SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.sf.ca.us http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #73 New Moon of December 25, 2000 Contents copyright 2000 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* This New Moon is a little unusual, not only in that it comes on Christmas, but in that it has a solar eclipse associated with it. The eclipse will only be partial (unless maybe you're Santa and your sleigh can get a thousand miles or so above the North Pole to catch totality), but still that's a little unusual. According to one article the last Christmas eclipse was back in the 1950's. The article also mentioned the fact that the Moon is slowly moving farther away from Earth, and in a few hundred million years it will be too far away to make total solar eclipses any more. Then the best we'll have will be annular eclipses. That led me to wonder about the other end: Did the dinosaurs see more total solar eclipses than we do now? I think they would have seen roughly the same number of eclipses, but more of them would have been total when viewed from any given point on the surface. I say "I think" because there are other factors I'm not expert enough to say much about. The Moon's orbit was a little different, and the Earth's rotation was also a little different. And the one thing that would have made the biggest difference, the angle between the plane of the Moon's orbit and the plane of Earth's orbit, is something I have no data on and don't know how to calculate. So if someone asks me whether the dinosaurs saw more eclipses than we do, I'd have to say that I don't know. But whatever the truth of the matter, I'm fairly sure the dinosaurs didn't really care one way or the other about eclipses. They might have reacted to it suddenly getting dark at the wrong time of day, but they wouldn't have anticipated eclipses months in advance or done the bit with the pinholes in the cardboard or any of that. So if you're thinking of going back in a time machine to sell telescopes and other eclipse-related stuff to the dinosaurs, better rethink your business plan. Even if we were still in the middle of the dot-com investing frenzy, that would be something I wouldn't have bet on. ********************* In one Christmas movie I saw recently there's a scene where a little girl tenderly touches a reformed villain's face. That, plus the fact that they were of somewhat different species, got me to thinking of how our ideas of love and affection are derived from our being warm-blooded and endoskeletal. If, for example, we were exoskeletal like insects or lobsters, would we even have the concept of "cuddling" at all? Would soft things like pillows still seem more emotionally comforting than hard things like rocks? What if mating did not require physical contact? For example, suppose the female laid eggs and then the male fertilized them outside the female's body (permeable shell or something)? Would there be such a thing as "couples" and "marriage", or would all children belong to the tribe collectively? Would there be such a thing as lovers, and would they still enjoy touching? Whatever the inhabitants of such a planet did, they would probably think we were pretty strange. ********************* Two jokes and a proverb walk into a bar. The shark asks "Why do you smell like that?" whereupon the kangaroo answers "NAND gates are sufficient to build arbitrary logic with." Now most Earth people won't find this funny, or at best may get a chuckle out of what a mess of a joke it is. But certain hostile ET's who often go around disguised as Earth people will find it hilarious, sometimes to the extent of being practically helpless with laughter, even if they're heard it numerous times before. At this point you can kill them easily if you have the right weapons, but even if you don't, at least it blows their cover. So you should memorize it to tell whenever you want to be sure there are no hostile ET's lurking around. One caveat: If you're a big business executive or are in a similar position of power so that you're surrounded by people who always laugh at your jokes no matter what, you're likely to get false positives. One work-around might be to have a low-ranking assistant actually deliver the joke so people won't feel obligated to laugh if they don't find it funny. There are other such jokes, but at present this is the only one that's been declassified. But if you notice someone you don't know telling a joke that seems to make no sense, that may well be the reason. ********************* Some remark on the email list got me to thinking about an idea I'd had many years ago about alternate timelines. In the standard science fiction version, some decision causes the universe to split into two parallel universes where the decision goes one way in one but the other way in the other. Thus there might now be an alternate universe where a certain Supreme Court decision went 5-4 the other way and they're still not sure who's going to be President. And there may be yet another in which Gore won. That's the standard science fiction idea. But I think it's too simple. First, there's the assumption that the whole universe splits at each decision point, and splits all at once. But would it? Would beings in other star systems really be affected either way by how our election went? Assuming they weren't here spying on us and therefore didn't send the news back home by some sort of FTL technology, they haven't yet been affected. They won't see any effect for years, even if they're monitoring our TV broadcasts. That leads to the first disagreement with the cliche: I would think that any such split would not happen all at once, but instead would start at the decision point and spread out from there no faster than the speed of light. Think of some hyperdimensional analog of a blister that starts small and grows, so there are two separate layers at the origin but they're still stuck together outside the boundary. And the split may not grow indefinitely. Since