Considerations of Time Travel in Media

 

There was a problem with the pre-order entry for A New World. That's fixed now.

Go here, for pre-order. Now for today's post.

To say that I’m not a fan of time travel stories is to understate the issue.

 

This is not to say that I don’t enjoy a good romp at time’s expense. Many films that use time travel can be fun. (I’m looking at you, Back to the Future.) Books, too.

 

But often time travel is essentially an excuse for lazy writing or lack of imagination. (Now, I’m looking at you, Star Trek.)

 

Science fiction has so many avenues and opportunities for literary exploration that to me time travel is usually superfluous.

 

All fiction is, in some way, about the time, place, and idiosyncrasies of the author. After all, the author has a point to make or the effort of making the work would not have been written. The point might be as crass as “I want to make a lot of money”—in which case, I suggest the author go out and become an accountant. I’ve been writing for decades and have yet to see much money. Or, the point might be “isn’t this scientific fact/theory/locale/time of interest really neat? Let’s examine it.”

 

When it comes to time travel, the point made most often has to do with using the locale to target some interesting idiosyncrasy of the present. There’s a misalignment with the states that were members of the Confederacy and the other states. Hence, what if the South had access to modern weapons during the Civil War? (The Guns of the South, Harry Turtledove.) Christian religion is on the rise. What if we could go back and witness the life and crucifixion of Jesus? (Behold the Man, Michael Moorcock.)

 

Novels like this are examinations of the underlying subject matter. Time travel is a narrative convenience, allowing modern sensibilities to be juxtaposed against the period under scrutiny.

 

However, many time travel stories involve thwarting the past or thwarting the future (The Terminator movies, Back to the Future, every Star Trek time travel story ever made.) In these stories, there is a contrived crisis that can only be solved by dealing with time traveling. While I can enjoy some of these, I don’t think much of them. It’s like eating peeps. After the first time, you might regret it or chalk it up to a learning experience. About the fifth time you’re muttering kill me to yourself.

 

These days, time travel stories have a huge barrier of entry for me.

 

That said, here are a few films and books where time travel is actually used in an interesting fashion. Part of the fun—sometimes all of the fun—of time travel fiction is the surprise the author/filmmaker gives you. Consequently, I’m not going to give much away.

 

Primer: There are basically two kinds of time travel stories: Stories where the past can be changed and stories where the past cannot be changed. Primer is of the former category—sort of. Primer’s conceit are two engineers that discover a means by which an individual in the time field goes back in time for the duration of exposure. The time machine, the “box”, is entered, the field is turned on, the user waits in the box a specified period of time and then turns off the field and exits at some point in the past. This means the past can be modified, occupied by different representations of the same person simultaneously, etc. Time can’t be broken—in the sense of the universe be destroyed or some such—but the individual lives of people can be severely damaged. Which is what this film is about.

 

Frequency: This film takes the same idea of a malleable past but locks it down. In this story, Detective John Sullivan discovers a way to talk to his dead father (Frank Sullivan) twenty years ago via a ham radio. (Just let that go.) In this kind of story, no physical objects can transit to the past. Objects can travel to the future normally. But information can be transmitted freely between present and past. John manages to tell his father how to avoid his oncoming death. Thus, he suddenly has a father again. However, there are consequences.

 

12 Monkeys: The past is not malleable in 12 Monkeys. Humans can go physically to the past but whatever things they do there are already accounted for. The “present” of 12 Monkeys is in our future where most of humanity lives underground in fear of a virus that has killed most of humanity. Scientists keep trying to determine how to cure the pandemic. Leftover messages and scraps of knowledge is all they have. Eventually, they manage to send James Cole to the past to uncover what these messages mean. But the cost to him is high.

 

Predestination: This film is based on Heinlein’s story, All You Zombies, which I think is probably the best time travel short story ever written. Essentially, this is a story about a paradox from the paradox’s point of view. I think the film is better if you read the story first, but it still stands on its own.

 

The Man Who Folded Himself: This novel runs the whole idea of time travel, malleable or otherwise, until the bolts fall off. TMWFH is a lovely book about Daniel, a not so lovely man who makes many, many mistakes with power he probably should not have had. The thing that is so downright good about this novel is that it is absolutely unflinching about consequences—even when Daniel is trying very hard to avoid those consequences. The novel was nominated for both a Hugo and Nebula. I think it should have won.

 

Announcement: A New World

 I have a new novella, A New World, coming out in June:

When Columbus discovers the New World, he finds it populated by intelligent dinosaurs.

 

The expedition does not go as expected.

 

 

 

Pre-orders are available here.

 

To see more, and to see the other works, go to www.stevenpopkes.com.

Cheese Ends, 2022-05-09

Another edition of Cheese Ends.

 

Get your bootleg provolone and swiss right here.

 

DARPA seeking nuclear thermal rocket proposals

 

DARPA, the Defense Agency that brought you the internet years ago, is asking for proposals to demonstrate a thermal rocket in space.

 

This is potentially big news.

