Colbert, Meyers, and Stewart take closer looks at sending troops to Portland and medbeds

I promised monologues from my favorite late-night talk show hosts to end September and I'm following through, beginning with Stephen Colbert's Trump Declares War On Portland | Medbeds For All! | The Weak Case Against James Comey.

President Trump sent the military to Oregon after seeing a misleading report on Fox News and indicated that everyone in America will soon have access to futuristic medical technology, while the indictment of James Comey represents a chilling escalation of Trump's efforts to punish his political enemies.

I'm starting with the last story, since the other comedians I'm featuring didn't cover it. The game of musical chairs Donald "Hoover Cleveland" Trump has been playing with the lawyers in the Department of Justice reminds me of what I wrote in Noah, Meyers, Colbert, and Kimmel mock Trump's lawyers for his second impeachment trial: "Trump doesn't want to listen to his lawyers. He wants lawyers who listen to him. He should be careful what he wishes for. I think he's getting them, and they're not that good." I think he cares more that they're good looking and obedient than if they're competent. That means his lawfare is unlikely to result in convictions.

Seth Meyers had more to say in Trump Posts AI "Med Bed" Conspiracy Video, Threatens to Send Troops to Portland: A Closer Look.

Seth takes a closer look at the president posting an AI video of himself and threatening to send troops to yet another American city.

I haven't had much to say about QAnon since Meyers, Noah, Colbert, and Kimmel take closer looks at Marjorie Taylor Greene being removed from committee assignments more than four years ago, and I'm relieved not to, so Hoover Cleveland sharing the AI video about medbeds is annoying. Not only are medbeds a conspiracy theory, they're science fiction. They remind me of the autodocs from Larry Niven's Known Space stories. Those would be nice to have, but they're not supposed to show up until 2126, a century from now. Of course I would connect this to Niven. It's on brand.

I finish with Trump Sends Troops to Portland & Shootings Trigger Left-Right Blame Game | The Daily Show.

After a string of mass shootings across the U.S., America swaps out “thoughts and prayers” for a left vs. right blame game, Republicans hypocritically criticize the Democrats' “violent rhetoric,” and Trump escalates a nonexistent problem by deploying troops to Portland.

"Why Portland?" Because Hoover Cleveland was watching Fox News showing clips from 2020, not today. The preview image I had for Seeker explains how television entertainment can shape our political opinions and need to replace showed Hoover Cleveland saying "I learn a lot from television." Yeah, and a lot of it is wrong.

That concludes September's blogging. Stay tuned for the first post of October.

Yet another attempt at a 'Ringworld' movie/miniseries plus bonus 'Snow Crash' from Amazon

For the Sunday entertainment feature, I'm recycling what I wrote on Dreamwidth.

Four years ago, I wrote Finally, a Ringworld movie!

That's the one in which I repeated my twenty-year-old grousing about how I wrote an adventure for Chaosium's Ringworld table-top RPG, but lost all that effort because the movie rights to the book were sold and the movie production company asserted that they had the game rights, too.  To add insult to injury, there was no movie.  Apparently, that will change, as SyFy announced that they will develop the book into a four-hour miniseries.

The good news was that it became one of the two most read posts of that year.  The bad news is that no "Ringworld" movie or miniseries came of it.

Not all is lost, as io9 reported this week Amazon Is Developing a Bonanza of Genre Titles: Ringworld, Snow Crash, and Lazarus.

Amazon just announced a virtual land grab of genre titles that it’s putting into development: Larry Niven’s scifi classic Ringworld; Neal Stephenson’s cult classic Snow Crash; and Greg Rucka’s acclaimed comic Lazarus. In a perfect world, we could be seeing all three made into drama series.

As Deadline reports, the announcement comes as the streaming network is hoping to land a “big-scope genre drama series in the mold of Game Of Thrones and The Walking Dead.” There aren’t too many details yet, but the standout points include: the Ringworld project will likely draw not just from Niven’s 1970 original, but other books in the series; Rucka will be adapting Lazarus himself from page to screen; and Snow Crash will be co-produced by Joe Cornish, who at one time had the project on his own feature-directing slate.

