Oracle
Page 42
Finally, I’ll leave this section with an excerpt from an article suggesting we consolidate memories while we sleep. There is more and more evidence that this is the case. Alas, this still isn’t the same as absorbing countless audiobooks in your sleep the way Anna did, but it’s fascinating, nonetheless.
“Yes, you can learn a foreign language in your sleep, say Swiss psychologists” (Independent, UK, 2014)
EXCERPT: Subliminal learning in your sleep is usually dismissed as pseudo-science at best and fraud at worst, but a team of Swiss psychologists say you can actually learn a foreign language in your sleep. Well, not from scratch, but research published in the journal Cerebral Cortex by the Swiss National Science Foundation claims that listening to newly-learned foreign vocabulary while sleeping can help solidify the memory of the words.
Microtubules and the hard problem of consciousness
I present a lengthy discussion on the nature of consciousness in my novel Infinity Born. This is truly an impossible topic that has been debated for thousands of years, and will continue to be debated for many more years to come. To make this impossibly thorny topic even more thorny, a deep dive into this subject matter must inevitably also consider the existence, or non-existence, of the soul. For those of you who are interested, if you Google “the hard problem of consciousness,” you will find enough material to last you a lifetime. But be warned, material on the nature of consciousness can be very deep, so don’t be surprised if your brain starts to hurt as you read through it.
When it comes to the question of when a computer can be considered sentient, scientists are coming to the conclusion that the Turing test, long considered the gold standard of measuring computer sentience, is no longer a valid metric. This is another topic on which you can readily find endless information and speculation online.
I actually had an epiphany about computer sentience while writing Infinity Born. It occurred to me that perhaps “boredom” would be the simplest test. Computers operate at the speed of light, over a hundred thousand times faster than our plodding speed of thought. If we were in this situation, we would literally die of boredom while waiting for a human to provide the next input. I would think that any computer intelligence that could be shown to be losing its mind from boredom, or growing impatient, would have to be fully conscious.
With respect to the role of microtubules and quantum effects in consciousness, everything written in the book is accurate. And Quantum Biology has become a growing field. The resource that I found most helpful in this regard was a 2018 article in Discover Magazine entitled, “Down the Quantum Rabbit Hole: Fellow Scientists labeled him a crackpot. Now Stuart Hameroff’s quantum consciousness theories are getting support from unlikely places.”
This is a fairly long, fascinating article, and I tried to capture the most relevant points in the novel. I’ll excerpt just a bit more of this article below, and then a different article, to underscore the possible importance of recent findings.
EXCERPT: A microtubule is composed of many individual subunits. If they operated in a purely classical fashion, as insulators—like wood, glass, and other common materials that stop electrical current from flowing freely—the amount of resistance across the microtubule should increase. But Bandyopadhyay found something very different when he applied specific charges of alternating current. Resistance levels jumped by a factor of one billion. The microtubule was acting something like a semiconductor, one of the most important development in electronics. He stood there in wonder at his own results.
“Discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons supports controversial theory of consciousness” (Science Daily, 2014)
EXCERPT: A review and update of a controversial 20-year-old theory of consciousness claims that consciousness derives from deeper level, finer scale activities inside brain neurons. The recent discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons corroborates this theory, according to review authors. They suggest that EEG rhythms (brain waves) also derive from deeper level microtubule vibrations, and that from a practical standpoint, treating brain microtubule vibrations could benefit a host of mental, neurological, and cognitive conditions.
Retrocausality
Retrocausality is real—maybe. :) I’ll be honest with you, this subject is like quantum mechanics for me. It gets deep fast, and the more I read about it, the less I understand it. So I can’t really explain to readers what I don’t fully grasp myself. (Part of this is laziness on my part—I’d like to think I could get a handle on this if I really put in the effort, but I haven’t so far.)
So with this as a feeble introduction to the subject, I’ll leave you with one excerpt on the topic that I hope you’ll find interesting. This is from a 2010 article in Discover Magazine entitled, “Back to the Future: A series of quantum experiments shows that measurements performed in the future can influence the present. Does that mean the universe has a destiny—and the laws of physics pull us inexorably toward our prewritten fate?”
EXCERPT: Jeff Tollaksen may well believe he was destined to be here at this point in time. We’re on a boat in the Atlantic, and it’s not a pleasant trip. The torrential rain and choppy waters are causing the boat to lurch. The rough sea has little effect on Tollaksen, who grew up around boats. Everyone would agree that events in his past have prepared him for today’s excursion. But Tollaksen and his colleagues are investigating a far stranger possibility: It may be not only his past that has led him here today, but his future as well.
Tollaksen’s group is looking into the notion that time might flow backward, allowing the future to influence the past. By extension, the universe might have a destiny that reaches back and conspires with the past to bring the present into view. On a cosmic scale, this idea could help explain how life arose in the universe against tremendous odds. On a personal scale, it may make us question whether fate is pulling us forward and whether we have free will.
