Hello, welcome to Sock Talk with JNab and the Sundance Kid. We are going to explore the frontiers of technology, art and the human experience. Hello, welcome to episode 5 of Sock Talk. Sorry we were away for a little bit. This is two weeks longer than we would have liked to have our next Sock Talk, but we are back. Unfortunately, we don't have our producer Jackie today, so hence we have this wide angle setup because we can't do live camera switching. As much as we'd like to have replaced Jackie with AI following with current business trends, it's not that at all. No, no, so you will have to endeavor with this single camera setup. If you're watching the video, that is, a lot of you just listen, so you don't know what we're talking about and this makes no sense. Getting right in, last week we had our first guest on, Nicky Thompson. During that podcast we were talking quite a bit about sci-fi and John and I love talking about sci-fi, so we thought, let's talk about sci-fi. For an overarching theme for today, we're thinking, we'll go through some of our favorite sci-fis and talk about some of the technologies and concepts that they introduce because ultimately they're just fun to talk about and think about. A lot of these sci-fis have influenced culture and technology, which fits right within the remit of what we like to talk about on this podcast, so it makes a lot of sense. To kick us off, I had to sit down and think about what are some of the sci-fis that have stood out to me over my life as I've read and consumed books and TV shows. To get started, I thought I would go back to 1970, Larry Niven's Ring World. Have you read it? Yes, I have. It's a great book. It's fantastic. Obviously, the big main concept to talk about in that one is the ring world itself. That's a very interesting, big, massive device. I think it ends up having millions of times the surface area of Earth filled with different cultures and species all across the surface of it. Do you want to just set up for everybody what a ring world is? Absolutely. That's a good idea. Ring world is, imagine a ring in space, expand its circumference out past the length of the orbit of a star. I think in ring world, it's at the orbit of Earth about its circumference. One of its circumference is diameter. It's on its surface, on the inner surface facing towards the star is habitable surface. Trees, mountains, seas, oceans, and they all point inwards towards a star in the centre of the system. In Larry Niven's Ring World, he has other devices to cast shadows on the ring world's surface so that it has day and night cycles. That's essentially what the ring world is. That in itself is just fantastic. That has obviously influenced other sci-fi's. One that immediately comes to mind is Halo, the video game, which is a smaller version of that. Also going to go into some other sci-fi's that use ring worlds as concepts as well. The idea of exploring this planet, well not planet, sorry, exploring this device, well that's not a device, what would be the word? I think device is a good one, maybe environment. Environment, megastructure, out in space with millions of times the square mile footage of Earth. Just as a human, we've explored our planet, we're done. There is still lots of interesting things to figure out about our planet. In space I'm sure there might be lots of interesting planets out there, but then something this big and designed that you could just go out and explore and see all these different species that are there is super fun. It's a bit weird as well. It's definitely got kind of a, I don't know how much you remember about the book, but all of these species kind of like, where do I put it? What's the scientific word for when species copulate? There we go. Copulate. All of these species end up having to copulate to solidify deals and stuff. That's how they're kind of bonobos, all of these species across the ring world. It kind of gives off the vibe of this is definitely his fantasy, exploring this millions and millions of square footage and finding all these different species and copulating with them. I didn't want to go down that route so much. I was going to say, it's not the key point of the novel at all. It's just a little background detail. That's a little background detail and I was about to go into that tangent, but that's not the interesting part. But there's other front tech in that book. Well, for one, the ring world was actually, I remember seeing that a bunch of physicist students kind of did the calculations and said it wouldn't work. It would be unstructured. It wouldn't be able to maintain itself. It wouldn't be, yeah, and it would collapse. So then he wrote in the next book that it fires off and sustains itself and everything. But it was a fun battle. Another really cool thing I like in that book series is at the start, they're on this ship and they've been charted to go and they've heard about this ring world and they're going to go find it. And they crash the ship on it immediately. The first thing they do is crash on it. But when they crash, the ship doesn't get, it basically crashes into in light speed and it doesn't get damaged because they have, he creates something he calls stasis fields, which is where a localized field where time is zero within the field. So if you think about F equals MA, if you have acceleration, which is what, delta V over delta T. Very nice. Well, that's the deal. Yeah. So if you change T to zero, it nulls out the force. Because you're multiplying all the other factors by zeros. It doesn't matter if you were going at light speed or something close to light speed. Yeah. Yeah. The force is zero, which is fun. It's very, very clever. And other people have used the idea, but I don't think other people have used it as so fundamental to starting a story and then quite irrelevant to all the rest of the story. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of science fiction crosses over a lot to fantasy. And ultimately that is a fantasy story. It's a massive, massive world that they explore with different cultures and species. That's an interesting point. I'd love to get into that with maybe a leader on the podcast as opposed to now, but I'm very interested in the difference between fantasy and science fiction. I do think they walk the knife's edge. They walk a knife's edge, but they're also a tale of a lot of human experience throughout history as well. I'm Mars of a conquistador. Have you ever? I have not. It's a firsthand account of conquistador exploring the Southern Americas or Mexico. No, Mexico specifically. Burning of the boats and everything. And just being like, we're conquering this land. And it reads like a sci-fi to me because I've grown up with sci-fi more. So those stories to me are we crash land on an alien planet and there's this weird culture and we're going around. For them, it's like our boats have crashed and are not being crashed, but we're conquering this world and we're going to meet all these people and they do things differently. It's all weird. It feels like a sci-fi. A lot of these stories are... To me, the difference between... I like the term speculative fiction. A lot of folks say SF instead of sci-fi. And if you're saying SF, then you can replace psi with speculative. Oh, thank you. So I like the idea of speculative fiction because a nice distinction I learned a long time ago was that fantasy is just that. Anything might happen. And it works better if you concretize the rules. So you say these things can happen, those things can't happen. Let everybody have a sense of that before you start telling the story so nobody is expecting your hero to be able to fly when she falls off a cliff or nobody is expecting her to fall off a cliff when she can actually fly. The way to concretize the difference that I like is to say science fiction or speculative fiction is speculating on a single point. What if this were true? So if it were true that you had faster than light travel available to everyone, then you could have most of the science fiction adventures that are set in space. If it were true that you had a transporter that could somehow transport you from a ship to the ground and it's still you, not a duplicate, then you could have Star Trek. So things like that. And you can speculate mostly around one point for good science fiction, but often we buy into the tropes and you have speculation around a lot of known ideas and then a single new one that introduces the story. So Ringworld starts with this idea of faster than light travel and a whole bunch of other stuff in the introduction of the characters. But the notion of the Ringworld itself is really the speculation. It was an idea that you could build space stations like in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 where they would spin around their own axis and still have fake gravity. I'm going to get into that. He did that before then as well. So all I mean is the idea of a circular structure having an artificial gravity. It had been around for a long while. Yep. Specifically Herman Oberth. He was a Nazi scientist. He was one of the rocket scientists. Yes, but he wasn't in project Paperclip. He was of the bunch, but he wasn't. He wasn't stolen by the Americans. But no, exactly what you're like. I love good sci-fi's that just ground their whole worlds in what of this. One little thing, a good example of that, which I was literally going to lead into next was Mass Effect. It's a video game series. 2007 was the first one. Before this video game series came out, I think they, I'm not sure what the relationship they had, but they had a science fiction writer on board to write the lore of the game world before the game. During the game you can have such a well thought out universe, which I love. The only, well, there's a lot of speculation that they do, but they ground everything in the name of the series, which is Mass Effect. The one speculation they come up with is that there's an element called element zero. If you put a positive current through it, it increases the mass of objects around it. If you put a negative current through it, it decreases the mass of objects around it. From that, it explores out what signs could you do if that were true. They have faster than light travel just by decreasing the mass of the ship. If you decrease the mass of the ship, then you can accelerate faster and faster and faster past light speed to the point, and I think they even go to negative mass so you can really pick up speed and not have time dilation, which is super, super fun. I love that grounding of your speculation. Just one little jump. Okay, if this little jump, what happens? Yeah, me too. To me, that's a lovely writing challenge and a lovely thing to play with. The ideas that authors use for that little twist are rooted in science of the moment. Whatever science is going on right then has inspired a writer to think of this. It's really fun to look back historically at what was going on that inspired people. For example, submarines exist. What if there was one that never had to surface? Just lovely. Or Mary Shelley. Galvini has been for 30 years or almost 40 years, he's been running electricity through animals. He found out that there's electric current through living tissue and not through dead tissue. If you run electric current through dead tissue, then the muscles move. Maybe electricity is the force of light. We still talk about galvanizing. The galvanizing force behind this movement. You are the galvanizing force behind this podcast. Yeah, Galvini. Thank you, sir, for inspiring Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Yeah, yeah. I just looked up because Jackie's not. Yeah, yeah, I thought you'd be looking up something. Well, I wanted to see the science fiction writer you mentioned because that's such a cool thing. I thought it'd be good to get a name too. I don't know if this is the right name though. Is it Drew Carpician? It could be. It says here, "Drew Carpician, sci-fi and fantasy author behind Darth Bane, Rayvan, Mass Effect, and many other books and games." That'll be him. I don't know if I'm pronouncing the name correctly, but it's with a couple of "Y's." I remember getting really, really... 