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 #92 New Moon of July 10, 2002 Contents copyright 2002 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. ********************* Out of dreams. That's what I dreamed one recent night. I had dreamed all the dreams in the dream library, so I would have to start over, dreaming old dreams over again. And then as I was gradually waking up I got to wondering about immortal souls, and whether they eventually run out of things to experience in finite universes. If your surroundings are made out of atoms and such, of which there are a finite (if large) number within range of your senses, but you exist for an infinite span of time, won't you run out of experiences? I suppose one workaround is to forget stuff so it seems new when it comes around again, but that feels kind of bleak. Or is this a non-problem for some other reason, such as there being an infinite set of different possible universes to exist in? ********************* I was playing a Jefferson Airplane CD a couple of nights ago and that got me all nostalgic for the Sixties. It was a turbulent time, but for me one of great optimism and hope for the future. We flower children were going to change the world. And it was an interesting era in other ways, such as being a golden age of artistic experimentation. Then the Sixties faded as Flower Power morphed into a number of other things, some much less pretty than flowers. As I sat there listening to the music and watching a laser-based light- show thing I'd built a few months earlier I got to thinking about going back to the Sixties. But I can't go back. Even if I had a time machine, I couldn't really go back to the Sixties. With a time machine I could go back to those years, but they wouldn't really be "the Sixties" for me. I would not be able to dream the grand Sixties dreams of the flower children, knowing that those dreams were doomed to be broken. True, not all was lost. Some of the dream-shards fell on fertile ground and took root: Women's Liberation, the Gay movement, much progress against other forms of discrimination, increased concern for the environment, all were once pieces of those broken dreams of Paradise on Earth. But even though bits and pieces of them flourish, the dreams of universal love and world peace as dreamed in the Sixties are dead. And I would know of another vast undreamed dream that I would not be able to share. What would turn out to have been the greatest force of all for bringing isolated individuals together with others of like mind, the Internet, was not even a dream for the Sixties flower children. If anything, computers were the Enemy, being big mysterious expensive things available only to the government and large corporations, who, likely as not, would use them for evil. So, had I a time machine with which to go to the Sixties, I would be a hopeless outsider, even if I looked the part physically. Knowing what I know now, I just wouldn't be able to dream the dreams that those around me would be sharing. ********************* Assuming something like Christian Heaven exists, do they have dentists there? Of course a certain number of dentists would end up going to Heaven. But that's not my question. What I'm wondering is whether there are people in Heaven working as dentists. Suppose some dentists who like doing dental work do go to heaven. Would there be work for them? If not, I would think Heaven would be diminished for them because they can't do a job they enjoy. If there was work for them, that would mean that at least some people in Heaven have bad teeth. So there's sort of a paradox here. How is it resolved? ********************* "How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" That question has been around for ages, but I don't think there has been much of any serious attempt to answer it. Problem is, there are lots of starting assumptions you have to make, and those can skew the answer considerably. First, the word "chuck" has the colloquial meaning of "throw" or "toss". So I would assume the woodchuck would be taking wood from one pile and tossing it onto another, perhaps as part of loading or unloading s suitably scaled truck or something. And I assume the wood is in a format suitable for chucking by woodchucks. The info I've seen on woodchucks says they're roughly cat size. So the wood probably ought to be in pieces somewhere between pencil size and drumstick size. No huge logs. Given that, you might make a first estimate by getting statistics on how much wood humans can toss around, and then assuming a human scaled to the size of a woodchuck standing on its hind legs. But how do we scale such things? Such a small human (assuming no problems with scaling internal organs and such) would be able to lift a greater portion of its body weight than a full-size human because of the square-cube law. And smaller things often seem to operate in a sort of speeded-up time, for a whole bunch of reasons ranging from the speed of nerve impulses to how fast things fall under normal gravity at different size scales. So anyway, a scaled-down person could probably lift a total weight proportional to the square of his linear dimensions. And things would fall a distance equal to his height in a time proportional to the square root of height (neglecting air resistance), so he might be able to speed up by that ratio. So I would guess that the amount of wood a scaled-down human could chuck per unit time might go as something like the 1.5 power of height. Maybe. Remember, these are only approximate because of things like the balance being different when he picks up something that weighs more than he does. But even if we work out figures for scaled-down humans, what of woodchucks? How would we need to modify them to enable them to chuck wood? Opposable thumbs? Longer forelegs? Different joint articulation? Higher intelligence or some kind of wood-chucking instinct? And since some of these aren't absolutely necessary for chucking wood if you don't care how inefficiently or slowly it's done, which modifications do you consider and which do you exclude? We probably need some kind of preliminary study just to work out the assumptions for the actual study itself. And grant money is kind of thin nowadays. So alas, the question may never be answered. ********************* Some scientists say there may be many parallel universes, and many of them will be lifeless. Their physical constants may be different from those of our universe in such a way that life cannot come into being, even if there is matter and energy flowing around. If there are such dead universes, are there spirits there, waiting vainly for life to arise to give them physical bodies? If so, do they know their cause is doomed? If they do give up