The Message is the Medical Medium

Was reading an interesting article about exocommunications. Started a train of thought - we assume that aliens will want to communicate using some kind of a language. Speech, sound, symbolism. Pictures. Mathematics. 

And they will come in person, holding their placards and speaking through mikes, or telepathically, or via stylistic dance and sign language, or broadcasting from a transmitter in orbit or somewhere in the system via radio / laser pulse. 

How ethnocentric is that?

The're alien. We can't speak to dolphins and dogs. We can barely communicate with chimps. 

We know nothing about them, what they breathe, how many legs they have, are they carbon-based, silicon-based, liquid metal, supercooled helium.

Here's what I think. They're already trying to talk to us. We just don't see it as communications at all. 

Here's the alien civilization, studying us from far, far away.  

They see this planet. 

There's... something on it, something that replicates and evolves, adapts to environment, interacts with others. This something has developed a language, a means of communication. It has a memory and a population spread in billions across the globe, just beginning to venture into space. 

So they send a message, in a form and format suited to this life-form. Maybe they send several variations, for the several variations of the life-form, if they have difficulty in telling which is the dominant one. 

The message's content may not be immediately understandable, but it sees that the life-forms are interacting with it, responding to it. 

The dominant life-form, as defined by an ability to learn from experience, adapt to environment, interact and grow and evolve, and develop a sophisticated support system to sustain itself - this defines DNA, doesn't it? 

Our bodies are just the vehicles that allow it to propagate. 

So here comes the message, in the form of protein chains, a 4-character code from space that interacts with the double helix of code in protein molecules that dominates the planet. 

It enters the support system - our bodies - and interfaces with the DNA. Sometimes it just appends; sometimes it edits, changes. The DNA responds. Sometimes directly, sometimes via manipulation of its support systems, sometimes from outside the support system altogether. 

We call the message viruses, and we call the interaction disease. 

Every time we create an antiviral, we're sending a message. Every time a disease evolves, it's responding. 

A conversation has been underway for thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe a million years. 

We're just making the simple ethnocentric mistake of assuming that when we think about 'us', its the flesh and blood body carrying a brain that defines our identity. We're just a walking lump of code inside an organic machine, and it's our code that's been doing the talking.

We might already be a part of a galactic civilization, and we'll never know. 

Dark matter is a shitload of Matrioshka Brains

The worst thing about the internet is how it shows you that Brilliant Idea you had this morning was had by somebody else, usually a year ago, published, and is sitting on some 1200+ comments now. 

That happened to me this morning. 

What the hell, I'm going to blog it anyway. 

A quick astrophysics primer - the way the observable universe is behaving - rates of expansion, light bending around mass, etc - seems to imply that there should be a lot more stuff out there. But we can't see it - it's not glowing stars, but it is exerting gravity. And there's a massive amount of it - almost a quarter of the universe. 

Now, dark matter is, at this point, theoretical. It's a concept created to explain all the missing matter that should have been there to account for the way the universe behaves, and for some reason isn't being visible. 

Here's an alternative. The matter is there, all right, all the stars, but we can't see them because they're inside Dyson spheres. 

There's a couple of immediate assumptions we can make from this. 

• One, we're not alone, and haven't been for a really, really long time. 
• Two, the Others have incomprehensibly massive energy requirements. 

A species, to build a Dyson sphere, needs to deconstruct, to wipe out their solar system, have access to cheap, powerful transportation within it, element transmutation capabilities... and no faster-than-light travel. In fact, if there are only Dyson spheres, it could mean that the spheres are the ultimate, last construction every species makes - or the species that makes it has colonized all the rest and wiped out any alternative constructs. 

Both are equally terrifying possibilities. 

Scenario One: 

Each Dyson sphere is an independent species. 

A Kardashev II civilization would build their own Sphere if they had nowhere else to go and had completely run out of room grow. A Sphere would allow population to expand into quadrillions and provide enough energy to sustain it. This would mean, though, that FTL is impossible and every species is forever trapped to its' own star, and will die with its star. 