2007, I was getting really excited for that game just because I was reading all the lore and everything before I even played the game. Nice. And it was great. It was just a little bit of humanity's journey on that. They'd start exploring the solar system and then beyond the orbit of Pluto, they just found this giant alien device in orbit. I think they figure out how to turn it on. It's like a Stargate kind of thing. Stargate's another... That's another fantastic, fantastic sci-fi. But I'll try to stay on track in the ones I wanted to talk about. So you were talking there about Arthur C. Clarke and the spinning orbital for artificial gravity. Before 2001, Space Odyssey, it's a fantastic story as well. I know the story behind that. I'm going to tell you whatever. I know a few stories behind it. So Kubrick obviously directed it. Kubrick actually wanted to shoot childhood sand. Oh really? Yeah. So childhood sand. I'd love to have seen that. That would be amazing. So he came to Arthur C. Clarke and he said, "I want to make childhood sand." He's like, "Well, no, let's just make something new." So he wrote 2001 of Space Odyssey with Kubrick alongside the making of the film. No kidding. So he wrote the short story? I don't know about the short story or maybe he already had the short story. All I know is that Kubrick wanted to do childhood sand and instead they did 2001. Maybe that's when he expanded the short story. Maybe that's when he wrote the short story. It could be. So the book, there's a book alongside and there's just slight differences, but it's ultimately mostly the same story. I think the monolith is an orbit around Jupiter in the book, but in the film it's around Saturn just because Saturn's prettier. Yeah. I was at a conference last week and said it was Mars during my talk. No. Pretty sure it's Saturn. Absolutely it was. And that was just me being foolish and making mistakes, speaking of which. Is this okay time for yeah, actually we're gonna do that apologize to anyone listening Reviewing and to you and to everyone else in the world not listening you're doing I tend to make mistakes as I mentioned a few times It's one of those things that was introduced into me when I came to the UK They said you'd better start making mistakes John or they won't like you here. Yeah, not actually true I was actually making mistakes long before that So yeah, I've made a bunch of mistakes on the podcast and there's a couple in particular that I would like to point out Go for it Of course now I won't remember know that when we were talking with Mickey. I very badly told the story of The person everyone calls Edward Moybridge though often he's pronounced Edward because of the weird spelling of the first name I used to teach about Moybridge 20 years ago and somehow I just got some details wrong So yeah, I left out his name. His name was Muggeridge Edward Muggeridge spelled Edward spelled the usual way and he changed it to Edward or Edward Moybridge thinking that Edward with an EA at the beginning was the more traditional spelling So he did that he was known as a photographer. He was known as I think Helios Hmm I think that I'm probably making another mistake But I think it was Helios and a lot of the original black and white photography of some of the great Parks in California come from him and to this day they're sold as posters with his signature on them or sometimes without Anyway, the the thing that I got wrong was that I said that he was a madman who killed his wife He didn't kill his wife He decided that his wife was having an affair and probably she was They were decades apart in age and he spent very little time with her. He went to where the chap she was purportedly having the affair with where he was working and shot and dead and Then calmly let himself be arrested. Hmm never protested his innocence. Never said anything else the Lawyers who were hired for him Argued that he was insane and said that it was because of a carriage crash She had been in that it caused brain damage, which is probably true, but he refused the defense He refused to say he was insane He killed this man because he had found a photograph of his baby son That the woman had signed that his wife had signed for This military man and he assumed that meant that this was actually that guy's son So he killed him the jury found him innocent Not because he didn't do it and not because he was insane but because they felt anyone would have done it Which is an interesting point of jurisprudence And one to watch out for if you're ever ever visiting, California, especially a hundred years ago Time travelers beware strangely He went on to a long and happy life His wife died shortly thereafter and he placed his son in care wanted nothing to do with him saying it's not his son The son grew to old age died. I think in California in his 80s or something. He was hit by a car while crossing the street Everyone says he was the spitting image of his father, but his father denied him for his whole life So that said would my bridge or mugger age or Helios? Sorry. I told the story wrong. Well, there we go Now we corrected it for the record. Thank goodness. The other thing I got wrong. I Think in our second podcast, maybe on our first I Was talking about the chap I do more research with than anyone else in the world Dr. Lucas Esterly of Arhus University and I said he's over there in computing and when I listen back to it I couldn't believe I said that he's not in computing. He's an engineer. Yeah he's he's in a I'm gonna get it wrong again, and I probably should have it looked up But he's he's in the school of computing engineering or engineering and computing I'm sorry Lucas and you have to come and visit and be a guest on the pot Absolutely, please do you come and do that Lucas and then you can correct it and we'll have a laugh at how bad I am At this really you'd be very welcome to do that. Yeah, so I'm sorry I've gotten that wrong yet again, but I did want to mention these things that I've gotten wrong I don't like to let errors go and corrected and please folks if you're listening or watching Or trying to do both and you hear either of us make a mistake Please let us know We're not going to be pompous about it. We make mistakes With regular frequency Especially me I make mistakes of regular frequency. That's why I have some little notes here this time So I get dates, right like 1970 for ring Wouldn't have guessed it was my dad 70. I'm glad you said that no no My favorite part of ring world was in the sequel Yeah, the first sequel which ones that called again. No that this is where I did it right down Yeah, I'm not good. There's like children of ring world and other things Yeah There there was one that came a while after then a bunch of them that came well after that and I'm sorry I'm not going to recall or take the time to look them up But one of the main characters in the first novel is this young woman who doesn't seem to belong on the trip But there she is and we find out Spoilers if you don't want spoilers for ring world one of one of the unknown sequels that we're talking about Skip ahead ten seconds 20 seconds make it a minute make it a minute skip ahead a minute Okay, and if you only skipped ahead ten seconds, that's now skip ahead a minute. Yep Okay, so this this young woman we find out it towards the end of the first novel that she's the luckiest human that was ever born and It's an important part of the story The cool thing is in the sequel when he's describing her walk. He says how clumsily she walks Because she never fell down as a child. So she never improved her walking. She never got to iterate it So she walks like a toddler and I just thought that was such a great detail to add in after the fact I love little things like that just little smart things There's one of Arthur C. Clarke books as well where he's talking about There's a woman who's traveling to Mars and it's her first time on Mars she's finding the gravity a little bit weird and The hardest thing for her was keeping her coffee not spilling Just a simple thing like that thinking about those everyday human things and what's different Yeah coffee would react differently and a jar in a cup and likely to spill right? That's lovely. That's just lovely Yes, so we were there talking before we took a tangent there Saturn being prettier than Jupiter and thus they use Saturn interestingly also in Christopher Nolan's interstellar That's the name of it. They also use Saturn for a wormhole next to it just because it's beautiful I remember in the IMAX I was in New York actually the IMAX when I saw interstellar on the massive screen and yeah, those shots were made for IMAX you've got Saturn Beautiful beautiful rings and when you watch it on a TV There's a shot of like the ring of Saturn just covering up most of the frame and there's like a little white dot Crossing the frame and when you watch it on normal TVs It's just a little white dot in that IMAX you could see this this station the ship like floating across. It was really cool Okay, Arthur C. Clarke Rondi Woo with Rama. Have you ever read it? Yeah Many decades ago. Yeah, so plot is We detect something out in the solar system. It's coming past the Sun I believe it's just kind of doing a fly-through through the through the solar system and it's a giant Cylindrical device and they just think it's whatever it's interstellar object, but then it starts accelerating away From the Sun so then all of a sudden everyone's paying attention to it because why is it accelerating? Why does it come past the so the periapsis or the apo lapsis? There's a periapsis and apo lapsis of orbits and I forget which ones which But at the point where you would accelerate when you're closest to a gravitational body to get a gravitational sling It starts accelerating. So it's a ship and then boom Okay Everyone pays attention and they fly a ship out to catch up with it and see what this is and it's a giant black cigar so it's a cylinder they figure out a way in and on the interior of it is a world massive cities and everything like this and the thing I love most about this book other than just that device in general it spins for artificial gravity is that as we were talking about last episode about professionals and in Star Trek everyone is professions in this book everyone is professional like no one gets stupidly killed At one point someone kind of takes a risk, but then really is annoyed at themselves for taking that risk They just they go in there. They explore it. They do their job well and document everything well, and there's no There's no moments where you go. Why would you do that? What are you doing? It's just nice and clean Yeah, ultimately the themes theme so far of a lot of these is exploration. It's Star Trek to boldly go where no man has gone before and That's probably why we love a lot of these stories. