Analog Science Fiction and Fact - 2014-03

by Penny Publications

  RICHEMBEAU: What, you mean in a lab? On Mars.

  KIESLOWSKI: Well, of course. Why would I—with my own body—when they're not exactly sending us with maternity wear spacesuits, you know? [She laughs.] I mean, come on, Murrielle—be reasonable. That's just not happening.

  RICHEMBEAU: Well, I—Folks, we're here with Elena Kieslowski of the Aldrin V Mission to Mars; we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

  Future Prospects

  During the two-hour communications blackout, I take a rather lonely meal in the mess and return to visitor quarters, where my tablet sits neatly atop my duffel bag at the front desk—GC security's way of saying, yes, we searched your things while you were away, but look how upfront we are about it! Even from the entrance, I can make out the front cover of my latest read, the most recent in K. L.'s Sweet Traveler series, temporarily imprinted on the tablet's screen. (Rest as sured, I have received no end of ribbing from associates for still storing books on such devices; I know the entire Library of Congress is downloadable on Specs, but I simply cannot bring myself to let go of the tactility of reading, and all the spatial variation that comes with such a solid interface.) That day in particular, I am especially grateful for the ability to put literal distance between the text and my mind for a while. Sifting for the last two weeks through the detritus of main-and counterstream reactions to the Aldrin missions has left me, I suspect, with quite a changed appreciation for certain written words.

  Flipping through K. L.'s latest, for instance, it is no longer any wonder to me that our most popular wild tales leap so far into the future, or so deep into the thick of alternate worlds— anything, anything to get away from the pimply-faced pubescence of our own, early efforts at colonizing outer space. Away from the juvenility of all our gossip in the interim. Away from the diversities of ignorance that parade our every media interface at each new juncture in the collective human experience. We are starry-eyed, would-be young lovers brought to near-paralysis just by the thought of sticking our piddling Tab As for the first time into all the Slot Bs of the universe. And so generations of trial and error will surely have to pass before we can even begin to look, with calmness, and composure, and some semblance of cultural unity, upon the full feast of our cosmonautic explorations. Until then all we have is the promise of these words— their gentle assurances that it will get better, it has to get better, and of course, how could it not get better, given time?

  "I give us a hundred years at the outset," says Kieslowski, when I ask all the typical questions about legacy. "Then we'll become more of an embarrassment than a tragedy. Maybe an object lesson in government incompetence and technological def iciency, or some pet project of youth instructors and fundamentalists hoping to teach some vaguely moral lesson about the sins of civilization to their progeny. But not much talked about outside of that, no."

  "What, you don't think Armstrong could be the next Titanic?"

  I earn a smile with my crook-mouthed cynicism. Kieslowski does not share Mukherjee's interest in re-envisioning the crew's odds— sees it as irrelevant, even, to the work of survival that now lies before them. In hindsight, I imagine if I had first tried mainstream media's "Mission of Mercy" line on her instead, I would have received something other than boredom—a tirade, perhaps. Now I will never know for sure.

  "Not a chance," she says to all my talk of twentieth-century failure. "The aesthetics are all wrong. Watery graves are easier to glorify than the hideous gradations of radiation sickness. You think anyone's going to link in to see JoJo Sivechy play me rotting away in a faraway desert? And then, there are no kids out here, either—and no blatant class or gender divisions in outcome. Radiation poisoning just doesn't care the way those old aristocrats did. Oh, and above all else, there's no blatant show of arrogance on the part of the ISC. No obvious lifeboats we coulda-shoulda-woulda brought on board to prevent this disaster. In fact, right from the beginning the ISC's been trying to downplay expectations, teach mainstream how fragile this whole project is. Not that mainstream was much for listening, not in those first years. Not when everything about Mars was still so glamorous. But still, yeah, not the same thing at all."

  "So, what, you don't think there'll be vids about this?"