I'm a lot more confident in Amazon pulling off "Ringworld" than I was about SyFy, so I'm looking forward to it.  The other project I want to see is "Snow Crash."  It may not be the best of Stephenson's novels, but it is the best-known and it's a lot of fun.  Here's to both of them reaching the small screen before the decade is out!

Here's to getting that "Ringworld" movie I was promised 33 years ago, even if it ends up being a series streaming on Amazon!

R.I.P. Jerry Pournelle

I've gained a lot of readers since this blog's first post in which I explain the source of the name.  That's still part of this blog's description, which I haven't changed since I created it six-and-one-half years ago.*  One of the co-authors of "The Mote in God's Eye," where Crazy Eddie comes from, at least in science fiction, was Jerry Pournelle.**  He died yesterday at  the age of 84.

Former SFWA President Jerry Pournelle (b.1933) died on September 8.
Pournelle had a PhD in political science and worked with politicians throughout his various careers. He worked in the aerospace industry and consulted with various politicians on space related technology. While working towards his PhD, Pournelle published science fiction using the pseudonym Wade Curtis. In 1973, Pournelle served as the President of SFWA.

In the 1970s, Pournelle began publishing under his own name, starting with A Spaceship for the King. This began his long running military science fiction series. He collaborated with Larry Niven on The Mote in God’s Eye, Inferno, Lucifer’s Hammer, and other novels. While Niven was his most frequent collaborator, the two also collaborated at times with Steven Barnes and Michael Flynn. Pournelle also collaborated with Dean Ing, Roland J. Green, Charles Sheffield, and S.M. Stirling.

In addition to his solo novels and collaborations, Pournelle edited several anthology series including There Will Be War, Imperial Stars, and War World. He co-edited Nebula Award Stories Sixteen with John F. Carr.

I preferred Niven to Pournelle; the latter's politics were too right-wing for my taste.  Just the same, he was a brilliant man and a great writer.  I might have more to say except that I'm not feeling up to it.***  Instead, I'll let someone more in tune with his politics talk for me.  Take it away, Jeffrey McArthur!


I honestly couldn't have said it better.  R.I.P.

*Although I've been tempted.  One of the ideas, which shows up on the blog's Facebook page, is "A blog about sustainability with a science fiction slant and a Detroit perspective."  It certainly is still about science fiction and sustainability, but I'm writing for more of a national audience, so the Detroit perspective, while still there, isn't as strong.

**The real source was "Crazy Eddie" Antar, the infamous electronics retailer in New York, which the legendary figure was named after.  I once tweeted something about being a Crazy Eddie.  Antar's nephew liked it, thus completing the circle.

***I am in the hospital for diabetes and Grave's disease, which is why I didn't post yesterday.

Discovery of seven Earth-like planets announced by NASA

I promised to write about the speculative fiction winners at the Golden Reel Awards for today, but something more important came up.  NASA/JPL announced yesterday NASA & TRAPPIST-1: A Treasure Trove of Planets Found.

Seven Earth-sized planets have been observed by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope around a tiny, nearby, ultra-cool dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1. Three of these planets are firmly in the habitable zone.

Over 21 days, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope measured the drop in light as each planet passed in front of the star. Spitzer was able to identify a total of seven rocky worlds, including three in the habitable zone, where liquid water might be found.

The video features interviews with Sean Carey, manager of the Spitzer Science Center, Caltech/IPAC; Nikole Lewis, James Webb Space Telescope project scientist, Space Telescope Science Institute; and Michaël Gillon, principal investigator, TRAPPIST, University of Liege, Belgium.

The system has been revealed through observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the ground-based TRAPPIST (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope) telescope, as well as other ground-based observatories. The system was named for the TRAPPIST telescope.

NASA/JPL followed up with TRAPPIST-1: Weirdest habitable worlds.

A new discovery by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed seven Earth-sized planets around the M dwarf star known as TRAPPIST-1. Three of them lie in what is known as the habitable zone -- where there is the potential for liquid water. It is the largest batch of Earth-sized worlds ever discovered in the habitable zone of a single star. While we don’t know if there is life on the TRAPPIST-1 planets, we do know that any life discovered there would likely be very different from life on Earth. It would have to survive the stormy solar flares of an M dwarf, adapt to a planet that might have extreme temperature swings, and thrive in red and infrared light. All seven worlds are early ambassadors of a new generation of planet-hunting targets that promise a new vision of the word “habitable.”

