Selective Science for Mundane Fiction

Checking out the most recent Mundane SF Blog, we see a nice little rant which, to my mind, exemplifies the very selective use of "science" in Mundane science-fiction.  The author, frankh, is reviewing Welcome to the Greenhouse, an analogy of stories about global warming, and he says:

What a welcome relief from all the wish-fulfillment and thumb-twiddling bullshit that regularly gets published as SF -- never mind the straight fantasy that now dominates.

During the Golden Age of SF, there was a consensus that atomic power and rocketry were big things in our future. It was just a matter of how the science and society would play out. Well, that has all pretty much played out, and sorry, we do not have a libertarian space age with unlimited resources. Now, as then, we need to make do with scientific reality. That reality now includes "climate change."

He's arguing that "atomic power and rocketry" have both "pretty much played out," which is a rather silly thing to say given that controlled nuclear fusion hasn't yet been achieved, plain nuclear fission reactor designs are still being greatly improved, and we're very obviously at the start of a major boom in both manned and unmanned spaceflight, with a dozen major national and private players in the field and several new types of spacecraft being launched a year.  But, nope, despite all the evidence "scientific reality" decrees that both these fields are "played out," and we have to agree with him because he's all Mundane and literary, so why would we want to listen to a lot of nasty grotty investors and planners and engineers and (ugh) scientists on the issue?

Furthermore, we don't have "a libertarian space age" (it's telling that he appends the political label to a human movement that crosses many political boundaries -- were the Soviets being "libertarians" 50 years ago when they launched Yuri Gagarin into space?  Are the Chinese "libertarians" now when they launch taikonauts?) with "unlimited resources."  And if we don't have it by now, we won't have it ever, because -- ooh, look, shiny metaphors and irony, pay no attention to the scope of history!  So we're going to have to deal with real issues, such as "climate change," which apparently science-fiction has never dealt with before (1).

Of course, a stickler for physical scientific reality might point out that if we decide that "atomic power" has "played out," we might find "climate change" coming a bit sooner rather than later, and in the direction of the Paleocene climatic maximum, since barred by Mundane edict from gaining energy from a chemically-neutral process such as uranium fission, we will instead have to gain it from the combustion of coal, oil and methane, all of which put significant amounts of carbon dioxide (and nastier things) into our atmosphere as part of their normal operation.  But hey, then frankh can crow about how he was right all along.  What's a little drowned real estate compared to the joy of going "I told you so?"

The larger issue here, of course, is that the Mundane science-fiction "scientific reality" is based on a very selective subset of "science."  Atomic power and rocketry are verboten, for no real reason other than that the Mundaniacs say that they are (and, truth be told, the banning of atomic power as a topic for discussion was neither stated nor even implicit in the original Mundane Manifesto, which shows how this sort of negativism naturally expands to blot out all light and happiness in one's futures).  For that matter, the original Mundane Manifesto didn't try to ban spaceflight, merely limit it to the Solar System (I suspect it's expanded to anti-rocketry because some slightly more astute Mundaniacs realized that if we can cheaply access the whole Solar System then we don't have "limited resources" from the POV of anything but the very far future).

It's not about being scientifically-realistic, because if it was then the Mundaniacs would happily herald the aspects of scientific and technological progress which promise to bring us precisely the "libertarian future" of "unlimited resources" about which frankh is complaining.  It's about being depressing (2), which is why the Mundane science-fiction writers and fans carefully pick and choose only those aspects of scientific reality which are unpleasant, rejecting those which offer felicitious solutions.

So it is that we must give up fossil fuel power generation, but not adopt atomic energy in its place, because if we did then we'd have lots of cheap energy which would get cheaper and cheaper as we developed more and more advanced and capable reactors.  No, we have to choose between any number of cackbrained, impractical systems (3), so that our power is expensive and unreliable, the better for us to suffer and mourn the passing of the old days of plenty  (4).  "Of what use is a newborn infant," Benjamin Franklin famously said of electricity, and the Mundaniacs add "... if we cut off its arms and legs!"

So it is that, if chemical rocketry won't give us the stars (and it, in fact, won't -- one needs nuclear or antimatter rockets for interstellar travel) we must settle for Just One Earth, forever.  The other planets of our Solar System are mysteriously useless to us, even though in real life we're discovering more and more resources on them.  Furthermore, we can never have anything better than chemical rocketry, even though in real life we're developing various kinds of ion and plasma drives, nuclear power plants, and the superstrong materials required for space elevators.  These technologies will never ever get anywhere, no matter how many decades and centuries and millennia we work on them.

What's especially stupid and insulting about the Mundane Movement is its denial of anything but the shallowest sort of time.  They assume that anything that we can't build out of off-the-shelf components, right NOW, can never be built.  We actually have the science, and most of the technology, needed to colonize Luna and Mars, right now, but we just haven't deployed it yet in the form of actual spacecraft.  Thus, we never can in the future -- but if you read the Mundane Movement's "futures," you'll find that they are either (1) just a few decades into the future, or (2) set after civilization has permanently fallen to a lower level of technology.  These assumptions are necessary to the Mundane vision-- even a very slow level of technological and economic progress, compounded over (say) five centuries, would be enough for us to plant thriving human settlements all over the Inner System out to at least the Asteroid Belt, if not farther.

You'll notice this if you discuss the possibilities of space colonization with them.  They'll start off by saying something like "We will never ..." (colonize the Moon, colonize Mars, develop cheap orbital launchers, etc.), but if asked to explain now, they will proceed to produce arguments to the effect that we can't do so NOW (or at best, within a decade).  And if called on their sudden shift of tense, they will either ignore one's argument, or condescendingly explain that it's "unscientific" or "immature" to speculate about anything other than the deployment of existing technology, or technology very similar to existing technology.  Which, if true, would of course negate the whole point of science-fiction.

I've discussed this issue at greater length in my "The Fear of Boundlessness" and "The Promise of Boundlessness" on this blog, but I'm glad I located the Mundane Blog.

It gives me something to laugh at, and my audience can share in the general merriment :)

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(1)  What, do you protest Last and First Men or Fallen Angels?  "Climate change" does not imply "soon" or "hotter," it just implies a changing climate, in some direction over some period of time.  Not being a Mundaniac, I'm able to think flexibly in terms of deep time.

(2) I won't dignify Mundane SF with the term "tragic," because "tragedy" should be reserved for unavoidable collisions between hubris and nemesis.  This isn't Achilles meeting his fate in battle, this is Achilles deciding to beat his head aganist a rock until he suffers irreversible brain damage, just "because."

(3) Some of which are perfectly practical as auxiliary power systems, granted.  It's just that they don't work well as primary grid sources, because they are either low-density, intermittent, or geographically very limited.  Which is why the Mundaniacs love them.  Brownouts are good for the soul!

(4) Think I'm exaggerating?  Here, from the wiki summary of the Manifesto: "

• That this dream of abundance can encourage a wasteful attitude to the abundance that is here on Earth.

In other words, we must not even dream of "abundance," lest this tempt us to waste what we have.  Right.  And when you send a kid to college, you drum it into him that he's preparing for a minimum-wage job at McDonald's.  That will make him work hard and take like seriously, won't it?

Oh, and by "abundance that is here on Earth," they mean "sufficient for everyone to live like a Third Worlder, for at least a few centuries."  Apparently the future will consist of meals of Ramen noodles with vitamin supplements, forever.

The Promise of Boundlessness

(this started as a comment to a post of akilika at http://akilika.livejournal.com/1072154.html)

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All existing human cultures are deeply founded on a pre-Newtonian and pre-Copernican world view, in which the Earth is "special" as the stage for life and human activity, amd the rest of the Universe is merely a background. This prejudice is reinforced by our ignorance: the Earth is, in fact, the only part of the Universe about which we possess much detailed knowledege, so it is easy for us to imagine that it is the only place of any importance.

If we bother to seriously think about it, this attitude is obviously absurd, but it is an easy opinion to return to, and we return to it at every chance, finding new excuses in each case. The implicit excuse of the Mundane SF movement is that we have serious ecological problems on the Earth and that thinking about colonizing other places "distracts" us from solving them.

The first fallacy, of course, is a variant of that of the Excluded Middle. "We" (Mankind) are not a unitary entity which can only think about colonizing other worlds or problems on Earth, one or the other. Indeed even "we" in the sense of each separate nation are not so bound: it is quite reasonable to envision some people in each country working on Earth-based ecological problems while others work on colonizing other worlds.

