Analog Science Fiction and Fact 12/01/10

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  Reader's Departments

  Wednesday, December 1, 2010

  EDITORIAL

  Stanley Schmidt

  About three years ago (in “Which Stitch in Time?,” March 2008) I mentioned the concern among biologists about the proliferation of Burmese pythons in Everglades National Park, in Florida. As their name suggests, they don’t belong there; they originated on the other side of the ...

  IN TIMES TO COME

  Our next issue starts off 2011 with a double issue offering an uncommonly wide and varied selection of stories, articles, and special features. Juliette Wade has only recently started appearing in Analog, but immediately made a big impression on readers with her tales of truly alien yet very believable...

  THE ALTERNATE VIEW

  John G. Cramer

  Much of science fiction is set on and around planets that are orbiting stars other than our Sun. How are the planets arranged in other star systems? The usual assumption is that we can take our own Solar System as a model. By this logic, each star should have a set of inner planets, with perhaps one...

  THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

  Don Sakers

  This being the December issue, it’s the time of year when everyone is thinking about gift giving. And for a lot of Analog readers, giving gifts means giving books and other stuff to read. Naturally, you want to give science fiction—what better way to spread good will? The single best ...

  UPCOMING EVENTS

  Anthony Lewis

  14–17 January 2011 ARISIA 2011 (Boston area SF conference) at Weston Boston Waterfront Hotel. Writer Guest of Honor: Kelley Armstrong; Artist Guest of Honor; Josh Simpson; Fan Guest of Honor: René Walling; Webcomic Guest of Honor: Shaenon Garrity. Membership: $50 until 31 December 2010,...

  BRASS TACKS

  Dear Stan, Thanks for printing my letter, and for the factual correction on “bahiana.” Thanks also for recounting your math-class experience (similar to many of my experiences in school) in “The Halo Handicap.” Many of the folks I know—many of whom read Analog—find...

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  EDITORIAL

  EUTHANIZING THE EUPHEMISM

  Stanley Schmidt

  About three years ago (in “Which Stitch in Time?,” March 2008) I mentioned the concern among biologists about the proliferation of Burmese pythons in Everglades National Park, in Florida. As their name suggests, they don’t belong there; they originated on the other side of the planet—but in an environment so similar that once they get into the Everglades, they flourish. To an individual pet owner who bought one as a baby and belatedly realizes he’s taken on more than he or she can handle, releasing it next to the Tamiami Trail may seem like no big deal. It lets the snake live, and how much impact on the environment can one snake have?

  Quite a bit, as it turns out—and since this happens fairly often, it’s not just one snake. A Burmese python can grow to twenty feet and 200 pounds. Doing so obviously requires quite a lot of food intake, and for a release, that means local wildlife ranging from mice to deer and alligators. Furthermore, they reproduce prolifically. In July 2007 the New York Times reported that about 350 had been found in the park since 2002. In 2010 (after the Nebula Awards and the shuttle Atlantis launch) I returned to the Everglades myself and was told by a tour guide who seemed to know his natural history that there were then estimated to be about 150,000. That doesn’t really mean the population increased by a factor of more than 400 in three years, of course. The 350 reported in 2007 was the number found, which was almost certainly just a small fraction of the number actually present. It’s hard to say exactly how small the fraction is, but it’s unlikely to be as small as a quarter of a percent. So the numbers suggest that the python population has been growing quite rapidly during the last several years. The ecological impact of so many predators that can take such a wide range of prey has to be considerable, and it’s getting worse.

  Therefore, the aforementioned guide said, he and his colleagues were under standing orders to promptly report any python sightings, whereupon the National Park Service would send someone out to “euthanize” the snake.

  This statement immediately struck me as odd—not because it was unthinkable that the NPS would ever intentionally kill animals, but because the guide’s description of the act seemed a completely inappropriate use of the word “euthanize.” The general policy of the NPS these days (in marked contract to that in some decades gone by) is to try to preserve complete ecosystems in their natural state, which means letting established predator-prey relationships play out without human interference—but not allowing invasive species to become established and disrupt a system that works. When an invasive is as large, disruptive, and hard to relocate as the Burmese python, killing them when they’re found where they don’t belong seems a perfectly reasonable, if regrettable, response.

  Bt it isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, euthanasia. The Greek prefix “eu-” means “good”; “euthanasia” is sometimes called mercy killing and is considered good in the sense that its intent is to cause a relatively painless death as a preferable alternative to a life that has become one of hopeless suffering because of incurable illness or injury. In our culture it is widely accepted as a merciful thing to do to domestic animals under some circumstances (though many still find it unthinkable that the same principle might ever apply to human beings). But it’s never something that any decent person would undertake lightly, and the object, to use a simple popular phrase, is always to put a fellow being out of its misery.

  Its misery—not somebody else’s.

  The park service’s python policy does not even remotely meet this test. The pythons aren’t at all miserable; they’re in a position a bit like the proverbial kid in a candy store. If you asked one, and it were bright enough to answer, it would probably tell you it was having the time of its life. They’re not being killed to end their suffering; they’re being killed to curb a threat to an established ecosystem into which they’ve been introduced through no fault of their own.