distant galaxies may never be affected by events on Earth, the split may never get that far. Once the light from the event gets far enough away that an observer would not be able to tell the difference between the two versions of the event, the split might well stop. So again with the blister analogy, it grows to a certain size but no bigger. It's not really that neat. If there's a gas cloud to one side of us that prevents beings farther away from seeing what we're doing, the split might stop there while continuing to grow in the other direction where there's no such obstruction. In other words, it need not be symmetrical. If a spaceship from beyond that gas cloud were to land here it could participate in our split, whereupon the two versions of the ship would carry the two versions of the news back home. That would start what would amount to a new split on their home world when they landed and started spreading two versions of the news. Whether or not observers along the route would see a split would depend on whether the ship gave any outward sign of the information, or perhaps whether it altered its route or decided to leave earlier or later than it otherwise would have. Now sometimes a blister will grow to a certain size, and then shrink back to nothing and heal up. Likewise, timelines might merge. If one present could have been produced by any of several alternate pasts, then we have a merger of timelines. In other words, the answer to "Which of the possible alternate pasts really happened?" might be "All of them." To take another historical example, perhaps JFK was killed by Oswald acting alone, but Oswald really didn't do it at all because it was actually CIA gunmen on the grassy knoll, but no, it was Cubans or time travelers or extraterrestrials or ... So where does this leave us? For one thing, the image of a tree of timelines is no longer valid. It would be more like a marsh or a river delta, with streams branching off and then sometimes merging again. But it would actually be more complicated than that, because we have more dimensions: Three of space, one of time, and at least one of paratime. We're left with something like a five-dimensional sponge. Slice it vertically and you see a history of timelines branching and merging in one particular area. Slice it horizontally and you see a map of the timelines in existence at any one instant. And it also leaves us with the thought that voters in Florida may have intended to vote one way in one alternate past and the other way in another, but put the same dimples into their ballots in either case. So all these timelines have crossed and intermingled and are splitting again, so all possible combinations of the decision going either way and being right or wrong for going the way it did are equally valid. ********************* Mention of alternate timelines and such reminds me of some previous thoughts on time warps. Apparently there are anecdotes about weird time- warp phenomena associated with thunderstorms. Assuming there's some truth to those tales and we want to do some experimenting, what do thunderstorms have that we can't easily duplicate in the laboratory? A more or less empty space several miles across filled with strong electric fields. What if that's the bare minimum you need to be in a position to start working with hyperspace, and you really want something an order of magnitude larger? You can build such things in space fairly easily using Mylar balloons and such, but you pretty much can't build them on the ground. So maybe that's why we haven't discovered hyperspace yet. If that's the case, what would it do to the development of interstellar travel if FTL ships were fairly easy to build once you figured out how, but no matter how little other stuff you had your hyperdrive engine had to be at least ten miles across? ********************* The Birthday of the Light On the Christmas morning comics page Two people slogging through the crowds of shoppers pause to ask one another "Isn't this all supposed to be somebody's birthday?" Yes, it is. This is the birthday of the Light. Different people see the Light differently: To many the Light is a babe in a manger, A child destined to grow into a great teacher and healer, Bringing the light of love to a world lost in darkness. To others the light is the light of freedom, Seen in the miracle of a lamp burning Far longer than its meager supply of oil should have lasted After the conquerors were driven from the Temple. And still others celebrate winter sunlight Bringing the promise of springtime And reminding us to look at endings As opportunities for new beginnings. But even though we see the light differently And hold different days in this season sacred to it, Let us all look into the light together To see opportunities for new beginnings For a world of freedom and healing and love. Thomas G. Digby written 1230 hr 12/25/91 entered 1905 hr 12/25/91 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU If you're getting it via email and the headers show the originating site as "lists.best.com" you're getting the list version, and anything you send to DigbyZine@lists.best.com will be posted. That's the one you want if you like conversation. There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, dying down to almost nothing in between. But any post can spark a new flurry. If there's no mention of "lists.best.com" in the headers, you're getting the BCC version. That's the one for those who want just Silicon Soapware with no banter. The content is the same for both. To get on or off the conversation-list version send email to DigbyZine-request@lists.best.com with the word "subscribe" (to get on the list) or "unsubscribe" (to get off) in the body, but nothing else (except maybe your signature if that's automatic). Then when you get a confirmation message edit the REJECT in the subject line to ACCEPT and send it back. To get on or off the BCC list email me (bubbles@well.sf.ca.us or bubbles@well.com). I do that one manually. -- END --