A deeper error lies in the assumption that activities "in space" and activities "on Earth" must compete in the long run for resources: that effort we put "into space" is somehow lost to "the Earth." The reason why this is an error is that progress is synergistic and often serendipitous: advances made in one field often are prerequisites or triggers to advances made in another field, as explored in the classic series Connections http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) .

We've already seen this, more than once, in regards to this very issue. When we were first able to see the whole Earth from space, we realized that she was a planet and a unitary thing as we never had before, which gave impetus to the environmental movement. And the development of Landsats made it possible for us to monitor global processes on a global scale, without restrictions created by the accident of accessibility to ground and air expeditions.

We can expect further advances in the future. As the cost of Earth-to-orbit and orbit-to-Earth travel drops, Earth will become economically connected to extraterrestrial resources -- first to terrestrially rare ones such as tri-helium and certain uncommon metals, eventually to others as the cost drops even further. Mining and industry will increasingly move off-Earth, enabling Earth to become a garden planet.

But the truth is starker than this, because I've just described it from Earth's perspective. Though there will long be a practical, and still longer be a sentimental human tie to the motherworld, in the truly long run, Earth is only one planet among literally trillions in our Galaxy, and quintillions to sextillions in the Universe as a whole.

If Man is successful as a sapient species, we will expand out into the Solar System, the Galaxy, and the Universe beyond, and one day Earth will be at best only a distant memory, an echo of long ago and far away. And if Man is not successful as a sapient species, then we will perish, and one or more of the unknown number of other sapient species in the Universe will succeed in our place, and to then Earth will be at best an archaeological dig site, possibly not even that, if they don't discover the planet before the Sun expands into her red giant phase and whiffs her into vapor.

This is the true root of the Mundane SF movement: not just Fear of Boundlessness, as I argued before (http://fantasticworlds-jordan179.blogspot.com/2011/01/fear-of-boundlessness-explanation-for.html) but the Fear of Insignificance. We recoil at the chasms of deep space and deep time in our future; we fear that everything we hold dear may mean less to the Cosmos than the little worlds of the Two Rivers or the Nile -- in which our fundamental moral system evolved -- meant to the Earth as a whole.

To this fear I can offer two counters and a hope. The counters are that it doesn't matter -- reality is whether we choose to pay attention to it or not, and more trivially that places beyond the Earth exist and will be expanded into by other human cultures and subcultures, even if any particular human culture (yes, even America!) chooses to squeeze her eyes firmly shut and chant "you're not there, you're not there!"

The hope is simple.

The Universe is out there. We may be worthy of it. And if we are sufficiently worthy, then Man -- rather than being insignificant, as the insignificance of our birthworld might make us imagine -- might be one of the most significant productions of the Cosmos, as the entity destined to become at least part of the great stream of sapient life which will organize the Cosmos and bring it consciousness. Earth in this view would merely be like a single fertilized human egg, a tiny insignificant thing which can produce the most momentous consequences in the form of a new human being, if it succeeds.

A baby can't succeed if it spends its whole life in the womb. And Man can't succeed if we spend our whole life as a species on Just One Earth.

There's a whole big Universe out there. Let's grow into it.

Worlds for Man - Part 2 - Venus

"Worlds For Man - Part 2 - Venus"

(c) 2007, 2011 by Jordan S. Bassior

Venus is in many ways a disappointment. The cllosest separate planet to the Earth, with almost the size and mass of the Earth, with the gravity to retain a thick atmosphere, Venus should be a prime choice for colonization. But the planet's proximity to the Sun and lack of a moon, coupled with a denser crust and resultant feebler tectonic action, have caused her to suffer a runaway greenhouse effect (the atmosphere is mainly composed of carbon dioxide) that has resulted in surface temperatures averaging over 400 degrees Celsius -- hotter than Mercury, and owing to atmospheric convection experienced globally rather than merely on the dayside.  To put more simply, Venus is everywhere, at every latitude, even in the shade or underground, at temperatures sufficient to melt lead (1).


With such high temperatures, and a surface pressure of 90 atmospheres coupled with clouds of sulfuric acid vapor, Venus is an extraordinarily hostile environment. Even robot probes can only endure a matter of hours on the Venusian surface, and vehicles capable of protecting organic life forms from such conditions would have be extraordinarily well-armored and thus bulky. Any permanent habitations would require powerful heat pumps to maintain survivable conditions within for prolonged periods (vehicles could operate for shorter periods using heat sinks) (2). Thus, the colonization of the Venusian surface would be very expensive, dangerous (3) and difficult.

Near-Term,  there is fortunately another option. 50 km above the Venusian surface, the pressure and temperatures are Earth-like (1 atmosphere and 0-50 degrees Celsius). In addition, at this altitude solar energy is abundant -- 1.9 times per square meter the amount available on Earth. Consequently, the early colonization of Venus might involve the construction of blimp or dirigible-like floating stations ("aerostat habitats," in Geoffrey Landis' terms), in which the provision of life support would not be unusually difficult. From these stations, human crews could supervise robots and conduct excursions onto the surface. The stations might float freely, blown by the winds around the planet every 100 hours or less; or they might be tethered to the ground (4).

One thing that would ease their design is that ordinary Earth air (a 21:79 oxygen-nitrogen mix) is a lifting gas under Venusian atmospheric conditions -- consequently, the aerostats' gas bags could be used as combination air reservoirs and large common areas (5). Thus, life in such a hab might not be unduly claustrophic; provided that the total load was not increased too much the gas bags could be formed as parkland, complete with soil, plants, and water lakes whose aqueous contents could double as droppable ballast (6).

Ground stations might also exist, but would be used as bases for surface operations rather than long-term habs. The ground stations would be mostly robot-manned, and most actual scouting work would probably be done by fleets tele-operable semi-independent robot robers, with humans remaining within the safety of the thick-walled ground habs rather than risking their lives in bulky, probably mecha-like Venus Suits (7). Conditions within the ground stations would certainly be spartan and claustrophobic, especially during this early phase of colonization.

Venus offers some useful resources. The planet is probably metal rich, though not as much so as the Earth (8), and certainly contains volatiles, especially carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. Unlike most terrestrial worlds, it lacks ice, but with the available solar energy and hydrogen-containing minerals, enough water could be obtained for colonial purposes. Venus also has a moderate gravity which would be better for health purposes than the lower gravities obtaining on the other terrestrials. Unfortunately, none of these advantages are particularly dramatic (Venus is outcompeted by Mercury as a source of minerals and by Earth and Mars as a source of volatiles) and hence Venusian colonization will probably be a slow process (9).

Middle-term colonization will see this slow process yield significant growth. The aerostat habs will have grown into genuine "floating cities" (again using Landis' terms); on the surface, the ground stations will have time to grow into immense warrens.

Load will be a major problem in the floating cities: every effort will be made to build things out of light but strong substances, such as the nanoformed carbon-filament polymers which will be then be spinnable kilometers long (10). Here will live many humans and organic artificials, in a sort of floating fairyland.

Refrigeration will be the major problem on the ground: where ever possible labor will be done by inorganic artificals, so that as little space as possible needs to be conditioned to Earth norms. Thus the surface will be the realm of robots -- specifically, ones designed to survive Venusian temperatures and pressures.

By this time, the work of terraforming may have begun. The main problems are the heat, and the lack of water. The heat could be reduced by orbiting sunshields (which could double as solar power stations) (11), as proposed by Robert Zubrin. Water (on the scale needed to terraform a moderate-sized terrestrial planet) would be a more difficult problem: iceteroid bombardment would take a very long time to deliver enough to make a difference.

Paul Birch has suggested crashing one of Saturn's small ice moons onto Venus to deliver a lot of water at once: of course, if colonization has already begun, this would be a very dangerous technique. Perhaps an ice moon could be pushed into Venus orbit, behind a sunshield, and then the moon sliced up and dropped onto Venus in smaller, more manageable pieces?

Landis has pointed out that the floating cities could also serve as sunshields and atmosphere converters. While a single floating city would not be able to achieve much in this regard, as they spread (especially if linked by large areas of artifical floating "wilderness") a lot of floating cities could perform considerable terraforming over time.

Because of the division of Venus into two main environments -- the soaring sky-world and the sweltering surface -- there is an obvious social conflict likely to develop. Especially where terraforming issues are concerned, the interests of the organic sapients in the cloud-cities and the inorganic sapients in the surface-habs may not be compatible. Skydwelling humans, cosmopolitan in outlook, might take for granted that Venus would be improved by becoming more Earthlike; but robots already optimized to Venusian surface conditions may see no need to introduce corrosive free oxygen and salt water into their world.