  This is not to say that they shouldn’t be killed. It’s an unfortunate situation all around, but calling it “euthanizing” instead of “killing” seems less than honest. It appears to be an attempt to make the people who must do it—and park visitors who go partly to be entertained, and who help support the parks with their taxes—feel less guilty about an unpleasant duty. And while to some extent people do need ways to ease the pain of having to do regrettable things, I question whether outright misrepresentation is a good way to do that. I may not like what I have to do, but should I be allowed to delude myself about what it is that I’m doing?

  Although I have spent quite a while on this one example, my primary concern here is not Burmese pythons in Florida, but the dangers inherent in misuse of euphemisms. Pythons are just one timely example. There are many others, such as the indiscriminate use of “improvement” or “development” to describe any human-made change in a piece of real estate, or imposing a new requirement on people and telling them you’re “offering them an opportunity.”

  Euphemisms have been with us for a long time. Sometimes they even serve a useful purpose, as one of a large class of practices I call “cultural anesthetics.” If you’re trying to get someone else to change a habit you find annoying, they’re more likely to be amenable to your suggestion if you can word it in a way that suggests what they’re doing is not so bad, but what you’re suggesting might be even better, rather than bluntly telling them that what they’re doing is terrible and has to stop. That kind of euphemism is part of courtes
y, which has been described as the lubricant that keeps society running smoothly.

  But, as I pointed out in a long-ago editorial (“Cultural Anesthetics,” January 5, 1981), anesthetics don’t just block pain during a temporary and ultimately beneficial process like surgery. They block all kinds of sensation, including pleasant ones and the pains that serve to warn us of imminent danger, like heat from a fire. Excessive or inappropriate use of euphemisms carries similar risks—e.g., they can enable us to hide even from ourselves the fact that we’re doing something that, even though it may be necessary, we should feel a little bit guilty about. Calling every change to land an “improvement” may blind us to the fact that some changes are quite the opposite. Calling every new tax an “opportunity” may encourage legislators to keep piling on more and more. We all sometimes have to do things that we wish we didn’t, but in general I question whether we should be allowed to forget that they are what they are.

  Maybe an important distinction that we need to make in deciding whether euphemisms are appropriate and useful is whose actions we’re euphemizing. Looking back over my earlier examples, I’ll venture as a zero-order hypothesis that it’s often a good idea to use mild language (at least at first) in describing somebody else’s behavior that you hope to change, and dangerous to describe your own actions in terms that make them sound better than they are. For that way lies the temptation to justify more and more by kidding yourself about what you’re really doing.

  And some words, while they’re often used as euphemisms, also have quite precise meanings; and those will be eroded if we let ourselves and others use them in ways that disregard those meanings.

  So “euthanize” may really be the right word for what we need to do to a lot of such euphemisms—like “euthanize” as a blanket substitute for virtually any killing of anything not human. They’re words that used to do important jobs of precise communication, but have been so weakened by misuse that they can no longer do that. They must find that terribly frustrating.

  Maybe we should put them out of their misery.

  Copyright © 2010 Stanley Schmidt

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  IN TIMES TO COME

  Our next issue starts off 2011 with a double issue offering an uncommonly wide and varied selection of stories, articles, and special features. Juliette Wade has only recently started appearing in Analog, but immediately made a big impression on readers with her tales of truly alien yet very believable cultures seen from within. It’s one of the hardest things to attempt in science fiction, but she has a special knack for it, no doubt due in part due to her background in linguistics—and living with alien cultures. Next month she leads off our double issue with another fine example, “At Cross Purposes,” which inspired Bob Eggleton’s cover.

  A well-known theme in science fiction is the generation ship, in which humans embark on a voyage so long that generations will live and die on board before anyone reaches the destination. In many such stories the successive generations lose sight of what the trip was for and the original mission is never accomplished; but next month Domingo Santos, one of Spain’s most prominent science fiction writers, looks at the problem from a different angle: How can you make sure that the would-be colonists don’t forget their purpose, and even if you find a way, what actually happens when they get there? The answer may involve an unusual combination of very old and very new ideas....

  Astronomer Kevin Walsh has a science fact article about what Earth’s past stages may tell us about the prospects for Earthlike planets elsewhere, and Richard A. Lovett has another of his popular special features about writing, this time about incorporating autobiographical material into fiction. Last but by no means least, the rest of our stellar line-up includes a wide range of stories by Michael F. Flynn, Stephen L. Burns, Dave Creek, Sean McMullen, Donald Moffitt, Norman Spinrad, and perhaps a promising newcomer or two.

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  THE ALTERNATE VIEW

  WHAT IS A “TYPICAL” SOLAR SYSTEM?

  John G. Cramer

  Much of science fiction is set on and around planets that are orbiting stars other than our Sun. How are the planets arranged in other star systems? The usual assumption is that we can take our own Solar System as a model. By this logic, each star should have a set of inner planets, with perhaps one or two that are Earth-like and habitable, an asteroid belt, and a set of outer gas giants, perhaps some with rings like those of Saturn.