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely Part of what's cool about fantasy or science fiction is The idea of pushing you beyond what you can experience in your own life I tend to prefer science fiction because I don't want it to be too different from life if your hero Finds out that he has magic powers Where does that end? When Luke can draw the lightsaber to him in the ice cave and Hoth? Yeah, well then why can't he push the self-destruct button from his ship? Yeah, right Yeah, if he can do that then he should be able to do that and the answer is in order to create a story that's more interesting than a guy with psychic powers who sits back in the X mansion and fights all the villains from the The padded comfort of Cerebro the chair right You need rules Newer stories. Yeah, and the rules should serve the story But I like it when they also serve a structure of of of the universe so that the universe makes sense Yeah, and a lot of folks don't care about that one way or the other Yeah, there's a lot of bad sci-fi now. I'd say They've crossed into what I would say sci-fi fantasy Which is fine. It's can be its own thing Absolutely Star Wars is originally I would say more that it's Star Wars. I don't consider science fiction. No, it's a fantasy film It's fantasy which is fine. It can it can be its own thing as long as its rules are consistent within its world Yeah, exactly. I mean otherwise lightsabers make no sense combat weapon, right? I think I've done that exercise with you as an old fencer Okay, take your thumb off the button and keep cutting and now no Perry works. Yep. Yep Or why can't you just turn your lightsaber off on a swing and then turn it back on? No, but that's exactly what I mean. So like okay I turn on my sword you turn on your sword you do a nice cross overhead Perry covering prime I guess it is and I cut down at your head and release the button and press it again Yeah, and it doesn't matter if my timing is between your sword and your head I can press it again anywhere past your sword and introduce my blade into your abdomen or anywhere else All right So the lore that you have what I came across a random YouTube video and people explain this and they're like well actually And it takes a moment and XYZ of books It was explained that the both the sif and the Jedi is just completely so much forbidden that none of them ever do it Oh really so taboo that none of them would ever ever consider. Oh, that's hilarious The explanation I heard which someone else who could quote page and verse for where it comes from Was that it takes a moment for the lightsaber to warm up? That's a good that's a better explanation Yeah, and it makes sense with the sound effect. Yeah. Yeah, but The explanation I prefer is that's not how this works. Yeah, just stop questioning that question other things Yeah, you have to suspend our disbelief that reminds me of Ben Affleck while they were shooting Armageddon this plot of Armageddon is NASA take a bunch of a bunch of ragtag oil oil drillers Yeah train them to be astronauts and then send them up to an asteroid to split it in half so it won't go past earth Ben Affleck asked is it James Cameron? Yeah, James Cameron Ben Affleck asked James Cameron Wouldn't it be easier for astronauts to be trained how to do the drill? I think you said shut up Yeah, we do that we can't use Tommy Lee Jones or James Garner any of these yeah classic folk we want to use Yeah, I just said did I just say James Cameron? Oh, actually I'm confusing it now with space Cowboys Yeah, space guys with James camp and James Garner and Ben Affleck saying goodbye to Liv Tyler. Yes. Yes. Okay. That's thing. He's daughter. That's Armageddon. Yeah. Okay. That's Sam Mick Jagger's daughter. No Michael Bay it wasn't James Cameron. Sorry Michael Bay Michael Bay lens flare lens flare lens flare Mike who am I confusing? No different rock star from the same era And it's embarrassing that I can't think of it Similar look I guess you could say Steven Tyler Steven Tyler obviously In the name. Yeah, I kept wanting to say at least we're real-time correcting this time So we don't have to go back on the next episode I don't know it might be better to just go back every now and then and let the flow happen Yeah, well you guys let us know. What do you think? Is it better with the interruptions? Like yeah, should we correct ourselves on the fly or should we just keep talking? Do let us know. Yes Okay, so to keep the momentum going please one of my other favorite book series is the culture series by Nina Nambanks He's a Scottish writer. Is that the three-body problem? Nope. That's Jing Jing right right Chinese. I Go for an answer completely wrong. What's the culture? The culture series is by an Ian and banks. He's a Scottish writer died 2000 something But he was a fantastic prolific writer. I remember the name I recall the name, but I don't recall what he wrote He wrote some of them are surface detail hydrogen sonata considered Pleiades I don't know if I've read any of them. You should I love them I definitely briefly talked to you about some of the concepts in them before just in casual conversations So I'll go over them on the podcast again because it's fun Yes, please a lot of his books are different stories in the same universe He had a some sci-fi novels which were outside of this universe But the majority of them are in the same universe and this universe Follows a post-scarcity anarchist utopian interstellar interstellar society Rolls off the tongue. It truly does post-scarcity in that they don't have to worry about resources at all They've figured out physics to the point where energy matter doesn't matter too much Takes no energy. Yeah An anarchist in that every individual can almost pretty much do what they want because there is almost no consequences because a lot of technology Reduces all those consequences. For example death isn't a thing because people have backups They just make backups and just make remake themselves and such but the cut it follows a culture And this is this interstellar super advanced civilization that looks after a lot of species across Numerous worlds and it's all driven by the ai's in that universe That they call minds and minds are just these hyper super intelligent entities that are machine based ultimately they can think way faster and way more than any Biological being but they're benevolent. They're completely benevolent So unlike a lot of other sci-fi series where we have to worry about the ai's coming these ones are completely benevolent and are Essentially gods really to the to the biological beings and they look after them In M banks, we're talking about ring worlds and This series are called orbitals, but they're the same thing in Halo and in this series culture series It makes way more sense to park them to you don't need to build them around a star You just need to have them in orbit next to a star and you can rotate them at an angle Where the natural where the rational rotation you'll just get a day night cycle from its own shadow Makes way more sense in building giant plates Right in orbit and and you could probably well, I shouldn't say probably my physics is probably completely off But couldn't you also feed their spin so that it's based on the rotation of the planet that they're near or the star that they're near No, you don't you just do you do need to center of course still couldn't you just like with? What's the counter spinning device that keeps things in there? Gyroscope couldn't you have a gyroscopic effect that would cause the thing to spin around its own center Yeah, I mean that's where you do you kickstart it so it starts spinning right and then but what I mean is the movement It's got around a star naturally because are you saying for it to have a bit of a wobble? Or I don't think it would have to I think at the right angle. That's what I'm saying Yeah, so with the right angle, it's in it's in orbit around a star at the right angle. It's just spinning like this So it's day night cycle. Yeah, but I'm not talking about the day night cycle I'm saying you wouldn't have to propel it to spin around itself If it was set at the right angle and the right distance from the star the fact that it's turning this way would cause it to Also turn this way. Okay for those of you listening. We're doing a lot of hand gestures Sorry folks Okay, skip 10 seconds. No No, what I'm trying to suggest is that it's the old experiment about angular momentum Where if you hold a wheel that's across an axis two handles and you spin it Maybe it feels like it's pulling your hands a little bit to one side or the other to the direct depending on the direction you're spinning it if you stand on a plate Or a surface that can spin freely and you spin the wheel that you're holding in your hands Turning your hands at different angles will change the direction you spin in but the spin of the wheel will cause you to rotate Yes, and I think there's something similar that could happen if the device is Naturally orbiting around a star then it will have a rotation naturally not just around the star but around its own balance That's what I'm saying. Yeah, it'll have its own Rotation spinning right like it's like I don't have to maintain that. No, no, no, you wouldn't have to make that naturally it wouldn't even It would happen. No, not naturally you would have to kickstart it You would have to have an initial momentum, but once it's spinning it would never stop because there's no drag. Yes. Yeah disagree I don't think you would