Cover for the RPG

 

Human teleportation...it happened once, why not again?

In doing research on a folded space teleportation idea for a story, I stumbled across a little mystery that has yet to be solved. Now whether or not this is true, it certainly seems that it did occur. Let me share it with you.

So apparently, in 1593, a Filipino soldier was standing guard at the Governor’s palace in Manila, on Las Islas Filipinas, or the Philippine islands. Our erstwhile guardsman, one Gil Perez, was exhausted from the events that preceded his fateful watch.  Moluccas pirates had killed the Lord Governor of Las Islas Filipinas, Gomez Perez-Dasmarinas, during an ill-fatted attempt to eradicate them.

Wait the story gets better… Gil Perez decided to close his eyes, leaning against a wall to rest, just a little catnap is all. After all the place was in a tizzy from the death of the Governor and the possibility that the pirates might attack.

Although he was determined to do his duties, he was exhausted, and quickly fell into a slumber. After a while, strange noises woke him, opening his eyes he was startled to find himself in wholly unfamiliar surroundings. The people spoke fluent Spanish, however with an accent he found a little...different.

However being a proud member of the Guardia Civil, and unsure of what to do, he continued to do his duty and guarded the palace he found himself at. However his bewildered expression, and completely different guard uniform made him stand out among the other guardsmen. Soon an officer began asking him questions that frankly Gil was unable to answer.

After a brief conversation where our guardsman became increasingly agitated when he found out where he was. He, Gil Perez, a member of the Filipino Guardia Civil, was at the Plaza Mayor… in Mexico City.

During his interrogation with the Viceroy and his Council, he happened to mention that the Moluccas pirates had killed the Governor of the Philippines, His Excellency Don Gomez Perez Dasmariñas.

No one believed him of course, but then poor Gil Perez was interrogated by Church authorities and even though he continually insisted he somehow traveled from Manila to Mexico overnight but had no idea how, he was promptly accused of either being a cowardly deserter or practicing “the black arts”, either way he was imprisoned.

Proclaiming his innocence for two months as he languished in prison, Gil Perez, erstwhile teleporter resigned himself to dying in prison. However, a ship arrived from the Philippines bearing news of the death of the Lord Governor on October 23. Several people aboard the ship also confirmed that they knew who Gil Perez was and in fact had seen him assume his duties as palace guardsman and were surprised to see him in a Mexican jail.

Both government and church officials were amazed and mystified but could offer no explanation to what happened. After some lengthy debate, Gil Perez was released and sent back to the Philippines with a letter explaining where he had been, that he had not deserted and seemingly went back to assume his duties as a member of the Guardia Civil

This is one of the weirder stories I have come across, but is has given me a number of ideas for expanding my story. It also gives rise to many questions. There have been theories that humans can teleport. There is supposed research by the United States Air Force, which reportedly  has commissioned an 88-page study titled "Teleportation Physics Study" in which author Eric W. Davis of Warp Drive Metrics says that teleportation – the movement of a thing or person from location to location through the power of the mind alone – is "quite real and can be controlled."

The Air Force purportedly is intrigued enough by the possibilities of psychic teleportation – or p-Teleportation, as it is called – to spend some $7.5 million to research it.

It is always interesting when doing research for a story idea to stumble upon bits of history that don’t fit into a defined category, and untold possibilities. I wanted to share this with you with the parting thought, what if Gil Perez had actually teleported?  He would have done so without any of our advanced technology, since it was the 16th century. Does that mean the ability to be instantaneously anywhere in the world is inherently in us we just haven’t figured out how?  

Science and Belief; The Age of the Earth.

I have been staring at my computer screen for a few days now, simply trying to frame the argument, no not argument, rather it was a discussion on the long seven-hour flight from Oakland to Philly.

I managed to have gotten the aisle seat very near the front of the plan, I found myself sitting next to an older woman, in her late fifties or early sixties. Very prim, proper, her white hair drawn back into a tight bun. Her glasses that sat low on her nose, shielding clear blue eyes, she also had a quick smile that she offered as she sat against the window.

