Tenerife, Part One

I'm out on our generously-sized private balcony. It's difficult to focus over the gentle roar of the Atlantic below and the creaking, popping metal sounds of my own muscles relaxing. This stunning view of Los Cristianos—the harbor, the rocky beach, the dusty hills in the distance—is a constant distraction. The fresh twenty-something-degree breeze dancing on my skin and the bellyful of room service breakfast have been conspiring to lull me over to sleep since I came out here.

That took about an hour to write. The tendency here is to do nothing and go about it in an unhurried way. There's a massive shelf of rock on an island a few miles away that could crash into the Atlantic at any time sending four-hundred-metre high waves in every direction, but I'd imagine those waves would simply lift the little boats below and plop them back down again unharmed, then pass over the island refreshing everything, then continue on to ravage the west coast of Africa, depopulate southern Europe and drown the east coast of the U.S. in a disaster that would be remembered for a hundred generations.

A weather report then:

This is day four of seven—halfway through our stay. The sky was an unbroken blue for the first two days. The sun was intense. Yesterday and today are a bit cloudier—it's pleasantly warm, and there's still plenty of blue up there, but there are also these white ribbons and furrows of cloud high in the sky that have softened all the shadows. It feels more like a good summer's day back home might feel, which is excellent, because back home it almost certainly feels like another shitty day in the middle of winter. It's good to get away from all that rain and dark. The atmosphere in Derry contains so much water (if you average it out) that we are essentially a lost city under a freshwater sea with a really low specific gravity. Derry twinned with Atlantis. We're just waiting for the raindrops to join up and finally drown us all. 99% of all the shootings that ever took place in Northern Ireland took place indoors—when guns are fired outdoors the bullets are slowed by the rain and fall uselessly to the ground after a few yards. That's an actual fact. The last proper outdoor battle fought in Northern Ireland was fought with swords and umbrellas. It's a matter of weeks before the dolphins realize they can breathe our air and move freely about in it, and then we're fucked.

Fiona has just pointed out that my trousers unzip into shorts just below the knees. Bonus shorts!

Tenerife looks a bit like how I imagine the moon colonies of the 22nd century will look, except without the vast self-healing domes overhead and without the methane towers spouting fire and without the big scanline-heavy projection of the Asian woman selling you Coca-Cola or Happy Tong brand moon-opium. It seems that nothing grows here of its own accord except some sort of waxy shrub or bushy cactus that covers the hills—all the palm trees and other plants exist only because they are irrigated by these little black pipes that run everywhere. It is an artificial paradise—the plants could just as well be cardboard cutouts. Don't get me wrong, the scene below me (a chaos of old hotels and dusty palm trees and imported sand) is beautiful. I'm sure most of the world looks like this, what with most of Earth being a bare and barely-inhabitable wasteland. But for a pale Northerner who spends summers trying to quash (or at least looking disapprovingly at) the abundance of unwanted biomass growing in his garden (and driveway, and patio, and drains) it's strange to see anything being watered. There is no grass here. No, sorry—I saw a patch yesterday. It had a man guarding it.

Not sure what we're doing today. Getting on the Internet and sending a few emails to our family (as well as posting this) was about our only aim. Oh—we need to buy a cheap camera somewhere as I forgot to bring ours in the wild screaming panic oh jesus we'll never make it what do you mean the bag is too heavy of getting here on Tuesday night. Then it's more chilling out I suppose. Tomorrow we're heading out on a glass-bottomed boat to take a look at some dolphins, perhaps even devise strategies for fighting dolphins without the use of projectile weapons. We have a trip up the volcano planned for Monday or Tuesday. Those are the main boxes we wanted to tick, really.

---

Okay, I'll talk to you all soon--Internet access is free but only available in the lobby of the hotel, which is a bit of a downer. Still alive though. Having a fine old time.

Some Art!

Hey folks! Here's some art to break up the traditional Megatonne Marble wall '0' text:

Whitechapel Remake/Remodel: Mysta Of The Moon


Proper explanation over on the forum. The little robot on her shoulder is part NoNo (Ulysses 31, remember?) and part Metal Gear Mk II. This didn't take very long--a few hours last night, just to do something different.

On the other hand, this...

