Analog Science Fiction and Fact - March 2014

by Penny Publications

  This is the idea of lockstep time: use hibernation to solve the problems of distance and duration, rather than trying to solve the problem of speed. It's not just travelers moving between the worlds that spend trip-time in cold-sleep: the worlds themselves, both origin and destination, do the same. Do this ridiculous thing, and the problem of speed goes away.

  Turns, frequencies, and jubilee

  The decisive element that turns these far-flung worlds into a true interstellar empire is synchronization. If you and your neighboring planets adopt the same hibernation frequency—for instance, a ratio of hibernation-time/awake-time, expressed in months, of 360/1—then hundreds or even thousands of planets are literally one night's sleep away. You'll have to wait a month to come back, but when you do, only a month will have passed back home as well; there's no relativistic "twin problem" in the lockstep worlds.

  From here, the logic of the locksteps becomes pretty direct. Those worlds that synchronize their turns experience the same passing of time. The longer you sleep, the more worlds are "next door." And those worlds that operate on different frequencies are separated from you by a barrier more fundamental than distance.

  A lockstep is my name for a group of colonies—be they individual space stations, clusters of buildings dug into the depths of comets, planet-bound cities or whole worlds—that sleep and wake on the same frequency, ratio, and schedule. Lockstep 360/1, for instance, collectively sleeps for thirty years at a time (except for its robotic sentries, resource harvesters, and factories). When its worlds wake, they all wake simultaneously and are awake for a month. Travelers who set out thirty years ago, if they are not still in transit, have been at their destination for perhaps years. They've been hibernating too, waiting for this moment. Now they wake and disembark, and at the end of the month new travelers set out, entering cold sleep at the same time as the rest of the lockstep. In this way, simultaneous time is experienced throughout the entire region, regardless of its size.

  Far-flung destinations may require more than one hop to reach. Some ships will cruise for centuries before reaching the more remote worlds. This, however, is no different from travel in the age of sailing ships, when some ports of call were weeks away, and some many months. Global empire was possible under those conditions in the 1800s; it will be possible between the stars in a similar mode.

  The longer you sleep, the smaller this problem becomes. A lockstep that slept for a million years at a time could experience a galaxy's worth of planets as right next door. Of course, those planets would change unrecognizably between turns, so you might not want to go that far. But, a frequency of thirty years... that's within the lifespan of trees, and certainly rivers, hills, and the buildings on them would not normally crumble overnight. And on frozen-over worlds like Pluto and the Kuiper planets, the landscape really won't change over the lifespans of people, even if those lives are stretched out over hundreds of thousands of years.

  The price you'll pay is that time on worlds like Earth will seem to accelerate. A version of the twin paradox does exist in the lockstep worlds: if you leave your twin on Earth to join 360/1, they will have died of old age less than three months (turns) after you arrive. Stepping into lockstep time means leaving Earth, and all other realtime worlds, behind. There is no going back. If you pay this price, however, you get in return more worlds to explore than any realtimer could dream of. Those poor souls from Earth may in their lifetimes travel to other worlds—eight or ten of them. You can experience thousands.

  Strangely, the most inaccessible places may be right next door. If your neighbors are lock-steps that operate on a different frequency, then you'll rarely if ever see them. Two cities might exist side by side, whose inhabitants never meet because they live at different frequencies. Those frequencies might never match up exactly, but most will go in and out of phase: locksteps 360/1 and 372/1, for instance, will both wake simultaneously once every 960 years. I call the simultaneous waking of two or more locksteps a jubilee.

  Jubilee is a special time among the lock-steps. Then, diverse cultures come together—parallel worlds that seldom meet catch a glimpse of one another. The rest of the time, the dormant fortresses and cities of locksteps of different frequency are as mysterious to one another as they are to those who live their lives in realtime.

  If you think about it, having multiple lock steps can be beneficial. No matter how meager its resources, you can carpet a planet with lockstep cities because only one lockstep will normally be awake at any one time. If it's a rich planet—a habitable Earth-like world, for instance—it could sustain a population of tens of billions with minimal impact to the biosphere, because only a fraction of that population would be drawing on its ecosystem services during a given period.

  Scale

  One obvious objection is that if you are actually able to stay awake all the time, you can harvest resources and manufacture much faster. Isn't it obviously to your advantage to do so? For instance take two planets, one where the colonists hibernate for a decade and then awake for one month at the end of that time; and another where they are awake all the time. Surely the second world will be 120 times as productive as the first?

  Firstly, we're assuming that there is no limiting factor among all the resources that will slow World Two's productivity rate (fundamental scarcity of some critical element or of energy etc.). We're also assuming that World One doesn't have a machine economy that is always awake even when its human population sleeps. This is an important idea for lock-steps: the tiniest of comets might not have enough energy or accessible elements to sustain a human colony, but if a population of energy-sipping robots slowly but constantly mines and manufactures for decades at a time, they may be able to produce enough, in a few years, to enable the brief awakening of a sizeable city.