Long-Term

In the end, Venus is likely to be terraformed, if only because by doing so the Venusians would be joining a community of Earth-like worlds in the Inner System, including Earth, Luna, Mars and Mercury. This process may or may not involve a war between Sky and Surface, or some degree of accommodation to the needs of the surface-dwellers (12).

Venus will become Earth-like, but it will not be Earth. Two great continents will stand amidst shallow salty seas, but these continents lack the rugged mountains and these oceans the abyssal depths of the Earth's, because of the much simpler Venusian geological history (which involved complete crustal recycling every several hundred millions years rather than Earth's tectonic dance of eruption, merging and subduction) (13). The air will be breathable, but also thicker -- the process of carbon-sequestration will reduce its density but not down to that of the Earth, and a thicker atmosphere will be beneficial as protection from solar radiation, especially given the weaker magnetic field.

Venusian populations, fauna and flora will be more slender than those of Earth, both because of the lower gravity and because ectomorphy is adaptive to hot environments. With thick air and low gravity, flight will be easier. Humans won't be able to fly with simple strap-on wings, but the minimum practical airplane or glider will be much smaller and more manageable than is the case on Earth (14). It is possible that a Venusian subrace may emerge which is engineered for flight with hollow bones and improved respiration -- shades of Olaf Stapledon! This flying culture might develop from the old floating cities, and use them as homes (15).

Likewise, in the extensive shallow seas, there might develop a marine sapient culture. This might be based around cetaceans, and it might also include marine-modified humans like the "selkies" of Earth (see Part 3), who might also participate in Venusian colonization.

A terraformed Venus might resemble the Venus of the old pulps in several ways. With shallow seas and low-lying lands, there would be much marine life and wide marshes. Extensive forests and jungles would be an obvious ecological component stablizing the terraforming and keeping carbon dioxide sequestered. If there was political disunity, possibly stemming from the terraforming disputes, there might be all sorts of exotic adventures and intrigue. With the ruins of earlier colonization stages and failed projects littering the landscape, it might even be a place that an Eric John Stark or a Northwest Smith might find not wholly unfamiliar. Heck, at least one zoology enthusiast might create a safari park stocked with dinosaurs, and some might later escape and go feral ...

Venus would have a rich future, possibly with as much change and history and brilliant culture as has the Earth.
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Notes:

(1) - The Venusian crust has had more than enough time to equalize itself to atmospheric temperatures.  Unlike Earthly caverns, Venusian ones won't have cooled during the night and retained the lower temperatures, because the Venusian night isn't that much cooler than the Venusian day.  Furthermore, since Venus is still geologically active, temperature probably increases with depth as one descends, just as is the case on Earth below a certain level.  This factor, coupled with the lack of plate tectonics, is one big reason why the Venusian crust melts every several hundred million years, renewing its own surface.

(2) - This would necessitate nuclear reactors as the only practical means of powering the air conditioning.  Fortunately, Venus is probably almost as rich in radioactives as is the Earth, since it is still geologically active and hence probably has a uranium-thorium core just like our own planet.

Furthermore, given the extreme deadliness of the Venusian heat, each base would probably require multiple reactors and backup air conditioning systems for safety purposes.  Most Solar worlds will kill you slowly on a life support failure:  Venus would kill you relatively quickly.  One backup system that would help would be to maintain a "cold room" containing ice or liquid nitrogen, which could be used as a heat sink should the air conditioning temporarily fail.

(3) - Any significant breach in a compartment would be instantly fatal to the occupants:  90 atmospheres of 400 degree Centigrade carbon dioxide liberally laced with sulfuric acid would pulp, bake and dissolve the unfortunates therein, leaving only thready black goo in roughly humanoid shape.  Some large bones and the teeth might survive for a while.  One would be wise to design habs and large vehicles with multiple hulls and sealable compartments to limit the consequences of such a penetration:  given the extreme atmospheric pressure, however, this solution would be more than minimally expensive, meaning that some would be tempted to cut corners, resulting in the occasional disaster.

(4) - An airhab might be designed to do both:  it might be an airship which docked for long periods at a time to provide services to ground habs, much like crane-ships and drill-ships do in the seas and harbors of our Earth.  Docking would not necessarily require descending to the surface:  with the carbon- and silicon-fiber cabling already under development, the airhab could remain at a cooler and lower-pressure altitude, communicating by cable-car with the groundhab.  The cable-car could mate with an airlock at the groundhab, so that the passengers could travel from airhab to groundhab in a shirtsleeves environment.

(5) - This is a somewhat counter-intuitive design, because Earthly airships (which use hydrogen or helium as lifting gas) keep their passenger gondolas or decks below their lifting gas bags, so that gas leaks will have no effect on equipment or personnel.  However, on Venus, breathing and lifting gas can be the same, so the design works just fine.

(6) - Safety gratings could ensure that the airhab didn't jettison livestock or (worse) passengers while ensuring an emergency ballast drop.

(7) - The main problem in spacesuit design is combining protection with flexibility. In the Venusian environment, any sizable suit breach would be instantly fatal, and even a pinhole puncture would cause severe injury to the wearer. Consequently, the best design for a Venus suit is a spherical or ellipsoid, heavily armored life support capsule, with the head turret, arms and legs being remotely operated from within that capsule: rather like the "Fat Man" deep-sea diving suits from Tom Swift, Jr.

(8) - Venus is smaller, less dense, and (unlike most terrestrial worlds) hotter and under greater pressure than the Earth, which complicates mining operations.

(9) - I see Venus as the location of hardship stations, and possibly even penal colonies.  Escape from a Venusian penal colony would be considerably more difficult than from a Lunar or Martian one:  even technically-competent prisoners with access to the machine shops would have trouble cobbling together a Venus Suit.

(10) - Carbon-filament nanofibers would probably be destroyed by the conditions pertaining on the Venusian surface, but then the aerohabs aren't meant to descend to the surface, and probably couldn't survive such a descent even if they were made of more refractory materials.

(11) - As has been pointed out already in reference to terraforming Mercury.

(12) - The air-dwellers would have better access to space and hence the commercial advantage, but their large low-density cities would be terribly vulnerable to nuclear weapons; the surface-dwellers would have ready access to all sorts of metals and would be living in habs equivalent to massively-strong bomb shelters, but would have difficulty reaching space against the opposition of the air-dwellers.  It would be an interesting conflict for wargaming purposes.

Of course, it would be better for both sides if they didn't fight, as each would have things the other would need, and hence good grounds for mutually-beneficial trade.  However, because they would probably be culturally-divergent, this might not be enough to keep them from engaging in open warfare.

(13) - It might be a good idea for the terraformers to deliberately open some volcanic rifts, even though this would add to their gas sequestration problems, if only to relieve the internal heat and pressure and hence postpone the Big Melt.  Not that the Melt would be likely to happen any time soon, but I would imagine that some pretty big faulting and rifting occurs naturally on Venus from time to time well before the Melt -- better to have this occur at times and places of the terraformers' choosing, rather than right under a city!

(14) - We've already developed man-portable single-user jetwing vehicles:  these would work even more efficiently on Venus than they do on Earth.  Jet-powered aircycles might become a common mode of personal transportation up among the airhabs.

(15) - Once Venus was fully terraformed, there would be no particular need of the old-fashioned airhabs, but traditions die hard, and hence the culture might continue, finding new economic occupations.

The Seminal Status of "Doc" Smith's Lensman series

"The Seminal Status of "Doc" Smith's Lensman Series"

(c) 2007, 2011 by Jordan S. Bassior

E. E. "Doc" Smith is today sometimes dismissed as "merely" a pulp science fiction writer who produced "cliche" space operas. What is not commonly realized is the extent to which he actually originated many ideas which were so widely copied by other writers that they became "cliche." Here is a quick listing of some of his most important ideas


I.  Most importantly, the Lensman series was the first to put forward and explore in detail (1) the concept of a multi-species interstellar federation as a future civilization. (2) This idea is very common today, largely because of the near universality of its acceptance by both science fiction fans and mundanes as a plausible model for an interstellar civilization. It's the clear inspiration for the Federation of Star Trek, Central Control of Andre Norton's space opera stories, Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic League, etc. Even when you have something nastier (such as Anderson's Terran Empire) it exists in an auctorial awareness that better things are possible.