The Transported Man (follow link for generously embiggened version)


...took a minor epoch to do, back in June. It originally appeared in Murky Depths #9 accompanying a story by Anthony Malone. (I also have work in #10 and I'm currently working on a seven-page story for #11--a thoroughly excellent little magazine that is well worth checking out. They have the vision to publish my stuff on a quarterly basis, right?) Looking back now, there are all sorts of things I would do differently--but it's still one of my favourites.

(If I had a link for the author I would share it, but he seems to be googleproof. If you are he--drop me a comment.)

2009 has been a good year for art; I've gone from idle sketching to...well, I'm still working on it, but something better than idle sketching anyway. The first year of the next decade will herald new and exciting things.

Vengeance

They chose a high cave for shelter, a shallow axeblow wedge in the ribs of a sandstone giant. They stowed their gear, laid out their tarp, and settled on their bags. There would be no tent that night, no fire--not while on the hunt.

The boy watched as his father counted and re-counted his pipeguns. Eighteen short lengths of dull copper pipe, each sealed at one end with neat folds and welds, packed with black powder and tissue and a single fat cylindrical bearing scavenged from the belly joint of an old earth-mover, wrapped in strips of cloth and tape. If they caught the men asleep and did the job cleanly, they would only need four.

"Dad."

"Son."

"Who was Jesus?"

His father unwound a few feet of fuse from his pack and cut two-inch lengths. They fell in a little pile between his legs. "Who told you about Jesus, then?"

"Lady in the bus."

"Lady in the bus was a crazy lady, son. She'd lost a lot of folks and that made her crazy."

"You schtupped her. I heard you."

"You'll understand some day. You schtupp when you can. You schtupp as long as you half like them and they're willing--I half liked her, and she was willing."

"Could I schtupp her some day? When I'm haired and grown? I'd like to try."

"No. Never. Not even when you're haired and grown and I'm dead in the ground. Promise me that. What did she say about Jesus?"

"She said, Jesus says that killin' is wrong, even when we do it for someone else. Jesus says when people hurt us, we have to give them both our cheeks instead of killin' them. Vengeance is a sin and we're awful sinners."

His father dropped his fuse and spat on the ground. "Pay her no mind. We shouldn't have stopped there. We won't stop there again." He shook his head, lips thin, brow folded low.

"You don't want to schtupp her again?"

"I could strangle her. I'm tryin' to bring you up strong. You need to be able to do what has to be done without worryin' about crazy ladies and the opinions of their invisible friends."

"I know. Sorry, Dad."

"Let me tell you about vengeance, Red. Vengeance ain't a sin. It's an evolutionary response to the unfortunate existence of bastards who need puttin' down." The Sheriff raised a fist covered in thick white scars, fixed his eyes on his calloused knuckles. "Once upon a time we were all either Bastards or Saints with nothin' in between. The Bastards naturally did whatever they pleased with the Saints who naturally accepted this as simply being the way of the world. The Bastards spent their days raping and killing and eating the Saints, who turned their cheeks like Jesus and thanked them for the attention. We made no progress. There was no peace. Just wild laughing Bastards dancing around in blood. That was the world, and it would have been the world forever, until one day a Saint was born with just a little bit of cold murdering Bastard in him. He was the first Sheriff."

"He was the first man who could tell good from evil, right from wrong, and he could do that because he had the capacity for both. He used hard words and hard deeds to keep evil in check. The Saints were able to flourish. The first Sheriff had many children with them, and all his children knew right from wrong. All his children knew what had to be done. The Bastards never went away entirely, but they found they could not take life without their lives being taken in turn, so their numbers thinned. They knew fear for the first time. This was vengeance at work. Vengeance brought that balance. The Saints and Sheriffs and frightened Bastards went on to make the world--all the things we see."

The Sheriff went back to cutting his fuses. "The world eventually went to shit, of course."

"So now it's all Bastards and Saints again."

The Sheriff grinned. "That's except for you and me, son, because we know right from wrong, and we know vengeance ain't a sin." He took the nearest pipegun and screwed a fuse into the base, then held it out. "Take it. That's a good one."