Once in the air I noticed she was reading a book, “Starlight and Time.” By Russell D. Humphreys, in my mind I thought great someone to talk science with since I was reading a book on parallel universes. This would not be such a bad flight after all.

After engaging in pleasantries, I nodded to her book and said jovially, “I am a sci-fi writer and gobble up books on science so I have a better grasp of the science concepts I employ in my stories. I don’t think I have seen that book before.”

Her smile stiffened as she eyed my book, and then said matter-of-factly, “Modern science is wrong.”

It was a long flight, I had never met a Young Earth Creationist before and it certainly was a revelation. If you do not know what YEC is, it is a creationist movement that believes in a strict adherence in the Bible’s creation story that God created the world/universe in six, 24-hour day cycles somewhere between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago.

The book my companion was reading attempts to refute the greatest objection to their theory, the light of distant stars.  It was an interesting discussion, from what I gathered, the model holds that the earth is near the center of the universe, and that due to relativistic principles relating to gravity, light, and time dilation, only a few thousand years of time transpires on earth while the rest of the expanding universe experienced billions of years of time

.

I asked her if she believed that the distances that science has established for nearby stars and even galaxies are correct. She answered yes, which gave me a moment of pause, because I had written down on my note pad, 186,000 and even circled it.  186,000 miles per second, or about 671 million miles per hour is the speed of light. The farthest galaxy we can see is A1689-zD1, and that is at a distance of 13 billion light years.

I pointed this out to her, that the math doesn’t seem to work based on the speed of light, and the acceptance of distance of galaxies. She had an answer which surprised me.

She stated that our Milky Way is near the center of the universe, and that the proverbial “Let there be light” moment was the birth of a “white hole” several light years in diameter. Furthermore the solar system and more importantly the Earth is near the event horizon, thus the incredible gravitational pull slowed time on Earth relativistic to the rest of the universe.

Strictly speak that could be possible, however I don’t know if “white holes” exist  But I asked her if it did exist, why we cannot find any evidence of the gravitational effects of this “white hole”? If the event happened only say 10,000 years ago we should be able to see the effects of such a strong gravitational pull and thus far there are none, especially if the gravitational field of such magnitude were close enough to earth.

That quieted her a moment. I didn’t win the argument, I just pointed out that if we can measure the effects of gravity everywhere else in the galaxy and universe, surely we should be able to see the effects of a field that close to Earth bending light.

She sat back and smiled, then opened the book again and began reading. Clearly, our friendly discussion was over.

   

I want to be perfectly clear that I don’t discount anyone’s belief, but I do question things when they attempt to use science to explain something by “cherry-picking” their evidence.  If you state that such huge gravitational field is what caused the discrepancies between the bible date for the Earth and the rest of the universe, you should be able to back it up with empirical evidence.

After we landed, I said good-bye and disembarked heading towards the baggage claim, when I heard her on the phone telling someone that she had a horrible flight because she sat next to a non-believer.

Wow. 

Multiverse: The Dot-Line Universe

It has been a trying time the last few weeks. My father sick and in the hospital required me to fly back to visit the family. For those inquiring, he is ill, and it is a matter of time before he passes.

To take my mind off the rigors and realities of life, I spent time with some very old friends, and the topic of multiverses and parallel realities came up. Wow! There is a great deal of misconceptions of multiverses and the implications of such things occurring. A confusion regarding my multiversal setting and the Dreamers who inhabit it, how can they “walk between worlds” as I call their ability to traverse time, space and various realities.

Multiverses are a great way to explain situations in stories that are complicated. Things like time loops, alternate realities and space travel without the realities of distance for story continuity. However, in hard science fiction the readers are fairly versed in science, so trying to tap dance around it is difficult.

With a grin, I explained to my friends that as a writer I accept that parallel universes exist; therefore, the concept of infinity is also true. Infinity is an abstract concept describing something without any limit. Quickly a cough and hand went up asking how can infinity exist?

Well infinity exists if there is always an in-between state between two possible outcomes. Say, you draw a line on a piece of paper; at the end of the line, you place a dot. There is a myriad of outcomes to where one dot maybe in relation to the other dot along that line. The space between the two original points is where the dots can be moved closer to one another and as long as there is a space between them there is always a third outcome.

