident, or some mysterious and not yet understood disease.
But even if there is a hard limit to this fleshly body, who says we have to stay inside bodies of flesh?
In his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur C. Clarke described an advanced alien civilization which briefly visited Earth three million years ago and then moved on to other explorations and discoveries. In chapter 37, paragraph 13, he wrote: "And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and of plastic."
Even forty years ago, in 1968, Arthur C. Clarke was able to envision this possibility. With the advantage of four decades of progress, I described in one of my novels (Plague at Redhook) a situation in which advanced alien nano-robots replaced all the living cells of a small group of people with artificial cells which mimicked the behavior of their original living cells. And they replaced them with such skill and craft that the people remained unaware that the transition had been made. They had become immortal and immune to all disease but did not know it.
What if all this nonsense becomes real?
Extending human life expectancy beyond its apparent limits is a noble goal and fun to think about, but what if it becomes real? What if you were faced with the fact that you might actually live 300 or more years? What would you need to do—besides celebrate? More specifically, what should you be doing differently right now?
I have three pieces of advice:
(1) Keep busy; keep active; keep learning. Hobbies are as important as career.
(2) Reinvent yourself every decade or two. Change profession or hobby or residence or city or nation or language or spouse or something.
(3) Invest a percentage of your income. This may be my best advice. Even a mediocre 401-K plan will let any moron become a millionaire in 40 years or less. 40 years may sound like a long time to wait for the good life, but those 40 years are going to pass whether you invest during them or not. If you live 300 years beyond your current age, at least you would be a millionaire for 260 of them. Or do you want to spend the next three centuries being just as poor as you are now?
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Stephen Euin Cobb is an author and futurist, and host of the podcast The Future And You.
You can learn more about Stephen Euin Cobb here or here.
Or learn more about The Future And You here, or here or even here.
Breeding Like Rabbits—Or Hugos
Written by Mike Resnick
Walk up to any serious science fiction reader and name the last hundred Hugo winners. Chances are he'll know less than a quarter of them, no matter how much of the stuff he reads.
There's a reason for it.
Movies have the Oscars. Theater has the Tonys. Television has the Emmys. Mysteries have the Edgars. And we here in the field of written science fiction have the Hugos.
They're our most prestigious award. Even overseas, every science fiction writer, reader and fan knows what the Hugo is.
The problem is that it's not what it used to be. Maybe it never was.
The Hugo was first awarded in 1953. It went to Best Novel, Best Magazine, Best Cover Artist, Best Interior Artist, Excellence in Fact Articles, and Best New Author. Six awards, and only two went to writers (although everything went to professionals, a situation that would change before long.)
Move the calendar ahead to 1957, and only three Hugos were handed out. Right—just three.
1957 was an aberration. By 1963 we were back to giving out six Hugos—Novel, Short Fiction, Artist, Magazine, Drama and Fanzine. No one had a problem with that. We were thrilled that TV and movies were starting to take us seriously, and since fandom was responsible for putting on the Worldcon where the awards were handed out, it made sense that they'd want to award Best Fanzine.
It started innocently enough. But let's take a quantum leap ahead, to 2007. You know how many Hugos were awarded this year? Fourteen.
And of those fourteen, you know how many were given out for written science fiction, which is the basis for this entire field? Four. That's right. Less than 30% of the Hugos now go to written works of science fiction.
How did this come about?
Well, 1967 was a very fannish Worldcon. More panels were devoted to fandom, as opposed to written science fiction, than ever before. And since there was nothing in the rules that said you could only give out six Hugos, NyCon III (the 1967 Worldcon, the last to be held in New York), added Best Fan Writer and Best Fan Artist to the list. So, when you include Best Fanzine, NyCon III handed out as many Hugos to fans as to works of science fiction.
By the time of Noreascon II (the 1980 Worldcon, held in Boston), the academics had discovered us, and we them, and a new category was added: Best Non-Fiction Book—and suddenly we had seven annual Hugos that did not go to works of science fiction.
Now, all during the late 1970s and early 1980s, fanzine editors and publishers were grousing about the fact that Locus kept winning Best Fanzine every year. Which figured. It was professionally printed (almost no other fanzine was), it was supported by dozens of ads from major publishing houses (almost no other fanzines had any ads at all), and it had a circulation that was well over 6,000 and climbing (most fanzines printed and distributed less than 300 copies). Clearly there was no way a "traditional" fanzine would ever win the Best Fanzine Hugo again—but aha! The 1984 Worldcon committee came up with a brand-new category—Best Semiprozine—where Locus could win every year to its heart's content and traditional fanzines could once more win the Best Fanzine Hugo.