  "Sure there will. For a while, at least. We've even got that alien horror flick in the works right now, just posted last week. You know, the one where everything's fine with the radiation shielding when we get there—which would explain the energy grid: I give them credit for that much—but base-camp's drilling efforts pulled up something nasty all the same, and it gets us one by one just like it got the rest of the colonists? You should see the trailer; it's crazy. And they've chosen one hell of a creepy actress to play Michiko."

  Kieslowski laughs nine minutes after I evince surprise that she would bother reading up on such tasteless, morbid things. Don't what-if stories like GERM just make it all the more nerve-wracking to think about the landing? And besides (I falter for obvious reasons in my next question) has GC entirely ruled out the possibility of...?

  "No Martian monsters that we know of yet," says Kieslowski. "After all, that's where the writers got it wrong: we haven't even started drilling operations yet. We're still working through all the ecological reforms and long-term shielding, plus improving resource management systems on the ground: that sort of thing. So no nasty bugs were set to be exposed to Martian air for, oh, another couple years, I think."

  (Kieslowski's file and mainstream interview performances, I quickly discover, have not adequately prepared me for the dryness of her humor.)

  "And in answer to your other question—no, not at all: it's kind of calming, actually, to read up on all the inane what-ifs. I get to pretend none of this is real for a while, you know? I get to laugh, too, about something I can't really change—and well, I signed up for this gig, risks and all. You think I haven't been watching all the old, bad Russian dubs I could find all my life? I've even got one of my own in the works. Little screenplay I'm hoping someone else can make something of, maybe once I become famous for being among the first to rot in outer space."

  Can I see the script? I obviously ask. Can you tell me about it? When Kieslowski floats up to the Specscreen, I have the sneaking suspicion that I am being strung along.

  "Maybe," she says. "But what've you got to trade?"

  Relics in the Making

  Michiko Wakahisa is the only crew member to turn down my interview request—a fact that should not prove at all surprising, considering how few public appearances she has made in the entirety of her life. Heir to the Wakahisa fortune, the Hong Kong native has been dogged since her initial selection to the Aldrin V mission by accusations of greasing the selection committee's wheels—a claim only fanned further by charges of cronyism faced by the selection committee chair. However, as the two corruption issues involve profoundly different demographics, it is curious that this indictment against young Wakahisa has persisted despite the failure of many other affluent persons to merit even a mention in the ISC's long lists, and despite Wakahisa's own, undeniable excellence in the preliminary physical and mental examinations. Oh, and of course, despite Gerhardt Michelson's now-infamous remark that persons of his financial worth "already have occasion to be bored with outer space in a way few others will ever understand."

  Undoubtedly, citizen flights to the international space station are within the grasp of only a select few of Earth's nine billion, and even then, beneath the interests of many of the rich-and-famous on account of the various "intolerable" deprivations in creature comforts such a trip necessitates. "If I wanted to be chucked around and breathe into motion sickness bags for a couple days," synth-rap superstar Felonius Creed said in interviews around the release of his eleventh Spec-spin, Astro-kaze, "I'd buy a damn theme park." Which, incidentally, he did the following year, after losing his bid for the Chargers.

  But for all this bluster and affectation of indifference among some of the well-groomed set, the look of heartbreak on natal billiona
ire Duanne Fleming's face when the ISC failed him on the comp exams was genuine. At least for that one day, no media outlet, main-or counter-, would dare contest that the desire for Mars burned as deeply and as desperately in some of Earth's wealthiest as it does in the most dirt-poor.

  Wakahisa's near-complete avoidance of the mainstream media circus is even more remarkable, though, in light of her earlier actuation as a musician in her own right—a brief but brilliant star in the cosmic drone scene from 2039 to 2041, under the unassuming pseudonym, Flyt. After YOLO's iconic I'm Sick of You Fucks/Get Me Outta Here stage tour in 2039—the first to fake last-minute artist cancellations for every stop en route, instigating carefully coordinated rage-raves in sold-out amphitheaters instead—the absence of artists from their own performance spaces trended highly enough for Flyt's concerts (which were always remotely orchestrated) to attract no great notice until fans eventually realized that they had never once seen her face.