Each parallel universe is a reflection of another but there are differences in that universe that caused it to split from the universe it is reflecting. For instances our lines and dots universes are all reflections of the one universe where the dots are at the terminus of the line. Each parallel universe is a dot and line; however, the location of the dots is different in each universe therefore making a universe, parallel to every other dot-line universe, save for the location of the dots. Thus creating an infinite number of possible dot-line universes.

This comes from Hugh Everett III, who in 1957 while at Princeton, came up with the idea that if two alternatives can interfere with one another, then these alternatives must exist simultaneously. If they exist simultaneously they cannot occupy the same space, hence they must be in a separate but parallel universe.

So each universe is wholly unique and separate from each other by some alternate placement of the dots.

As I explained this to my friends, several noted that they had bought e-books that held similar concepts but were all over the place with them and in no way made sense. With a begin smile, I told them to buy my books, and that there are many sci-fi e-books out there with similar concepts but if the writer doesn’t put time in trying to understand them, even at a basic level, their science fiction often lacks focus. 

The best parallel universes are different but not overly, so, to make them radically different  doesn’t make sense. Star Trek used the parallel universe concept with opposite personality differences in the crews. The crew everyone loved and the other a dastardly pirate crew.  It was great the familiarity of the setting and characters was the base dot-line universe and the personality dots had been moved slightly to give us the pirate personalities.

Infinite parallel universes are great and offer so many avenues of exploration to the writer, but to use them with any competence a working knowledge of the concepts is a must.  Now where did my dot go?

Autonomous Robots, War Machines and Ethics.

Whew. It has been an interesting week. Working on another story in my Dreaming Universe setting while trying to drum up more free-lance work, but what really topped it off has to be an email I received regarding artificial intelligence and robotics.

Primarily, I am a technologist; since we live in a technological society, I can identify and extrapolate through logic where technology may lead us in the near and possibly far future. Yes I blend technology and mysticism in my Dreaming Universe setting, although I do know that a parsec is a measurement of distance (one parsec equals about 3.26 light-years) and not time…(zing!)

Back to the email, it seems one of the writers in my review group posed the question about robots being used in war. This is based on the reboot of Robo-Cop and the prevalence of drones in modern warfare; he wanted to know if I believed that robots would become common on the battlefield in the near future.

Firstly, yes they will become more prominent on the modern battlefield. Currently there are hosts of robots that are directly controlled by an operator in the military and with police forces. However, the actually question posed was do I think autonomous robots will become common on the battlefield. Again, the answer is yes. However, there is a caveat to that answer, once we open the Pandora’s Box of artificial intelligence and autonomy in war machines, we will have to face the ethical issues that come with it.

Isaac Asimov, one of the greatest sci-fi writers, thought on this subject back in the ‘40s, and developed his Three Laws of Robotics. You don’t know what they are? Here are the laws and their genesis.

The Three Laws of Robotics (often shortened to The Three Laws or Three Laws) are a set of rules devised by science fiction author Isaac Asimov. These rules, introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround", were foreshadowed in earlier stories. The Three Laws are:

11)    A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

22)    A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

33)   A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

A pretty neat set of rules for autonomous entities created by humanity, whose sole purpose is to make human lives easier, (really do we need to make society any more sedentary?) however these laws come from an ideal society where humanity realized the dangers of robots.

Human society, regardless of the kumbayah mentality that many cling too, is one of struggle. Humanity in its storied million-year history has been engrossed in a brutal struggle for survival. In fact, we eliminated the last opposition to our dominance, the Neanderthal 30,000 years ago.

However, a human soldier, seeing a mother trying to save a child moving a firearm or ordinance off the child will recognize it for what it is and hold fire. A child running across the street towards during a firefight trying to find safety will usually not draw fire. Granted I am using Western soldiers as examples, as we know there are murderous men leading armies throughout the world that have no regards for any life that are the perceived enemy.

