Augeries of Westworld Innocence

Nebuchadnezzar, William Blake (c. 1805)

We're just now getting around to finishing Westworld Season 2 (it's been a pretty busy summer). One striking scene for me in this season of the show was a simple little scene where the character of Ford (Anthony Hopkins) is reintroduced, this time as a digital representation of himself within the control unit of Bernard (Jeffrey Wright). Not only is this a scene where Ford reveals rather eloquently that Westworld itself was an attempt to digitalize human consciousness and reach immortality as a species, but it's prefaced by Ford reciting these poignant four lines from Augeries of Innocence, by William Blake:

        To see a world in a grain of sand
        And a heaven in a wild flower,
        Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
        And eternity in an hour.

Here's the scene itself in video:

This has long been one of my favorite lines from poetry, but the episode forced me to think a little more about the poem and how apt it is to the concepts considered in the show. Augeries of Innocence presents good and evil, right and wrong, etc. in light of natural and supernatural understandings of Blake's time. In many ways, the ideas touched upon in Westworld make us question good and evil and right and wrong when it comes to our development of modern technology (especially technology that not only has the potential to radically change who and what we are, but even to utterly destroy us). The episode has definitely had me thinking about this poem. Here's the entire poem, for your reading pleasure:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand 
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour
A Robin Red breast in a Cage 
Puts all Heaven in a Rage 
A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons 
Shudders Hell thr' all its regions 
A dog starvd at his Masters Gate 
Predicts the ruin of the State 
A Horse misusd upon the Road 
Calls to Heaven for Human blood 
Each outcry of the hunted Hare 
A fibre from the Brain does tear 
A Skylark wounded in the wing 
A Cherubim does cease to sing 
The Game Cock clipd & armd for fight 
Does the Rising Sun affright 
Every Wolfs & Lions howl 
Raises from Hell a Human Soul 
The wild deer, wandring here & there 
Keeps the Human Soul from Care 
The Lamb misusd breeds Public Strife 
And yet forgives the Butchers knife 
The Bat that flits at close of Eve 
Has left the Brain that wont Believe
The Owl that calls upon the Night 
Speaks the Unbelievers fright
He who shall hurt the little Wren 
Shall never be belovd by Men 
He who the Ox to wrath has movd 
Shall never be by Woman lovd
The wanton Boy that kills the Fly 
Shall feel the Spiders enmity 
He who torments the Chafers Sprite 
Weaves a Bower in endless Night 
The Catterpiller on the Leaf 
Repeats to thee thy Mothers grief 
Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly 
For the Last Judgment draweth nigh 
He who shall train the Horse to War 
Shall never pass the Polar Bar 
The Beggars Dog & Widows Cat 
Feed them & thou wilt grow fat 
The Gnat that sings his Summers Song 
Poison gets from Slanders tongue 
The poison of the Snake & Newt 
Is the sweat of Envys Foot 
The poison of the Honey Bee 
Is the Artists Jealousy
The Princes Robes & Beggars Rags 
Are Toadstools on the Misers Bags 
A Truth thats told with bad intent 
Beats all the Lies you can invent 
It is right it should be so 
Man was made for Joy & Woe 
And when this we rightly know 
Thro the World we safely go 
Joy & Woe are woven fine 
A Clothing for the soul divine 
Under every grief & pine 
Runs a joy with silken twine 
The Babe is more than swadling Bands
Throughout all these Human Lands 
Tools were made & Born were hands 
Every Farmer Understands
Every Tear from Every Eye 
Becomes a Babe in Eternity 
This is caught by Females bright 
And returnd to its own delight 
The Bleat the Bark Bellow & Roar 
Are Waves that Beat on Heavens Shore 
The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath 
Writes Revenge in realms of Death 
The Beggars Rags fluttering in Air
Does to Rags the Heavens tear 
The Soldier armd with Sword & Gun 
Palsied strikes the Summers Sun
The poor Mans Farthing is worth more 
Than all the Gold on Africs Shore
One Mite wrung from the Labrers hands 
Shall buy & sell the Misers Lands 
Or if protected from on high 
Does that whole Nation sell & buy 
He who mocks the Infants Faith 
Shall be mockd in Age & Death 
He who shall teach the Child to Doubt 
The rotting Grave shall neer get out 
He who respects the Infants faith 
Triumphs over Hell & Death 
The Childs Toys & the Old Mans Reasons 
Are the Fruits of the Two seasons 
The Questioner who sits so sly 
Shall never know how to Reply 
He who replies to words of Doubt 
Doth put the Light of Knowledge out 
The Strongest Poison ever known 
Came from Caesars Laurel Crown 
Nought can Deform the Human Race 
Like to the Armours iron brace 
When Gold & Gems adorn the Plow 
To peaceful Arts shall Envy Bow 
A Riddle or the Crickets Cry 
Is to Doubt a fit Reply 
The Emmets Inch & Eagles Mile 
Make Lame Philosophy to smile 
He who Doubts from what he sees 
Will neer Believe do what you Please 
If the Sun & Moon should Doubt 
Theyd immediately Go out 
To be in a Passion you Good may Do 
But no Good if a Passion is in you 
The Whore & Gambler by the State 
Licencd build that Nations Fate 
The Harlots cry from Street to Street 
Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet 
The Winners Shout the Losers Curse 
Dance before dead Englands Hearse 
Every Night & every Morn 
Some to Misery are Born 
Every Morn and every Night 
Some are Born to sweet delight 
Some are Born to sweet delight 
Some are Born to Endless Night 
We are led to Believe a Lie 
When we see not Thro the Eye 
Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night 
When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light 
God Appears & God is Light 
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night 
But does a Human Form Display 
To those who Dwell in Realms of day