Before "Doc" Smith, it usually was TAKEN FOR GRANTED that if different species met the only possibilities would be (a) genocidal warfare, as in Wells' War of the Worlds or (b) domination of most species by a "master race," as in the situation on Barsoom and by implication in most 1930's multi-racial Solar Systems (for that matter, Smith's first two Skylark novels tended to assume that humanoid oxygen-breathers couldn't get along with non-humanoid or non-oxygen breathers).  This concept was part and parcel of the rise of illiberal philosophies starting with 19th-century Romanticism, darkening with Marx, Gobineau, Spencer and Nietzsche, and reaching its full horrible depths in the decades from 1914 through 1976, leading to the rises of Lenin,Stalin, Hitler and Mao, and systematic murder on the most massive scales.

When reading the science fiction of the interwar era it is important to realize that the (non-Commuinist) dominant intellectuals of that age considered some sort of fight for racial supremacy to be normal and historically necessary.  (The Communist ones considered some sort of fight for class supremacy to serve the same role).  "Doc" Smith was bucking the intellectual trends of the 1930's by asserting that the applciation of a liberal idea of racial equality, even across species, was possible.

Smith was one the first science fiction writers to see that there was, inherent in sapience, the possibility of a peaceful resolution to the struggle for survival between species, and was most certainly the first science fiction writer to make this the theme of a major work. Note that one BIG reason Civilization triumphs over Boskone is that Civilization can make use of the talents of all its races, while Boskone (which is strictly hierarchical) keeps most races in such subjection that they cannot fully develop their capabilities.

II.  Smith was one of the first writers (3) to grasp the immense scales of energy, time, and distance which were inherent in cultures with atomic power and interstellar spaceflight. In the Lensman series, fleets comprised of thousands and eventually millions of large warships (made possible because they are produced by two warring cultures each of which contain dozens of major and thousands of minor production planets) clash in campaigns which span tens of thousands of light years and battles which sprawl out across whole solar systems.

They attack and defend with energies and explosives utterly dwarfing anything producible by planetbound, 20th century Man. Against their awesome forces, no more primitive culture could hope to last for an instant (in The Vortex Blaster, Cloudd ends a lower-tech interplanetary war by using a Civilization lifeboat's engines offensively) (4)

III.  Smith was one of the first science fiction writers to grasp the inherent (i.e. institutional and systematic) advantages which free societies have over unfree societies (5). As such, he can be argued to be the true father of not only space opera but also of libertarian science fiction (6).

This is a major theme of the series, and one which is implicitly and explicitly repeated in every book. Time and time again, whether conceptually (as in the case of the repeated underestimation of the rising Civilization by Boskone) or physically (as in the negasphere duels) Boskone's rigid and hierarchical nature dooms the Boskonians to defeat. Time and time again, whether on the grand scale (Virgil Samms' willingness to regard the Rigellians and Palanians as fit partners for the Triplanetary League) or the most personal (Kinnison's mercy towards Ilona of Lonabar), the essential humaneness and tolerance of Civlization gives it major advantages and wins it new allies and vital information.

I'll note here that Smith's ideas in this regard were very advanced -- most Western intellectuals wouldn't come around to his point of view until 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall exposed the rottenness at the heart of the 20th century's greatest totalitarianism -- and ended the long nightmare the West had been in since 1914.  Smith's own universe had the Cold War end in World War III, but it is obvious that Civilization itself is far more descended in terms of culture, economy, and political system from the Free World than it is from the Communist one, and one may assume that the "Tyrant of Asia" (actually an energized flesh-form of Gharlane of Eddore) ruled as some sort of Communist.

IV.  E. E. "Doc" Smith was one of the first sf writers to realize the tremendous potential capabilities of propaganda, subversion, terrorism, and psychological operations in large scale warfare. You could argue that he was merely copying the real-life events of World War II here, except that the series originated conceptually as a future police story, and Galactic Patrol (copyright 1939, and hence written before the Second World War started) already has drug dealing subversion and terrorism as major elements of the Boskonian attack on Civilization. In his stories, both sides make extensive use of this sort of warfare -- Boskone inflitrates Civilization repeatedly from the start, and Kinnison repeatedly infiltrates Boskone (most importantly in the last part of Second Stage Lensman). In the conquest of the Second Galaxy, Civilization repeatedly converts Boskonian worlds to Civillized norms by intensive propaganda, and in the last phase of the war, Boskone uses systematic terrorism to destablize numerous Civilized worlds.

V.  E. E. "Doc" Smith was one of the first sf writers -- or indeed military affairs writers! -- to recognize the immense importance of what is today termed C3I (command, control, communications, and intelligence) in large scale military operations. His concepts of the plotting tank and of the "Directrix" were not only revolutionary in fiction, they have been credited by the US Navy as seminal influences in the development of REAL-LIFE ship-board Combat Information Centers!

His fiction in general stresses the importance of intelligence (both intellectual and espionage) in warfare, and in battle after battle, Civilization prevails owing to a superior command structure -- which in turn, as I've noted before in this mini-essay, comes from its superior social structure.

VI.  E. E. "Doc" Smith was one of the first (though not THE first) science fiction writer to realize that, owing to the escalating energies present on the battlefield, it would eventually be impossible for unprotected and unaugmented humans to survive combat. All his combatants wear at least "space armor" (which note, by the time of the main story cycle, includes duralloy armor and a personal force field) if there is a serious fight brewing, and specialized combatants (such as the Valerian Space Marines) are fighting in what amounts to man-portable legged tankettes. He was one of the first sf writers to predict powered armor, which Kinnison develops first for his personal use. (7).  At several points in the series, power-armored combatants are able to defeat much larger soft-skinned enemy forces.

Smith was one of the first sf writers to realize that, if psychic powers were really possible, they could be scientifically studied and utilized in large-scale "psi-tech" type applications (8) (the most obvious example being the Lens itself, and some lesser ones being Worsel's handy-dandy miniaturized death-ray, the Triplanetary Service's meteor badges, and the Patrol's tele-projectors). Note that in Smith's world, it was possible for the utterly materialistic and mechanistic Eddorians to deduce and employ both psionics and (if you take Kyle as canon) necromancy on a large scale. Note the essentially materialistic description of the climatic psionic attack of Civilization against Eddore, at the close of Children of the Lens.

This is one of the sources of virtually every science fictional use of psionics since.

Conclusion

Well, that's all I can think of at the moment. I'll note that even ONE of these achievements would be enough to win any other science fiction writer fame for life -- and we're talking here about SEVERAL such achievements in just ONE of the series of an author who wrote several series in his lifetime.

E. E. "Doc" Smith was one of the greatest minds the genre has ever known -- a giant in his field, and the originator of many ideas in our genre -- and even some in our civilization as a whole.

====
Notes:

(1) - Aside from being really good adventure stories, the various episodes involving Kimball Kinnison's undercover missions are vehicles for exploration of Civilization itself -- we learn a lot about the various planets, races, cultures and subcultures of Smith's world from the bottom up (sometimes literally as Kim starts a mission as a street bum or ordinary worker and wiggles his way up through the levels of an enemy organization).  The high command strategic scenes display important features of the politics and economics of Civilization, giving a top-down view.  In Second Stage Lensman, we get to see the Boskonian culture as well. 

Edmond Hamilton created something like Civilization as early as the late 1920's, but he used it merely as a backdrop for world-wrecking adventures of alien invasion; he did not go into detail about his universe the way that Smith did. Nevertheless, he must have strongly inspired Smith, a fact I learned after the first publication of this essay.

One could argue that Olaf Stapledon's Galactic and Universal Minds worked sort of like Civilization, except that in Stapledon's universe a race had to be incredibly superhuman AND able to move itsr whole planet to engage in interstellar travel or to get along peacefully with sapients not of your own species. Note that the super-moral Second Men and the Martians couldn't get along, even his Fifth Men had to exterminate the Venusians, and the ultimate (and passionately sympathetic) Eighteenth Men, who were each superhumanly intelligent, routinely formed 98-fold thinking-and-mating groups, and could on occasion form a World Mind, didn't have the jets to swing to flee their dying Solar System -- and they DID try to launch starships, they just weren't up to the job.

By contrast, Civilization easily incorporates something like half a dozen sapient races in the Solar System alone (especially if you take Spacehounds of IPC to be in the continuity at least in terms of its description of the Jovian System) before even developing FTL travel and concludes its first interstellar war with a rational peace treaty, incorporating its former foes into its own culture. (all in Triplanetary!) By the time of Kimball Kinnison and the Children, exceedingly alien races like the Rigellians and Palanians cooperate with the more humanoid races smoothly and as a matter of course.

