Where's the Basement?

Proof that children the next generation of adults can read, write, and dream is found in the NASA Space Settlement Design Contest». Eric Yam from Northern Secondary School in Toronto, Canada, was one of the Grand Prize Winners»

Eric's winning proposal was for an Orbital Habitat that he named ASTEN (Right click here to save the 12mb PDF) one of the alternate names for the Egyptian God Thoth.

I am amazed by the breadth of thought that has been put into this document. Issues ranging from immigration through to nutrition are addressed. In the context of World Building this is a great example of what can be done if you are motivated.

Congratulations Eric Yam, the First Canadian to win the Grand Prize in this contest in the 16 years that it has been run.



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The Age of the Cyborg impacts Warranty Coverage

There's a posting at robots.net that has collected a together couple of recent news stories on Cyborgs. Sadly they aren't the death ray wielding type, but still pretty interesting stuff.

The Second of the two stories (which I'll mention first), is a pretty standard piece that fits with traditional image of a cyborg. It's about Ginny Ong, 21, a student who can hear thanks to a cochlear implant.

It isn't exactly super hearing, but it's super that she can hear. Bionic augmentation/replacement of hearing or other senses is straight out of the pages of many books. In this case though it's just a part of her life, and someday the lives of many others who have hearing problems as the technology (40,000 US$) comes down in price.

The First story however is an essay entitled The Age of the Cyborg from some local (University of British Columbia) professors. They haven't juiced up local law enforcement yet, instead they are developing materials for nanoscale medical implants. These implants can be used as support structures inside the body, releasing medicine and aiding in the regeneration of damaged tissues. An example being skin on a burn victim, another being a damaged heart valve.

This is an interesting story because it shows an extension of the definition of cyborg, taking it beyond biomechanical wonders. Here is where Science starts to surpass and redefine Fiction. The Cyborgs these professors predict are invisible, subtle, in fact in many ways elegant. No noisy hydraulics or metal exo-skeletons, just normal people with a few artificial structures supplanting and boosting their biological body.

The Cyborg of the Future isn't the Hulking Silver Dood with the resonate voice, instead it's the seventy year old with a new hip, or it's a seventeen year old girl who enjoys the sound of the birds in the morning.


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Holographic Universe

And it seems that the resolution isn't perfect.

There's an Article at New Scientist that discusses some surprising results from the GEO600 experiment. The original intent of the experiment was to detect Gravity Waves. While they haven't succeeded at that they may have detected evidence that supports a Holographic Theory of the Universe.

From the article:

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

Now as a Speculative Fiction writer this opens up all sorts of possibilities, beyond the standard Matrix and 13th Floor references. It's easy to see where the fringe has taken the concept.

For me the really exciting story here is the human story. Imagine being the lone theorist who sent a package of equations to GEO600. Suggesting a wild explanation for what had till then been dismissed as random noise. The struggle to have your theories accepted and verified. Think of the moment when people realized that this wasn't noise but the very essence of the universe. That can be the end of the story as much as it can be a beginning.

As much as science fiction contains science, it's strength lies in it's ability to showcase the limits of human emotion and ability in novel environments. Science Fiction doesn't need to have spaceships and rayguns to differentiate it from contemporary fiction. Doing research on Gravity Waves in the contemporary world and discovering the fundamental structure of the universe can easily be called science fiction. We have the novel environment of the research facility, the excitement of new discoveries at the edge of human knowledge, and the vindication of our hero, the lone researcher. Very much Science Fiction to me, only today of course it's news.


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