As much as I like comparing possibly habitable exoplanets to those in Niven's Known Space, such as Plateau or Wunderland, I won't be able to do that for this discovery.  The closest analogue is Gummidgy, which orbits CY Aquarii, a much larger star, which in the real world is much farther away, but in the Known Space universe is apparently much closer.  Either way, none of these worlds is Gummidgy.

That written, these planets are already in science fiction, as CNet reports.

While it's a little unusual for a top scientific journal to publish a work of science fiction, Nature is no stranger to the practice. The journal has regularly published a science fiction column since 2007, and the Trappist-1 planets really beg for the sci-fi treatment. The seven planets tightly circling a dim, ultracool dwarf star are much closer to each other than the planets in our solar system, and at least three of them might be just as habitable as Earth.

"The Trappist-1 system, with its short interplanetary distances, makes space opera possible," writes Suhner, who read the research paper before penning her story. "Traveling from Nuwa to Pangu takes a week. A lilliputian system where worlds are like neighboring countries."

Suhner said collaborating with scientists is essential to her work.

"Integrating advanced research into my texts allows me to talk about science while keeping the sense of wonder and awe intact," she wrote in a Nature blog post about the short story. "This is one of the main advantages of science fiction."

That didn't take long at all.

As for the Oscars and other award shows, stay tuned.  I'll get back to them tomorrow.  I do have my priorities.

Did we just discover Wunderland? No, Moiroi

Four years ago, I asked "Did we just discover Plateau?" in response to the discovery of a possibly habitable exoplanet around Tau Ceti.  Today, the question is "Did we just discover Wunderland?"  New Scientist has the story in Proxima b: an Earth-like planet on our cosmic doorstep.

We've found a planet orbiting in the habitable zone of our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, just 4.25 light years away. Here's what we know about it so far.

Nature has more in The exoplanet next door.

Astronomers have discovered evidence of a small, rocky planet orbiting our nearest star - and it may even be a bit like Earth. Nobody knows whether the planet, called Proxima b, could ever sustain life. The little planet orbits our sun's nearest neighbouring star, Proxima Centauri, making it the closest exoplanet ever found.

The answer is no, as Wunderland orbits Alpha Centauri, not Proxima Centauri.  It is, however, the next best thing, even if it is tidally locked.  That might make it a combination of We Made It and Jinx.

On the other hand, we might have discovered Moiroi from the game 2300 A.D.  According to Wkipedia's Alpha Centauri in Fiction article, it's the only habitable fictional planet with a proper name listed around Proxima Centauri.  The others are Proxima Centauri 3 from "Babylon 5," an unnamed planet in Stanislaw Lem's "The Megallanic Cloud," and another unnamed planet in "Spacecraft 2000-2100 AD."  Since they don't have names, Moiroi it is.

SciFi is Now: Energy and other technologies for 2014

Continuing the retrospective of the year about to end that I began with Ebola best and worst for 2014 and Happy to rewind 2014 in entertainment and social media, I'm going to run with the "sustainability with a science fiction slant" that I use to describe this blog on its Facebook page to repeat another catch phrase of mine, "we live in science fiction times."*  I begin with Marianne Lavelle of National Geographic News describing Four 2015 Energy Ideas 'Back to the Future' Got (Almost) Right.

Hoverboards, flying cars, and auto-fueling are closer than you think, and garbage energy is here.

Energy is so cheap and easy in 2015 that we all have flying cars and robot gas attendants. That's not the reality as of New Year's Day, of course, but rather the "future" depicted in the hit 1989 movie Back to the Future Part II.

It's easy to feel bitter that we're still stuck in traffic on the ground, pumping our own gas, and now worrying about climate change, to boot.

Director Robert Zemeckis never intended to paint a realistic forecast, but it's amazing how much of his vision of energy is taking shape. Science is trying to deliver not only skyward transport and renewable fuel, but also efficiency and solutions to lower greenhouse gases.

So we're not quite getting flying cars, but we are getting self-driving cars, a necessary precursor.  That's a science-fiction idea will make car travel safer that isn't a massive energy hog, which is good enough for me.

Follow over the jump for more science fiction technologies that have come true.