(2) - Edmond Hamilton and Jack Williamson wrote early stories of the naval and military forces of interstellar civilizations, of which Edmond Hamilton's was a peaceful multi-racial federation along the lines which Smith would later draw his Civilization, and Williamson's a more humanity-centered culture protected by the Legion of Space.  Neither provided much detail about their cultures, compared to Smith. 

Olaf Stapledon, who was working under the handicap of his own snobbish refusal to read the science fiction magazines, which meant that he was insulated from many of the best ideas of his era, depicted interstellar federations but only of vastly superhuman beings and only on the broadest scope.  Unsurprisingly, 1930's and later science fiction writers mined Stapledon's novels for ideas.

(3) - The others, obviously, were Olaf Stapledon (who was working under the handicap of his own snobbish refusal to read popular sf, which meant that he was insulated from many of the best ideas of the pulp and Golden Age eras) and Edmond Hamilton (who was nicknamed "World Wrecker" for this reason).  "Common sense" notions of the limits of the application of energy were based on our familiarity with merely chemical energy sources:  our culture was slow to grasp the difference in quality when one can convert mass to energy.  To be fair, we only learned that it was possible in 1905:  in the 1930's, the mass-energy equivalence was as recent a discovery as is, say, quark dynamics today.

(4) - Smith was one of the first sf writers to see that the scale of energies required to enable spaceflight would be utterly devastating compared to unaugmented humans. And in real life, the Apollo missions lifted off atop rockets each of which contained about as much energy as an atomic bomb.  Cloudd's lifeboat was capable of greater levels of thrust.  H. G. Wells' movie Things to Come may have anticipated the point with the classic scene where a whole rioting mob is (presumably) blown to bits by standing too close to the firing of a Moon-capable Earth-based launch cannon.

(5) -  And note: he began writing the series in the late 1930's, at a time when most intellectuals were wondering not if liberal democracy could survive (they ASSUMED it to be doomed) but rather whether it would be Communism or Fascism that would dominate the world. Reading the series today, his arguments for the inherent superiority of freedom over totalitarianism seem very modern; by contrast Stapledon's slavish worship of socialism seems very old-fashioned.

(6) - While Civilization seems very authoritarian and militaristic in the stories, this is because they focus on an interstellar WAR -- it is explicitly stated in one of the books that under normal circumstances the tax rate is something like 1% and in another that most citizens of Civilization go throughout their lives without ever seeing anything more violent than a fistfight).  The extreme hostility of Civilization to drug production and smuggling is in part derived from the propaganda Smith read growing up, and in part from the fact that narcotics are being used against Civilization as a Boskonian tool of subversion to crash Civilized cultures.

(7) - Robert A. Heinlein, who immensely respected and was was immensely inspired by "Doc" Smith, would of course be the first sf writer to develop this notion in detail, in Starship Troopers. John Ringo, in his Posleen vs. Terran novels, has recently taken the whole notion a lot further.

(8) - To be fair, the concept of "psi-tech" could also be said to date back to the "Lost Race" science fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "Vril powered" Atlantean airships were a staple of these tales, Lovecraftian "magic" worked on this principle (see especially "The Dreams in the Witch House" and "The Shadow Out of Time"), and Stapledon's "psychic gravity" could be viewed as (accidental and disastrous) terraforming on a very large scale!

Also, an even earlier example of fictional psi-tech comes from Hodgson's The Night Land, in which much about the human soul is scientifically understood. Hodgson may have pioneered this notion, in this work and in his Carnacki the Ghost-Finder stories.

Smith himself used the concept of psionics, as a higher-order energy form, in his earlier Skylark series.  In the later books it becomes utterly vital to the plot.

Worlds For Man - Part 1 - Mercury

"Worlds for Man - Mercury"

(c) 2007, 2011 by Jordan S. Bassior

Little Mercury, the smallest of the currently-official eight planets, is notable for her density (second densest world in the Solar System) and proximity to the Sun. Mercury is an airless rockball, superficially similar to Luna, which has been stripped of her volatiles by heating and of some of her lighter solids by impacts. The result is a dense and refractory planet, rich in heavy elements but poor in many lighter ones.

Mercury is primarily of economic interest for three reasons. The first is that it is probably the richest of all Solar worlds in terms of readily accessible metals, radioactives and other heavy elements (1). The second is that it (like Luna) probably has significant deposits of tri-helium on its surface (2). The third is that Mercury is bathed in solar energy, and is furthermore a good base from which to construct and deploy close-in orbiting Solar energy collectors (3): energy may also be drawn from Mercury's passage through the Sun's magnetic field.

In the Near-Term, colonization of Mercury will focus on prospecting and mining. Mercurian ores can be easily (4) refined  using the abundant energy, launched up the shallow gravitational well, and then dispatched elsewhere in the System. Though Mercury is deep within the Sun's gravity well, the total delta vee required to get elsewhere in the system from the surface of Mercury is still smaller than that required to do so from the surface of the Earth (5). One disadvantage is that a space elevator isn't practical: Mercury rotates on its axis far too slowly for that.

Despite Mercury's proximity to the Sun, it is in some ways a surprisingly friendly target for early colonization. To begin with, Mercury has a magnetic field strong enough to ward off the Solar wind, so colonists need not worry about being bombarded with charged particles. There are four good sources of energy: solar radiation, solar magnetic, fissionables, and fusibles. Though the dayside is hot, some polar regions are in perpetual shade, and the rotation is slow enough that ground vehicles could easily remain in the night side or twilight zone (important for prospectors!).

Like Luna, there are probably ice deposits at the poles, providing a small but vital source of water, hydrogen and oxygen for a starting colony.  Unlike Luna, the ice deposits probably exist only at the poles, so at some point water would need to be imported.  Hydrogen might also be extracted by magnetic scoop from the solar wind, providing a source of fuel for fusion reactors.

We may thus envision Near-Term colonies being placed in the polar regions, with a webbing of solar-magnetism power receptors and electric train lines running from pole to pole. Prospectors would venture forth from the polar colonies, probably in large tracked or balloon-tired wheeled all terrain vehicles, endeavoring to remain near the Terminator or Twilight Zone. To maximize their exploration in the limited available time, each sapient prospector (6) would command a fleet of roving drones. Almost all of this infrastructure would be easily constructable from local materials.

The poles themselves would become increasingly crowded, owing to the difficulties of permanent settlements elsewhere on the planet. Direct launches and landings might well be made at the poles, because Mercury is small and very slow-rotating, and hence the delta vee advantages of equatorial operations would be small compared to the disadvantages of the extreme temperature variations. To the poles would come imports of volatiles and lighter solids; from the poles would depart shipments of heavy metals, radioactives and rare earths for the Outer System.

Mercury is also, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, ideally positioned as a base for operations designed to extract Solar energy. Eventually, there would be frequent launches of material to construct close-in Solar power satellites.

There would in general be a high proportion of robots to organics, because the cost of constructing robots would be relatively low. Mercury would be one of the first worlds in the System to have a large robotic population (another such world would be Venus, considered in the next part). By the end of this period some of them would be sapient.

Mid-Term development would largely continue on the same terms. The web of rail and power stations would spread over the Mercurian surface. Permanent settlement of the temperate and equatorial zones would begin, fed by growing population and new technologies that would enable excess dayside heat to be conducted to and radiated from the nightside. These new towns would be mostly underground, to avoid the thermal stresses at the surface, and would be connected by ultrafast underground maglev railways.

Most of the prospecting work would have been completed and most of the surface resources taken. Mines would now burrow deep into the crust, and begin tapping the mantle. Hermeothermal (6) energy might be employed as a cheap alternative to nuclear reactors.

The initial work of Solar materials extraction would be based from Mercury: the first vast electromagnetic coils would have been drawn from Mercurian metals, though in time that operation would become self-supporting. Almost certainly a lot of the plant would be owned by Mercurians.

The Mercurians themselves, both organic and inorganic, might have engineered themselves to better suit their world. Thermal and hard-radiation tolerance would be obvious design goals. For humaniform organics, part of this might take the classic pulp SF approach of extremely dark skin, and possibly third eyelids to protect against glare (7).