Groove like the sci-fi nerd you are with these sci-fi and ambient sound videos

Gates to Elysium, by Christian Hecker

Getting lost in layers of thought about what else there may be is one of the fun parts of science fiction!

As I've been getting my Ph.D. dissertation closer and closer to being finished, I've been slowly meandering through watching sci-fi (like Star Trek Voyager), listening to music (like metal instrumental and electronic groove music), and finding ambient sounds to groove with in the background while I write. I recently shared a post with a video that had 10 hours of ambient noise mixed with the sounds of an Arctic icebreaker. I've played that video as background a few times now while writing and it's been awesome, but now I've found something else that is definitely pretty groovy.

The Youtube channel for crysknife007, who also goes by Cheesy Nirvosa at Bandcamp, is full of ambient music tracks that are awesome for background noise. But, what's even better, he's put together a whole bunch of tracks that feature ambient sounds from science fiction television shows and movies! Like this one, which features 24 hours (yup, one full day) of the ambient sounds of the starship Enterprise-D from The Next Generation: 

Or, this one, with 12 hours of the engine sounds of the starship Serenity from Firefly:

These ambient sound videos are great for background noise for focusing on work or even for just relaxing. Also, I've found that playing some of these along with some soft background music is really helpful in getting my mind into the writing zone. 

Let's say that living on a spaceship isn't exactly your thing, well why not then enjoy the sounds of a police call booth that's both a spaceship and timeship and a living being, with this video of ambient sounds from the TARDIS from Dr. Who:

It's definitely worth taking a look at the stuff over on crysknife007's page. He's got a bundle of tracks with background ambient sounds from various sci-fi shows and movies, but also a lot more. For instance, he's got some tracks featuring the sonified data from the EM fields collected by our spacecraft around Europa as well as from the Voyager spacecraft. Here's one more that's pretty freaking cool:

If you're a sci-fi nerd like me then you're probably already digging it, but just for a little more enticement, check out crysknife007's biography of himself from Bandcamp:

Crysknife007 specializes in extended ambient space and spaceship sounds. He also enjoys working with other scifi soundscapes.

Also known as Cheesy Nirvosa, his homefried beats break from traditional cycles and regularity. The sound aims more for confusion than melody, often favoring some that sounds particularly out of place than a tune which syncopates expectedly. 

Red Dwarf Lego

Red Dwarf is one of my favorite television shows. If you haven't seen it, then what the smeg are you doing with your life?! Get on it! It has a pretty decent cult following. Enough so that it led one fan, Leigh Hadfield, to build a Red Dwarf Lego set to match the show! You can find a bunch more pictures of the set at the British Comedy Guide. The set has been submitted to Lego Ideas. 

Adam - a short film created with Unity

Get ready to trip out. 

Here's a fantastic short film called Adam that was produced using the Unity gaming engine. I don't know when this might become a real game, but I think they could just take my money now...

The beginning of the film reminds me of the beginning of the film Pandorum, where a character is awakening from some kind of dormancy or sleep and having a difficult time figuring out where they are. Adam, whom we are led to believe is the mechanical being we see at the beginning of the film, appears to just be discovering that he/she/it is no longer a human being, but rather has been turned into a robot. We see Adam stumble out of the room where he awoke (like a baby emerging from a womb), only to discover more beings just like himself. We see a large industrial complex that Adam and the others are walking away from as well as humans who appear to be herding them.  We then see the two characters who we imagine Adam was dreaming of (or envisioning) at the very beginning of the film. They appear well-armed, but also worn from their travels. They also appear to be robotic beings themselves. As these characters approach, warning klaxons go off and the humans flee (what are they afraid of?). The two characters approach, playing Chopin's Nocturne in E-flat major Op.9 nr.2, and then the larger of the two interacts with the computers within Adam and the other mechanical beings. What does he do there? Whatever he does inspires Adam and the others to follow.