Top post for the third year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News--Ringworld

As I promised yesterday,* I'm beginning the reverse countdown of most viewed posts from the past year.  I'm departing from the procedure I used the past two years, in which I ordered entries according to what I call the primary counter as the first resort, then used the secondary counter for the remainder of the top 20 entries not listed in the primary counter's top ten, as I did first in The first year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News: last of nine parts, where I called it "the alternative counter."  Instead, I'm ordering them strictly according to the secondary counter, which I find much more complete, as well as more useful for an annual retrospective.

The primary counter is what I see on the blog dashboard for top posts by past two hours, day, week, month, and history of the blog, while the secondary counter is what I see when I look under all posts.  It does not give a listing for the past year, which would be very convenient.  The primary counter's page view statistics also tend to reach a maximum and decrease over time as duplicate page views from the same IP address and page views generated by "referrer spam" and other bots gets culled.  The secondary counter tallies all page views regardless of source or duplicate views.  That one does not decrease over time.  It also gives stats on all entries, not merely those that make it into the top ten during one of the time frames listed above.

That explanation out of the way, the most viewed entry of the third full year of the blog is Finally, a Ringworld movie!  That entry from May 23, 2013 had 1317 page views according to the secondary counter and four comments.**  It was not among the all time top ten according to the primary counter, even though it has more   That's the one in which I repeated my twenty-year-old grousing about how I wrote an adventure for Chaosium's Ringworld table-top RPG, but lost all that effort because the movie rights to the book were sold and the movie production company asserted that they had the game rights, too.  To add insult to injury, there was no movie.  Apparently, that will change, as SyFy announced that they will develop the book into a four-hour miniseries.  If so, good news, but no Farnsworth until it reaches the little screen.  According to this video review, that might be this fall, but I have my doubts, as IMDB lists it as 2015 and beyond.

Status: In-Development
Based on the 70s Space Science Fiction Novel "Ringworld"

Notes: Announced as a 4 Hour mini-series in development in the spring 2013...Writer "Michael R. Perry" will adapt the 1970 Science Fiction Novel for a TV show by SyFy.

As for how this entry became so frequently viewed, that's easy--the power of search terms.  The phrase "ringworld movie" currently has 129 results, tying it for seventh with the URL of the blog itself among all search terms for the entire history of the blog and making it the most searched new term for the past year.  In this way, the entry is similar to Detroit "what people think" meme and Dungeons and Dragons alignments for Game of Thrones characters from 2012, both of which became top entries through web searches.

As for how I feel about this, at least hundreds, if not thousands, of people have read about my misadventures with the Ringworld game and my disappoinment that there hasn't been a movie--yet.  Knowing that people have heard my complaints and that something is being done about them, even if I had nothing to do with the action, will generally get me to shut up about them.  It may also be enough to get me to buy a Larry Niven book again, too.

Follow over the jump for the footnotes.

Religion news from campuses on the campaign trail

It's the week of Halloween, which means I have lots of scary and silly material planned for my upcoming entries, as if the prospect of civilization collapsing, for whatever reason, and the (pop) cultural responses to the possibility weren't scary and silly enough.  Before I begin with that project, I will take a more serious look at an aspect of culture I cover irregularly, religion.  Here are the religion stories from campuses on the campaign trail I've included in the past three weeks of Overnight News Digest on Daily Kos.

I begin with Rutgers Hillel Moves Torah to New Home from Rutgers University.

Members of the Rutgers Hillel community celebrated and danced in the street as they ceremoniously moved Torah scrolls to a temporary home on Bishop Place while their new building is under construction. Rabbi Esther Reed, senior associate director of Rutgers Hillel, says the ceremony recognized the significance of the move for the entire Jewish community on campus.

Follow over the jump for more, beginning with something appropriate both for the season and to the inspiration for the name of this blog, a book about Dante's Inferno.

The ethics of orcas as entertainment

In PETA attempts a science-fiction solution to a real-world issue, I embedded a Next Media Animation video describing a lawsuit PETA filed against Sea World to release the aquarium chain's orcas, along with how the lawsuit was an action right out of Niven's Known Space stories.  That lawsuit was dismissed, but the controversy has continued, as ABC News reported in Should 'Killer Whales' Be Tourist Attractions?