have to start it and there is drag. It's just that there's very little drag I think you'd have to start it. Otherwise, it would just be Orbiting without even remember with those wheels you still they still have to spin them You still have to kickstart them if you just held it out like this and started spinning right in the circle It would that would be a different thing But if you have to spin that but once you've put that force into the equation your body will rotate Because of it. So you don't have to but that would be that would be the star would get an extra bit of rotation Not the device. I think it's reciprocal All right Maybe yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I'm also not not a physicist. This is part of the fun of speculation Yeah, yeah, we need we need we need a astrophysicist Those of you who are not watching this can't see how much we're both smiling Yeah, yeah, we both love this kind of thing. This is one of the reasons we became friends very quickly We're happy to speculate and try to be right while being very comfortable that we could be completely wrong Absolutely and someone more knowledgeable could be sitting here right now and correcting us both and it would be There's a correction when we went back. I was just remember where you're talking about the left hand right in this Yeah, I was right at when I was speculating that something do with chirality it is it's chirality It's specifically what it is. That's the word I remembered and I'm not gonna go any further I was about to go try and paraphrase as much about chirality as I remember But your point but it means it's something that can't be it can't be symmetrical It's a it's it's a shape or a form that cannot be symmetrical. Okay, so you can't see the same effect looking from the other direction Yeah, yeah, if you if you mirror it, it's a different thing. I think that's what chirality is Excellent. You can tell by my humming and hanging here I'm not I'm not gonna stand on that hill and confidently say what that is, but it's nice chirality is absolutely term Thank you. I'll look it up and become better informed and I encourage everybody listening or watching to do the same. Yes So yeah, okay, but orbitals anyway the spinning device actually funny enough Whilst I was this is a long time ago I don't know where my knowledge is coming from but while I was reading that a lot of physicists were like Ring world would not work. Halo turns out you can make it out of steel so in the the video game series Halo, it's called Halo because there's a planet and there's one of these orbital rings above it or decide doesn't matter where it is, but Someone calculated you can make that out of steel and it would work. Wow, and it wouldn't tear itself apart It would be fine now. That is an absolute Dusty piece of knowledge in my head So it could be completely wrong and I could be completely misinformed with that one But I do recall it being that so some more fun concept now Why I was talking about orbitals in the culture series specifically is because these minds There's a quote at one point where they say that planets are a waste of matter So they so that's why they build these orbitals is because for the amount of matter you get in a planet You can disassemble that and make millions and millions of orbitals Which also goes into Dyson spheres as well a little bit of the logic behind a Dyson sphere if you're going to take all The energy from a star You don't need to build a one solid device But numerous numerous devices to absorb the energy of the star in orbits around the star you can essentially Get close to a hundred percent of the energy out of the star Freeman Dyson obviously Speculated on that and they also he also speculated that you might be able to find advanced civilizations if you see Where there should be a star, but there's not a reason to anymore Yeah, if it was said the mass so that wouldn't be but it could still be a black hole then actually Could still be a black hole, but I don't know. I'm never going too much I am a filmmaker Now resort back to whenever I try and save something to come confidently regarding physics. I'll just revert back to I'm a filmmaker Don't nice. Yeah the line I used the other day in the discussion of neuropsychology was I'm a farm boy Yeah, and I am I grew up a farm boy. I am a farm boy. Oh, so was Luke Skywalker Fair boy and the dread captain Roberts. Yep Yeah, or dread pirate Robert. Sorry. Yeah, so they they a waste of a waste of matter The unfortunate thing about the culture series is Elon Musk really loves it That's not an unfortunate thing it doesn't matter at all Yeah, well Elon Musk we could talk about actually as a fun thing The hype train that exists that aren't looking with their head screwed on. I have to be careful talking about But one fun thing that I do like him for is the the names of the Children no, not not the children I'm not the children but the names of the flotation devices they have that catch the Rockets and they named him after ships in the culture series So like it's like PS. I love you is the name of one of them But that was the name of one of the ships in the culture series. They all give themselves funny stupid names And the PS. I love you is one of the ships and why I was saying he clearly likes The culture series is because he's read it all and he's trying to he thinks he's doing it He thinks he's getting us there Neural link is literally neural laces in this and in the culture series is mesh devices within brains that are Computers that essentially are just capturing the state of a brain at any one time So that's how they can have backup so easily. It's because they've got laces inside their noggins To take the state of a brain at any one point to be able to recreate it, but The way I love how the culture series handles this is that The civilization is completely over death and completely over the idea of backups. So in Contemporary sci-fi we have the philosophy of the transporter where the Star Trek transporter the way it's described Is it tears apart all your atoms? Sends the information does it send the information or is it send the literal atoms? Yeah, good question It depends on which series of star-t Watch yeah, yeah In I it doesn't make sense to send the matter it makes more sense to send the information it does but then the problem is Are you you yeah? Are you you in early Star Trek fiction? Before there was a second series or a first movie There were a couple of really great stories written about that novels about people being sent I Won't go into details about it in part because I don't want to spoil really great novels and in part because I did I'm going to get them wrong anyway and have to come back and apologize But established characters being transported and then coming back Sorry being transported killed in a transporter accident then it ends up. They weren't killed. Yeah, they were beamed somewhere else and kidnapped and The Corpse was generated at the other end As a kid reading that it's like no no what you've done is you have murdered this character, and you've also made a duplicate anyway It's it's it's it's Interesting in either case tearing apart the body of its component atoms essentially dissolving someone that's a disintegrator ray in science fiction You're dead. Yeah, and not only are you dead it would take more energy than has ever been consumed on earth Well disintegrate something to the point that's also where we'll exclude that that's the sci-fi jump Yeah We quite often ignore the energies problem I mean the only reason that they came up with the transporter for Star Trek wasn't to have a cool machine It's cheaper than having shots of a ship going up and down Yeah, yeah cheaper than having to build the ship cheaper than having to spend time on the ship going back and forth Right so they firstly tried to convince Roddenberry that the enterprise should be able to land on a planet and The alternative was okay. No we've got a device they step in a room. They step out of Out in the blue sky yeah, or red sky or whatever it happens to be yeah literal philosophers debate this as well My sense is that let's give that forget the energy problems Transporters exist let's say they can Once you step into it probably that continuity of consciousness is gone But the one that steps out of it Doesn't know that doesn't know that and we'll have the exact same experience as you but might not be you Yeah, there's a lot of cool science fiction about that the prestige was a pretty good Nolan movie that did that in a nifty way. Yeah, thanks to a beautifully played version of Nikola Testa By yet by David Bowie just fantastic, but other other science fiction series have done the same thing in Interesting ways I think it's Cory Doktoro who would be one of my favorite science fiction writers futurist blogger all around really cool guy Freedom of information guy not in the way that some people use it but in the real this helps us all sort of way Cory Doktoro had a Novel in which everyone has a visible HUD visible heads-up display that says what their social credit score is so, you know how much credence to give them and Everyone is working with backups there But they're not Constant that you have to go and back up so that you can be restored save your game Yeah, exactly and it's an interesting idea plays on what you were saying so a character in the novel dies while cave diving and Doesn't remember the cave diving because he died doing it All right The last thing he really remembers is the last backup that he did but he understands he was cave diving when he died Yeah, yeah, right and what what happens with continuity of conscious? Is this one of those problems where we just have to say ignore that part is are we back to that? Circle brought round again, or is it something where? That would be the interesting thing to discuss in a science fiction novel. I'd read something about that It can be it is lots of science fiction novels. The one thing I love in the culture series is that's not the interesting part They're over it. So there's there's multiples of everybody. So they have rules They just have if you accidentally make a copy of someone while the other person still exists. They just live their separate lives Nice, they just whatever. Oh, I've got a duplicate running around whatever doesn't matter They did that in Star Trek the next generation where there was a duplicate of Riker and because it's post scarcity It's not like there's any resources assigned to one or the other. It's right on you can there's enough resources You'll be fine. That's so they don't have to worry about that. It doesn't make me wonder though Aren't there people who would just say yeah, there's gonna be more of me then So there in this series They also have what they call smatter outbreaks, which is where either through von Neumann probes or