  Even so, let's assume that World Two (our always-awake world) can mine and build and harvest as fast as it wants. It has an advantage in those areas. But does this advantage hold for trade as well?

  If it's using simple FFR rockets, World Two can exchange trade goods with its neighbors on a sixty-year round-trip schedule. For it, the benefits of one trade exchange are diluted across an entire human lifetime (give or take). For World One, which collectively sleeps for a decade at a time, one trade exchange is diluted across only six months of subjective time. World Two may mine and manufacture 120 times faster than World One, but it also uses those resources 120 times as quickly, while in absolute terms both worlds trade at the same rate. If you look at the lives of people living on these worlds, the difference is dramatic: across the lifetime of an individual, they experience the same productivity. They may appear radically different from an outside observer, but from within, these worlds feel the same.

  World One, however, benefits from an enormous advantage in trade—again, looked at from within. A citizen of World One who sleeps for ten years at a time doesn't experience those ten years, only the brief summers that follow. Chained together, those summers make a life similar to that of World Two's citizens—except for the constant flood of trade goods that World One (subjectively) experiences.

  Actually, the difference is even more dramatic, because while World Two may increase its productivity by spreading out across its (flat) landscape, World One can increase its trade capacity eight times faster by increasing the (three-dimensional) volume of space in which it trades. The longer World One sleeps, the more worlds its ships can reach during... let's call it a turn. Double the geographical hinterland of World Two's planet-bound economy, and you increase its economic power by roughly four times. Double the distance in three-dimensional space that World One's ships can travel during a turn, however, and you multiply its potential trading partners by eight.

  For hibernating worlds, trade scales faster than the exploitation of local resources.

  Hibernation vs. FTL

  The most important word in science fiction is if... if Einstein was wrong, or if Alcubiere was right, and somebody discovered a miraculous technology to travel
faster than light... if it took less than the energy of an entire galaxy to use it once... the ifs pile up pretty fast when we're talking about FTL. There are little issues like navigation, and what happens when an FTL ship encounters a large immovable object like, say, the Earth. The time-honored science fiction technique known as 'hand-waving' usually comes into play to deal with issues like this.

  In order to imagine an FTL civilization, we have to pile on the ifs and hand-wave like crazy. By contrast, what do we have to do to imagine locksteps? We have to imagine near-perfect hibernation technology.

  Humans can't hibernate. So far, attempts to develop hibernation technology for unmodified human beings have failed. There are promising avenues and hints of avenues to explore. Right now, cold-sleep is impossible.

  But, in contrast to FTL, we know of no reason why hibernation would be impossible, provided we allow some biological alterations to human physiology. It's a bit of a transhumanist cheat to redesign the human genome to give us an inbuilt hibernation reflex—but not much of one. In Lockstep, I've imagined a combination of extremely meticulous and careful external mechanisms—devices that monitor you down to the cellular level and do repair on individual cells if necessary—and genetic alteration. Nanotech in the body coordinates with the hibernation chambers I call cicada beds to allow humans to slip into cold sleep, and even be frozen solid to await resurrection after the thirty-year sleep. That reawakening could actually take months, as the machinery carefully repairs cumulative damage, tones your muscles for you, and so on. It doesn't matter to the sleeper.

  There are actually lots of ways to do it. If you believe in the possibility of uploading or backing-up the human brain, then the lock-step citizens could have their neural patterns stored while the physical body is recycled; then, when waking is required, a new body is printed and the mind inserted back into it. I don't like this idea, though; it's almost as hand-wavy as FTL. The cicada beds are pretty conservative by comparison. But maybe there are other techniques, like some sort of quantum-level flash-freezing, or insanely powerful magnetic fields that lock every atom in the body in place. For Lockstep I invented the denners, genetically and cybernetically altered animals similar to cats that can take over the role of the cicada bed, making it possible for humans to hibernate anywhere at any time. Biological as well as mechanistic solutions are possible; and you can set a lockstep frequency to account for any amount of recovery time that might be needed between sleeps. Maybe a month is too brief a period to be awake, and maybe thirty years is too long to sleep. Doesn't matter—these times can be adjusted according to what's actually possible.

  The point is that the more you look at FTL, the less likely it seems, while the more you look at hibernation, the more avenues to it open up. I take this as a hint about where to spend my mental energies.

  Redefining our way to the stars

  It's true that the locksteps are a bit of a cheat. They exemplify the idea that there are few problems that can't be solved by redefining them. In this case, the problem was never the impossibility of faster-than-light travel; it was the difficulty of imagining how to have a space opera, Star Wars -type future in the universe we've been given. And unlike FTL, this is a solvable problem.