Your Harrowing Future

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/11/ibm-makes-supercomputer-significantly-smarter-than-cat.ars

Mull over that for a moment. Mull. Now, this machine isn't meant to replace your cat or anything like that, it's a research device to provide insights into the behaviour of mamallian brains. But this is a machine with 4.5% of the cognitive capacity of a human brain. It runs slower than real-time, and even if it had 100% of the cognitive capcacity of a human brain it still wouldn't be a human brain (not without also simulating the strange bath of mood-altering chemicals our brains slosh about in) but, my god, it's a functioning virtualised brain.

Let's skip over the associated philosophical minefield for a moment and think about what this technology means in practical terms. It means that we're a few short technical hops away from virtualised human and post-human minds. An explosion of familiar and unfamiliar new forms of thought.

What does this do to the economy (and any kind of power structure built on that) chaps?

Let's say you strap down a few dying writers and artists, for example. You use your MindMapper 3000 (technical hurdle) to extract their brain-states and run them on your machines, running them at 100X real time (still concievable), and in each case disabling the part of the mind that knows fatigue. Give them all the resources they need in a simple simulated environment. In a week you have more new writing and art than the ('outside') market can possibly absorb in a year. That's the end of any creative industry in the traditional sense--these virtualised minds can continue to add as much beauty and depth to the universe as they like, and other virtualised minds can enjoy absorbing their output in a sort of glorious Earth-shaking Cambrian explosion of ideas, but the idea of those creations having any kind of monetary value becomes absurd.

The same thing can and will happen for other forms of mental labour. Software development? Gone. Law? Gone. Finance? That's gone. Medicine? What if your doctor could spend three months mulling over your charts and scans in the space of 24 hours, give you a diagnosis, then perform any surgery you need (or virtualize you) the next morning?

What's left? Micro-economies of food growth and distribution, I suppose. Someone needs to stoke the fires of the power stations. But certainly, the idea of engaging in any kind of creative process at real-time becomes meaningless to anyone but yourself. You'll want to be virtualised, to live a lifetime in a year, to expand, to join in that vast dialogue.

It's an exciting and dangerous new age. Will the outmoded old system give way easily? Will we apply sensible restrictions to what can go on in these mind banks? If you have virtualised thinking minds, even non-human ones, you have the potential for misery on a hitherto unimaginable scale, both inside the sims and outside.

---

Forget everything I've said about mapping existing human minds into these machines. Forget that--it'll happen, I think, but for some it's going to be an imaginative stretch too far. Let's say we use this technology to produce new kinds of minds, specialised ones, vast minds without names or any sort of recognisable consicousness but vast creative, productive capacity. You have a new sort of machine, a black box if you like, where you pour in energy and get anything you need out of the other end. The old economy is still dead, utterly flooded and washed away. Plain old fleshy real-time work becomes a navel-gazing niché market.

We are perhaps fifteen years away from 'human made!' stickers on consumer products.

Who will be doing the consuming, and with what?

---

EDIT: Here's a fun thought experiment.

Let's say it's mid-November 2031 and this technology has been improved upon and miniaturised. Something like a super high-res MRI or a friendly swarm of nanomachines can map any section of your brain and transfer both the structure and a snapshot of activity to a mind machine both smaller than the equivalent section of brain and requiring less power to operate at real-time.

Person A transfers his whole brain in one go to the mind machine. He confirms that it has worked, buys a body for the mind machine, then goes and throws himself off a bridge. A few hours later, the mind-machine version of Person A emerges in a sleek robotic body, finds his old body, buries it in the woods, then gets on with his life.

Is Person A alive or dead? Is he the same Person A? Is it the same conscious entity? Certainly if you asked him, he would say that he was.

Person B is told that he has a degenerative brain condition with no known cure. The doctor suggests a new treatment: replace the worst-affected parts of his brain with mind-machines simulating just those parts. They'll be right there in his head powered by a plutonium battery in his chest. The severed synapses will be connected to microscopic ports that map to the equivalent virtual synapses. The only difference he'll notice is that alcohol will affect him a little less than before, but there's an app for that.