hope for the universe they're in, can they go elsewhere? Or is there perhaps some grand cycle of creation and destruction such that if they wait out this one they might have better luck in the next one? If universes do go through repeated cycles of creation and destruction, might there have been past cycles where our universe was unsuitable for life, so all the resident souls could do was wait for that world to end and hope for a better one to follow? And are they dreading the end of this current cycle, because it may be followed by cycle after cycle of nothing but dead matter until another lucky combination of factors makes life possible again? ********************* "Step on a crack, break your mother's back." Or so they say about walking on concrete sidewalks. And I must admit that I've been careless about this lately. But it may not matter. My mother has been dead for several years now, and I know of no reason anybody would want to exhume her body. So my lack of concern about where I tread may never become an issue. But what if they do dig her up for some reason, and find several fractured vertebrae, with the breaks all clearly post-mortem? Will the story of how scientists are flabbergasted at the condition of my poor departed mother's bones be splashed all over the tabloids alongside stuff about flying saucers, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster? And will they connect the damage with my walking habits? My sister lives only a few miles from where Mother is buried, while I'm clear across the country from them. So any investigation may focus on her first. And come to think of it, she may actually be as guilty as I am, since I don't know how carefully she watches her steps when she goes walking. But as I said earlier, I don't know of any immediate plans to dig Mother up, so it may never become an issue. ********************* There was some discussion in one email group about men-only clubs and lodges and such. Some still exist, although many have gone co-ed. One person was saying that mixed-age all-male clubs used to be places where elders could instruct youths in how to be civilized men, and that that function has fallen by the wayside. Young men may no longer be learning the fine points of civilized male behavior. How true is this? And if there is truth to it, what can be done about it? Part of the reason for getting rid of all-male clubs was that they also acted as centers of business and political power, thus unfairly excluding women from those endeavors. So can we have single-sex mixed- age groups for passing down traditions and mores without getting them tangled up in society's power structures? Or are the media taking over this teaching function nowadays? ********************* I have some thoughts on the movie "Minority Report". If you haven't seen it yet you might want to skip down to the next row of asterisks. As you may know, the main premise is that they have some people who can see the future ("precogs") and are using them to arrest people for murders they haven't committed yet, but will if not stopped. This is run by an agency called "Precrime". This works OK for a while, but then problems develop and the program is stopped. I wasn't really satisfied with the part of the ending about the Precrime program being abandoned, with no mention of any work after that. That got me to thinking about how I might want to manage an operation like Precrime for the longer term. One main point is that as shown, the precogs are a scarce and non- renewable resource. If anything happens to them, there's no more Precrime program. So one of the first things I'd do is start researching precognition, to find out more about how it works. We don't need to convince the world that precognition exists (that's already done), but we do need to find out how many (if any) other people have the talent, and to what degree they can use it usefully. The ideal situation would be if we had a fairly large number of people who could be trained (or drugged or whatever) into being useful precogs for some period of hours or days at a time, but could still function as normal human beings the rest of the time. In other words, I'd work toward having being a precog be a job that people could enter into voluntarily, not an affliction that makes one a freak. So I'd screen various groups of people from various walks of life, including drug addicts, various kinds of patients in institutions, and "normal" people who think they may have the talent. If I found any promising candidates I'd do brain scans and such to try to figure out how the talent works, what drugs enhance or suppress it, whether performance can be improved by training, and so on. So let's suppose the technical and ethical problems get worked out, and we have a corps of working precogs. I don't think I'd try to go with the legal theory shown, of convicting and sentencing people for things they've been prevented from doing. I'd prevent the crimes, but I wouldn't treat the perpetrators as being guilty. I'd treat it more like any other crime that gets prevented by a credible tip that it was about to take place. If a murder is going to be a crime of passion, with the killer acting on impulse, having the cops show up and temporarily detain the killer may be enough. Let the people involved cool down, maybe offer counseling or whatever, then let them go. If the same person keeps getting repeatedly fingered as a future killer, then maybe I'd go for some kind of mental- health ruling that the person is a danger to others and may need to be put in an institution, But I wouldn't treat them as a convicted murderer if they haven't succeeded in killing anybody. If the program is successful, premeditated murders should essentially vanish, as they did in the movie. There may be a few attempts, but they will be seen and stopped, and they will be investigated. If the investigation reveals premeditation, there are other laws (attempted murder, whatever) that the person can be held under. So again, we don't need this instant guilt thing. Assuming evidence uncovered as a result of precognition is admissible in court, those plotting murder should be tried like any other criminals. Of course we don't see what happens to that society after the Precrime program folds. Maybe by 2100 or so they'll have something like I'm describing. It might not be as snazzy a thing to make movies about, but it would serve society better, it would be scalable to nation-wide and world-wide programs, and it would be sustainable. ********************* As I wrote that piece on how the precogs (people who can see the future) in the movie Minority Report might be better organized and used, I also got to wondering about what would happen to society if precognition became more widely