  People have thought of lots of other solutions, too. Uploading and virtual universes can give us countless worlds to explore. The locksteps are for people who want those worlds to be real, physical places. The price is that they'll almost all be frozen iceballs; and, of course, that you'll be leaving your own era behind forever if you join a lockstep.

  All of which makes me wonder: what have I missed? Is there an even better solution that will give us the space opera future science fiction promised us? Are there other clever redefinitions even better than locksteps?

  One thing that's clear is that we're not done learning. Maybe FTL will turn out to be possible; but even if not, discoveries like the one hundred thousand free-floating planets per star will continue to come. Even if we can't do FTL, we may discover technologies that make it unnecessary—clever reality-hacks that give us the future we wanted, just by another route.

  The point is that we needn't abandon reality for fantasy. Aspirational, exciting futures are still possible, provided we use a little imagination and stay open to the possibilities of the real. I'm a bit of a curmudgeon in this regard. I think that a fantastic future that is nonetheless possible is infinitely more worthy of our attention than a fantastic future that's just a fantasy. Call me crazy, but there it is. There's more than one way to go. Who needs FTL, when you've got all the time in the world?

  * * *

  God May Love Us Today, But What About Tomorrow?

  177 words

  Our species' high position as the current culmination

  Of Darwinian Selection is a spot we doubtless savor.

  But let us add reality into our meditation,

  Since Evolution's future may not grace us with such favor.

  The arguments fly thick and fast concerning global warming,

  And one point in particular has everybody storming:

  It is maintained by experts whose credentials we revere,

  That a global mass extinction is about to take place here.

  Some think this cycle's "natural," does little harm, and passes,

  So we need not concern ourselves with excess greenhouse gases.

  And since some mass extinctions made us what we are today,

  "Then let it come! It's good for us!"They thoughtlessly will bray.

  It's true we're here 'cause dinosaurs, (the former top bananas),

  All ended up as food for ants (or maybe for piranhas).

  Mass extinctions, one may argue, aren't so artificial.

  But that does not imply that for us they're beneficial.

  Before we cheer for "progress" we should think, and maybe stop,

  For mass extinctions don't bode well for species at the top.

  Just because we rule today, will that be true forevermore?

  Why don't we ask a trilobite, therapsid, or a dinosaur?

  —Robert Lundy

  * * *

  ARE WE THERE YET?

  GUEST EDITORIAL Edward M. Lerner | 1870 words

  Despite "predictions" in early science fiction of flying cars and robot servants, of cheap, limitless fusion power and colonies on the Moon, we have none of those things. That doesn't stop us from looking: when I Google "Where is my flying car?" I get 133 million hits. When I Google "robot servant" (or maid or butler), I get more than 15 million hits.

  What happened to the future?

  It arrived unannounced—and will continue to do so—because (a) science fiction's job is not predicting the future and (b) the nature of chaotic systems is to surprise.

  We'll consider both explanations before looking at what I believe to be the deeper reason that some of us are disappointed.

  Many SF stories are set in a future. It's the natural place for considering the implications of technologies not yet deployed and of possibilities that science has yet to prove (or disprove).1 Having said that, pondering "What if?" hardly qualifies as a prediction about the future. And, of course, SF authors sometimes ask no more of an imagined future than that it plausibly support an entertaining storyline, humorous parody, or biting satire.

  But disclaimers aside, SF is a forward-looking genre. Shouldn't we be enjoying at least some of the future tantalizingly dangled by our literature?

  Well.

  As Yankees philosopher Yogi Berra astutely observed, "It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future." And that brings me back to my second disclaimer. The future is hard to predict because so very many factors—and often subtle factors—shape it.

  Recall the most famous (fictional) prognosticator of our genre: "psychohistorian" Hari Seldon of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.2 Seldon, for all his success in forecasting and charting the fall and rise of galactic civilization, worked from the aggregated characteristics of worlds' populations. His sci
ence could not foresee the monkey wrench that would be thrown into his plans by the psychically enabled mutant individual known as the Mule.

  In a familiar example from our place and time, I'll venture that few people anticipated whole industries upended by one individual: Steve Jobs. (Music distribution shifted from CDs to downloads. A marginal computer company turned into one of the world's premier cell-phone manufacturers. Tablet computers are on track to replace laptops and desktop PCs.) Which other industries might Jobs have disrupted but for the rare variant of pancreatic cancer—or his idiosyncratic decision to forgo conventional cancer treatment for nine months—that led to his early death? 3

  I referred earlier to chaotic systems. Chaos theory, of course, is the mathematical representation of dynamic systems that are sensitive to even very slight variations in initial conditions. In common metaphor, it's the butterfly effect. Does a hurricane taking form today— or failing to form—depend upon whether last week some butterfly in a distant jungle flapped its wings?