Over the years, more and more of Person B's brain is replaced, until finally it's just a few ragged strips of gristle and a dozen or so NHS mind-machines operating in concert. From his point of view, nothing has changed (apart from the angry scar running up the middle of his head, but we'll ignore that for now). Then the doctor calls to tell him that the last strip of gristle has to go. Come in on Wednesday, he says. We'll swap it out.

On Thursday morning Person B gets up and brushes his teeth. He shaves. He kisses his wife on the way out the door. He drives to work listening to vintage rock.

The function of his brain has been transferred to a network of mind-machines in his skull. Is Person B alive, or dead? Is he the same Person B? Certainly if you asked him, he would say that he was.

EDIT: Turns out all of this might well be bunk. Oh well.

Further Adventures in FTL: The Ganymedan Lottery Winner

Some folks have expressed further misunderstandings based on my previous post. As my lectures go, that one was particularly impenetrable, and I am sorry. I muddied it up with all that origin talk. I will demonstrate the danger of FTL travel again, this time with smaller distances, and a more compelling character.

---

Joe Palmer is an IT professional from Ganymede City Five. That's right: Ganymede City Five. In the last three hundred years or so they've made some serious progress on Ganymede. He doesn't make much money; the machines have had IT tied up since 2015. The machines use him when it comes to swapping out memory, wiping old hard drives, and so on. They call him an IT monkey behind his back. He lives in a 160 square foot apartibox, part of a ziggurat complex of six million 160 square foot apartiboxes on the outskirts of his city, with his wife Mandy and three semiclones. His youngest semiclone is profoundly deaf because they have no kind of nationalised health service on Ganymede and Joe and Mandy can't afford ear drops.

Joe has been sent to Earth on the FTL shuttle to grab a few yottabyte sticks of memory for GANY-23, a water purifier with an IQ of 11!. (Notice the punctuation there. GANY-23 has an IQ of 11 factorial.) The trip to Earth is no big deal. They have those Branefudger engines now. The journey takes just three minutes, with a boarding/unboarding time of one minute on either side. The shuttle runs every five minutes. It's generally standing-room only, but a quick hop on a Branefudger shuttle beats the hell out of a three-week trip on one of the old fusion ferries.

Jupiter is at its closest to Earth. Light from Earth takes about 35 minutes to reach Jupiter.

Joe arrives on Earth, walks to the nearest hardware repository, hands over his requisition form and picks up the pair five-hundred ton memory sticks in their antigravorite wheelie-case. He drags them back in the direction of the shuttle. It's just turned noon and the fat and cruel Earth sun is high in the sky; Joe starts sweating up a storm. He feels about in his pocket and finds some sol-creds. He decides to take a detour via the mall near the shuttle depot and pick up something to drink.

Near the entrance to Baikonur Hyper-mall Six, Joe happens to pass a System Lottery stand. A mustachioed holoman invites him over with a cry of "roll up, roll up! Try your luck!" Joe shuffles over. "Everyone wins the System Lottery," boasts the holoman. "The winner is decided by quantum decoherence! Everyone's a winner!"

"Everyone's a winner?"

"That's right, son," says the holoman. "Your number is guaranteed to come up in at least one branch of the multiverse. You only need one ticket--just three solcreds! Trillions play the System Lottery. You give me three solcreds today, I'll give you back eleven trillion--guaranteed! That's enough to buy yourself a Saturnian pleasure moon! Are you ready for that? Three solcreds. No tombola, no numbers, I just need your System ID. Quick now, the next draw starts in ten minutes."

Joe hands over three solcreds without another thought. He waits by the lottery stand; the holoman announces the start of the draw. A drumroll sounds. The holoman flickers for a second, then points at Joe.

"Ladies and gentlemen, our winner: Joe Palmer of Ganymede 5! Your account has been credited, Mr. Palmer. Please allow--"

"HOLY FUCKOLA!" wails Joe. "You mean--oh god--HOLY FUCKOLA!" He drops the antigravorite case and gives it a stout kick. The case opens, the contents scatter over the floor of the mall, smashing the tiles and sinking through the concrete beneath like hot lead through butter. "I'm rich! Rich! Ha! HA!" He sprints for the shuttle. "Wait 'til I tell Mandy! Ear drops for little Maurice!"