“Aharonov was one of the first to take seriously the idea that if you want to understand what is happening at any point in time, it’s not just the past that is relevant. It’s also the future,” Tollaksen says. In 1964 Aharonov and his colleagues Peter Bergmann and Joel Lebowitz, all then at Yeshiva University in New York, proposed a new framework called time-symmetric quantum mechanics. It could produce all the same results as the standard form of quantum mechanics that everyone knew and loved, with the added benefit of explaining how information from the future could fill in the indeterministic gaps in the present.”
DNA Information Storage
Storing huge amounts of data within the twists and turns of the famous double helix is being worked on now. DNA is stable and compact (thank you Nature), and already carries the entire blueprint for a human being, which is even more complex than a starship or planetary shield. In Oracle, Redford claims that all the world’s data, encoded in DNA, could fit in a teaspoon.
Did I arrive at this bit of imagery after doing extensive calculations? Actually, no. This information was deeply hidden within a 2015 Quartz.com article entitled, “Scientists say all the world’s data can fit on a DNA hard drive the size of a teaspoon.” (Okay, so maybe it wasn’t so deeply hidden, after all. :) ) Here is an excerpt:
EXCERPT: Servers, hard drives, flash drives, and disks will degrade (as will our libraries of paper books, of course), but a group of researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have found a way to encode data onto DNA—the very same stuff that all living beings’ genetic information is stored on—that could survive for millennia.
One gram of DNA can potentially hold up to 455 exabytes of data, according to New Scientist. For reference: There are one billion gigabytes in an exabyte, and 1,000 exabytes in a zettabyte. The cloud computing company EMC estimated that there were 1.8 zettabytes of data in the world in 2011, which means we would need only about 4 grams (about a teaspoon) of DNA to hold everything from Plato through the complete works of Shakespeare to Beyonce’s latest album (not to mention
every brunch photo ever posted on Instagram).
I’ll end this section with an excerpt from MIT Technology Review entitled, “Microsoft just booted up the first ‘DNA drive’ for storing data
EXCERPT: Microsoft has helped build the first device that automatically encodes digital information into DNA and back to bits again. Microsoft has been working toward a photocopier-sized device that would replace data centers by storing files, movies, and documents in DNA strands, which can pack in information at mind-boggling density.
According to Microsoft, all the information stored in a warehouse-sized data center would fit into a set of Yahtzee dice, were it written in DNA.
The center of the galaxy
I chose to have all known intelligences, other than humanity, arise within the galactic center for several reasons. One, I wanted Earth to be unreachable by starship, so there could be a raging galactic war 25,000 light-years away, but one that couldn’t impact Earth—at least not yet. This way I could focus on just two of the twenty-seven intelligence species on Earth, and tell the story I told.
But if I did limit the speed of starships, the combatants would needed to be fairly close to each other, cosmologically speaking, to be able to conduct a respectable war. Having them all reside in the center of the galaxy was the obvious solution.
The fact that this would mean that the residents of Tartar and Vor would be used to nearly continuous light, making them uncomfortable on Earth, and would help pave the way for an homage to angels and demons was a nice fringe benefit.
The little I wrote about the center of the galaxy is accurate. Here is an excerpt taken from NASA’s Web Telescope website entitled, “What is the center of our galaxy like?”
EXCERPT: If you lived in the center of the Milky Way, you would look up at a sky thick with stars, one thousand to one million times more dense than we’re used to seeing, depending on how close you were to the core. For Earth’s inhabitants, the next closest star to our sun is about four light-years away. In the center of the galaxy, stars are only 0.4–0.04 light-years apart. This is a region so packed with stars, it’s equivalent to having one million suns crammed into the volume of space between us and our closest stellar neighbor a little over four light-years away.
The center of the Milky Way, roughly the inner 10,000 light-years, consists of the region where the galaxy’s spiral arm structure has broken down and transformed into a “bulge” of stars. Even if humans could explore the region, it would take us more than 25,000 years to reach it, traveling at close to the speed of light.
So that’s it for the notes section of Oracle. I hope that you found at least some of this helpful. For those of you interested in reading my essay, “Scientific Advances are Ruining Science Fiction,” it appears beyond the “Author bio and list of books,” as I mentioned before.
3) Author bio and list of books
Douglas E. Richards is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of WIRED and numerous other novels (see list below). A former biotech executive, Richards earned a BS in microbiology from the Ohio State University, a master’s degree in genetic engineering from the University of Wisconsin (where he engineered mutant viruses now named after him), and an MBA from the University of Chicago.
In recognition of his work, Richards was selected to be a “special guest” at San Diego Comic-Con International, along with such icons as Stan Lee and Ray Bradbury. His essays have been featured in National Geographic, the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Earth & Sky, Today’s Parent, and many others.
The author has two children and currently lives with his wife and dog in San Diego, California.