some other Biological or technological thing that keeps self-replicating and growing and growing growing. They call them smatter outbreaks and they just eliminate them immediately Oh, wow, so it's kind of like against the rules to Propagate something over and over and over again. I think I'm right in saying roughly that that's cool It sounds really I remember the name smatter outbreak specifically because I thought that was a fun term. Yeah Yeah, makes me want to fill in the what comes before the apostrophe s and In this series, there's a similar thing with the cave diving. There's there's a short little story where someone is mining some asteroids and There I think it's specifically at that point a smatter outbreak is coming towards him that which is disassembling everything and turning into something else And he just sits and contemplates like oh, no, when was my math back up? I said, oh, I'm gonna miss this I'm gonna miss that I'm gonna miss this. Oh, well, whatever. That's a shame and then boom So there's other fun implications With these mine states that he uses in the in the series, which is sending sending mine states as communication So it's quicker and easier to send information over time But they can just send a mine state over long distances throughout space So you can receive a mine state and start conversing with someone's mine state as instead of the communication So it's still real-time communication but it's a mine state of the person as Exactly what they would say and think and feel and you talk back and forth of them And what happens when you're done talking with them? They know they're about yeah, but they know it's a mine. They know that's a mine state of themselves and they don't care You'd think the mine state would care you think but in this series everyone's over it They don't care even the ones who are about to die there, but they aren't today then they're in their concept and philosophy It's just oh, this is a mine state. Okay, I just have the conversation. I'm here for I can get it That you would think that when you receive my mind state Yeah, and I would think that when I sent my mind state Yeah, but the mind state you'd think would be like no, it's this is John exactly So there's other fun interesting stories where you could have that sci-fi where you could have that sci-fi of oh No, this mine state doesn't want to be turned off, but he never goes there. It's just like there are other things going on That's that's not this story here Yes, you know It'd be a fun if I were still into Running games that would be a fun game to run. Yeah, you're a bunch of mine states about to be deleted. Maybe we are right now Well, it's a Forgot the term in philosophy and there's a specific term this term of philosophy specifically where it's a theory that only this Literally only this present moment exists for you everyone listening. Yes, you were in the present moment This is all that exists right now, but there's a theory specifically that that is literally it. That's the whole universe is you right now There's no past. There's no present. It's just this existence right now also alongside that thought Boltzmann brings bolts of Boltzmann of the physicist who is a Boltzmann constant He proposed that well the universe is infinite Who's to say that somewhere in this infinite universe is atoms just by chance have Conveniently coalesced together to create a brain create an experience and you're that which why not if you have an infinite universe and infinite My own particles why couldn't that happen and you're just a random cloud of gases Somehow had experience all of a sudden and everything right now is boom. This is it and then it disintegrates and whatever You formed but with this fantasy and now you are dissolved and some people take it too seriously Forget there was a rock talk to add absurdum the point of it was to point out that stupid and Probably not very nice That's an important thing to say for all those who think they are Experiencing such a moment and it doesn't matter what they do Yes, like day traders and other people who play with the financial well-being of other humans Yeah, no and you can you can think that you're in the center of the universe as much as you can But turns out things will happen that you have no control over if you pay attention to that It turns out you don't have control over everything. All right, and just to be clear in an infinite universe Infinite. Yeah, we are all the center True, I'll stay on track with this person has yeah past it That's interesting as I find when people are past like right now where we can have contemporary discussions about specific elements But then what happens when you take that as a given role with it and see where it goes Yeah, I'd love that and there's lots of great examples to go back to the query doctor Oh no, I was mentioning a minute ago. That was called down and out in the Magic Kingdom It's his first novel and if anybody is interested Doctor O does this really cool thing where at the same time that he publishes books and audiobooks. He doesn't agree with Kindle he and Amazon hate each other So all of the ebooks that he writes are available for free on a creative commons license So if you go to his website, you can read that novel for free. You can download it for free He doesn't think novels should be married to technology. He thinks that's a form of theft Because when you stop using your product, then they take away all your novels that you paid for Yeah, yeah, so I will not say whether or not I think it's theft because then I'd just be saying I agree with Cory doctor Oh, did I say that I meant to skip that part? quiet part out loud anyway well worth reading this idea of the your social value is really really played well and the idea of Death being something that people don't think about the same way comes out in the resolution of the novel on a really strong way nice nice So we're talking about neural aces and the culture series He plays with that idea quite a bit more. I think in surface detail of the book. There's a whole B plot about There's a larger scale plot of the culture is at war with another civilization in the galaxy Essentially and they're fighting it out virtually They don't they both agree. It's a waste of battery energy resources to do this in reality So with they have their wars in the virtual space but if I remember correctly the civilization that they're battling with it's over an ideology and the ideology is specifically that this other civilization has an evangelical religion where they've used that technology of Being able to take mind states and with the mind state you can make a virtual Virtual version of yourself or a real version of yourself, but in this other civilization they do that But they basically made a real hell. They've made a real afterlife So you'll live out your life normally and through technology they make their religion reality So there is a real heaven and a real hell Yeah Exactly. It's crazy That's just such a crazy thought them the idea that technology could literally make heaven and hell and after life that you could go to And that's what this B plot happens as you follow follow one of these Characters of the civilization who's living through the hell, right? Yeah, yeah and the culture is at war with them because they think that's a bad idea Which I would much rather live in the culture than that other Other civilization, but again, it's just super fun taking that concept. Okay, if you have this technology What bad could happen because we always well, we don't always there are lots of good sci-fi's that take powerful Technologies and then say what if it went wrong? Most AI stories are actually that yeah most science fiction stories are based on that right actually going back to the Mary Shelley novel I referred to earlier right Lot of people say Frankenstein is the first science fiction story. I don't think that's true. It's the first one that uses current science and It's clearly a horror story Developed on the basis of if galvanism is true and you can run Electricity into a dead thing and bring it to life because a convict that had that done just shortly before What was it? 1816 1817 it was the year without a summer. Yeah the year that that volcano exploded and There was no some of that year all around the world I I used to say it was cracker - oh, but it wasn't it was the one begin with a J or one in the region I will look it up during a pause and correct But anyway the volcano blew up so no summer that year all around the world hailed in London during that Spring and summer July or June or something So it was really cold it was really dark and a bunch of people who were supposed to be having a vacation at Lake Geneva and Up cold and miserable and thinking of things to do indoors and one of them was a storytelling competition Who could write the best story and so this daughter of a feminist this feminist daughter of a feminist? Hanging out with allies if you don't mind my using the modern term comes up with the greatest horror story out of the bunch of them I think she won. I think she did. I haven't I haven't read the other stories Remember a bit of speculation about how good were the others? Yeah, I wouldn't share them, but yeah, it's a fantastic story It's nothing like the movies In the story of this fellow creates life Frankenstein is the name of the guy who creates life not the monster I think the monster calls himself Adam Yeah, I recall that yeah and basically, he's he's beautiful he's not ugly and monstrous looking and he decides that the his creator has not created him with the right respect and responsibilities and Through a bunch of interesting things decides that he has to punish Frankenstein by killing the people that he loves And so they hunt each other all the way up to the Arctic. Anyway, when she wrote that Galvanism was the latest science and the idea was maybe we can bring the dead back to life and she said in her story And if we do maybe it goes wrong. Yep. Yeah, right and I think that's a vital part of science fiction forever an earlier version of Bringing something to life according to the science of the day would be the medieval story of the Gollum I don't know if you've heard of the Gollum before Vaguely ringing bells. So in in Hebrew a Gollum is what humans were before God brought them to life it's just a Shaped mass right and then God puts his name on them and they become alive And so this rabbi faced with anti-semitic violence in the ghettos sculpts the Gollum a creature out of clay just like humans were made out of clay and Carves the name of God into its forehead and it comes to life and goes out in the ghetto Ghetto being a Jewish German word meaning a neighborhood with its own laws right, and so it goes out into the ghetto and gets vengeance and gets too much vengeance and goes completely overboard