  The real connection was not uncovered, though, until Wakahisa had long immersed herself in aeronautics research, and by the time she was selected for the Aldrin V mission, no new work had been released under the pseudonym Flyt for over two years. While some in the mainstream suggested that Flyt was a mere phase in Wakahisa's intensely isolated youth (and still others paid her music no heed whatsoever, their journalistic interests lying more in line with what the Aldrin V mission meant for the future of Wakahisa Enterprises), counterstream has consistently entertained a more whimsical notion that the rest of the Aldrin V crew will neither confirm nor deny:

  Did Michiko Wakahisa get blasted into space, or did Flyt? Did pursuit of "the perfect drone" compel this enigmatic Hong Kong heiress toward her most ambitious feat of sonic engineering yet? Is Flyt at work even now, during these last, tense few months of Aldrin V's journey to a broken human settlement on Mars, on a cosmic drone masterpiece pulled from soundscapes unlike any Earth has ever heard before?

  And if so—if these rumors are true and if Armstrong's radiation shielding cannot be repaired by even "the girls" on landing—what happens if Wakahisa/Flyt fails to complete and broadcast her work before radiation sickness takes hold? How long will her magnum opus molder under the shearing forces of Martian winds while Terrans quarrel about the future of deep space travel? Will it ever be recovered, or will it remain permanently fixed instead in that fragile, fickle half-life of pop culture mythology? What, if anything, will future Terrans grieve for most when they look back on troubled Armstrong, and all the Aldrins past and present: the loss of life, of hope—or of art?

  Gathering Rosebuds

  After, Kieslowski reads me her plot summary. The working title is Untitled. It's a zombie flick, she says—only, we're all zombies. Nine billion of us, give or take. We putter around on Earth living zombie lives; we have zombie dramas and zombie dreams. And then one day we send some of our zombie kin into outer space, in a capsule wrought of little more than bone and sinew. And obviously, we send out only those zombies we can train not to chew the walls of this cage to bits.

  Then something happens mid-transit (Midtransit to where? I ask. Oh, Kieslowski says with a flick of her hand—wherever. The Sun.) and the travelers start to mutate, transform. Reports filter back to Earth and pandemonium strikes the putrefied hearts of billions of our fellow zombies. We can't fix it. We can't turn back the clock. So right before our eyes, before all our incessant monitoring, we find that these zombies are turning... human. It's so monstrous that we want to look away. It's so monstrous that we can't.

  "I want to say there's a happy ending," Kieslowski says after a pause. She looks directly at the Specscreen, waits. "But, you know."

  I do now, in the consequential wake of our most recent transaction, and the knowledge sits so uncomfortably between us that I try to meet her at her humor's level. I tell her, "I thought dead men tell no tales." I even quirk a smile to match.

  "Yeah," is all Kieslowski says—one of her last words before the feed from Aldrin V cuts me off for good. "And wouldn't it be neat if that were true."

  Guy P. Morgan is the author of two works of hyper-nonfiction, Here/Now and Anon(Y)mous(ES): A Tale of Two Specspheres. A graduate of the MFA program at NYU, Morgan placed as a semi-finalist for the Citizen Slot on Aldrin II. His upcoming book, Notoriety and Beyond, explores the show's aftermath for seven other "unlucky" contestants from early seasons.

  * * *

  The Probability and Nature of an Interstellar Information-Trading Community

  Science Fact Mark H. Shellans | 5224 words

  If extraterrestrial civilizations were streaming out vast amounts of information about their culture, art, music, science, technology, and philosophy, would we want to tap into that data stream?

  It is likely that most people (especially those reading this magazine) would respond with a very enthusiastic "yes!" Similarly, any species that had achieved a level of technology equivalent to our own, and all that implies, would probably feel the same way. Admittedly, there are humans to whom such knowledge will be perceived as a threat, and who will fanatically oppose any such contact. But, for those of us who would welcome information exchange among civilizations, this article delivers some very good news.