You can friend Richards on Facebook at Douglas E. Richards Author, visit his website at douglaserichards.com, and write to him at douglaserichards1@gmail.com
Near Future Science Fiction Thrillers by Douglas E. Richards
WIRED (Wired 1)
AMPED (Wired 2)
MIND’S EYE (Nick Hall 1)
BRAINWEB (Nick Hall 2)
MIND WAR (Nick Hall 3)
QUANTUM LENS
SPLIT SECOND (Split Second 1)
TIME FRAME (Split Second 2)
GAME CHANGER
INFINITY BORN
SEEKER
VERACITY
ORACLE
Kids Science Fiction Thrillers (9 and up, enjoyed by kids and adults alike)
TRAPPED (Prometheus Project 1)
CAPTURED (Prometheus Project 2)
STRANDED (Prometheus Project 3)
OUT OF THIS WORLD
THE DEVIL’S SWORD
4) Essay: Scientific Advances are Ruining Science Fiction
I write science fiction thrillers for a living, set five to ten years in the future, an exercise that allows me to indulge my love of science, futurism, and philosophy, and to examine in fine granularity the impact of approaching revolutions in technology.
But here is the problem: I’d love to write pure science fiction, set hundreds of years in the future.
Why don’t I?
I guess the short answer is that to do so, I’d have to turn a blind eye to everything I believe will be true hundreds of years from now. Because the truth is that books about the future of humanity, such as Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, have ruined me.
As a kid, I read nothing but science fiction. This was a genre that existed to examine individuals and societies through the lens of technological and scientific change. The best of this genre always focused on human beings as much as technology, something John W. Campbell insisted upon when he ushered in what is widely known as the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
But for the most part, writers in past generations could feel confident that men and women would always be men and women, at least for many thousands of years to come. We might develop technology that would give us incredible abilities. Go back and forth through time, travel to other dimensions, or travel through the galaxy in great starships. But no matter what, in the end, we would still be Grade A, premium cut, humans. Loving, lusting, and laughing. Scheming and coveting. Crying, shouting, and hating. We would remain ambitious, ruthless, and greedy, but also selfless and heroic. Our intellects and motivations in this far future would not be all that different from what they are now, and if we lost a phaser battle with a Klingon, the Grim Reaper would still be waiting for us.
In short, we would continue to be the kind of human beings a writer could work with, could understand. James T. Kirk might have lived hundreds of years in the future, might have beamed down to planets and engaged warp engines, but viewers still had no trouble relating to him. He was adventurous, loyal, and heroic, and he lusted after life (along with green aliens, androids, and just about anything else that could move).
But what if you believe that in a few hundred years, people will not be the same as today? What if you believe they will be so different they will be unrecognizable as human?
Now how would you write science fiction? You would have to change two variables at the same time: not only addressing dramatic advances in technology, but dramatic changes in the nature of humanity itself (or, more likely, the merger of our technology and ourselves).
In the early days of science fiction, technology changed at a snail’s pace. But today, technological change is so furious, so obviously exponential, that it is impossible to ignore. I have no doubt this is why a once fringe, disrespected genre has become so widely popular, has come out of the closet, and is now so all-pervasive in our society. Because we’re living science fiction every day.
Rapid and transformative technological change isn’t hard to imagine anymore. What’s hard to imagine is the lack of such change.
In 1880, the US asked a group of experts to analyze New York City, one of the fastest-growing cities in North America. They wanted to know what it might be like in a hundred years.
The experts extrapolated the likely growth during this period, and the expected consequences. They then confidently proclaimed that if population growth
wasn’t halted, by 1980, New York City would require so many horses to stay viable that every inch of it would be knee-deep in manure. Knee-deep! In horse manure!
As someone interested in technology and future trends, I love this story, even if it turns out to be apocryphal, because it does a brilliant job of highlighting the dangers of extrapolating the future, since we aren’t capable of foreseeing game-changing technologies that often appear. Even now. Even at our level of sophistication and expectation of change.
But while we can’t know what miracles the future will hold, we’ve now seen too much evidence of exponential progress not to know that Jim Kirk would no longer be relatable to us. Because it seems impossible to me that we will remain as we are. Remain even the least bit recognizable.
This assumes, of course, that we avoid self-destruction, a fate that seems more likely every day as WMDs proliferate and fanaticism grows. But post-apocalyptic science fiction has never been my thing, and if we do reach a Star Trek level of technology, we will have avoided self-destruction, by definition. And I prefer to be optimistic, in any case, despite the growing case for pessimism.
So if we do ever advance to the point at which we can travel through hyperspace, beam ourselves down to planets, or wage war in great starships, we can be sure we won’t be human anymore.
It is well known that increases in computer power and speed have been exponential. But exponential growth sneaks up on you in a way that isn’t intuitive. Start with a penny and double your money every day, and in thirty-nine days you’ll have over two billion dollars. But the first day your wealth only increases by a single penny, an amount that’s beneath notice. On the thirty-ninth day, however, your wealth will increase from one billion to two billion dollars—now that is a change impossible to miss. So like a hockey stick, the graph of exponential growth barely rises from the ground for some time, but when it reaches the beginning of the handle, watch out, because you suddenly get an explosive rise that is nearly vertical.