and so It has to be killed in the end by having the name of God rubbed off of its forehead The name has to be removed so that it will stop its murderous work. So that that might be the earliest science fiction, but Well, if you go further back to the Iliad, I yeah, I was about to say Golden Fleece, you know the story of Jason and the Argonauts. Yeah, so when he puts together the Argonauts, yeah right, not the Toronto football team Named after a rowing team when rowing was a bigger competitive sport than football The Argonauts were the great heroes of the mythological age and so there was like a guy with super strength there was a guy with x-ray vision and Who's the guy with the loot or was Orpheus and Orpheus was on yeah, he wasn't was in part of the crew. Wasn't he? Every hero was yeah, Hercules was for goodness Yeah, those superpowers some of that was science fiction right speculating a thesius Grew up to be super strong because when he was a little kid his mom told him carry this calf up this hill Right do it every day of your life and by the time you're full grown It'll be full grown and you'll be strong enough to carry an ox up the hill Right based on the science of the time that was reasonable. Yeah at the same mythological time of those things Sorry at the same time as those mythological things There was the idea of Hephaestus the god of the Forge and he was served by robots Yes, he had handmaiden who handmaidens who were made of brass and could think and feel and carry out his biddings Robots by by the modern definition. Yep, not not by the Not using the word robot. No, no, not not computing in the way we think about it or anything like that That's right without an onboard computer But quite similar in the way they're described to the automatons that were common in the in the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries Where spring watch like watch spring style Robots existed where you wind them up and they could perform a series of tasks writing a letter and things like that Famous one of a half of a boy sitting at a desk and with a pen and inkwell could write a letter And it was always the same letter But it could do that because of the way the mechanisms interacted the only thing separating any of those From a robot as we think of it now is the idea of computerization and maybe the insertion of intelligence yes, and That also if we're talking about concepts in the way that people think a lot of Explanations of humanity about how the universe works often reflects whatever the technology is of the time like When we are starting to figure out thermodynamics and pressure The universe was obviously heat and expansion and contraction and all of this and now that we're into a digital computerized era We're like, well, it's obviously computing. It's all it's all a simulation. We live in a simulation obviously It's just contemporary our ideologies The lens that we look at the universe often reflects whatever the technology is of the time. Yeah, I agree And I think that's a vital point to make the the context in which science fiction is written You know regardless of the medium and the era it's the context of that age of that culture and time The word robot comes to us from the cheque playwright, um whose name i'm not going to recall now, uh, but Russum's universal robotics is the english translation. What is so many? No, i'm not going to get it boy. We should do another pause here and look that up. Yep Um, should we do another pause or just look at uh? Uh, oh i've just got a message from my wife that my dog has defecated on our carpet. Oh I think that means pause We've just cut out a bit there while we both dealt with some things but uh Rur was the play uh Written about russum's universal robotics by carl kapac or capetch. Sorry, let me get that right carol Chapak carol chapak cap ek but with a little inverted hat over the sea um And he just used the cheque word for slave or indentured worker, um or or worker with no choice about the work they do Which has become the universal word now for robot So his idea was artificially created humans were created specifically to do work So that we wouldn't have to and he wrote that and or produced it as a play I forget which it was either wrote it or produced it as a play for the first time in 1920 And then by 1927 we had metropolis by fritz lang showing a futuristic society in which the extremely wealthy are living in luxury and high towers while everybody else is working like dogs And a mad scientist is hired to help them keep the workers oppressed And he creates a robot. Yep Who also magically transforms into a beautiful woman and vice versa. Why not? Why not? um But yeah, actually the the robot in in uh metropolis fritz lang's robot And I forget if she had a name other than just she Yeah, I can yeah, anyway, um Call in if you know, uh, anyway, uh She was the visual inspiration for sea 3po. That's what I was about to say if you weren't oh, sorry No, no, absolutely. Yeah, she was yeah It's lovely how all of this ties together when the people telling stories Love the stories of the past as george lucas says it rhymes and one of his famous behind the scenes where he's talking about producing prequel series Uh, he starts telling the story about like oh, it's like it's like how in the the earlier ones that this happens And it's like it's like it rhymes Um, so that's his explanation of his own internal, uh creativity, but it actually expands out to Creativity in general things rhyme with each other. It's not an underlying synchronicity that yeah, it speaks to A more fundamental human experience. Oh, it makes the harmony of the spheres Yeah that people used to have is their model of the universe. Yep. Yep until figured out it turns out It's a bit more dirtier than we thought stamalypsis Yeah, and in those days we were in the center of most sphere Except for a lot of notable exceptions throughout history Of people who actually were closer to closer to accurate science than than others a lot of that though is common sense. Yeah, right like You've seen the demonstration of how the uh, the ancient romans knew that the world was round. So The demonstration i've seen Was that if there is a plinth? A rocky spire standing In one place and standing in another place and you know that the cities are well far apart Then you can record the time of day which positions their shadows are in And if the earth is flat their shadows should be in the same position all the time I think it was actually before the romans could well have been yeah. Yeah, but that's an interesting demonstration But anybody who's been on the sea? Yeah knows that the earth is round or at least curved Right, and it doesn't make sense that it's curving and the water isn't all running in that direction if it's not continuous Right, but if you've ever watched anybody go away from shore on a boat you see them sinking but they're not sinking Yep, they can come back, right? And that means they're going further down as you go further away. Now. We've just lost all our flat earther listeners. Thank god By which I mean there is no god Yeah, did we live somewhere? well Maybe okay. Well, if if you're offended by my words good good, it's good to be thoughtful and have strong opinions Please don't be so offended that we can't continue the discussion. You may convince me that i'm wrong. Lots of people have yeah John may well be wrong. It has happened. John has been wrong many times today. Yep. Yep And that would be a fun broadcast tell john why he's wrong. That would be a fun I would definitely sit in for that speaking of things. I was wrong about Mount kambora was the mountain that the volcano that erupted in 1816 and caused the year without a summer on the topic of favorite science fiction. There's a few things i'd like to mention So far i've been sort of responding to your list and that's cool. I love it But I would like to insert a few that you might not have on your list To start with i'd like to talk about David brin Who's known for his sundial birth series and a bunch of stuff like that? Which is excellent science fiction The short novel of his I like the best in terms of speculative fiction Is about a physics grad student who accidentally goes to a new dimension? And it's just because some people are screwing around with his work and screwing around with him and a competitor for research money and the love of a woman Um sabotage is the work that he's doing and he finds himself in this alternate reality in which entropy doesn't exist So instead of things getting worn down by use They become better with use So the novel is called the practice effect Because you can practice anything into being better. It's it's absolutely a fantasy novel It starts with a science fiction premise, but it's goes so far with its premises that we have to deal with it as fantasy Yeah, it's a fantasy story And it's just a fantasy story with a really nice speculative fiction Underpending so yeah, i'd recommend that strongly to anyone who's not sure if they like fantasy or science fiction or both. That's great It's it's I wanted to respond with that with another one and all that theme but then Along that fun kind of theme that's kind of sci-fi Crosses the boundaries into fancy quite a bit is off to be a wizard fun comedy sci-fi fantasy, I guess and it's been a while since I read it, but I remember the premise the premise is that There's a kid who's just hacking on computers And he keeps he goes into like a big government databases and just finds files files files and digging around and digging around and he eventually finds Himself the code for himself and he starts changing things and it actually changes reality That's lovely So then then he figures out he can do a lot of things he can write scripts and in this code and everything to So he's like I can be a wizard Like I can write scripts and then wave a wand or whatever and then a script will run And things can work like that and he's a women I can just change time. What happens if I change time? So he figures out okay If i'm going to be able to do this when in time can I go? I'll go back to when merlin was about because then I could be merlin and he goes back to that time and finds that no There's already merlin. He's a guy. He's a guy in the 80s who was there before him And and he's got his own scripts and everything like this And so in this universe There's people that have eventually figured this out and they're all calling themselves wizards because they're running scripts on whatever this universal server is Super fun. I think there's three books in this series off to be a wizard. Yeah, I've made note of it And I will have to look it up. There was a great there were a number of great fantasy series based around different similar concepts Before the age of computing and i'm trying to recall the author in the name of the series I