Here's some info from the designers on the world of Adam:

The film is set in a future where human society is transformed by harsh biological realities and civilization has shrunk to a few scattered, encapsulated communities clinging to the memory of greatness. Adam, as our main character, was the starting point of our visual design process. He was designed to provide a glimpse into the complex backstory of the world, by revealing himself as a human prisoner whose consciousness has been trapped in a cheap mechanical body.

You can find a lot more info about the design of the film and the characters (for instance, we learn that the two approaching characters are named Sebastian and Lu) on the blogs at Unity.

The Immunity Syndrome

My friend recently completed watching all of the episodes and films of Star Trek made thus far. Inspired by her, I've decided to go back and re-watch all of them myself. I'm now on the second season of The Original Series of Star Trek. I just watched the episode called "The Immunity Syndrome". In this episode, the crew of the Enterprise finds their ship and their bodies losing energy due to a gigantic, single-celled space creature. The single-celled organism looks very much like an amoeba, but one that is 11,000 miles long by 3,000 miles wide (that'd be one very large cell!). 

I love sci-fi stories that consider what other types of life could exist. A single-celled organism that is larger than North America may seem far fetched, but could it be possible that life at some point could evolve to form organisms so large? Even though this episode treats this organism as a giant cell (Spock even announces that it's composed mostly of protoplasm), maybe there could be organisms that are gigantic, contiguous structures as large or even larger than planets. Perhaps they have their own biomes composed of multitudes of other organisms inside of them, or perhaps they could be composed of various connected biological organs and tissues. Would such organisms need to eat worlds to live? Would they be able to develop some way to propel themselves through space? I guess we really wouldn't know if this is possible, until we ourselves step out amongst the stars and take a look to see if there are other forms of life out there.

The Modular Body

Those who know me certainly also know that I'm a sucker for sci-fi and horror films that consider what the futures of biotechnology and genetics may bring. Especially when we consider the flawed or even non-existent educations our citizens are receiving in ethics. We're building a future where tinkering with biology will become too easy, while not enough people will question the morality of those tinkerings before they're conducted.

Splice (2012)

Films like eXistenZ and Splice are definitely in this realm. The former considers the future of gaming and our interactions with the worlds we create through our technology, while the latter film considers what might happen in organismal biotechnology research when we're driven by our desires for success to the point of losing our morality. In eXistenZ, we're brought to wonder if we may be able to biologically develop gaming systems that can interact with our minds to put us into virtual worlds. While Splice gives us two young scientists on the cutting edge of medical biotech in developing new model organisms; these two young scientists jeopardize their careers when they create an organism that includes human DNA (and they create one awesome organism).

Now, Floris Kaayk is working on something a bit startling and intriguing that might make us wonder what the future of biotech holds. Kaayk recently came to some internet fame after creating an online "media art project" called Human Birdwing, which included a video of a man flying with artificial wings. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't realize that the video was not real and consider it more of a hoax than art.

Human Birdwing (by Floris Kaayk)

Kaayk's newest media art adventure is something called The Modular Body, and it's pretty trippy. As reported in DesignColumn: "Developments in the field of 3D-printed organs inspired Kaayk to think about a future in which our body parts could be divided into separate modules. Because the body would be made up of small blocks, it would be easy to alter its composition. We would be able to change certain modules in our bodies simply by plugging them in. For sporting activities you could plug in stronger limbs, while at night you would need only your brain, lung and heart modules" Sounds promising, but also potentially terrifying. For instance, in this video, a "scientist" is unveiling to the world the modular organism Oscar:

It's too bad this one isn't being turned into a full film, but it's pretty cool to see Kaayk turning this into a media art project. I'm sure a bunch of people will take this seriously as well, but maybe we're at a time where this seems believable enough given the current state of our world.
The very potential for little Oscar and other such modular beings could be the stuff of nightmares. Or, maybe, Kaayk's vision need not be so terrible. Maybe the development of such modular bodies really could change the nature of the human form. Might we one day have our brains in one module, while all of the other modules of our bodies could be moved around, or some things added or removed? Can you imagine meeting someone with 10 pairs of legs who walks like a centipede? Could we create limbs that allow us to walk along walls like spiders? I can think of so many possibilities for such modular forms, some amazing and some most terrible. What do you think?