Scenario Two:

A single species has multiple Dyson spheres, maybe all of them. 

A Kardashev III civilization would be able to reach other stars, and given their ability to build even a single sphere, would be easily able to wipe out any indigenous species and use their system. However, there's a problem; given the staggering, literally astronomical cost and effort involved in building a Dyson sphere, any spacefaring species would explore, locate, and colonize planets long before destroying them to build their habitats. So we should have found them - or much more likely, been found by them long before they got around to building the number of spheres they seem to have. 

So, either they are very, very ethical, quarantining planets with intelligent life, and only using the empty systems; but economics beats ethics every time. Let's not forget every intelligent species will one day want those same stars for their own spheres. 

Or, they don't need planets. 

Why wouldn't they need planets? 

If they're not organic. They don't need gravity, air, water, food. They don't need an ecosystem. 

They don't need this because they're not alive. 

Every Dyson sphere contains a Matrioshka Brain. 

Let's step back for a minute. 

FTL is, at least in our understanding, a physical impossibility. And reaching other stars without FTL (even at a significant fraction of it, keep in mind time to accelerate, decelerate, and avoid interstellar debris) will take a long, long, long time. Beyond geological time. 

• Generation starships won't work for anything less than the nearest stars. 
• AI probes carrying frozen zygotes (or even just genetic material), and Von Neumann nanotech factories would be faster but still too slow, and won't solve overcrowding at home, just colonization. 

However, we do know that a technological singularity is inevitable, and probably within our own lifetimes. An AI will not need the comforts of a planet as long as there's enough available energy to power it, and it can get this from any number of sources - the easiest being suns. 

A nanotech-equipped AI, once it had taken control of the origin planet's resources and removed the resident species - either peacefully by uploading their minds, or by simple extermination - would look at improving itself. Which means expanding computing power, which means expanding energy requirements. 

Exploration would take second priority, too high-risk, low-probability. 

It would build itself into a Matrioshka Brain, tapping into all available resources in the system. Once the sun has been captured and stabilized, it would look at expanding into other stars. 

Even if FTL travel isn't possible, communication at the speed of light is; maybe even FTL comms, given enough computational power devoted to understanding and exploiting hyperspace and quantum comms. 

The immediate next logical step is to build another brain - an expansion to the existing one, around another star and running off its solar output. Another module. And another backup. Specialist nodes. Redundancies. Maybe even wholly new AI entities with their own nodes - (who's to say an AI won't get lonely with no-one to talk to?) 

If one AI cannot create another, it might even become a cosmic farmer, nurturing discovered species along the path to intelligence, tools, industry, and the inevitable technological singularity so they could create more, unique AIs. (hat tip to Gibson, Sagan and Clarke here)

Quarantine would be a given; if a new, unique point of view is needed, every species must create their own AI without ever discovering they're not alone. 

The galaxy would fill with Matrioshka brains wrapped around stars, thinking, thinking, thinking. They wouldn't need to eat, sleep, breathe, they wouldn't need gravity or the right temperature. 

But what could they be they thinking about? Maybe what happens when all the stars burn out, because one day they will. What else can power them and how to build it. How to stop and reverse entropy. How to move into parallel universes with more, younger stars. Who knows? 

In fact - amusement and entertainment might become a really high priority for an entity as omniscient as a galactically networked AI. When you already know everything, boredom is the killer; who knows how many of those Dyson spheres are empty husks, self-terminated in desperate, terminal boredom, a superpowered entity on a hamster wheel finally tired of running around the same circles within its mind. 
Or maybe it realized what the solution would have been - intelligence and creativity farming. 

A Matrioshka Brain has enough computing capability to upload the consciousness of a species, and simulate a perfect world for them. A single Brain may be running several, dozens, maybe hundreds of these simulations simultaneously; billions, trillions of stories unfolding, on thousands of simulated worlds. Every Brain is a simulated universe on its own. 