think it was called the complete enchanter, but I could be wrong and I think it had two authors We'll have to fact check this but the idea was that a mathematician accidentally solved the mathematics of interdimensional travel And so he could go to mythological lands specifically to speculative dimensions where this mythology was reality So he went to the land of fencers of spencers fairy queen He went to the land of asgard and had these uh, these adventures I should know this stuff off the top of my head. I think one of the writers was fletcher pratt Maybe it was fletcher pratt and elspreg de camp character's name was harold shay, but i'm not recalling It's a better memory than I can because I can't remember any of the main character's names in any of the books i've mentioned Well, i'm going to just see if i've got any of that, right? See, this is the danger of doing this live checking is then we stop talking and start doing yeah Yeah, maybe it's better to confidently be wrong and keep going then stopping and checking or if we have a third party Yeah, the third party is the way to do it because we don't have jackie and I am going to stop here But it is elspreg de camp and fletcher pratt who wrote the harold shay novels Okay, I got that right. I shouldn't have checked it Lovely lovely books playing with the idea that all of the universe is described by some Encoded language and if you understand that even a little bit you can start playing with the coding I do want to read uh off to be a wizard though that That sounds wonderful. I think by the end of the third i can't remember if there's three books I remember the last one I read specifically which may or may not be the last in the series. I've not checked their go to atlantis Which is a fun one too. I also just really like the title of that. Yeah off to be a wizard As opposed to off to see the wizard, right? It's just great. It's so clever it plays with so many things. Yeah, I I have to mention a couple of other folks when we talk about science fiction A couple of my favorite writers are from the classic age and a couple of my favorite writers are much more modern robert heinlen Is largely disparaged these days? because of a post-hoc criticism of his literature and I'm not going to defend his literature here There are some parts of it that are very hard to defend these days But not for any of the reasons that people talk about anyway If you read the novels he wrote aimed at children in the 40s and 50s, they are fantastic If you read the novels he wrote for adults in the 40s and 50s and 60s and into the 70s They're fantastic. And if you come back into the lighter last years of his life, they're fantastic There was a period when his writing got weird, but he was literally suffering from a brain tumor at the time But I still love those novels too I won't go into detail, but if you want to know more about the argument Another of my favorite science fiction writers spider robinson wrote a speech for a science fiction convention That was published independently and you can find it for free online called rah rah rah Being as that robert ants and heinlein's name was rah and it he makes a better argument for why the author deserves respect than I possibly could but spider robinson is another one who plays with fantasy and science fiction and He's a very clever word play. He's also a musician And a poet and his his writing is fantastic And he does a lot of stuff about uh The deeper sense of the universe and the surprises that unfold that make magic the same as science and vice versa Well, there's the famous rfse clark quote that any technology that's so far advanced is indistinguishable from magic sufficiently advanced sufficiently in maths Yes, it's wonderful and it it's it's true if you look throughout human history, that's always been the case Right the ability to knock someone down from a distance or yeah, exactly Or how about you're on the shores and the biggest boat you've ever done is just a little canoe And then off on the horizon you see these giant white Things coming towards you never seen anything like it And then they it stops near your shore and then okay. No, I recognize that that's a small that's a boat There's people but then later on there's these four legged beings They're towering over running towards you and they have two heads and you've never seen it in your life You have no idea what it is horses when horses came to the americas. No one had ever seen them in the americas Amazing yeah, and to them that imagine that they have never seen a horse or a human on a horse And then seeing that that's another really cool thing about looking at the history of science Is you see where these overlaps happen where new things are discovered and they explain them according to the tropes of the time Right, like I think we may have talked before about the hippopotamus Right hippopotamus water horse or river horse Right. Yep Because the people the europeans who brought the news of it Back, I think it was to roam the europeans who brought the news of it back How do you explain it to describe? Yeah, it's a water horse a four-legged creature with a long face, but it lives in the water Sea lion Yeah, yeah sea lion great example, right? We've got so many stories like that of creatures Or even events where you try to you try to make sense of it as best as you can And looking back on it we can say yeah, wow, that was a crazy idea, but it wasn't it was really trying to Use contextual knowledge to explain a new experience. Absolutely. Yes There's uh, there's a lovely account of probably Probably an explosion of well asteroid crashing into the moon that's that was documented in the 15 or 1600s by a monk It's just looking at it. Wow. And yeah, it's like I'm paraphrasing so much and I can't remember the specific specifics of it, but it documents quite Specifically looking up at the moon and seeing a glow and then this like cloud coming out of it And I think they even traced it back figured out. It's probably that crater. Wow That is so cool But funnily enough this monk's description of it wasn't like trying to be anything. Holy. He's just he's just describing it Which is interesting a lot of people would jump to what is this? What does this mean? Was he a francisco? I don't know I'm not even going to confidently say he didn't jump to conclusions. I can't remember but I'd There's a little piece of knowledge in the back of my head because of the topic of science fiction I could talk about science fiction All day. I'm a big fan of early science fiction You know like to the moon Science fiction novel written by syrinoda berserach right in which people go to the moon by Uh building a platform that will be lifted by the dew in the morning when it rises into the ether Right, which was a lovely explanation of how dew works Right with no understanding of the rain cycle or anything else But yeah, it made sense at the time And so you end up with this thing that has to be called science fiction because there was a science Scientific attempt at explaining what was going on. Yeah, the ether is a fun concept Yeah, I mean is it as science fiction as when jules fern Said well you can voyage to the moon in a in a bullet a giant bullet, right? Well, yeah, yeah, it was a different mechanism pretty much what we did Yeah, anyway, i'm a huge fan of that but there are a couple of other folks I have to mention for science fiction asimov of course is a kazumov If you haven't read isaac asimov He says looking into the camera and trying to look into the souls of people who aren't watching If you haven't read isaac asimov, please do you don't have to read all of asimov because that will take several lifetimes But read some uh, he was a brilliant writer with ridiculous ideas. He coined the term robotics When he was a 19, right? Yeah, literally defined the term Um the first person to ever use it and when he when he wrote it In the third page of one of his stories, he didn't know no one else used the word He just assumed that was the term makes sense, right? but asimov absolutely brilliant, but also I think Sticking on asimov. I think it's asimov that could be mixing up with the earth's equal. I think it's asimov There's a short story About them building the supercomputer as because they're trying to figure out The universe and answer to enter the um butchering it all it's a short story It's basically one they develop it over time and over time and over time and it gets smarter and smarter and smarter And better and better and better because it's trying to solve the problem of entropy. I think this is it specifically It's trying to solve the problem of entropy And it gets more and more intelligent and smarter and smarter and smarter It starts out as just like a normal computer in modern day But throughout time there's this continuation of it and then they start giving it more and more energy It starts assembling itself bigger and bigger starts using galaxies to Do its compute power and then it gets closer and closer to the edge of the universe And it's like orbiting up the last black hole to get its energy And then it finally figures out and then the first thing it says is let there be light That sounds like something asimov right but others as well Um, yeah, I I love asimov science fiction his robot stories are clever clever Science fiction but also with maybe his most famous series of robot stories They're detective stories too, and he wrote great detective fiction Uh short of fiction. He had two different published series First one was for one magazine and when they stopped publishing him he recreated the series Under a different name with different characters so he could publish it in another magazine um He his first novel was he was a professor of chemistry And he wrote a novel called a whiff of death In which a chemistry professor realizes that a colleague he hated and who hated him has been poisoned And has been killed with something that obviously links to it being the chemistry professor himself who did it And he knows he didn't do it. He feels he's the only one smart enough to solve it this boston police detective On the scene is a bumbling fool who's going to butcher the case. So the chemistry Professor is trying to figure out how can I solve it in a way that will stop this idiot from thinking it was me Well, the idiot is actually brilliant pretending to be an idiot and it is the exact character of colombo from the tv and And the the writers who created created colombo eventually admitted that yeah, we just stole the character from asimov's first novel. Yeah Yeah, it's More lovely lovely writing. I mentioned spider robinson briefly His novels are great if you like word play He he is a punster and has characters who are punsters in almost all of his novels He does serious science fiction and and uh really light-hearted science fiction with some