10 Star Wars Movie Mistakes You Missed - from Screen Rant

Star Wars: The Force Awakens has brought the Star Wars Universe back into public awareness (especially since Disney has been throwing the Star Wars brand on just about everything). Surely, there will be plenty of dialogue about the strengths and weaknesses of newest installment in Star Wars films for years to come, but for those of us who are still die hard fans of the original series (that's episodes 4, 5, and 6, naturally) we've pretty much figured out all there is to know with regard to those films. For instance, in the following video Screen Rant breaks down 10 of the lesser discussed mistakes in the original series films. How many of these did you already know about?

"Dune - Leto II, Transformation" - artwork by Andrew Ryan

Here's a piece of beautiful artwork by Andrew Ryan (username AndrewRyanArt at Deviant Art). This illustration shows the transformation of Leto Atreides II, the son of Paul Atreides and the God Emperor of Dune within the Dune Universe. In this fictional world, Leto II transforms from prescient human to sandworm. Ryan's artwork showing part of this transformation is a bit different than what I figured when reading the original novels (I saw the change more as a mottling of the skin in scales than in whisps that look like tribal tattoos). Nonetheless, this is still a beautiful piece of Dune artwork.

"Historians exercise great power, and some of them know it.
They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well."

      -Leto II, His Voice, from Dar-es-Balat (Frank Herbert)

Star Wars a cappella by Jimmy Fallon, The Roots, and some "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" cast members!

Star Wars a capella, from The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon

Certainly, most of us from all of geekdom are super stoked for Star Wars: The Force Awakens (I can see 8 year old me playing with Legos I had cut and shaped to resemble Star Wars characters, playing Star Wars nintendo games, and dreaming of what more might come from the Star Wars Universe). Well, as if we didn't need another reason to get excited about this film, Jimmy Fallon and The Roots brought some of the cast members of the upcoming film onto The Tonight Show and put together this awesome a capella Star Wars medley. It's going to be an awesome weekend!

May the force be with you, always.

There is no sound in space (or is there?)

(You can pickup some threads with this picture here)

In space, no one can hear you scream! That's what the tagline from the film Alien taught a generation of folks. Well, at least it taught some part of a generation. Well, maybe it only slightly hinted at an idea for a minimal fraction of some part of a generation. Or something like that. 

Too many times we've gone to the movies to see yet another sci-fi adventure with spaceships blasting each other with phasers and lasers and things that go "boom", all making lots of noises that some sound technicians likely spent hours in a studio putting together. And, most of the time it seems, these films get space completely wrong. 

Humans cannot hear in the vacuum of space. We can't. Since sound waves need a medium through which to travel and space generally offers nothing of the sort, there will be no propagation of sound from space battles, Star Destroyers traveling past you, or your fellow astronaut screaming from inside their space suit as they drift away from the ship after forgetting to attach their tether (unless, of course, they're screaming into their radio communication system).

Check out this vid from Coma Niddy at Sci Code on Space Myths

Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and more: the sounds of the spaceships and space battles and other spacey stuff in most of our television and films seem to show an utter lack of understanding on the part of the populace general. Even if filmmakers know that there shouldn't be sounds in space, it seems like most of them pander to the ignorance of the people by adding sounds to space. There are some who get it right, though. The cult sensation Firefly was well-known for presenting the lack of sound waves in space. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gravity, and a few others also present the silence of space to the audience.

But hold on now, you might be thinking. Slow your roll, Cosmo Boy. Perhaps you've heard that NASA has recordings of some sounds from space. So what's up with that?

Just because sound waves don't generally propagate through space doesn't mean there's nothing for us to hear out there. For instance, several spacecraft (including the Voyager, Injun, and Hawkeye spacecraft) have had instruments capable of detecting the interactions of various particles with the ionospheres and magnetospheres of planets as well as the solar wind. The electromagnetic interactions spread over a large range of vibrations, but a lot of them are in the 20-20,000 Hz range in which we humans hear. NASA has released lots of these sound data sets online, including files primed for ringtones and notification sounds. Here's a video compilation of some of these sounds from our solar system (definitely awesome!):



Pretty cool, huh?!

Well, guess what? There's more.

As if listening to the interactions of the planets with the space environment weren't awesome enough, we can also take data from many our observations of the universe and convert those data into sound files. This is done through a process called sonification. For instance, we can take the Kepler light curves of stars and convert those light curves into sounds, allowing us to listen to the data. We can listen to the variations in the stars and we can even listen to the dips in the light curves as exoplanets transit in front of the stars. 