"...Please allow time for the results to propogate throughout the system," says the holoman, but Joe is already well out of earshot, pushing past the queue to the shuttle and into the cabin. "I'm absurdly rich!" The pilot congratulates him and agrees to take off immediately for a million solcred fee to be paid upon arrival.

They lift off and Branefudge their way to Ganymede in record time. The shuttle lands, the door cracks open, and Joe spills out laughing, guzzling a bottle of the shuttle's emergency champagne. From Joe's point of view, he has been a multi-trillionaire for ten minutes. He calls home to tell Mandy to bring the kids and meet him outside the apartibox. He has a big surprise for her. Then he bangs on the roof of the nearest taxi. "I'm Joe Palmer!" he says.

The taxi driver steps out. "Would you mind not banging on my roof like that?"

"I'll buy you a new one. A new one! I'm Joe Palmer--I won the System Lottery!"

"Last week, you mean? I thought that Venusian sewer guy won last week."

"No--this week. There now. I won it there now."

"No you didn't," says the taxi driver. "I'm still in with a chance. The draw won't happen for another...oh...twenty-five minutes."

Joe sags slightly. "But I won," he says.

"I see what's happened," says the taxi driver. "Oh dear me. Oh dear me. You are in a pickle, my friend. Didn't you wait for the draw to propogate? They always tell you to wait for the draw to propogate. The event propogates at the speed of light. You overtook it!"

"They didn't tell me!"

"Well--hop in." The door flickers out of the way and Joe climbs in. They set off for Joe's ziggurat. The driver turns up the radio. They listen to the droning preamble before the draw. Eleven trillion solcreds to be won. Then the draw kicks off...drumroll...the winner is...

The taxi is a hundred metres up skirting over the jagged obsidian hills outside Ganymede 5. It banks and dips when Joe lunges for the controls for the passenger door, wailing insensibly. The driver engages the passenger taser until he calms down.

"But I won! It was all mine! Mine!"

"Maybe you did win," says the driver. "But you outran that. That civil servant from Mars won instead. Now sit still, we're almost there." They land on Joe's level. "Look, I'll tell you what--there's no charge. Next time you find a favourable corner of multiverse...for god's sake, stick with it until it can propogate through the system."

Mandy and the kids meet him as he leaves the taxi. "What's happened, Joe? Some pilot just called the house. He says we owe him a million solcreds. How can that be, Joe?"

"Listen, Mandy, I..."

Joe's pocketphone flashes. The machine on the other end uses his machine-level authority to engage the phone's speaker remotely. "Joe, it's GANY-394. GANY-23 tells me that you haven't shown up with his memory yet--are you delayed somehow?"

"Fuckola."

---

The dangers of superluminal travel, my friends. Events in the rearview mirror may be less certain than they appear. Outcomes can be outrun, event fronts encountered more than once. You can be re-re-re-versioned by the same act of decoherence.

One Of The Many Hazards Of Faster-Than-Light Travel

I have a thought experiment for you demonstrating some possible implications of FTL travel (if the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics holds true, of course). I'll forget everything about bending time and so on and focus on a feature of FTL travel I haven't heard mentioned before: it allows communication of information between versions of the universe. This more or less breaks everything, and is possibly a fine argument against the possibility of FTL travel.

---

Join me, travelers, in my shining globe with tripod feet and glowing ventral vents. Let the silver escalator do the climbing--that's it--now, find a seat by one of our many portholes, and strap yourself in.

We are going just under four billion light years away, about a third of the way to the edge of our observable universe. (Due to our FTL drive we'll be in the middle of a whole other observable universe when we arrive there, of course, but let's not be picky.) (It is all blossoming spacetime plumes and ultraviolet-shifted stars and other special effects for a while. You are suitably impressed.)

Okay--I'll reverse the engines, you unzip your inertia bubbles; we've arrived. Gather over here by the holoviewer, will you? I've deployed the star-sized gravity binoculars and turned the viewer on Earth, March 19th 3,939,997,991 BC, about ten minutes before that steaming rock pool there on the edge of that oily river develops the first replicator from two chains of organic molecules. See that small comet? It's going to hit land about three hundred miles from our precious pool. If you were standing by the pool, the plume of white-hot ejecta would be just about visible. The sliver of heat will warm the pool to just over 45 degrees centigrade.