However, they are still human and we can bring those murderers to justice by trial for war crimes. But when a machine is ordered to assault a village, town or city, tasked with rooting out and destroying an enemy kills innocents, where is the justice for the victims? You can shut down the machine, take it off line, or reprogram it. How can you adequately hold it responsible for any atrocities it commits?

One option is holding the programmers responsible for the crime; however, I can see a legal defense for that. If the machine has some semblance of intelligence, it can be argued that the machine “choose” to proceed with its action, thus absolving the programmers or creators of any responsibility for the crime.

Looking at the news, we see protesters engaging in combat with security forces, with casualties on both sides, human on human combat. However, if the protestors in the Ukraine are facing a company of robots with the orders to disperse the dissidents, you create a unique dyad, where the death of one party will have ramifications for loved ones, but the loss of the other party is nil as the machine can be replaced by another unit in the arsenal.

The issue then becomes one of ethics. Is it ethical for a country with robots to engage in warfare with a country that does not have them? Is it ethical for the government in command of robots to use them to put down uprisings or even as police forces within their own borders? How can a robot be brought to trial for the murder of a human? Is a robot killing of a human being even murder?

Murder is defined as the unlawful killing, with malicious intent, of another human; the premeditation distinguishes murder from manslaughter.

How can a robot have malicious intent? Even if there is a highly developed artificial intelligence algorithm used by the robot, as a society we would have to admit that the robot and its AI are equal to humans, thus opening a new series of issues regarding the use and equality of robotic entities.

I have barely touched on the potential issues that will face humanity once robots become more active and begin to gain autonomy in their actions. Sadly, I don’t see the world adopting any meaningful set of standard rules like Asimov described. I do see a new arms race with more and more intelligent machines as countries try to keep ahead of the curve, but as that happens inevitably we will reach the tipping point, and machines may decide that the whole problem with the world is simply humans.

Jelly doughnut solved.

NASA's Opportunity rover spotted an odd Martian rock that looked like a doughnut on Jan. 8. Four days earlier, however, the rock wasn't there at all. So how did the rock appear? Alien rock throwers? A nearby meteorite impact? The truth is much less surprising. Scientists working with the intrepid robot have just confirmed that the rock (called Pinnacle Island) was simply kicked up by one of Opportunity's wheels as it made its way across the planet's surface. [Amazing Photos from NASA's Opportunity Mars Rover] "Once we moved Opportunity a short distance, after inspecting Pinnacle Island, we could see directly uphill an overturned rock that has the same unusual appearance," Opportunity deputy principal investigator Ray Arvidson, of Washington University in St. Louis, said in a statement. "We drove over it. We can see the track. That's where Pinnacle Island came from." 10 Years On Mars: Opportunity's First Sols: Photos The rock stirred up enough controversy that a concerned citizen even filed a lawsuit against the space agency, claiming that NASA failed to properly investigate a possible fungus growing on the Red Planet. Although researchers figured out where the rock came from, there are other weird aspects of the Pinnacle Island tale. Using Opportunity's tools, mission scientists have discovered that the rock has very high levels of sulfur and manganese. Both of those elements are water-soluble, suggesting that they were concentrated in the rock due to the "action of water," NASA officials said. "This may have happened just beneath the surface relatively recently, or it may have happened deeper below ground longer ago and then, by serendipity, erosion stripped away material above it and made it accessible to our wheels," Arvidson said. Faces on Mars and Other Things: Photos The rock is located in a spot on "Murray Ridge" along the wall of Endeavour Crater, where Opportunity is spending the Martian winter. Now that the rover is done examining Pinnacle Island, the Opportunity team is planning to drive the rover uphill to check out exposed rock layers on a different part of the Martian surface. "We are now past the minimum solar-energy point of this Martian winter," Opportunity project manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement. "We now can expect to have more energy available each week. What's more, recent winds removed some dust from the rover's solar array. So we have higher performance from the array than the previous two winters." Opportunity has been exploring Mars since 2004, landing on the Red Planet a few weeks after its twin, Spirit, touched down on the Martian surface. Both rovers were assigned 90-day missions, but Spirit gathered data until 2010 and Opportunity is still roving along. More from Space.com Mars Illusion Photos: The 'Face on Mars' and Other Martian Tricks10 Amazing Mars Discoveries by Rovers Spirit & OpportunityRover Tracks on Mars: Spirit and Opportunity | Video Show Copyright 2014 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. This article originally appeared on Space.com. http://news.discovery.com/space/alien-life-exoplanets/mystery-of-nasas-jelly-doughnut-mars-rock-solved-140215.htm#mkcpgn=rssnws1

World Building 101- part 4- Dehumanizing the races in your writing.