Terraforming is also a possibility. Sunshades could be deployed to lower the insolation on the dayside (this implies that solar power production moves offworld) and mirrors used to provide it to the nightside; iceteroids crashed to supply volatiles, including both atmosphere and hydrosphere. Mercury would probably always be a hot desert world by human standards, but in this period it might become shirtsleeves-habitable, especially to the Mercurians themselves.

Long-Term development would probably see core-tapping to extract rich concentrations of heavy elements. Mercurian geology (hermeology) would be brought completely under sapient control. Specialized races of animals or even sapients might be created to swim in the core and seek out especially valuable swirls of metals (8).

Solar operations would have long since become independent of Mercury, and with the availability of vast amounts of hydrogen, deuterium, tritium and trihelium from the Sun and the gas giants, the heyday of Mercury's importance as an energy-production center would be past. But Mercury would still make a good base for spacecraft construction, and despite its depth in the Sun's gravity well might become a launching station for the faster kinds of koopcruisers (9), oortcruisers (10), and starships.

Thus, the smallest terrestrial planet of the Solar System would be firmly connected to the longest-term future of Mankind.

===

Notes:

(1) - Earth is slightly denser and eighteen times more massive than Mercury, so Earth has in absolute terms far more heavy metals.  But Earth has also two and half times the gravity of Mercury, meaning that a mine of given structural strength can sink two and a half times as deep into Mercury as Earth.  Our deepest Earthly mines are about 4 miles down:  we could sink shafts 10 miles deep into Mercury.

The area-volume relationship also helps.  Mercury has a full one-seventh the surface area, and almost half the land surface area of the Earth, which means that the volume of accessible crust is roughly the same barring seafloor mining on Earth, and even with seafloor mining, a much larger percentage of Mercury's mass is within 10 miles of the surface than the percentage of Earth's mass within 2.5 miles of the surface.

Add to this that Mercury is, as far as we know, virgin for mining.  The easily-accessible surface deposits which, on Earth, were played-out decades, centuries or even millennia ago, would on Mercury be simply lying there for the exploitation.  The first century or two of Mercurian mining might hence be very profitable, as one wouldn't even need to go down that deep to strike rich lodes.

And Mercury has almost certainly been differentiated by geological processes, meaning that rich lodes would in fact be found.  Unlike smaller and colder bodies, Mercury had a molten core at least in the past, and possibly in the present, mixing, re-mixing, and thus concentrating valuable metals.  Mercury is likely to be the location of future metals rushes.

(2) - Both Mercurian and Lunarian tri-helium is sprayed into the regolith by the solar wind.  Logically Mercury, which is three times closer to the Sun than Luna, should have richer deposits of tri-helium than Luna.  On the other hand, that same Solar radiation might knock the tri-helium loose again, and once loose it would be lost due to the low Mercurian gravity.  On the gripping hand, Mercury's gravity is greater than Luna's.  So the issue is complex, but some tri-helium is almost certainly there.

(3) - Remember the close-in Solar power arrays proposed in the Near-Term for colonization of the Sun?  The materials needed to build these arrays need to come from somewhere.  Earth is relatively far away and Venus is a very hostile environment for factory and launcher construction and operations.  Mercury is the closest planet and will be, once we become accustomed to the extreme insolation and delve out underground bases for the crews, a relatively safe place from which to operate.

(4) - Assuming a background of experience in low-gravity, vacuum-environment, solar-flare endangered mining operations.  Obviously, the early decades of such operations might be plagued by fatal and costly accidents, as is the case in the early decades of any new resource extraction technology.

(5) - Though the Solar gravitational well is deeper than the Earth's, an object on the surface of Mercury is already in orbit around the Sun, and hence if it can achieve Mercury's escape velocity can then use a continuous low-thrust system such as an ion drive to spiral outward.  Mercury's escape velocity is only 4.25 km per sec, as opposed to the 11.2 km/sec required to escape from the Earth.

(6) - By analogy with "geothermal."

(7) - Barring at least Mercury-orbital sunshades, the surface of Mercury would obviously be too hot for our kind of life, even if such life were modified to be able to operate in vacuum without spacesuits.  On the other hand, orbital sunshades are not a very advanced technology, and the infrastructure to deploy such would be created in the process of creating the infrastructure to deploy Solar-orbital power collectors.  And, even if one is wearing a spacesuit or living in a hab, heat- and radiation-tolerance would allow one improved survival abilities in a crisis, where one might want to turn the air conditioning down or operate for extensive periods on the surface with no radiation shielding save that of one's suit.

(8) - Implying a high-temperature silicon or even exotic materials-based biochemistry, of course.

(9) - Koopcruisers ("Kuiper Belt Cruisers") would be longer-ranged ships than ordinary interplanetary vessels, designed and provisioned for flights across average distances of 10's of AU, rather than the AU's common in the System proper. The difference between an Outer System IPV and a Koopcruiser would be of course a vague one.

(10) - Oortcruisers ("Oort Cloud Cruisers") would be very long range space ships, designed and provisioned for flights across average distances of 100's of AU. Sufficiently long-range oortcruisers would essentially be short-ranged starships.

The Richness of Our Solar System

"The Richness of Our Solar System"

(c) 2011 by Jordan S. Bassior

Most people, including most people who are in favor of human expansion beyond the Earth, don't realize just how rich is the Solar System.  They tend to look only at the major terrestrial planets and assume that the only place into which we can expand without interstellar travel is Mars, because there are only three such planets in our Solar System aside from our own Terra, and Mars is the only one of these major terrestrial planet not to be  far too hot (Mercury and Venus) for convenient colonization.

But even if we only limit ourselves to non gas-giant worlds large enough to be forced into globular objects under their own gravity, and have some internal differentiation (for ease of access to ores), there are many others just in our Solar System:  not only Mercury, Venus and Mars, but also Luna, Ceres, Vesta, Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, Io, Titan, Triton, Pluto, Charon and Eris.  That's fifteen other terrestrial worlds in our Solar System, and I'm deliberately setting a high standard for "terrestrial world" -- I could set the bar a bit lower and add several other asteroids, moons and Kuiper Belt Objects.

The habitability of these objects of course varies (from Mars all the way down to Venus) and certain of these worlds have significant environmental challenges (radiation on the three inmost Galilean moons of Jupiter, cold on the three outmost Galilean moons of Jupiter and all the worlds farther out from the Sun, heat on Mercury and Venus).  But none are beyond the capabilities of our current physical science to colonize, and all are large enough worlds that there are certain to be valuable lodes of various minerals to attract our greed, and many mysteries to excite our minds.

The future is bright, for those who care to open their eyes and look beyond the current mess on Earth.

END.

Worlds For Man - Part 0 - Introduction and The Sun

"Worlds For Man - Sol"

(c) 2007, 2011 by Jordan S. Bassior

Introduction

This is an overview of the colonization and economic potential of the Solar System. In general when I talk about "Near Term" possibilities I am referring to throroughly known engineering; "Middle Term" assumes the possibility of considerable engineering progress and some scientific progress; and "Long Term" of vast engineering progress and major scientific progress. Obviously, the longer the term, the greater the speculation involved.

I considered doing it in terms of the rough time frames, but realized that I have no good way to predict the speed of scientific and technological progress. If you believe the most fervent advocates of The Singularity, we might get to "Long Term" levels of progress by 2050 or so; otherwise, I would imagine it would take many centuries.

I'm doing the system from the inside out.

The Sun

We normally don't think of the Sun when we think of space colonization, but it does contain some 99% of all the mass in the Solar System. Of course, it's hardly an inviting environment: at its surface the temperature is 5500 K, high enough to vaporize any substance we know how to make. This temperature climbs to 13.6 million degrees Kelvin in the core, enough to fuse hydrogen, which is exactly what happens, and what produces most of the Sun's energy (the rest being produced by gravitational pressure).

The Near Term exploitation of the Sun, therefore, centers not around colonization but around energy extraction. The vast majority of the Sun's energy, of course, is wasted from our point of view, because it is merely emitted into space without striking the Earth or any other worlds in our system. So the first thing we might do would be to intercept that energy and convert it into a usable form.

A solar panel in orbit at 1 AU (the Earth's orbital distance) from the Sun will receive 1.366 kilowatts per square meter of energy. If it were at orbit at 0.5 AU it would thus receive 1.866 kilowatts per square meter; at 0.25 AU almost 3.5 kilowatts per square meter, and so on (following the Inverse Square law for radiation).