Here comes the comet. So bright! I'll draw down the focus--see those amino strands? We know what happens now, don't we? Yeah--see now--the temperature in the pool has risen by three...four...six degrees. Watch those two strands. Watch them--here they come--closer--ejecting phosphate groups, now tipped by bare, hungry ions, moving along hidden lines of force. The viscocity of the medium is optimal, the heat is perfect...

Wait--was that a bubble? They missed each other? Oops. Looks like life isn't going to evolve on Earth after all. Back in your seats, folks. No need to panic. All will be explained in good time. First: let's pop by Earth again, shall we? I'll just engage this...

Earth, 2009. No time-compressed radio signals on the way in. No satellites in orbit. Barren rock and empty oceans beneath an atmosphere of ammonia, nitrogen and CO2. Unfamiliar continents. No ice caps. I said don't panic, folks, we're going to head back out and try again. The in-flight meal is chicken or beef. I recommend the beef.

We're a little further out this time--the light/reality shell of the replicator event has expanded by a few light-hours. I'll deploy the binoculars again. See? There's the pool. There's the comet, just seconds out. I'll just zoom in...there, look! The chains have joined. They're tangling--they've made a circle--and the circle is gathering a new strand at the join, forming another circle...things are looking good for life on Earth. Let's head back, shall we?

Earth, 2009. You'll notice that the continents are familiar, but look at that wide brown stain around the equator. Ah, look at that: this Earth is inhabited by a planetary hive-mind of sentient jellyfish creatures and living machines. You can hop out here if you like--looks like the land around North America is more or less free of those big protien harvesters.

What?

What do you mean, your Earth?

You're growing tiresome, you know. Stop crying over there. You're already home. You've already stepped off the ship and returned to your homes and families. Versions of you have, anyhow. Fully satisfied versions. Surely you understood the price? This is a faster-than-light ship. That also means it can outrun the expanding reality-shells of the multiverse.

What do you mean, what?

Every tiny quantum decoherence event generates a version of the universe where each possible outcome is true. A shell of reality--in this case, the region wherein it is possible to ever encounter anything affected by that decoherence event--expands outward from that point at the speed of light.

I took you out to a point beyond the expanding shell of Earth's first replicator event. Well, I had to--in order for you to witness it. Well I thought it was pretty special. We were versioning and reversioning with the collapse of every tiny quantum possibility as usual when the expanding reality shell from the replicator event passed by and versioned us into witnesses of each possible outcome. You understood that, right? And on our return trip to Earth we passed through a great many more reality shells. A superdense thicket of them, in fact. That's always the way with FTL travel. By the time we'd arrived in Earth orbit, we had been split into versions for all possible histories branching out from the original replicator event. So, I mean, you are home. It's just a great many more versions of you are not home. You just happen to be one of those versions.

I told you to stop crying. Come on, now. At least the jellyfish world still has life on it. How many versions of you have just arrived in orbit of a barren world where the replicator event happened, but the replicators went on to disintegrate after a few minutes? Or ran out of food in the first few days after failing to develop some early, vital mutation? Or the entire spectrum of worlds where life survived, flourished, developed cell walls and the like, but never went multicellular? Look on the bright side! You're a favourable and statistically unlikely version of yourself! They have the internet down there!

---

Perhaps the time-bending properties of FTL travel would conveniently return you to a point in the past which does not result in the communication of information (i.e. versions of you and the ship) between branches of the multiverse--just between you and the trunk of your past. I'm sure this could be worked out, using...math. If so, reality would be very neat indeed, and the laws of physics would have it all sewn up, and fair play to them.

---

Further to all of this is another thought: while we're four billion light years away from Earth, does life exist on Earth or not? There's no possible way to tell.

You know that the potential for life exists--a freshly post-Hadean world in the habitable zone of its Sun--but it's only after waiting around for the realities broadcast by quantum decoherence events that a version of you will ever witness life. From the point of view of any single version of you, out there at the four billion light year marker looking back with your telescope, you would see a single history of life on Earth play out from start to end. You are far more likely to be a version of yourself that witnesses life on Earth end prematurely, or never start at all.