Orcas are no threat to humans in the wild, but in captivity, they have killed.

When I included this video in Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (Solstice and Supermoon) at Daily Kos, one of the commenters responded with Simple answers to easy questions--"No."

Finally, a Ringworld movie!

I've been a huge fan of Larry Niven's Known Space ever since I watched The Slaver Weapon.  I thought the Kzinti were really cool and promptly checked out a copy of Ringworld from the library.  I read through all the Known Space stories I could lay my hands on during the years since, right up to Ringworld Engineers and The Patchwork Girl.  After those books, no new Known Space stories appeared for a decade.

All was not lost, as Chaosium Games, the publishers of Runequest and Call of Cthulhu, purchased the game rights to Ringworld.  I convinced Chaosium that I knew enough about Known Space and tabletop role-playing games to let me develop a scenario for an adventure module.  I wrote the scenario, playtested it, submitted it, and was about to revise it when Chaosium told me to stop.  It wasn't because what I wrote was bad; in fact, it had nothing to do with me.  It turns out that Niven had sold the movie rights to Ringworld and the movie company asserted that it now held the game rights, not Chaosium.  Chaosium was too small to take on the movie company and its lawyers, so it gave up.

I was pissed.  Not only did it stop publication of a game that I really believed in, it meant that all my effort, about $300 worth in 1984 dollars, went right down the drain.  I decided to never buy another Niven book new ever again.  To add insult to injury, Niven used the game guide as source material for the Man-Kzin Wars series.  Worst of all, there never was any movie.  All that loss was for nothing.

That may all change, as Entertainment Weekly reports.

Ringworld' miniseries in the works at Syfy -- EXCLUSIVE

Michael Perry (The River, Paranormal Activity 2) is adapting Ringworld as a four-hour miniseries. The story follows a team of explorers that travel to the farthest reaches of space to investigate an alien artifact called Ringworld – an artificial habitat the size of one million Earths. As they crash land on this enormous structure, they discover the remnants of ancient civilizations, technology beyond their wildest dreams, mysteries that shed light on the very origins of man and, most importantly, a possible salvation for a doomed Earth.

For Ringworld fans, this news might cause some deja vu. Syfy previously considered making a Ringworld miniseries under a different production team nine years ago.

I might finally get a Ringworld movie--30 years later.  Maybe I can get some comfort from that.

Happy 75th birthday, Man of Steel!

Los Angeles Times: Happy birthday, Superman! A look back at 75 powerful years

It’s an auspicious occasion for the Man of Steel. Exactly 75 years ago today, Superman made his debut in “Action Comics” No. 1.

Superman is celebrating his 75th birthday with a new comic book by DC Comics all-stars Jim Lee and Scott Snyder and an ambitious new film directed by Zack Snyder and co-written and -produced by Christopher Nolan, of “Dark Knight” trilogy fame.

Here is the latest trailer for "Man of Steel."

From Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures comes "Man of Steel," starring Henry Cavill ("Immortals," TV's "The Tudors") in the role of Clark Kent/Superman, under the direction of Zack Snyder ("300," "Watchmen").

I'm glad Amy Adams has her hair dyed brown.  Otherwise, I'd be asking, "Why are they calling Lana Lang Lois Lane?"  Never mind.  That's just the lighting.  It turns out that she's going to be a redhead after all.

On the other hand, it may be perversely appropriate that a natural redhead play Lois Lane, since the most recent portrayal of Lana Lang was Kristen Kreug, a brunette.

In any event, happy birthday, Man of Steel, and may you eventually find out that Lois Lane is not made of Kleenex!

Evolution in action

I'll be showing this video to my students tomorrow to explain natural selection. I've already included it in my slide show.

Discovery News: Humans Are Speeding Up Evolution

Turns out evolution isn't always slow. Scientists in Nebraska have discovered a bird evolving right before our eyes.

I can't resist quoting Larry Niven from Oath of Fealty: Think of it as evolution in action.

Did we just discover Plateau?

Science News: News in brief: Possible planet looks habitable
Candidate body pushes limit of astronomical detection
By Alexandra Witze
Web edition: December 19, 2012

The closest single star like the sun — Tau Ceti, 12 light-years away — may harbor five planets slightly more massive than Earth. One may even lie in the star’s habitable zone.
...
According to the analysis, Tau Ceti is surrounded by five planets that weigh between two and six Earth masses and take between 14 and 640 days to orbit the star. The one reported in the habitable zone is a five-Earth-mass planet with a period of 168 days.