  We will discuss six interrelated questions about the probability and nature of an Interstellar Information-Trading Community (IITC):

  1. Are there other civilizations in our galaxy?

  2. If so, why would they want to communicate?

  3. If they are motivated to communicate, what rules and protocols would naturally emerge to do so?

  4. Based on those rules and protocols, what would be the hardware requirements for the system(s) used?

  5. What would we need to do in order to determine the existence of that community?

  6. What would we need to do in order to join that community?

  First, are there other civilizations in our galaxy?

  The Drake equation hints strongly that there are many technological species in our galaxy right now that arose independently. But even if that number is low, there are almost certainly civilizations on habitable worlds resulting from the spreading of ancient species that sent out sublight ships long ago.

  Barring some sort of warp drive that violates our current knowledge of physics, travel among star systems to visit alien civilizations is apt to be expensive and time-consuming. Most of the potential utility for such a visit, moreover, would just be knowledge anyway: pictures, music, technology, etc. That information could be provided much more readily and efficiently by the local residents of those other star systems. Whereas you can only physically visit a few civilizations at a time, you can trade huge amounts of data with as many civilizations as are within range via electromagnetic radiation. You can do it from the comfort of home, and do so at the speed of light.

  But that is not to say that there would be no motivation at all for interstellar travel. A technological civilization may be forced to flee a system in imminent danger of a supernova or some other celestial catastrophe. If we, for example, had an overwhelming reason to travel to the stars right now (like our Sun entering its red giant phase), we could probably cobble together a number of functional "generation ships," using a significant fraction of the world's gross domestic product over 25 to 50 years. That's probably true for other civilizations, as well. So physical visits are possible, but probably quite rare.

  An additional reason for physical travel is the evolutionary imperative to spread one's species as widely as possible on one's home planet. That inbred motivation might also apply to being fruitful and multiplying throughout the galaxy via "seed ships" sent to habitable, but uninhabited, extraterrestrial planets (at least once in a while). The latter argument for physical travel to nearby stars almost guarantees that all habitable planets are, in fact, inhabited—as we will see, below.

  Let's use the Earth as a template of how life and civilizations arise (since we have no other). Life arose early in the Earth's history— about a billion years after its formation—but civ
ilization, such as it is, took another 3.5 billion years. Our galaxy is about 13 Billion years old, so let's say life on some other world might have started at about the halfway point, around 6.5 billion years ago. If they followed the same development course as ours, they would have developed a technological civilization about 3 billion years ago.

  Once having reached our current technology level, they could probably have built a number of functional "generation ships" to the stars, but it would have required using a significant fraction of their world's resources continuously for many years. A more likely scenario is that the task would have been put off for a thousand years or so until it became more feasible and affordable with more advanced technologies. Let's make that assumption about our hypothetical civilization: they send out a ship or two to colonize nearby star systems a thousand years after first developing space travel.

  Our galaxy contains one to four hundred billion stars and is estimated to have at least fifty billion planets, five hundred million of which may be located in the habitable zone of their parent star. The volume of the galaxy is 157 billion cubic light-years. Dividing that by five hundred million gives 314 cubic lightyears per habitable planet or moon. That means that habitable planets average about seven light-years apart. With the first generation of our hypothetical civilization's expansion, the diameter of their occupied space would have been 14 light-years. If their seedlings then "rested" for a millennium, and then did the same, it would increase by another 14 light-years. A more conservative assumption would be that the diameter of their inhabited space grew at an average rate of only one light-year per thousand years. In this way it took that civilization one hundred thousand millennia to reach the outermost reaches of the galaxy. At that point, the entire volume of the galaxy, and all the habitable planets in it, would have been spoken for by that single species and its descendents.

  And if that process actually occurred, and if it took one hundred thousand millennia—one hundred million years—it would have been completed 2.9 billion years ago! And that doesn't account for any other civilizations that may have arisen independently in the history of the galaxy going through a similar spreading and occupation of their own volume of star systems. Thus, every habitable planet in the galaxy... is very probably inhabited. Moreover, it means that there should be several (probably five) inhabited planets within seven light-years of the Earth. And that brings us to the second question: