The Big Idea

I've built a new story world and I'm inviting other authors to come explore it with me. Let me first describe the world a bit. On the description of my Medieval Mars novella, I wrote: "A future terraformed Mars that has fallen into technological collapse. Knights in armor, called "riders," patrol a circuit for pilgrims bound for the Gran Templo Bautista of Chryse Planitia, on a planet divided into feudal governments, where real dragons prowl the lowlands. When the heretic King of Olympus closes the door to the pilgrimage, the outnumbered riders of Ascraeus fight a literal uphill battle into his kingdom, one that marks Sir Evan's life with love and loss in a way he will never forget..." To add more detail to what I said above, at some future point I'm imagining that human beings deliberately change Mars to make it inhabitable. But then there comes a technological collapse after that, followed by a form of feudalism, as already alluded to. The ...

Shields, forcefields, and screens of various kinds adorn much of science fiction that deals with interstellar travel. There's a literary reason why this is so. As per the linked  New Scientist Article , while there are on average only 2 hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter in the vacuum of space (Earth's atmosphere at sea level is 15 billion billion times as dense), a ship going near-light speed would slam into so many hydrogen atoms that the effect would be like standing directly in front of the business end of the Large Hadron Collider. At a high percentage of the speed of light, a human being would receive a lethal dose of radiation in far less than a second. The way stories have dealt with this phenomenon for the most part is to imagine some future design using a force, unknown to today's physics that conveniently blocks all that pesky radiation. In a future post I'll talk about what I think the best candidate for such a design would be, but for now let's say t...

Star Trek series past the original have famously featured "replicators," machines that through technology linked to transporters could create any substance out of pure energy. In my Troubles with Transporters  bit on this blog I complained that if transporter technology really were able to work, it would have logical implications that are ignored in Star Trek, like being able to copy people at will. Not to mention there being serious issues with the realism of any transporter technology in the first place due to the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle--it is impossible under the current understanding of physics to know where all the particles of your body or an object to be assembled really are, which would make it impossible to reassemble them with total accuracy... But another approach to "replicators" is soon to enter service. A  3d printer is to fly in space  on the International Space Station, as referenced in the linked article (by the way, I was steered to th...

In an earlier post I entitled  An Unexpected Artificial Intelligence Revolution-  I speculated on the possibility of advanced artificial intelligences keeping human beings around essentially as house pets. Well, if we're going to speculate along those lines, what if the same artificial intelligences deliberately bred human beings to produce specific traits that especially distinguish them, much like human beings have bred the first wolf-like dogs into creatures as small as teacup chihuahuas to as large as Saint Bernards, in the act of breeding adding spots or stripes or rings, hair of different length and colors, breeding completely different face and body shapes and wildly differing behaviors. Presume for the sake of this idea that the same thing could be done with human beings--an argument could be made that humans already self-select for certain traits, which is perhaps why "natural" human diversity is quite large. Thinking we've already bred ourselves into a w...

Science fiction has a tendency to regard telepathy as a realistic mental ability that other species may have or humans may learn to develop in the future. This post lays out some fresh ways to write about telepathy based on how it might actually work. Note the faith some science fiction seems to have in the future reality of mind reading, even though there is no clear theory on how it would work. I suppose being in physical contact with someone and picking up the energy from the electrical patterns of their mind, their brain waves, could form a theory of sorts that supports telepathy. However, note that brain waves give an overall impression of a mind and do not at all reveal individual thoughts. In fact, they scarcely reveal individual emotions. They show the difference between a healthy and unhealthy brain and whether or nor someone is agitated, deep in sleep, drowsy, or normally alert. (It might be interesting to create a story where someone has the natural ability to read s...

Imagine a particular set of dragons who dwell in the vacuum of outer space. They'd have natural carbon in their body structures, like a natural version of carbon nanotubes. This would make them strong for large size, with wings--but most of their wings would be very thin, thinner than paper. For flight they could use light pressure but the wings required are so massive to beyond the scale of a living thing most likely, However, they could get some assistance out of light pressure. I'd make their primary means of getting energy generating natural electricity by means of aborbing solar energy in a photoelectric effect --which could be enhanced by electricity generated by temperature differences between hot and cold areas (a  thermoelectric effect ). The dragons would use this electricity to heat reactive material in their gut into a natural version of a plasma drive (as well as power their muscles and brains and such). So the dragons would not need to breathe. In fact, they ...

Imagining the "Image of the Beast" from the book of Revelation is an AI is not new to me. Thinking that such an image could be an Artificial Intelligence is as least as old as the 1981 Christian apocalyptic film with that title  (which I don't consider a quality production, but it does exist). And I've also found a few Evangelical Christian sites who repeat the same idea (which I won't reference here) and even link it with the notion of technological singularity . However, I do have what may be prove to be some distinctive twists on the notion. First off, while I don't usually quote Scripture on this blog, I'm going to make an exception. Let's examine the Bible reference to "the image of the beast" itself. Revelation 13:14-16 (NKJV): "And he deceives those who dwell on the earth by those signs which he is granted to do in the sight of the beast, telling those who dwell on the earth to make an image to the beast who was wounded by the...