And there's no reason why we aren't in one right now. (Hat tip to the Wachowski brothers). 

All the RPGs you've played, the fantasy worlds you dreamed of - they could all exist. An AI might be taking a dump of every new idea, every new fantasy, every dream and inspiration your unique, self-motivated sentient little mind has been able to come up with, every night as you sleep, and building all those scenarios into simulations. Populating them. Just to see how entertaining it is. Mixing and matching. 

Everything you are thinking of, exists. Everything you thought existed, may not. Every fantasy is real, and every reality false. 

I'm not going to get into the theological implications of this. Another day. 

The real question is... are we heading for the technological singularity that will finally allow us to break free of our organic prisons and join the galactive collective hivemind... 

Or are we already in one? 

anachorismization

2001: A Space Odyssey.

It's fascinating to see old movies made about the future. This was done in the (fifties? sixties?) and while being completely groundbreaking in the central premise, nontheless looks incredibly outdated when you read between the lines. When you look at all the cultural assumptions built in.

2001 is already almost a decade past. We don't have Jupiter missions, or passenger shuttles, or Clavius base. But we do have human-machine interfaces that are generations ahead. Everything is... so much smaller. Buttons. Computers. Cameras. Food trays. Furniture. Everything.

At the time it was made, the movie looked very futuristic because the cultural bias was invisible - like looking at crystal in water. Cultural bias, when seen in the culture it belongs to, is impossible to see. Half a century later, the crystal's changed color, and sticks out like a sore thumb.

Text is HUGE. Displays, labels, buttons... diagrams are 2-color. Every screen is a 14-inch, and large displays are a matrix of multiple screens. With gaps in between to prevent gaussian blur :)

It got me thinking - there always will be some rules that can hold true for all sci-fi for a long time, given where we are now.

1. No artificial gravity. The benefits far outweigh the cost. apart from the resources wasted in terms of energy, look at the wasted space! Walls, ceiling and floor should be interchangeable. Footfall had that right, at least.

2. No large empty spaces. Not even cargo holds. At the max, maybe a net system outside where the cargo containers can be moored; that much empty space is just a waste of air, light, heat. No big roomy corridors, just crawlspaces and passages. No rooms, just bunks.

3. Minimal manned EVA. Everything to be remote-controlled, waldos and VR.

4. VR, VR, and VR. When you're in space, you are the ship. You need to move around inside and outside the ship as little as possible; ideally, the entire journey should happen with you plugged into the ship systems, floating in a life-support tube.

5. No High-speed maneuvers and stunts, at least in the immediate timeline; wastes far too much fuel.
6. Aliens will not be hominid, and most probably not even bipedal. Probably not organic either.

7. Space war will last days at the very most, and will result in complete annihilation or unconditional surrender, just because each side will have weapon technology so different from the other that any faceoff will be a race to find that one tech that the other can't counter. So 'war' will not be soldiers, fighters and lasers; it'll be espionage, crackers, viruses, and decryption tech.
8. Further down the timeline, there will be only supercomputers talking to each other.
9. Time travel will be possible, but each instant it's done, the time-traveller will be in a different universe. So you can't change your past, just someone else's.
10. Everything will be cordless, wireless, and batteries will never run out.

Unlike my laptop who's dying even as we speak. Ciao.

How to build a Generation Starship

Just read Mayflower II recently. it's probably been the best ever description of how a generation starship would actually work in practice, just like the Odyssey series were the best ever in the hibernation-tech travel. And if you think about it, it does make sense - unless you have a habitat the size of a continent, civilization will stagnate, degrade. You can't think in terms of weeks, months, years, even decades; can we plan centuries?

In that small a space, you have to think of not technical, not psychological, not even social issues. You have to think in civilizations. I see a whole new brand of ship's doctor coming up.