I would guess that the spontaneous appearance of a self-replicating molecule falls into that region of things that are both astronomically unlikely but possible, things that only an endlessly reversioning multiverse could ever make a reality. We'll see soon enough; research continues into the starting conditions for life on Earth. It might happen all the time when you throw the right ingredients into a bowl; this might be bunk. But I have a feeling that it's very unlikely. There are more likely Earths where the Late Heavy Bombardment wore a continent-sized, perfectly symetrical smiley face into the crust and smoothed out everything else.

(We're sitting around witnessing ourselves, obviously, but that's just the anthropic principle again--we're here to witness ourselves because of the tiny but non-zero possibility of our existence. And we're not even the bare minimum necessary for self awareness. That makes us even more unlikely.)

So you're out in intergalactic space watching reality wash over you. We've established that you're one of the unlikely versions of yourself that sees life on Earth appear at all. An infinitessimally tiny number of versions of you would eventually witness the rise of multicellular life. A fraction of those versions would witness the appearance of the earliest vertebrates. Most of those versions would see nothing but writhing flatworms and variations on that theme. A tiny portion of you would see the first fish. After that--tinier and tinier numbers of you (still vast numbers of course, but tiny in the grand scheme of things) would see the fish do utterly improbable things like grow the precursors of limbs, start flapping about in shallow river beds, and so on. Every possibility is explored. Every possibility. And the unlikeliest possibility of all: a few trillion trillion trillion (and so on) versions of you would witness all the tiny variations of your ship being built, and eventually the fulfillment of your particular history.

When we turn our telescopes on far-off galaxies (off in the billion -ly range) and see star factories dragged through intergalactic clouds containing all the ingredients for life, we wonder: has life developed out there? The short answer is, it has. Every possibility has played out there over the last few billion years. Those galaxies teem with life. But if you waited around, watching every habitable planet in the cosmos, you might never actually witness a single extraterrestrial cell dividing. It doesn't mean that there is no life out there. Far more versions of them would look back at us and see a barren rock, too; it doesn't mean that there is no life on Earth.

The multiverse is inhabited by a great number of forms of intelligent life--every possible form.
You can expect countless variations on that theme here on Earth alone. The sad thing is, those civilizations are statistically likely to look out there and decide that they are alone. If they waited until the end of time, the majority of them would still be alone.

On the plus side, there are vanishingly rare versions of the multiverse (when all those reality shells finally overlap) where the intelligent civilization on every habitable planet sees evidence of intelligent civilization on every other habitable planet. Every single one. I imagine those universes are a good laugh.

---

One Of My Better Lectures

I've recently taken to ranting on and on about science on Twitter. I record one of my better lectures here for posterity. It concerns the LHC, the Higgs boson, and then eventually the 2004 presidential election. The NY Times article in question is here. You should go and read that first, return confused and a little afraid, and allow me to explain.

Tweets begin:

Some folks are expressing misunderstandings of the recent New York Times essay about the LHC, the Higgs boson, and fate.

I'll explain now. Let's say you have a coffee machine. And you have a handful of SPACE TIME OBLITERATION BEANS.

If you ever, ever use the SPACE TIME OBLITERATION BEANS in your coffee machine, it will entirely obliterate the past and future of the universe.

Not a popular blend, you would imagine. But no! You could set up a factory churning out the obliteration beans.

They would forever remain at the backs of people's cupboards. You would never, ever observe a universe where they were ever used, because as soon as they are used, that branch of the multiverse becomes unobservable. If you ever set into motion a causal chain that led to the obliteration beans being used, your particular universe would be erased.

The essay provides the example of a deck of a hundred million cards, all hearts, and one spade. If hearts are drawn, you turn on the coffee machine.

As long as you vow to turn on the coffee machine when a hearts is drawn, hearts will never be drawn. It'll always be a spade.

The anthropic principle at work.

Imagine: there could be Higgs bosons popping in and out of the universe all the time. But we would never observe any.

Makes you wonder what other conditions there are out there! How fragile is space/time anyway? How often are we undone every day?

An example: there is a keyhole at the end of the universe the exact size and shape of a certain human being.

If this human being does not step into the keyhole on a particular date and time, a Higgs boson will be created, and the universe undone.