Therefore, it follows that if we had a mature interplanetary transport capability, it would make sense to station our solar energy panels as close to the Sun as possible. There are, of course, tradeoffs: the closer the panel is placed to the Sun,  the greater the drift imparted by radiation pressure and the more heat it must dissipate.  These are both serious issues, as the former complicates the task of beaming power to the receiving-stations, and the latter risks loss of one's collectors.

Getting the energy back to the Earth or other inhabited places is in principle easy: one would connect the solar panels to a maser emitter, and beam the energy as microwaves to a receiver near where the energy was to be employed. The details of such systems have been long explored in both science and science fiction:  basically, one uses the reflection from the transmission to keep the beam on track and safely shut the beam off should it wander off-target.

Such an endeavor, once begun, would be highly-profitable, making it a practical project for any civilization which has reached the point of routinely sending at least robotic devices to the vicinity of Mercury, the planet most logical as a source of mass for the project.  Obviously, placing a crewed station on Mercury itself would be the easiest way to manage the mining operations.  More on this in the next installment.

In the Middle Term, our engineering and our materials science might advance, enabling the solar panels to be placed closer and closer to the Sun. If we developed a really good energy absorption and retransmission system, this might work as a cooling device for a spacecraft, enabling manned exploration of the corona and unmanned exploration of the deep photosphere.

One exciting idea would be the remote manipulation of Solar substance by means of powerful electromagnetic fields. Such fields might be externally generated, or might be used as catalysts to reshape the exceedingly powerful electromagnetic fields which the Sun generates naturally. This might enable the direct mining of the Sun for matter (mostly hydrogen and helium, but truly vast quantities of both, and even the heavy elements become significant when you filter enough Solar matter). Another application might be the generation of extremely powerful energy beams ("Doc" Smith's "sunbeams"), for military or engineering purposes.

In the Long Term, we might develop materials science (possibly employing generated force fields, or exotic matters) to the point where we could maintain organized structures at the immense pressures and temperatures inside the Sun. This would enable actual colonization of the Sun itself, though probably not by organic life forms: such writers as Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter, and John C. Wright have imagined these sorts of operations.  Among the purposes might be colonization (by greatly-modified or uploaded humans in the form of exotic-mater machines) or the formation and extraction of exotic forms of matter creatable only under the extreme conditions prevailing within a star.  Another aim might be the direct  management of the Solar power cycle, to a variety of possible ends.

Next: Mercury

Lone Adventurers versus Leaders, in Space Opera

"Lone Adventurers versus Leaders in Space Opera"

(c) 2007, 2011 by Jordan S. Bassior

The greatest space opera epic in the history of science fiction, by most accounts, is E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" saga (1). What sets this seris apart from many is that it is the chronology of a cosmic war, overtly between two civilizations -- "Civilization," descended in part from the civilization of Tellus (Earth), and "Boskone," essentially an anti-Civilization; covertly (2) between two ancient super-races, the benevolent, curious Arisians and the malevolent, power-hungry Eddorians. across two Galaxies and aeons of time (3).

Now, like most stories, it centers on one main character -- Kimball Kinnison (4).  However, it really is the saga of a whole war, and so in many crucial scenes he is an influence on, or even merely a witness to much larger events, such as massive interstellar naval campaigns.

One thing that sets this apart from a lot of later space opera -- though the idea was common at the time (5) -- is that Kimball Kinnison is not some sort of renegade or lone adventurer. He is a representative of and agent of Civilization, and much of what happens would not be possible if he did not have the forces of Civilization on which to call, lead, or persuade.

This avoided the major credibility problem of much space opera, which is the question of how and why one character is in a position of such importance to influence cosmic events. In the "Lensman" series the answer is that he has been appointed to this position: it is no more astounding that Kimball Kinnison should play an important role in a major space battle than that General Eisenhower should direct the Western Allied European Theatre in World War II.

Now, of course, the "lone adventurer" (or "band of adventurers") type of space opera, which is more popular today, has a venerable history. It goes all the way back to Edgar Rice Burroughs (though John Carter and the other Barsoomian adventurers, in particular, often acted as leaders or agents of Helium); notable Thirties and Golden Age adventurers included C. L. Moore's Northwest Smith and Leigh Brackett's Eric John Stark, and of course, going back to the Twenties, "Doc" Smith's Dick Seaton of the "Skylark" series (6).

There is much merit to the "lone adventurer" story. Even grand space opera must focus on individuals, and hence there will be "lone adventurer" stories within the grand epic (there are literally dozens of sub-stories within the "Lensman" series, for instance).

But lone adventurers can only accomplish so much, unless they are given tremendous auctorial assistance (as was Seaton in the "Skylark" novels). An insistence on only doing "lone adventurer" stories limits the stories that one is able to tell (7).

Why, then, has grand space opera fallen out of fashion? The reason, I believe, has to do with cultural changes to the popular concept of heroism. Increasingly, since the Vietnam War, the character who is acting as an agent of a higher governmental authority has been rejected as hero in favor of the character who is either acting solely on the dictates of his own conscience, or who starts out acting as an agent of a higher governmental authority but becomes a renegade because of the dictates of his own conscience (8).

It is my belief that this idea came about because many writers feel that "the Establishment" of any Western or Western-like society has been discredited by America's (much-exaggerated) atrocities in Vietnam and that, therefore, the only real heroes possible are Bold Rebels Against the Establishment. In other words, nobody who is fighting for the Powers That Be can possibly be a hero.

Among my problems with this notion is that it is suicidal. We are products of our society, and to wish to tear down or fail to preserve our society means to change it into something that we would not find as hospitable. If we are dealing with themes of Man against Infinite Space and Time, surely preserving what we ourselves value, which (like it or not) is what our Establishments spring from (9), is all the more important?

Interestingly, a more mature, "Doc" Smith like attiude is often found today in planetary science fiction, particularly in the two major "Sea of Time" sagas (S. M. Stirling's Island in the Sea of Time, which features a villain in part inspired by Smith's DuQuesne from the "Skylark" Stories, and Eric Flint's 1632 universe. On an interstellar scale, the grand epic is now being done mostly by David Weber, in a series of stories that began about Honor Harrington, a heroine acting as part of a larger organization, and have moved far beyond merely her own experiences.

In modern space opera, the limits of light speed are often used to grant the character "lone actor" status. This is of course reasonable, especially over really great spacetime gaps -- who, after all, is going to review the orders of someone 30 thousand light years from home in an STL travel universe? On the other hand, it is less reasonable across short interstellar distances (the captain of a ship on a 20-year round trip to Alpha Centauri does intend to go home someday), and it is a poor excuse in universes which do have FTL travel.

Stories about leaders are, admittedly, harder to do than stories about lone adventurers.  Any leader has to work with his organization.  If he has superiors, and they give him what he considers mistaken orders, he must either follow them, work around them, or persuade them to change their minds.  He must work with his colleagues, which may mean playing organizational politics in order to get to do what he wants to do.  And he must persuade his subordinates to go along with his plan -- even if they are under his unconditional authority, he has to worry about sparking a rebellion or simply being ignored if his orders are too unpopular.

This does not, of course, mean that the character must be some sort of "cover his ass" bureaucrat who is unwilling to make any independent decisions. One wouldn't want to assign crucial interstellar missions to persons matching that description, and such would make poor "heroes," anyway. But even someone far from home can show loyalty to his own culture, society and government (10).

Nor does it mean that every space opera must be about Agents of Authority. There is a good and honored place for Lone Adventurers, and many thrilling tales to tell about them.

It's just that some stories are too big for a Lone Adventurer to handle. 

If we want to control our future, we have to take responsiblity for our past, and if we want to speculate about our destiny on the largest of scales, it can't all be about a single and independent hero.

===

Notes:

(1) The novels, not the idiotic anime.

(2) Very covertly, as the Eddorians never catch on to the existence of the Arisians.

(3) Obvious comparisons in terms of scope can be drawn with Benford's "Galactic Center" and Baxter's "Xeelee" space opera sagas.

(4) Though there are two prequels (Triplanetary and First Lensman) which take place before his birth; and in Children of the Lens he shares the stage with his offspring.

(5) Edmond Hamilton originated and Jack Williamson also notably used this idea, often generalized as the "Space Patrol" setting. Its most visible modern manifestation is "Starfleet" in the Star Trek series.

(6) Leigh Brackett kept writing Stark stories to the end of her career, but they always had a Thirties to Forties feel to them.