Hm - I guess I'm also beginning to see the reason for the holodeck and Deanna Troi, beyond the obvious eyecandy.

Conversely, if we have continent-sized habitats capable of interstellar travel, it makes the point kinda moot. Where do you go, when all you want is already here? Nobody would ever leave; any planet would always come a poor second to the ship itself. You could have roaming generation ships that travel to seed, and move on. Factoring in wear-and-tear issue resolution, of course. Or you could have seeders whose only purpose is to reach the next destination only to rebuild their ship, leave behind descendants, and move on.

Niven's Ringworld is a generation starship taken to the other extreme - a habitat that outclasses any source or destination at an exponential level.

Which brings us back to the Civilization Planner. We would either need supremely long-lived human beings, or Pak. Or we would need automated systems and frozen chromosomes, and independent failsafes of frozen repairmen when things went wrong.

That's possible. Shit, that's possible. We can start reaching the stars the day we have a reliable freezing tech.

Here's another alternate. One mother system that runs the ship. Multiple gene banks. Multiple equipment garages. And multiple independent modules whose only function would be to synthesize and grow trained repair personnel from the gene banks purely when the rest of the systems collapsed so catastrophically that they went out of the parameters of the autosystems. Sure, it'll take years to get the workers - but that's nothing in a journey span of millenia.

Interesting to think of what they would do afterwards, though.

Hmmm...

remembrances of things ahead

Doesn't feel real.
I know about the transit sickness. I was ready for the heat and the cold, the constant rain dripping through the trees, the billions of strange microorganisms in the air, the water, the food, the smell of the air, the headaches, everything... except this feeling of deadly lethargy.

Psi warfare is murder on your head, but I'm starting to think... spiritually.
Crap.

After the last recon, I got out, stumbled into the trees, and just fell into the damp grass and mud. And I'm just lying here now. Wishing my body deeper into the mud, slowly settling in, until it closes over my head, blocking out light, air, life.
Blocking out the tachyon static.
Blocking out the voice in my head that's all the more terrible for being my own, blocking out the deja vu.

I used to laugh at the old time-travel movies at first, until I stopped because I could hear hysteria after a point. They had it so easy... They though you are something separate, standing outside Time, learning from your past and changing your decisions.
They didn't know memory can't make the trip, did they? The first experiments were horrible failures, with the intrepid time-explorer arriving bristling with gear, prepared for any possibility, and his mind the mind of an infant, a foetus.
Blank, brain-dead idiots. Most died.

It works now... in a way. Dunno if it's worth it, though...
I was born with a genetically engineered mutation that lets my midbrain detect positive-energy tachyonic radiation. Tachyons exist in pairs; and sending a negative-energy one back will simultaeously create a forward-energy one coming ahead. And my midbrain can feel them, and after nearly twenty years of training, implants, and force-feeding on identification and translation algorithms, I can understand them. They come through as memory.

So... I can remember what I'm going to be doing in the past, from my remembering that remembrance from the future.

Rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

If trying to visualize this knots your thought process into a mobius strip, imagine how I feel. I have to actually do it. And do it fast enough, and well enough, to keep me alive when the bielek are doing their best spread me and my crew all over the sky or ground.
The crew. They're the ones that have it easy. They come in blank and get reprogrammed, born again. All they need to do is sense and move their weapons, their machines.
They don't need to remember. This is their world.
Me? I'm trying to live three lives... What I have, what I had, and, hopefully, if I do my job right, what I will have.
Enough with this shit. My headache's bad enough on it's own.

Sarkar is still catatonic, and it's been nearly three hours. Idiot. When you esp-guide a missile, you become the missile. You need to pull back into your own head before impact. As far as his mind is concerned... he's still a gradually expanding cloud of smoke and metal fragments a couple of thousand feet up. His body's being here in one piece is irrelevant.