For a science fiction fan, discovery of a habitable planet around Tau Ceti would be very significant, as the list of planets around the star in Tau Ceti in fiction indicates.  Since this blog has a Niven and Pournelle theme, I'll quote the entry on the two they created for their fiction.

A Gift from Earth (1968), Known Space novel by Larry Niven. The colony world Plateau in the Tau Ceti system lives by a rigorous code: All crimes are punishable by involuntary organ harvesting, while organ transplants are reserved to the benefit of the aristocracy. A robotic Bussard ramjet (see graphic) arrives from Earth, bearing a gift that will upset the unstable social balance on Plateau.[16] The relative proximity of Tau Ceti to the Earth (with a turnaround point at UV Ceti) is an important plot element in the novel, enabling Plateau to be isolated from the mother planet, and yet still close enough to receive occasional cargoes via ramjet.

Tau Ceti also makes a cameo appearance in The Ethics of Madness, as noted in the Wikipedia entry on Known Space.

Plateau in the Tau Ceti system is Venus-like, with a plateau (called Mount Lookitthat), half the size of California, rising high enough out of the dense atmosphere to be habitable. Inhabitants ("Mountaineers") are divided into two rigid hereditary castes, the "crew" and the "colonists", depending on whether their ancestors piloted the colonizing vessel. The crew are the upper caste, and hold power through their monopoly on organ transplantation and control of the police. The original colonists signed the "Covenant of Planetfall", agreeing that this outcome was just recompense for the labors of the crew during the voyage; that they signed at gunpoint as they were awakened from hibernation is kept secret from later generations, and also that those who refused, died. This repressive system is overthrown in A Gift From Earth, and the former inequality and caste system appears to have disappeared by the time The Ethics of Madness takes place.

Now for a planet that both Niven and Pournelle created.

The Legacy of Heorot (1987), first novel in the Heorot trilogy (1987–1997) by Larry Niven, Steven Barnes, and Jerry Pournelle. Two hundred colonists arrive on the paradise world Avalon (Tau Ceti IV) to found a new community, having made the 100-year journey from Earth in suspended animation. The colonists, all selected for their outstanding physical and mental attributes, make a terrible discovery: Their intelligence and reasoning skill have been damaged in transit, a devolution that will ill serve them in their upcoming struggle with the native grendels for control of their new land.

Colonists to Avalon fighting Grendels.  That doesn't remind me of anything, does it?

Finally, read the rest of the list of fictional inhabitable worlds around Tau Ceti; it's impressive.

The first year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News: Part 5 of several

In fifth place with 361 page views and 7 comments* is First post: Why this blog? posted on March 21, 2011. It's no secret how this entry got to be in the top 10. It's been around the longest, it explains the motivation for this blog to new readers, I've linked to it several times, and, finally, in Google searches for "motie" or "moties" (the second and third most popular search terms for this blog the past two years), the image I used for the first post appears in the first line of the first page of results.




That's a much higher result than for the original source of the image over at Larry Niven's site. Go figure.**

The only odd thing about this post is that it fell out of the ten most viewed list after a couple of months, only to return to the top ten back in December or January. At least I can explain people started reading it again, unlike U.S.-China EcoPartnerships: The CoDominion plans for sustainability. I'm still mystified about how that became popular.

I know I promised to cover at least two posts from now on in the previous entry in this series, but I couldn't figure out how to link a second entry to this one. Besides, as the first post, it deserves to be commemorated by itself. Also, this part of the series is short. I'll make up for it by having a later post look at three at one time.

For the song, I could recycle the one from Happy birthday to Crazy Eddie's Motie News, but it's no longer the blog's birthday. Instead, I present "Video Killed the Radio Star" (lyrics here) which was the first music video on MTV.

Phil Plait on saving Earth from asteroids

Hat/tip to Sheril Kirshenbaum at Culture of Science for the following, which I also posted on Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday on Daily Kos.