(7) - To those which can plausibly be witnessed and affected by an at least semi-independent individual, or small group of individuals, which prevents one from telling large-scale stories.  Either the heroes have to be given ridiculous levels of influence, whether due to innate abilities or being At The Right Place At The Right Time, or the story must be merely a small slice of the event:  "What I Saw At The Grand Galactic War."

(8) - Ridiculous extremes of this cliche are the spy who has to wind up hunted by his own agency and the cop who has to be suspended from the force before he can solve the case: both ritual applications of "Outsider" status required to gain the moral advantage needed to deserve success.   The ritual nature of this plot development is clearly shown when the lone spy or cop becomes absurdly more effective on his own than he ever was as the agent of the organization.

(9) - This, I think, is the real reason for the attractiveness of the "lone outsider" hero.  All that is bad or corrupt or ugly about his society can be externalized and blamed on "The Establishment" or "The Powers That Be," while the hero can be painted as being above such flaws.  Yes, even when he's a Gritty Anti-Hero -- being such usually means that he is brutal or sleeps around or swears a lot (all, notice, hallmarks of his Alpha Male untamed nature), not that he participates in or profits from the social vices the author really despises.  (Heroines, of course, get the female equivalents].

It's a dishonest practice.  In real life, the flaws of a society's Establishment almost always spring either from the values of the larger society, and hence will be mirrorred in the hero's and (if the society is similar to our own) the reader's own personality.  What tends to be externalized onto the "Establishment" is not so much vice but failure, as in "victory has a thousand fathers, defeat is an orphan."  The very same beliefs and policies that all will take pride in and credit for when they work well will be blamed on shadowy nefarious politicians, bureaucrats and business lobbies should they fail.

It's one of the uglier sides of human nature.

(10) - As opposed to betraying his service oaths or employment contracts the moment that he runs into the "dilemna" in which his organization is obviously in the moral Wrong and its enemies in the moral Right.  Which begs the question of just why the character signed onto that organization in the first place ...

Metahumans as Ultimate Weapons

"Metahumans as Ultimate Weapons,"

(c) 2007, 2011 by Jordan S. Bassior

I was recently considering the way in which comic book universes handle the issue of metahumans and warfare, or more precisely fail to handle this issue. Specifically, the case was World War II, and Superman's inability to win the war for the Allies. The excuse in that continuity was that Hitler had the Spear of Destiny (the blade that pierced the side of Christ on the Cross), while the Japanese had the Holy Grail: each of these mystical artifacts somehow neutralized Superman's power (because he is vulnerable to magic).

Which doesn't really make sense. Sure, either of these might be dangerous to Superman were he physically in their presence. But it's difficult to see how the mages of either the Nazis or the Shinto priests could be so incredibly powerful as to be able to protect all Axis forces, all over the planet against the Big S -- and yet not powerful enough to do anything significant against the Allies offensively with their Arcane Powers. This was clearly a hasty attempt at papering over a major gaping hole in their universe's logic.

But of course this is a more specific case of a more general problem in comic books. In universes where there are metahumans at the power levels of even Spiderman, let alone Superman, there is no logical reason why they would not be the primary instruments of state power, the most valued members of any national armed forces, indeed, why they would not become a new "warrior aristocracy" whose battles, rather than those of ordinary humans, decided the fates of empires. And in the long run, becoming an aristocracy in other ways, for instance enjoying special legal privileges and exemptions.

I have heard explanations of how this could be avoided. None of them hold water. For instance, while it's true that a particular nation might decide to avoid using them in this role, or choose a means of recruiting them so ham-handed that most metahumans powerful enough to make a difference refused to join and could make their refusals stick, the problem is that all it would take would be for one Great Power to discover a competent means of recruiting and employing metahumans, and other Great Powers would be forced to either follow suit or be reduced to Minor Power status. It's like the issue of gunpowder in the Late Middle Ages -- the nobles and knights would have been happier had it never been discovered, but once it was a reality, any state which eschewed its usage was quickly reduced to irrelevance. Historically, gentleman's agreements to avoid using truly effective weapons and tactics are not Evolutionarily Stable Solutions.

I've also heard it argued that metahumans aren't really powerful enough to make a difference. While it's true that the typical metahuman, or even team of metahumans, is not powerful enough to defeat the entire military establishment of a Great Power in pitched battle, this is of course not how one would employ them -- the objection is about as irrelevant as pointing out that siege bombards are useless as light cavalry. Metahuman teams would be used as extremely powerful special forces, offering the hitting force of a whole airborne division transportable like a normal infantry squad. They would be tasked against enemy strategic targets (such as nuclear weapons production facilities), chokepoints (key tunnels and bridges, supply depots) and commanders (such as the President of the enemy state). Most of the armed forces of the targeted Great Power would watch helplessly as the highly mobile superteams went in, wrought amazingly precise destruction to vital facilities, and went out. Think of it as airmobility on steroids.

And besides, in the case of the Marvel or DC Universe, there are superteams powerful enough to take on, in pitched combat, the entire armed forces of lesser Great Powers, such as Britain or India, assuming that these armed forces lacked metahuman support. The Justice League, of course, is the prime example. (Indeed, there are single metahumans in both the Marvel and DC Universe capable of casually destroying the whole human race, but they rarely intervene in human affairs -- Galactus or Morpheus are not available for hire as a mercenaries!)

Indeed, normal metahuman teams could be used in pitched battle, if used carefully. The metahumans would be used to reinforce a striking spearhead or threatened salient, and would be extensively supported by friendly normal-human forces. The friendly forces would make sure that the enemy couldn't sneak up on the flanks of the metahumans while the metahumans would make sure that any heavy weapons support (tanks, heavy artillery, airplanes) which the enemy tried to use would be swiftly neutralized. This is precisely how main battle tanks are used in real-world combat, except that some metahumans are much tougher even in a slugfest than any main battle tank ever really constructed.

The final argument often used is that all Powers would recruit metahumans in rough proportion to their non-metahuman strength, so the world order would not be markedly different. While the first part might well be true, what this misses is that the social structure of the Powers which did this would be changed by the compromises -- either with the metahumans or with their own political cultures -- which they would have to make to do this. Either the metahumans would have to be bribed with perks and at least tacit privileges, in which case they would be on their way to evolving into an aristocracy (are you really going to lose the power of Megadeathbeam Man because you want to put him in prison for non-fatally beating up innocent Joe Average?), or they would have to be forcibly pressed into service (how safe is innocent Joe Average from being enslaved by his own government if they create an impressment service capable of forcing Megadeathbeam Man to work for them against his will?). Think about how the switch from heavy infantry to heavy cavalry in the transition from Classical Antiquity to the Medieval Era affected society, and then reflect that the advantage possessed by (say) The Thing over ordinary troops is far greater than that possessed by pre-industrial heavy horse over heavy foot.

In short, metahumans would change the world, if they existed. And it's a shame that very little science fiction has seriously explored the implications, because most commercial comic books can't -- they NEED an "everything's normal" type world in order to hook the mundanes in to read them.  

This is an inherent weakness of the mass-produced long-running contemporary world fantastic fiction form:  you can see the same effect working in, say, Doc Savage or Tarzan, in which the wondrous inventions of Dr. Clark Savage Jr. or the amazing discoveries of Lord Greystoke have absolutely no effect on the world of the early to mid 20th century, outside their battles against villains.  This produces an (unintentionally) weird effect if one reads many of them in succession, because they don't even cause the changes one might expect because the protagonist was aiming to cause them (or his aims would obviously tend to produce them as a secondary effect).

For instance, "Doc" Savage supposedly fights habitual criminals, but there seems to be an unending supply of them:  organized criminal gangs are still able to operate in his city; he also does war research for the Allies, but none of his advanced weapons technology, such as his lightweight bulletproof vests or mercy bullets, are ever put into production and used on the battlefield.  Tarzan aids various explorers and scientists, but none of the lost cities or forgotten technologies they discover ever become public knowledge (ERB being a better writer than the collective "Lester Dent", Burroughs justified this by specific decisions on the parts of the characters involved).

This doesn't have to be a weakness of non-long-running serial written science fiction, however.  Science fiction writers could explore the possibilities of superpowered metahumans emerging in society.  It's even been done, though only with very limited sets of powers, such as in Anne McCaffrey's Pegasus series (about the emergence of the psionically-gifted in a near- to mid-term future world).  But it's not done very often, and rarely if ever with multiple metahumans of a typical comic-book hero power level range.  Usually, when that scenario is imagined, it's done ironically rather than seriously, with genre conventions in full effect.

It would be interesting to see it done seriously, and sans genre conventions, someday.