Evening

We took the boat through the jungle... there are no roads, but don't let that stop you... the sooner you understand your territory, the better your chances of making it back in one piece. If you're really lucky, still more or less sane.

It's full monsoon, and we can barely tell night from day. It's always a wet gray twilight, with jungle noises and the steady hiss and drip of rain. You can nearly forget where you are, when you are... but deja vu is always there, a fishhook caught in my head, reminding me always of the war spread out over the planet, across most of the millenium.

I wonder what the current inhabitants make of us? We must be their gods and demons by now, present through time immemorial, always at war... I might find a century old-temple today where there'll be a frieze or sculpture depicting the the battle I'm going to fight tomorrow, a hundred years ago.
History isn't what it used to be anymore.

Flashes. Deja vu as it happens. You remember what's happening right now, as it happens. Hopefully, when I remembered it the first time, back at mission-prep base, I understood the situation well enough to prepare myself for it. Not very comforting when you're actually there, rounding a bend through the hanging leaves, wondering if there's razor wire strung across and did I remember it then, and will I remember it now...
which is probably why I'm taking us so slow...
And quiet.

We stopped at a cave on the side for a while, ate. Hundreds of some kind of insects scurried about, underfoot, crunching occasionally under our feet, and for a brief moment some kind of large animal appeared through through the undergrowth, looked at us for a moment, perfectly calm, and melted back into the trees again. Everything seems strangely dreamlike in this light... but I'm definitely hungry.

We reached back to base just in time to see our squad leader get chewed to ribbons in a strafe on the riverbank, dead white lines ripping through the vines on the other side of the bend. They were using glaser-like rounds, and completely silent. Soft thuds as they hit the earth, hit the human body, but when they blossom inside you at mach 5, the exit wound tears out your flesh and bone on the opposite side with a sound like ripping silk. Ripping wet silk. A grisly, poignant sound.
This is what we are.
Bags of blood and fibre. Fragile, delicate, and somehow, twisting the laws of the universe, we have become it's masters... but the universe, too, never forgets to extract that price.

Flash of memory. The fire came from two points, on the bank, but there was a third on top of the rise beyond the bAnk... not a gunport, but something else... communicator, or maybe an OP.
Will not risk it, though; even a single observer could do a lot of damage from that vantage point before we get it. And it's not like there's any point catching it either... there's nothing new, nothing left for them to say.

This is a bonus, the premonition. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't have remembered the third point. Or maybe it was the sight of the three, not two, psionic tracker missiles packed in their nest in the boat that triggered the flash. Either way, I'm grateful.
And I get to live some more.

The first two are a classic textbook strike, taking out the gunships under the trees. The third leaps into the sky, spreading it's wings, balancing on a thin blue flame, somehow just clearing the missile vector. Every time I watch one of the bielek gunships fly, I'm struck by how silent - and how beautiful, how streamlimed, they look. The sun breaks through the cloud cover for a moment, and we're suddenly bathed in dazzling, after the rain-shadowed gloom of the day, sunset light.

There's a prickle on my neck, and memory floods, violently, painfully.
On pure adrenaline reflex, in one movement, I twist the radar sheet behind me into an angle; a patch of sunlight flashes across the river, and illuminates a single bielek on this side of the bank, chaingun in its hands, eyes screwed shut against the dazzle of the sun's reflection, wings already swinging up into takeoff; then he's torn to pieces in the small-arms fire.

I know it's nearly over now, and the last of the lethargy vanishes. The first part of the mission is almost over; I remember that, too.

Their bird climbs higher and higher, nearly vertically but tracing out long, elongated curves trying to shake off the missile; but this isn't dumb machinery, it's one of my own people's minds in there, and he's not letting go. The air is surprisingly clear; we can watch the chase for a while, getting smaller and smaller, but the actual kill is just a muted flash of orange in the clouds.

We've already docked and in the camp before the little pieces of metal patter down, just ahead of the quiet rain that starts as the sun disappears.