Sounds that are produced in this way aren't anything you would naturally hear, but they're still pretty awesome. For instance, this video presents a chorus of sounds produced through the sonification of light curves:



That's some eerie stuff. We can use sonification to convert all kinds of data into sounds, but listening to the processes occurring so far away in some way seems haunting and yet inspiring. Pod Academy recorded an episode called The Sounds of Space back in 2012 which can give you a fuller description of some of the cool stuff that what we can listen to from our observations of space. It's definitely worth a listen.

So even though no one can hear you scream in space, and even though all those spaceships going "pew pew pew" with their lasers and phasers and such in science fiction movies is a bunch of silliness (even if it does sound cool), there are some awesome things that we can really hear from our observations of space, either actual interactions of matter that cause vibrations in our hearing range or from data that we've converted to sounds. 

If you'd like to hear some more, I have another post to accompany this one that includes several embedded videos with the sounds from some of the worlds of our solar system.

(Image from PRX)

The Sounds of the Planets

Below are some awesome videos that have sounds recorded from various spacecraft that let us listen to some of the interactions of matter and energy in our solar system. You can find these audio files and more from NASA's website for space sounds.

Earth

Jupiter

Io

Saturn

Uranus

Neptune

Why aren't the rest of us living in space yet?

Space art from NASA made in the 1970s (find more here)

We've read and seen stories and films for decades now that suggest a future where humans will live in space. From colonizing other planets to traveling through interstellar space, many people have dreamed of a human future beyond Earth. So why hasn't it happened yet? 

After sending twelve men to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s and supporting ventures of government organizations to send astronauts into low Earth orbit (LEO) since that time, we still don't live in a world where the rest of us can easily get into space. Of course, a large part of the argument for why this hasn't happened comes down to economics and initiative, but there are also many who would argue that we're not yet ready for it. Some may say that we need to figure out how to be better citizens of the Earth before we try to be citizens of space. 

That may seem like a flawed argument to space exploration advocates, but it's an argument that I've heard many times. I'm going to start working on another article considering what it will take to advance our human future in space, but I'd like some community input before I do that. Comment on this post or hit me up on Twitter or Facebook with your ideas about whether or not we should venture into space and why. Also, I'd like to know the reasons people suspect for why the past dreams of our future in space have not yet come to fruition. Please, tell me:

Why aren't the rest of us living in space yet?

Book Review: The Science of Avatar

I just finished reading The Science of Avatar by British scientist and science-fiction author Stephen Baxter. It was a most excellent read and definitely a book worth talking about.

Avatar

The film Avatar blew the socks off audiences worldwide back in 2009. Some people were even noted to have become depressed over not being able to personally experience the world that the film created. You've probably seen Avatar. If not, go watch it. You'll be happy you did, but here's a brief overview anyway:

Quick Summary: Avatar is a story about an ex-marine who travels to a world called Pandora to take control of an avatar, a genetically engineered organism that can be linked to a human "driver's" mind, so that he can interface with the indigenous, intelligent alien species (on whom the avatar is mostly based; though there are human components as well). This indigenous species are a humanoid group who call themselves the Na'vi (they are very reminiscent of various ancient Native American tribes). The ex-marine, Jake Sully, not only interfaces the Na'vi, but befriends (and eventually falls in love) with one of them. The conflict of the story is developed through the exploitation of Pandora's resources and disregard for the Na'vi and other wildlife by a company called RDA (Resources Development Administration) and their militarized force of employees (similar to our modern Private Military Contractors). The story develops as Jake Sully sides with the Na'vi in a battle against RDA and their "offense" forces. This is just a brief review of the story. If you haven't seen the film, go watch it. If you haven't seen it in a while, go watch it. I'll be here.

Seen it? Awesome!

I remember the first time I saw Avatar in the theater and thought to myself, "What a fantastical alien environment they've created here for the audience." I was stunned by the visual beauty and depth of the alien world, Pandora, and its similar-yet-alien biosphere (let's face it, most viewers would have a hard time watching the film if Pandora were truly alien - and so there are creatures that are very similar to life as we know it, and that's okay). I also really liked the story. 

It's a fairly typical story of the technologically-advanced bully wreaking destruction upon the indigenous ecology; we've seen this time and again. Many people made associations between the story of Avatar and that of stories such as Ferngully and Dances with Wolves. The blog Madatoms went as far as to create a rather humorous diagram showing some of the basic comparisons between Avatar with Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, Dune, and Ferngully:

"Avatar Dances in Ferngully's Dune" from Madatoms

Sure, the story of Avatar was not exactly new, but I think James Cameron and the other creators of the film did an excellent job telling the story within the world they created. They gave us a thrilling look at a possible dystopian future for Earth (briefly), interstellar travel, a new biosphere on an alien world, genetically engineered surrogate organisms that we can literally control with our minds, a possible role of mercenaries in future warfare, and, probably coolest of all, a biosphere where organisms can neurologically link together (thus giving the entire biosphere a "brain/mind" of its own). 