available and weren't limited to murders. What if, for example, many (most? all?) people had latent precog ability that could be brought out by drugs and/or training? Would we still have a stock market as we know it? How would it be structured? What would determine the price of a stock? And would companies be required to publish precog-based sales forecasts? If precogs could see things other than murders, I could see them being used for fire and ambulance dispatching. And they would also be involved in fire and accident prevention, reducing the need for fire trucks and ambulances in the first place. And if a precog could see you getting sick or not getting sick, would physical examinations still be necessary? What would happen to insurance? When you think about it, lots of business stuff in our present society is based on not knowing the future. So a society where people can see the future may be fundamentally different from ours in many ways, perhaps in more ways than we can imagine. In the movie there was some talk of alternative futures, where someone could change what they'd been seen as about to do. How would this enter into a precog-based society? And if precognition exists, what of other abilities like telepathy or clairvoyance or telekinesis? Would they start turning up as well? Would such a society even be recognizable enough to make good movie fodder for audiences in our world? ********************* In a universe where interstellar travel is common, will recycling instructions on food packaging and such say something like: 1. Find a star of a type that will eventually eject most of its outer layers. 2. Throw this in. The item would technically be sort of recycled, in the sense of eventually ending up as interstellar matter from which new stars and planets can form. But to me it feels like it violates the spirit of recycling. ********************* In other news, I read a story titled "The Moon Pool". This was the original that was later expanded into a novel which some say wasn't as good. The premise was of some modern explorers coming to the attention of some entity that had been sitting around since prehistoric times. This ancient entity comes out of its lair on each full moon night, and takes another member of the expedition. Most members of the group are taken as they try to figure out what the thing is, but the last member flees and is taken from a steamer at sea on the way to Australia. There seem to be few stories being written nowadays with the premise that some prehistoric civilization had powers, technological or magical, beyond our own. This was a common theme back around the early 1900's (this story was written around 1918) and before, but seems to have died out. I think part of it is that there's essentially no unexplored land left on Earth any more. So if any ancient civilization survived anywhere, we'd know about it. Same with dinosaurs living in some hidden valley. They would have shown up on satellite pictures and such. But what of some ancient civilization that's now dead, or at least sleeping in caverns or whatever? There's probably not much room for those either. Any really powerful civilization would (we assume) have spread over a large area, and would have left artifacts we would recognize as being artifacts even if we couldn't figure out their exact use. The example someone else gave is power-line insulators. If humanity were to vanish, whatever evolved a few million years hence would find these strange stone-like objects buried at various depths all over large parts of the world. They're a very hard porcelain, so they'll last about as long as any other rock, but they have distinctive shapes that aren't like other rocks, and would probably look "different" even after they've been eroded considerably. And internally, porcelain isn't the same as natural rocks. So once our successors started working in the physical sciences they would notice something that they would probably have no explanation for other than a prior civilization. Even if they didn't have power lines or electricity, they would know it's something weird. And we have lots of other stuff, such as plastics and glass, that would probably fossilize in distinctive ways. So the fact that we haven't found anything of that sort may be evidence that we're the first technology-users on this planet. We do get science fiction about finding ancient ruins on the Moon or Mars or other planets. And in some of those stories what we find isn't really dead yet. But I think modern science has pushed such stories off of Earth. ********************* Bomb Fish Somewhere on a world whose name I know not, Glimpsed in passing on the way to somewhere else, A castle is in peril. It looks hopeless. The attack comes from above: A mighty ship of the air drones overhead, Out of reach of slings and arrows, Raining death on the people below. Even the sun loses hope. Frowning, it hides behind a cloud, Then peeks out, Driven by morbid curiosity. But all is not lost. A wizard stop the tallest tower waves his wand And the falling bombs, With their tail fins and long bodies, Change in midair To become giant fish. Other wizards cast illusions of explosions, fire, and death, As the people, secretly anticipating the feast to come, Feign fear. The airship, knowing nothing of magic, Departs, satisfied: Mission Accomplished. As the death illusions fade The people gather up the fallen fish. Pretend conflagrations give way to real cooking fires As the mood becomes festive. The sun comes out from behind his clouds, Smiling again. I know not how or when this war started, Or how or when it might end. Perhaps not even they know. Nor do I know, As their world fades from view behind me, Whether I should wish them peace. -- Thomas G. Digby Prose Draft 20:54 06/14/2002 Poetic version 23:58 06/20/2002 Revised 21:15 06/21/2002 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU If you're getting it via email and the Reply-to in the headers is ss_talk@bubbles.best.vwh.net you're getting the list version, and anything you send to that address will be posted. That's the one you want if you like conversation. There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, often dying down to almost nothing in between. Any post can spark a new flurry at any time. If there's no mention of "bubbles.best.vwh.net" in the headers, you're getting the BCC version. That's the one for those who want just Silicon Soapware with no banter. The zine content is the same for both. To get on the conversation-list version point your browser to http://bubbles.best.vwh.net/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi and select the ss_talk list. Enter your email address in the space provided and hit Signup. 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