TED Talks on YouTube: What's six miles wide and can end civilization in an instant? An asteroid - and there are lots of them out there. With humor and great visuals, Phil Plait enthralls the TEDxBoulder audience with all the ways asteroids can kill, and what we must do to avoid them.

Remember that the theme of this blog is sustainability and collapse with a science fiction slant. What's a better example of a science fiction cause of the collapse of a civilization than an asteroid/comet impact? Better yet, it's something that has shown up twice in Niven's works. Can you say "Lucifer's Hammer" and "Footfall?"

Besides, this is the kind of challenge that, as Phil Plait points out, would be "a blessing in disguise," as it would unite the planet and help develop more advanced space-faring technology. Of course, that presupposes our ability to keep up the level of technology and organization required as a baseline in the first place. With Peak Oil, that might be an issue.

PETA attempts a science-fiction solution to a real-world issue

From Next Media Animation comes this story about PETA filing a lawsuit on behalf of the orcas at Sea World.

Seaworld has long been a family favorite for its spectacular shows. Trained killer whales have been a special draw.

But for members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, what Seaworld is doing is enslaving killer whales.

PETA lawyers are suing Seaworld. They argue the 13th Amendment does not apply solely to humans.

Instead, they recommend that Seaworld replace real killer whales with robots.

But if human laws apply to whales, shouldn't Tilikum be in jail for killing a trainer?

This is straight out of Larry Niven's Known Space. From the uplifted animal page on TVTropes:

Larry Niven's Known Space stories (e.g. World of Ptavvs) have intelligent dolphins that have learned to speak English. They interact with humans as equals; we manufacture artificial limbs and hands for them to use to enable tool-using.

• Actually, the dolphins were always intelligent. It just took humanity a long time to learn to communicate with them. The first thing they do once we do figure it out is, of course, filing a class-action lawsuit against humanity as a species for our whaling practices, something that they were evidently rather angry about (but unable to file complaint) since the get-go.

We truly are living in science-fiction times.

For Narb: Paul Krugman and fake alien invasions

Earlier this week, my best friend Narb* left a pair of his trademarked comments that look silly on the surface but are really quite thought-provoking when examined in depth. Today, I'll be responding to his first remark, a reply to Silly Sustainability Saturday for August 20, 2011. A couple of paragraphs of this weekly feature were devoted to a Huffington Post article "Fighting Global Warming Could Stave Off Alien Invasion: Report," which linked to an article in The Guardian. The gist of both articles was "[r]ising greenhouse emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat." Narb pointed out that the point of the original study was the Aliens are going to destroy us because of Global Warming. I responded that it gets even crazier.

Not only did six times as many Fox News viewers think we should prepare for an alien invasion than research climate change, which I mentioned in the Silly Sustainability post, but the week before, Paul Krugman postulated that preparing for a fake alien invasion would bring us out of recession.

No, I'm not kidding. Here's the video.






The only difference between the Fox News viewers and Paul Krugman is that Dr. Krugman knows the invasion would be a fake.  I'm not so sure about the people who responded to the Fox News poll.

The science fiction site Blastr wrote about it under the headline Nobel Prize-winning economist: We need Watchmen's alien invasion and cast Krugman as Adrian Veidt AKA Ozymandius. The author then posed the question, if Krugman is Veidt, then who is our Rorschach? None of the commenters answered the question in three screens of responses, but one did come up with an appropriate moniker for the strategy, Wag the Dalek. Yes, that's a link to a Krugman blog post; he rather liked the turn of phrase.

Personally, I think that the Daleks would be too nasty a set of aliens. I'd much prefer the intelligent elephant analogues from Footfall, which also happens to be a Niven and Pournelle collaboration. They're just advanced enough to get here, but not so advanced that they are undefeatable. When I first read the book 25 years ago, I thought they were at the exact level for an alien invasion. They'd be a lot better than dealing with the Kzinti!

If you think this post was weird, remember that this blog is about sustainability with a science fiction slant, written from a Detroit perspective. Consequently, it fits right in. You should be asking why there aren't more of them. Second, also remember that truth is stranger than fiction. If you don't believe that, just look at the times we live in.






*I'm not kidding about this, either. I've known Narb for 33 years. It just took me a while to figure that out. After all, on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog unless you post your picture on Facebook a competitor of Flickr's, even your best friend.

First post: Why this blog?