Stephen Baxter did a fantastic job reviewing some of these key points in his book on the science of Avatar. I thought I'd share a few of his ideas as well as mine for each of the major sections of the book. 

Science fiction is often inspired by scientific discovery (and vice versa); The background is a painting by willroberts04 on Deviant Art

The Science of Avatar

Stephen Baxter is a fantastic author of hard sci-fi stories. He has a background in mathematics and engineering, but has made a name for himself by writing science fiction stories with alternate history and future history slants. His approach to The Science of Avatar comes from someone who understands sci-fi but who also has a great bearing on modern science. 

The primary sections of Baxter's book are "Earth", "RDA", "Venture Star", "Pandora", "Hell's Gate", "Living World", "Na'vi", and "Avatar"; these sections discuss the possible future of Earth, the resources extracted from Pandora, interstellar travel, the planetary science related to Pandora, the potential future of human colonization of other worlds, the biology developed for Pandora, the tribe of the Na'vi, and finally the nature of the avatars.

By breaking down the film into some key points, Baxter made it easier to tackle some of the more intriguing ideas that were developed by the film's creators. The book considers everything from the ecology of Pandora to the nature of the fictional resource "unobtainium" (which appears in various science fiction stories and in various forms; in Avatar, unobtainium appears to be a mineral that serves as a superconductor at room-temperature).

Credit: Dylan Glynn

We're only given a brief glimpse of the dystopian future of Earth in Avatar, although Jake Sully gives us an idea of what it might be like: "See, the world we come from, there's no green there. They've killed their mother..." Yes, that's a little vague, but it leads us to imagine a future Earth that has succumbed to global pollution, climate change, and sprawl such that ecosystems have been destroyed globally. 

An early draft of Cameron's Avatar screenplay had intended a bit more detail of future Earth: "Jake stares upward at the levels of the city. Maglev trains whoosh overhead on elevated tracks, against a sky of garish advertising... Most of the people wear filter masks to protect them from the toxic air... It is a marching torrent of anonymous, isolated souls." This sounds like a sad future for Earth, but it is by no means unheard of with regard to science fiction. There have been plenty of sci-fi stories that have considered dystopian futures for Earth (including the films Automata, Mad Max, Blade Runner, 12 Monkeys, Cloud Atlas, Elysium, Looper, and WALL-E). 

The future of Earth in Avatar appears to be one where industrial pollution and overpopulation have finally driven the Earth to the verge of global collapse. However, the real industrial trouble we see in the film is the extraction of resources (namely unobtainium) from Pandora without any regard for the ecosystems or intelligent species who live on that world. 

We currently extract an exceedingly large amount of raw material from the Earth each year to support our industrial, technological, and commercial infrastructure and to provide for the lives that many of us enjoy. It's hard to find good estimates of the actual amount of material we mine, but most numbers I've seen range in the billions to hundreds of billions of metric tons (around 60 billion metric tons of raw material each year sounds like a reasonable estimate). Although some nations have implemented various forms of regulation on mining operations to avoid industrial pollution or the devastation of ecosystems, mining across the globe still causes deforestation, acid mine drainage, and a range of other environmental impacts.

This is the Bagger 288. Like the other Bagger mining vehicles, this sucker is one of the largest land vehicles on the planet.

The Resources Development Administration (RDA) plays the "bad guy" in Avatar. They're developed to fit with the stereotypical image of a mining company or tech company that develops their product with little to no interest for the wellbeing of the ecosystem from which they take their goods. In The Science of Avatar, Stephen Baxter does a fantastic job of considering whether or not this is a potential future for resource development. Baxter mentions some of the current plans for resource development in our solar system, especially from asteroids. Given the potential for resource development organizations to act humanely and with vested interest in more than just profits, it's sad to admit that many times in the history of our species we have pushed forward for our own gain without regard for the rest of the natural world. Maybe our future of exploring new worlds will involve companies like RDA, though I hope by that point we'd learn to act better, especially when encountering new worlds.