One of the things that can be found in fantasy and science fiction stories besides the struggle with or against technology as it affects the protagonist are a multitude of alien races. Elves, Dwarfs, Trolls are some of the mythic races found in fantasy writing. Klingons, Romulons, Zabrak and Wookies are some of the science fiction iconic races.

All of these races are generally human in form and in thinking. This is understandable because as human writers we are the ones infusing thoughts, emotions and motives to these races. There is a tendency to use anthropomorphism, (the attribution of human form or other characteristics to anything other than a human being) with our races.

At the writers meeting I attended last month, one of the writers brought up something that I always have taken for granted. When he was describing his character and setting during our world building exercise, I continually asked questions about the choices he made regarding what he presented. He said that my questioning made him think more, because these things were questions he had not thought of.

What he presented was a space opera setting, with a human hero, on an alien world. Yet his alien world where a conglomerate of alien and humans lived, a space age Tortuga if you will, was clearly driven by humanizing the aliens.

Now I understand that a majority of aliens were a backdrop for the story, used to make the city “feel” alien and exotic. Yet when we see the aliens and their shops, where the hero wanders, is nothing more than New York City or any large modern city. However, there was nothing uniquely alien when the hero entered a store.

I asked about the store, if it owned and operated by an alien species, is the atmosphere inside different than outside? Is the gravity the same? How does communication occur? Can the human make the required sounds or conversely can the alien make the sounds to form human words?

What does the store smell like? Why do the aliens smoke cigarettes? Why are drugs usable by both humans and the various aliens that inhabit this world? Why in face did all the aliens seem like human beings with funny colored skin?

It is not just writers who do this, those who claim to have been contacted by aliens from other worlds clearly apply anthropomorphism to these other worldly beings. There are according to ufo theorists who know such things, that 51 to 57 different alien species have and are currently visiting the planet earth.

Yep, 51-57 different species from presumably 57 different worlds, many light years from our little planet. Yet all of them, every single one, from the reptilians to the grays to the multitude that resemble humans, either Nordic or Mediterranean, and the various offshoots that seemingly populate the nearly all planets possible. Oddly enough, they all breathe the exact mixture of our atmosphere, the 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gasses with nary a gasp or wheeze. They also deal with our gravity with little to no ill effects and more importantly are anthropomorphically human. 

You know, one head, two arms, two legs. They also have a tendency to get freaky with our women, because somehow to these other species, human woman are more desirable than their own females. I am aware that there are a great number of human-like races, even so there would be biological differences from a planetary perspective that might inhibit a mixing of DNA through purely physical means.

To get back to the discussion at the meeting, I suggested that instead of dismissing the “alien-ness” of the species, actually work at it, to get in-depth with the development of the species from their planet to their religion to their wants and needs. I was asked if this was something that the reader needed to know. Perhaps not all of it, but enough to give the aliens or elves or dwarfs or what every race you are writing about a feeling of uniqueness. The one question I posed that seemed to be one that was hard to answer, “Why would species ‘X’ find a human woman a fitting sexual partner?”

So if you are writing about aliens races, and Dwarfs and Elves are just as alien to humans as a Zabrak or Wookie are, consider the whys of the races. Consider if you making them human. Why do they have the same concepts of loyalty, honor or why are they cruel and devious the way humans are? What makes them this way? Why do they have the same concepts of religion and deities as humans? If you can only answer it with because they are, you are doing a huge disservice to the race of creatures you are making. You are not making anything uniquely alien, only a human with pointy ears or green skin and a funny name.