And suddenly there were four Hugos for fans and four for written science fiction. In fact, the overall tally by the time of LACon II (the 1984 Worldcon, held in Anaheim) was four fiction Hugos and eight everything-else Hugos.
And so it remained until Buffy came along on the boob tube, and Buffy fans bemoaned the fact that a short TV show couldn't compete with a $130 million movie. So Torcon 3 created a second Dramatic category for the 2003 Toronto Worldcon: Best Short Dramatic Presentation. It was informally called the Buffy Award, just as the Semiprozine Hugo was informally known for years as the Locus award, the delicious irony being that although Locus has indeed won something like 20 Best Semiprozine Hugos, Buffy never did win the Buffy Award.
As you can see, it's become a bit of demonstrable folk wisdom that if you lose enough Hugos, sooner or later you can put together enough disenfranchised (read: Hugo-losing) friends so that you can get a new Hugo category installed and maybe have a chance to win one. (The fan awards were not proposed by professional writers, and the short dramatic award was not proposed by people who only watched or produced full-length movies.) This year's Japanese Worldcon marked the first time that Best Editor was divided into Best Magazine Editor and Best Book Editor. Some of the book editors were getting tired of losing to magazine editors every year (only two book editors ever beat the magazine editors in open competition, and both of them did it posthumously), so one of the book editors, through a fannish surrogate, proposed splitting the award—and to make sure the new one went to a true-blue novel editor, anthology editors were lumped in with magazine editors.
What's next? I don't know.
But I know this. We now give out fo
urteen Hugos every year, and only four go to the reason for the existence of the field, the Worldcon, and the Hugo itself—written science fiction.
Think about it.
Pleistocene Park
Written by Mike Resnick
Turns out Michael Crichton had the right idea after all. He just had the wrong time frame.
As perhaps every scientist in the world has pointed out, DNA decays in considerably less than 65 million years, and you really can't substitute frog DNA for the missing stuff and still come up with T. Rex and all those other nifty dinosaurs. It simply can't be done.
So kiss the notion good-bye: there will never be a Jurassic Park.
But that doesn't mean there won't be a Pleistocene Park—and sooner than you think.
Right. The Pleistocene era has two advantages over the Jurassic era. First, it comes 138 million years later. (Yes, T. Rex was around 65 million years ago, but the Jurassic wasn't. The final 73 million years of the dinosaurs' lifetime was the Cretaceous, but Cretaceous Park just doesn't roll off the tongue like Jurassic Park.)
Second, the Pleistocene has ice. Lots of ice. At one point, during the most recent Ice Age, ice covered a goodly portion of the Earth. In places—quite possibly where you're sitting and reading this—it was between half a mile and a mile thick.
What's important about that?
Well, some of that ice never melted. It's still with us.
And it's holding some nicely-refrigerated wooly mammoths.
I can hear you snorting now: "That crazy Jurassic Park stuff!" the way people who feared and distrusted science fiction used to snort "That crazy Buck Rogers stuff!"
Only it's not so crazy.
The Japanese mounted a pair of very expensive expeditions to Siberia to find a frozen mammoth. And when I say expensive, I'm not just talking about the cost of outfitting the crew and getting them there. An awful lot of Russian Mafia hands had to be crossed with gold and silver.
The expeditions were financed by Kagoshima University and led by Kazufumi Goto, a renowned genetic researcher. And despite the cost, and the fanatical dedication of his crew, he came away without a mammoth.
But the French found one.
Their expedition was led not by a researcher, but an explorer, Bernard Buigues, who knew the local people (there aren't a lot of them in northern Siberia, and they have very little use for strangers) and enlisted their help—and lo and behold, after a few months the expedition actually came up with a fully-frozen (i.e., fresh) wooly mammoth. Even better—we'll come to why in a moment—it was a male.
Now, if that had been a movie, they would have thawed Jumbo out right then and there (and if it was an exceptionally bad movie, he'd have come to life and started ripping the clothes off the elderly scientist's beautiful daughter, who just happened to be along for the ride.)
But this wasn't a movie. They dug around the mammoth, then moved him, still encased in tons of ice, to a cave where the temperature was well below zero. Their next step—the one they're working on right now—is to widen the cave and turn it into a high-tech laboratory for mammoth experts from all over the world (including Kazufumi Goto, who inspired the expedition in the first place).