Late yesterday local time (but still today according to the time setting I have on this blog), I wrote the following on my Dreamwidth and LiveJournal accounts:

There are times when I feel like we're all Moties, the aliens in Pournelle and Niven's The Mote in God's Eye. Here's what one of them looks like:



And here's what Wikipedia says about how their civilizations end and begin again:

Each war typically ends in the complete destruction of the current civilization on Mote Prime. However, due to their high birth rates, enough Moties always survive to eventually repopulate the planet. A faster rise to civilization leads to a longer period between Collapses, since productivity increases more quickly than the population. The museums exist to accelerate this process after a collapse. They are located in unpopulated areas to avoid their destruction during the inevitable wars. Once the surviving population is advanced enough to solve the puzzle at the door, they have access to a literal catalogue of civilizations, and the weapons to put them into effect. Population is controlled by disease and injury between collapses and reconstructions, but the cycles have thus far never been stopped completely.

The Cycles of civilization, war, and collapse have apparently been repeating for hundreds of thousands of years. In some cases, Mote Prime was completely sterilized and then repopulated by those living in hollowed-out asteroids within the system. The current asymmetrical form is probably a mutation resulting from nuclear weaponry prior to a collapse.

Presumably, each civilization arises, unlocks the museums, and discovers that unless they can solve a problem that had plagued countless others, they are doomed. Thus, the Moties have become fatalistically resigned to the never-ending Cycles.

When I think of Moties being a metaphor for humans, then I think of myself as a Crazy Eddie. As the passage above concludes, "Only a mythical character called "Crazy Eddie" believes there is a way to change this, and any Motie who comes to believe a solution is possible is labeled as a "Crazy Eddie" and deemed insane." The term is also "a translation of the term the Moties use for any exercise in futility, or any attempt to do, or even think about doing, anything to try to stop the inevitable collapse of their current civilization which is war driven by overpopulation."

Consequently, all my environmental and political activism seems like an exercise in being a "Crazy Eddie." I'm half tempted to start a blog about civilizational collapse (as if there aren't enough of them already) and how to try to stave it off or at least survive it (not enough of those, IMHO), then name it "Crazy Eddie's Motie News." A Google search shows no uses of this term. The field's wide open for me.

Thus, this blog.

The feedback, such as it was, was quite positive. On my Facebook page (no, I'm not linking to it; I don't want to make life any easier for my stalkers than it already is), one of my treehugger friends wrote, "Do it. I have a feeling this would be a good thing for you." On my Livejournal, one person said that as long as I didn't monetize my blog, I'd be OK. I have no intention of doing such a thing, as Niven and Pournelle's lawyers would probably crush me for copyright infringement. Another gave some suggestions.

"First thing is to eat the clowns who spend money on bombs not books, with organic BBQ sauce of course.

Saving civilization is about preventing libraries falling into ruin while we build sports arenas and military bases.

Oh, and using climate change deniers as building material for flood prevention levies."

Actually, saving the libraries might strike some people as frivolous, but remember that the way the humans in the book discovered the truth about moties was by stumbling into a museum designed to speed the rise of Motie civilization after the next collapse.  Another example involves Canticle for Leibowitz, the plot of which revolves around a monastery that includes a library the mission of which is to help revive civilization after its collapse.  So, it's not as stupid an idea as it seems.  Thanks to that suggestion, you can expect posts on saving cultural institutions during collapse, not just for how to keep yourself fed and safe.

You should also expect to read posts about politics.  One of the common themes of this blog will be explaining how global, national, and local events and politics are about various factions fighting to maintain their shares of a shrinking pie--one they openly deny is shrinking.  Once you recognize that's what's going on, a lot of mystifying events become much more understandable.

I'll also post reviews of other blogs about societal collapse and what to do about it.  There are plenty of them out there, and they all deserve a good meta look.  The ones who receive favorable reviews, or that demonstrate that they are worth paying attention to even if they are bad, will end up on my blogroll.  The first one up is likely to be Clusterfuck Nation.  I have lots of opinions about James Howard Kunstler, and I now have a forum to post them.  Besides, he updates in a few hours.  How convenient! /Church Lady

Finally, expect digressions about post-apocalyptic science fiction.  After all, this is a blog named after a legendary character from a legendary science fiction novel!