We would always observe a universe where that human being existed, found his way to the keyhole, and stood in it. Always. Without a doubt.

We'd also look back at evolution and see strange, unlikely things. Multicellular life. Fish with legs. Eventually, the human body plan.

Because universes where those things did not evolve to create the human body plan are stricken from the record.

Interestingly: whatever shape you make that keyhole, something will appear the next day to fit into it. The Cockosaurus of Venus? Hark! Here he lumbers in his little suit, helmet gleaming.

Imagine all possible histories converging on the same vital moment then branching off again.

Further thoughts (back from my walk): we should all have portable Higgs Emitters in our pockets. Wire them to our heartbeat/brain activity.

Have a button on the Higgs Emitter that you can press whenever anything goes wrong. Miss the bus? Emit a Higgs boson.

Lose the election? Emit a Higgs boson...

You would see an awful lot of unlikely election results. A lot of 51/49 splits in the favour of unlikely candidates with powerful friends.

I mean...let's say your powerful friends ran the Tevatron collider in the states. And you were a really, really unpopular President.

You could also wire the LHC to biometrics from every human being on Earth. Fire off a higgs boson every time someone dies.

(As the years wore on you'd end up with a world filling up with people who are almost, very nearly, almost exactly dead)

A Higgs emitter is immediately the answer to all dispute and the most powerful item in any modern supervillain's arsenal. Forget the A-bomb!

...I want one. No wonder the scientists in the NY times article are undermined. "Otherwise respectable" etc. The gentle diffusion of Dangerous knowledge!

(Thus the lecture ends. Everyone leaves feeling a little better informed. And I sit and plan exactly how I can wire the event of losing the lottery to the firing-up of the LHC...)

The Beast

I only had Korma, which is normally reserved for old ladies and children under five, but technically it was Indian food and my stomach is a Draconian organ. It follows the letter of the law, disregarding the spirit, punishing severely and without restraint. Heartburn and throatscorch. I spent the night swallowing back hot acid and chomping on rennies between short bouts of sleep plagued by sweaty nightmares.

The nightmares. The nightmares.

Fiona and I are upstairs in our house. Not our actual real-life house--this is a fiction pieced together from all the houses of my youth. We hear a thump downstairs like a cupboard door closing. Go down and see, she says. Fine, I say, and I creep down the stairs. There's a couple of big steel cooking pots on the table in the hall; I grab the lids to use as weapons. Into the kitchen. I check each cupboard, I check the fridge, nothing. I peer outside--I can see overgrown grass and mutant hedgerow for a few feet and then it's just the endless formless black of the inside of my own head. Out of the kitchen (with the electric dread feeling of being watched from somewhere out in the dark dancing up and down my spinal cord) and into the living room. The living room is contempary, our actual real-life living room. I approach the mahogany cabinet in the corner. Fiona is behind me now. I lean in and open the doors.

There, coiled and waiting, is the biggest slate-grey shit-eating black-hearted sewer rat my imagination could conjure up. Hair all patchy and matted. Eyes black, beady, hating. Its teeth are cracked yellow shards pointing at odd angles from its black gums. The mouth is open.

The rat is screaming. It is metal grinding on concrete overlaid with the sound of galaxies colliding.

The rat leaps for my face. I slam the pot lids shut and I just in time to catch its hindquarters--the entire front end of this abomination is free to thrash about. The screaming continues, the claws flail, the mouth snaps at my arms.

The window, I shout. Open the window! Fiona runs over and flings the window open. I throw the rat out, pot lids and all. Clatter and hiss. I slam the window shut and lock it down before the mad beast can scramble back in.

Then I wake up all sweaty with my heart pounding against my ribs and a throat full of acid.

The Flamingo

For this wonderful thread.

At first I thought "The Flamingo? What can I possibly do with that?" but then I heard a whispering, a tweeting sound coming up through the dialtone at the back of my brain, and it said, "wicker thong, wicker thong, wicker thong."

A New Look

I thought it was time to change things about a bit. I hadn't changed the blog in any way since 2005 (except to add sidebar sections on top of sidebar sections). The old badly-photoshopped banner was starting to look a bit stale.

So: the new look for 2009 is stark.