The Hallelujah Mountains from Avatar

One of the cooler story points in Avatar is the nature of the Hallelujah Mountains. Much like the the floating island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift's Gullivers Travels, the Hallelujah Mountains fit with a common fantasy of islands floating in the sky, but in Avatar they give these floating mountains a scientific basis. The Hallelujah Mountains are composed mostly of the mineral unobtainium. The creators of Avatar built a backstory for the origination of unobtainium along with the formation of the moon Pandora and the planet it orbits (Polyphemus, in the Alpha Centauri system) - an object (either a planetary body or maybe a neutron star) impacted Pandora early in its formation causing an enrichment in the moon with the mineral unobtainium. As Stephen Baxter points out in the book, though, with a back-of-the-envelope calculation one could see that the magnetic field required to raise the Hallelujah Mountains into the air is thousands of times greater than the magnetic field here on Earth (not only that, but it would be far stronger than the magnetic fields produced by our Sun). Although the film's creators have built a Polyphemus and Pandora system with intense gravitational fields, it's still not likely to be enough to raise the Halleljuah Mountains. However, sometimes the fun of merging science fact with science fiction is having the creative license to push the boundaries of truth a bit. Which might be what the film does with the idea of the avatars.

Jake Sully checks out his avatar in its amino tank

The avatars are pretty sweet. It's not unthinkable that we may be able to port ourselves into created bodies in the future. We're already pushing into more immersive media with improved 3D films, steps towards better virtual reality with tech like the Oculus Rift, and developing CAVE systems (I had the chance to try one of these immersive systems at the Desert Research Institute some years ago). With increasing interest in virtual worlds (like Second Life), I can definitely see people in the future looking to find ways to take on new personae, possibly through the control of another body in the real world. In fact, a pretty fun movie came out not too long ago looking into just that: Surrogates is a 2009 film featuring Bruce Willis which portrays a future where nearly everyone interacts in the real world through surrogate robots. But will we get to the point where we can take control of a biological form like that of an avatar?

Baxter points out in The Science of Avatar that the basic biological structure of the organisms of Pandora does not utilize DNA/RNA and proteins the way that Terran life does. This means that to make an avatar requires an understanding of Pandoran biology to the point of genetically engineering organisms, but, moreso, it requires that the scientists who create the avatars are capable of appropriately decoding human and na'vi heritable traits (not so hard for the human side these days) but then that they be able to logically code these two forms of life together to make a third form that becomes the avatar. It doesn't seem too outlandish, but it definitely would be a huge marvel of science to attain that level of biological engineering. It seems to me that if we were to get to that point then we could easily have fixed Jake Sully's paralysis or even may finally develop gene therapy to the point where we could make it so that human colonists could live naturally on the Pandoran surface.

Avatar ends with Jake Sully having his conscious self fully transitioned from his human body into his avatar body. It's an interesting idea, for sure. Although there really isn't a good reason to believe in dualism (the idea that our physical minds and our conscious selves are different), a lot of people have been wondering lately if we may be able to upload our brains to computers in the near future (neuroscientist Randal Koene wants to see this happen, though there are other who doubt it's even possible). The 2014 film Transcendence, starring Johnny Depp, is one of the more interesting takes on this idea in recent media. Not only does Avatar force us to question whether we could create a newly biological form like an avatar but also whether it would be possible to code everything from the structure of our brains into the brains of one of these organisms. A very intriguing consideration.

The Science of Avatar considers all of these points and more. For instance, Baxter goes into what we currently know about the possibilities for life beyond Earth, the relativistic effects of near speed-of-light travel, the history of rocketry, what we currently know about exoplanets, the potential for terraforming, and more. The Science of Avatar was definitely a fantastic read. It's inspired me to watch the film again (but this time paying a little bit closer attention to the world of the film). I think Baxter could have filled the book with so much material as to make it a tome of information, but he wrote it so that it's accessible to just about anyone and can be read in as little as one sitting. Now that I'm finished writing about the book, I think it's time to watch Avatar again. 

In case reading this hasn't inspired you to watch Avatar again yourself, maybe having a listen to the film's soundtrack will help:

New Horizons, Pluto, and Yuggoth: Is the fastest spacecraft ever launched set to awaken The Abominable Ones?

A digital speculation from Daily Galaxy of what Pluto might look like 

The New Horizons spacecraft is set to make its closest approach to Pluto this summer! Pluto has been the center of discussion and debate in the last decade due to it's reassignment to the new classification as a dwarf planet in 2006. Beside my excitement for the New Horizons mission and all of the awesome imagery and data that are soon to come from Pluto, a little part of me revels in the fantasy of New Horizons waking up an ancient evil race of beings coming from that distant world, which they call Yuggoth, as imagined by the great horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.