 

Chemical rockets produce thrust by hot gases that are created via combustion. Nuclear thermal rockets do something similar in that they take a gas and run it over a nuclear pile and heat it up enormously. The expansion forces it out the back end of the rocket.  But NTRs are 2-5 times as efficient as chemical means.

 

Of course, none of them are as efficient as ion thrusters where the thrust gas is forced out via a magnetic field. Why not use them instead? The power requirements are enormous. So, until that happy time we can a fusion power plant into space, chemical and nuclear rockets are the only game in town. Of course, if we had a fusion power plant we could shoot into space, we could use a Direct Fusion Drive . DFDs probably rate their own column.

 

The US actually had an NTR program called the NERVA. It was quite successful in achieving its goals but it was cut between atomic nervousness and expense. DARPA getting into the game could be very interesting.

 

Anti-Geriatric Poop Transplants

 

A study in Microbiome describes what absolutely no one foresaw: fecal transplants from young to elderly mice reversed some age related disorders.

 

This is pretty exciting, too.

 

The researchers were trying to tease out the role of gut microbes in aging. This association has been known for a bit but until now (to my knowledge, anyway) nobody has tried this experiment.

 

If I were so inclined, the SF story almost writes itself. You could go Hunger Games on this where aging power mad tyrants scour the youth for their intestinal flora. Or, even go economic: young donor shops his product around to find the right bidder. The possibilities are endless.

 

Machine Learning used to find plastic recycling solutions

Plastic is hard to recycle. It’s hard to break down. It’s hard to reuse. Often, it’s difficult to dissolve it sufficiently to actually use it to make new plastic. Instead, the material is reshaped and used for inferior purposes—downcycling—and those products are often a dead end as well.

 

Biological systems recycle most things pretty readily using enzymes: chemicals that lower the required energy and bring within the temperature, pressure, and energy tolerances of living systems. We don’t break sugars down by heating them up and combusting them. We use enzymes to break them down at room temperature and pressure. Not having a couple of million years to figure out these new fangled plastic polymers, living organisms haven’t managed to crack them. Which is why our plastic milk cartons remain plastic in landfills instead of being eaten by bacteria.

 

The researchers in this study used a machine learning mechanism to find a set of enzymes that could quickly and efficiently take polymerized plastic and turn it back into usable raw material—what they call virgin plastic. Then, they introduced mutations into bacteria to use these hydrolases.

 

At least, that’s what I think they did. Much of the article is behind a paywall. So, I’m not sure if they induced a living organism to produce the enzyme or produced the enzyme themselves. But they were able to almost entirely degrade a PET water bottle in a week. Since these same water bottles circulate in the Pacific Ocean for years, that’s a win.

 

Cosmological Principle Failing

The article calls this “controversial” but I’m not so sure. Sabine Hossenfelder talked about this on her YouTube channel a while back. How controversial is it when a reputable scientist takes it to task on YouTube?

 

The Cosmological Principle is the presumption that on the largest scale the universe is pretty much the same on average. A corollary of this is the presumption that scientific principles and models should function the same regardless of locale. Campbell talked about this in one of his lectures when he mentioned the Apollo project. The depth of dust to be found on the Moon could not be determined without testing it. Yet, the amount of energy and thrust required was known before we got there. Differences across the universe must be explained in some way. The simplest approach is to say everywhere is the same. If everywhere is the same, then the same physical laws must apply.

 

Yet, there have been a number of observations that suggest the universe is decidedly not uniform on the largest scales. There are significant mass and energy imbalances in one direction over another.

 

There are some interesting problems that arise in the theories of the origin of the universe if the Cosmological Principle fails. Why isn’t the universe uniform? What would cause it? Theories abound.

 

The Freezing Point of Extraterrestrial Oceans

There are at least two ice moons in our solar system that are thought to have internal oceans: Enceladus and Europa. In addition, Callisto and Ganymede might have oceans but buried under rock. All four are possible candidates for life if the oceans are liquid, not too chemically salty, and stable.

 

(Lately, I’ve been seeing Titan on the list of possible moons with life but I don’t see it. Life in liquid methane seas where the temperature hovers around -179C? You can use the word extremophile until you’re blue in the face but nothing on earth remotely compares to it. Antarctica is a tropical beach by comparison. There might be life there but it’s not going to resemble earth life in the slightest.)

 

These experiments have been trying to figure out the limits to where water will remain liquid. The chemical constraints and stability are a different matter and require further research.

 

Marriage as an Economic Mechanism

This one came across my desk describing the operations of marriage forms within different economic mechanism. Unlike SF, this article used real marriage systems: the polygamous Mosuo people in China. This is not your standard one man, many women model that we’ve seen before. Instead, this is referred to as a “walking marriage” where men have no parental or economic responsibility whatsoever. Property is owned solely by the women.

 

It also described the polyandrous Jat people in Uttar Pradesh, where brothers share the same wife. This was presented as, essentially, a tax dodge. If three brothers married three women, there would be tax on three households. But of three brothers marry a single woman, there is only one household.

 

Of course, all of this denies the role of love. Love would come into this system as a disaster—much like the whole courtly love problem in the arranged marriages of the European nobility. But it comes, just the same.

 

Interesting article.

 

That’s it for now.