And then?
Well, they have two directions they can go.
One, they can clone the mammoth.
And who, I hear you ask, will carry the fetus?
An Indian elephant, who is genetically closer to the mammoth than any other animal.
Is such a thing feasible?
Absolutely.
I live in Cincinnati. Our local zoo has been doing some cutting-edge work in the transplanting of fetuses. We've had elands give birth to okapis, and cows give birth to kudus, and I guarantee you they are a lot less alike than Indian elephants and wooly mammoths.
The second direction is trickier, but not impossible: since the specimen they have is a male, they can try to artificially impregnate an Indian elephant.
Possible?
Well, yes, possible. I consider it a bit of a longshot, though the DNA experts say there's no reason why it shouldn't work. On the other hand, it's probably no more bizarre than breeding a horse to a Grevy's zebra, and I personally have seen several offspring of such matings.
But even if the breeding doesn't take, they'll still have a bank of frozen mammoth sperm, and if the next frozen mammoth happens to be of the female persuasion . . . well, it's simply a matter of introducing the sperm to the egg and finding a suitable host for the embryo, which would of course be an Indian elephant.
Will it happen with this particular frozen elephant? I hope so; he was a pain in the ass to find and extract. But if not, it'll happen with the second or the third, as our knowledge of cloning (and all other reproductive methodology) is increasing geometrically.
And there's something else to look forward to. Our Pleistocene Park won't be inhabited solely by mammoths and other animals that got caught in the ice.
There's another preserver of animals: tar. The animals we dig out of the tar pits won't look as good, but some of their DNA will be just as well protected. (Where? The nerves inside the teeth, for starters.)
So along with mammoths, a zoo-goer in your lifetime might drop by Pleistocene Park to see a saber-toothed tiger as well.
Like I said, Michael Crichton had the right idea. He just had the wrong park.
The Pig-in-a-Poke Factor
Written by Eric Flint
In this essay, I want to take up the second of the arguments that is often advanced against the policy of taking a relaxed attitude toward fair use when it comes to online publishing. In my last essay, I believe I pretty much demolished the argument that the policy I follow (as do many other authors) leads to a direct decline in the income of authors. But that leaves the question of what might be the long-term impact of the policy.
In a nutshell, the argument usually advanced in opposition is that, while free distribution of a writer's material online might very well produce an immediate benefit for that author, its long-term effect on all authors will be negative. Even, eventually, on the author who follows the policy.
The reasoning is simple. If it's true—as I say that it is—that the worst obstacle faced by authors is obscurity, then it follows that any author who uses online free or cheap distribution of their work is indeed overcoming their obscurity, at least to a degree, and will improve their sales as a result. But it also follows that they can only do so by cannibalizing the sales of those authors who don't make their work readily available on the internet. Their gain comes from the loss of others—and it should be obvious that, over time, this is a losing proposition. If we assume that eventually all authors are forced to follow suit, then we simply return to the same situation of mutual obscurity that the policy was supposed to overcome. All we've done is replace a market whose obscurity is caused by darkness with a market whose obscurity is caused by an excess of blaring advertisements.
This is not as silly an argument as it may seem, at first glance. For it is in fact true that too much visibility—if it becomes universal—can be every bit as blinding to potential customers as too little. Everyone has had the experience of being in a place which was overloaded with advertising. The typical effect upon most people is simply to make them learn to ignore it all.
So you gain nothing, in the long run—except that in the process you've lowered the price that authors can expect for their work.
Another way of putting this is that a policy which works fine if only a few authors follow it, will not work if they all start doing it.
There are three fallacies to this argument.
The first is that, underlying it, is the notion that the market for written text—fiction, at least—is pretty much fixed. That being the case, any expansion of sales enjoyed by one author due to his or her policy of using online promotion aggressively, will have to come at the expense of another author.
It's enough to state this baldly, I think, to see how silly it is. In reality, the market for fic
tion is one of the most variable in existence. Not only that, it's a shallow market to begin with, not one that has even begun to be saturated. Another study just appeared that lamented (again) that the average American adult reads only four books a year, and most of those were non-fiction. Assuming full hardcover prices of about $25 a book—and that's certainly too high an estimate, because the majority of fiction purchases are of paperbacks—that means the average American adult is spending $100 or less on fiction annually.
Which, in turn, means that fiction buying is so small a part of the average American's budget that it could easily be expanded tenfold before it started making much of dent in their income. It's no higher than the spending of most households on movie tickets, which is in approximately the same range.