  There are, of course, variations. One alternate scenario is a Jupiter-like gas giant that is close enough to the parent star to have an Earth-like planet as a moon. The rebel base on the moon Yavin-4 in Star Wars 4: A New Hope and the moon Pandora in Avatar are examples of habitable moons of gas giant planets. Another is a pair of habitable planets orbiting each other as the orbit the parent star, as in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Nevertheless, for most of SF our Solar System is the model.

  But is our Solar System really a typical star system? The Nice Model described in a recent AV column (see my March 2010 AV) suggests that during its evolution, our own Solar System was subjected to a major rearrangement. A 2:1 orbital resonance occurred between Jupiter and Saturn that produced the Late Heavy Bombardment of the inner solar system and the orbit-swapping of Neptune and Uranus as they were flung out to larger orbits. This violent and chaotic behavior of the gas giants in our Solar System might just as well have produced configurations of planets that are very different from the present one. Further, the Nice scenario depends directly on the fact that our Solar System has four gas giants. Is that typical?

  Let me begin with some planetary astronomy basics. Because of Newtonian physics, planetary orbits have the geometric shape of an ellipse, with the parent star located at one focus of the ellipse. The size of the orbit of a planet is characterized by its semi-major axis, represented by the symbol a. The semi-major axis a is half of the width of the ellipse along its long axis. Astronomers like to describe orbital sizes by using Earth’s orbit as the standard. Thus, the orbit of the Earth is exactly one astronomical unit (a = 1.0 AU), and the orbit of Jupiter has a = 5.2 AU.

  During the past decade, astronomers have been able to detect over 400 extrasolar planets of relatively nearby stars. These planets orbiting other stars have been detected mainly using the Doppler radial velocity technique, in which the “wobble” of a star induced by a close-orbiting planet is observed. The overwhelming majority of the planets detected have been short orbital-period gas giants with masses comparable to those of Jupiter or Saturn. This dominance of gas giants is to be expected, of course, because the Doppler radial velocity technique is strongly biased toward the detection of planets with large masses and short orbital periods. If a planet has a mass less than 35 Earth-masses or an a greater than 7.5 AU, the wobble induced in the parent star will be too small to be observed, and the Doppler radial velocity technique will not detect the planet.

  It is important to note that most of the stars studied with this technique do not show any indication of the presence of planets. The detection of planets in some systems and not in others raises the question of how common gas giants really are in the star systems of our Galaxy. Astronomers have carefully examined this question using all available data and have concluded that between 24% and 50% of all stars have gas giants in orbits with a less than 20 AU (i.e., inside the orbit of Uranus). Thus, the majority of all stars do not have Jupiter-like gas giants at a = 5 to 20 AU orbits that would affect the inner, possibly Earth-like, planets. Possibly this is because the density of pre-planetary matter is too low in many cases to support the runaway formation of gas giants in the early stages of planet formation.

  How, then, are the planetary systems configured in these more typical star systems, around half of which have no gas giants in Jupiter-like orbits? Andrew W. Mann and Eric Gaidos (University of
Hawaii) and B. Scott Gaudi (Ohio State University) have used computer simulations to address this question. They have numerically studied the evolution of one-solar-mass star systems using 230 different sets of starting conditions. They followed the disk of gas and matter around a new star as it developed planets from protoplanets (which they call “oligarchs”) and the smaller “planetesimal” chunks of orbiting matter until stable orbits are reached. The calculations spanned a system time period of about five billion years. The planet-formation scenario used consisted of three phases: (1) the runaway accretion of protoplanets from the primordial disk of planetesimals; (2) the slower growth of oligarchs from these protoplanets as they consume neighboring planetesimals and each other; and (3) the chaotic or giant impact phase that is reached when the mass in residual planetesimals is less than that in the protoplanets and the oligarchs’ orbits began to cross and resonate. The phase 3 behavior resembles the Nice Scenario (described in the March 2010 AV) but is somewhat less violent because the oligarch masses are smaller.

  The calculations are focused on planet formation beyond the “ice line”, an adjustable parameter of the calculations (varied from a = 2.7 to 5 AU) corresponding to the orbital radius at which ambient water is a solid, increasing the probability of planet formation. The calculations also vary the starting oligarch number (2 to 12) and oligarch spacing, as well as the initial oligarch masses (0.44 to 3.63 Earth-masses) and the mass of ice initially resident in the disk (10 to 35 Earth-masses). Some 230 different simulations were run for five billion years (model time), enabling certain conclusions and generalizations to be proposed, based on the results.

  One conclusion that one can draw from the calculations is that “oligarch swapping” is common, and the closest-in oligarch at the start of the process does not always end up as the innermost planet. When only two oligarchs are present, each has about a 50% chance of ending up as the inner planet. Sometimes, particularly when more than two initial oligarchs are present, one or more of them may be ejected from the system. The inner oligarch in all cases migrates inward from the ice line, typically becoming the most massive planet of the system and moving inward by more than 3 AU, most often settling in an orbit between 1.2 and 1.9 AU. In our Solar System that would be roughly at the orbit of Mars (1.6 AU). A massive planet so close to the small inner planets (not included in the planet-formation simulation) would be expected to cause disruption of orbits.