A visualization by John L. Cherevka (skullbeast on DeviantArt) of what a Mi-go may look like, based on The Whisperer in Darkness (1931)

Yuggoth: 

Home of the Mi-go and target of New Horizons

H.P. Lovecraft's blend of mystical horror and sci-fi horror from the early 1900s is still regarded as some of the best writing of the 20th century in the horror genre. It's a tragedy that Lovecraft never knew the impact his writing would have; he died in poverty, having only ever published his stories in pulp magazines. Lovecraft's stories often involved mysticism and mythology. He created a universe of ancient evil beings, including the famed Cthulhu Mythos. Of Lovecraft's work the great horror writer Stephen King has said, "I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale." (American Heritage, 1995)

Lovecraft introduced the term Yuggoth within the Cthulhu Mythos in his collection of sonnets, Fungi from Yuggoth, though the first elaboration about the planet of Yuggoth and the creatures known as Mi-go were first depicted in his short story The Whisperer in Darkness. Written in September of 1930, this story appears to have been partially inspired by the discovery of Pluto by Clyde Tombaugh in February of that same year. In that story, we learn that the Mi-go are a race of alien creatures from Yuggoth, a distant world at the end of our solar system. The Mi-go are large, pink, crustacean-like fungi who can transport themselves through space to travel between worlds. These beings appear to be evil to humans who encounter them, though we're never fully informed of their intentions within Lovecraft's work.

Of Yuggoth, Lovecraft wrote "Yuggoth... is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system... There are mighty cities on Yuggoth—great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone... The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples... The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges—things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids—ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen..."

Allicorn on Bandcamp offers a full recording of Fungi from Yuggoth as read by Paul MacLean.

Lovecraft was likely thinking of Pluto when he wrote his stories of the Mi-go and their world Yuggoth. Although complete works of fiction, it's still fun to fantasize about the possibility for some unthinkable and horrible discoveries to occur when New Horizons passes by Pluto in July of this year (the fly-by is scheduled for 15 July 2015). Will we discover that Pluto is more similar to the 8 planets of our solar system than it appears, or will we confirm that Pluto has far more in common with the Kuiper Belt Objects of the outer solar system? Or, rather, will we discover that Pluto is really the home to a hideous race of alien creatures with potentially evil intentions?

The blog Lovecraftian Science posits this question with regard to what New Horizons may find when it reaches Yuggoth this year:

"Will it find oceans of semi-frozen methane slowly vaporizing into interstellar space while the stars continue to shine?  Or will it find… 'black streets where abominable blasphemies moved among hideous gardens of those greyish nodding fungi and vast black windowless towers?' – from Ramsey Campbell’s The Tower of Yuggoth."

Of course, there's not a great reason to think that we'll discover alien life on Pluto, especially intelligent alien life, but it's still fun to let our minds wonder about the possibilities for alien life out there. Much as Lovecraft imagined races of alien beings with a completely different moral structure than our own, I like to imagine sometimes that our contact with intelligent alien life lies just around the corner with our continued exploration of space. Maybe there are alien races out there right now who have heard the radio signals we've broadcasted into space. Perhaps there's an alien race that have been watching our solar system to see when we advance enough to control the light that leaves our star system. There are so many possibilities when it comes to what we may find in our exploration of life in the universe. It makes me giddy sometimes just to think about it.

With a closing thought, perhaps we shouldn't call Pluto by the name Yuggoth. Perhaps we could do some justice to the memory of H.P. Lovecraft by using that name in a different way. Lovecraft's stories were motivated by his interests in science as well as mysticism. Perhaps, one great way to reflect on Lovecraft's stories of Yuggoth and the Mi-go is to use these names for future discoveries of astronomical objects. Indeed, the Italian astronomer Albino Carbognani suggested on the blog Urania in 2012 that if we discover another dwarf planet beyond Pluto, that we should consider calling it Yuggoth in honor of Lovecraft. That would be a great way to honor Lovecraft and to have a little fun with a name for a newly discovered object in our solar system. 

I'll surely be writing a lot more in the coming months with regard to the New Horizons mission, and if strange alien fungi creatures decide to attack our spacecraft, you'll definitely be able to read about it here on A Cosmobiologist's Dream!

Perhaps the Mi-go are not just fungi, but are fun guys (The Fun Guy from Yuggoth by DrewArt on Deviant Art)

Note: I'm personally amongst those who don't think that Pluto should be equally classified with the terrestrial or jovian planets, though I also think the current IAU definition of "planet" is pretty unfulfilling. I think most of the people who argue that Pluto should still be considered a planet do so out of sentimentality more than anything else, although there are good arguments for just accepting Pluto as a planet and then counting all the other dwarf planets as planets as well (though we would probably end up with over 100 planets that way). What do you think about Pluto's status as a dwarf planet? Feel free to leave a comment about your stance on Pluto, planet or not.