serious themes He's also a folk musician and a fantastic guitarist singer songwriter well worth checking out. He collaborated with his late wife genie to create the field of artificial or of zero gravity ballet She was a dance teacher. They have a novel called star dance that became a series of novels You know going into a very different idea of speculation, but what would dance be without gravity? Right. It's just there's so many great ideas out there being written by so many great writers steve perry uh not the musician, uh, but a science fiction writer who wrote probably the best episode of uh, batman the animated series cartoon famous for having a lot of great episodes He wrote night of the ninja. Um, he also wrote some of the best star wars novels ever He wrote a series of books based on the premise If you experienced relampago if you experienced the touch of god the the moment of enlightenment Beatific vision. Yeah and realized oh the world is unjust. I have to change it Would it be possible for one person to bring about the overthrow of a galactic empire? And he decided it would be and he wrote a story in which it happens. It doesn't happen quickly But it's not supposed to could you with a message of peace? Defeat a warlike oppressor The novel series is called the matadors The last time I exchanged words with him on facebook was back before I worked at facebook So it was years ago, but he was working on a new book in the series I think there've been seven already his publisher stopped publishing them a few years ago. Unfortunately, his work is brilliant very fast paced very deep thinking and very cool speculations about a lot of things if Faster than light transmission of information is super expensive It wouldn't be enough to communicate just with your voice Or with written words you would have to communicate in multiple modalities at once for it to be worthwhile What would that be like? Could people learn to do that? So he's got a type of communication called fugue where people are using two different series of hand gestures and other expressions along with speech and voice modulation So lots of cool things like that. Yeah, but his idea as a lifelong martial artist his idea that You could with pacifism Overthrow violence, but it would take a long time and some interesting changes of mind I so recommend it The first book is called the man who never missed and if that's the only book in the series you read it's all worth it And if you look up the man who never missed you can find steve perry And if nothing else buy an ebook copy from him because he sells them directly now I was going to take a note, but then this podcast is a note I think that yeah, actually it will be useful to um, we'll we'll link all of the books mentioned. Yeah, it's a great Past at the bottom As part of this. Yeah I really I think that's a great idea. We we have to support these authors folks who rely on publishers Are living in a tight space? Yeah, right when the publisher says There's not enough market for your book anymore. What do you do? If you're lucky you get the rights to the book back Yeah, or if you're cori doctoro, you never gave them the printed rights to the book in the first place Or at least the full rights to the book Yeah, I think uh cori doctoro's model of science fiction publishing or publishing in general is the model of the future You know, we share profits on what you print But on what nobody prints that's mine to give away or keep or do what I want with. Yeah Yeah hopefully People will always appreciate humans writing stories where our previous podcast we've been talking about AI text generation and such and there's already people flooding bookstores Well, I say bookstores amazon people have been people have been flooding amazon with nonsense, which might be a good reason for Publishers actually to come back seriously strong It's to be the gatekeepers of no, this is worthy of putting down into paper into reality Yeah, exactly, but when people say AI has access to all of the wisdom of humanity They're forgetting sturgeon's law, right 80 percent of everything is crap Yeah, right and sturgeon another great science fiction writer well worth reading check out his short story a slow sculpture Or any of the stories in his best of collection called caviar Uh, because what else would be the best of a sturgeon? Yeah, amazon is full of work that you can buy I've got friends and relatives who have books on amazon That were written with loving care and deep concern and lots of thought and lots of effort to make it as good as possible But their books are selling right next to books That somebody wrote with an ai or that somebody wrote without ever using spellcheck or that somebody wrote In a direct rip-off of somebody else's book. It's it's a shame, but it's out there. I agree. We need to have It used to be that if you wanted to read a book you'd go to the library and uh, Some people could afford to go to bookstores But all of us could go to libraries if you lived where there was one or if you were visiting where there was one And when you went there there were these wise wise people almost always women who who could guide you towards things That would blow your mind We need that for the internet. Yeah page masters Remember that film page master? Yeah, I think it was christopher loyd Was the librarian in that page master? Wow. Yeah, there's a blaster in the past next week. We'll talk about page master But yeah, we we need librarians Librarians are people who have dedicated their lives to understanding quality and organization And thoughtfully consider both things. Yeah, the modern rush towards ai towards fast tech towards fail fast Is a rush away from considered thought and it's good really good to have people who specialize in it Absolutely considered thought fees rush to fail. There's Scenarios where rush to fail is good software development Sure, if you've got no consequences in your very early phases where you don't have users. There we are. That's fine. Good Iteration if you're if you're writing your concepts of your ideas for your stories. Yeah, sure rush iterate play around with ideas when you're developing machines that are supposed to go into orbit and use billions of taxpayer Dollars probably don't rush to fail probably be a bit more considered word I'm specifically talking about space x the apollo program their first test their first apollo sat at saturn five rocket was unmanned It took off it went to orbit. It did all its procedure and didn't fail Now there was a absolute fatal failure with the apollo one when astronauts were in it There was a fire But after that fire they started even more rigorously and seriously being very very serious about no We do not rush to fail. We are serious. We do things properly. We communicate and we make sure that never happens again absolutely unfortunately the idea of speed as required for profit has overtaken most common sense in most industries now because of this notion That's really only become popular since the 80s as far as I can tell that the folks Who are making a profit from everything we do need to make more profit next quarter than this quarter And that must always be the case and that is not an algorithm that works in the real world That's an algorithm for how algae grows that's an algorithm for how cancer spreads this matter outbreak Yeah Which I was wondering is that short for trans matter because we were talking about how it's breaking down things in order to make Them into something. I'm not sure because that that's an old idea, right that if you started something that could Take things apart and build new things out of it. How would you turn it off if it ate the off switch? Right, so it just made me think of that. Anyway, yeah Careful consideration is a good idea. Absolutely. Caution is a good idea. Proceed with caution I'm always astounded by people who say that they are conservative in their politics and then destroy things they cannot restore if you're conservative Then you should be always Working to avoid The dissolution of things you cannot restore right that you should be conserving with them. Yeah. Yeah institutions and Forgetting why things were set up in the first place. I mean, it's it's human history. We forget Any generation you can say to a kid don't do this don't do that But sometimes they have to learn from themselves and unfortunately, it seems like it happens on a civilizational generational level, too Piaget talked about this in terms of learning stages of development in the brain We go through an era of only believing we can think we are the only ones who can and gradually, we come to accept that other things around us in the world can also think and Gradually, we come to accept that they can think as well as we can maybe even better And that allows us to go from psychogenesis the ability to learn from ourselves to generate ideas ourselves to socio-genesis the ability to Understand and accept and learn from the ideas of others The difference between those is reflection and the ability to to think slowly and carefully as opposed to reacting quickly and emotionally somebody who you've already mentioned is Elon Musk and I wonder sometimes if The fact that he brags about not sleeping much the fact that he brags about sleeping under his desk Sleeping only a few hours in a day or a week I wonder if that's done to him what it does to so many of us and removed our ability to access the slow and Considered and reflective part of our brain. Well, I don't know if you've ever seen him talk He takes long pauses, but he then what comes out of his mouth is never usually that smart. I Haven't watched him talk in a long time. I try to avoid it I also used to like Kanye West's music until he became a self-evowed Nazi. Yeah, that's annoying when artists It's like stop it. I like I like your music stop. Yeah, Michael Jackson. Just please Ender's game was a great novel But it had anti-semitism built right into it and everyone was like, yeah But that's one of the characters until his second and third and fourth books Shame Orson Scott Card great writer cannot read his work now And I don't mean no one else should read his work. Well, there's a that mean that goes into a whole other debate Can you separate the art from the artist which would be a great debate? Which is a whole other debate Let's not go into it because I think that is a whole other debate exploring do that another week take out The threads and figure that one out. What do you guys think? Would you like us to talk about that? Is there something else you'd like us to talk about? Yeah And I keep saying let us know or get in touch and I never tell you how to get in touch if you do want to get in touch at any point and have some ideas or Criticisms or any feedback in general emailed podcast at Jamie Sun dot dance It's podcast at Jamie Sun dot dance. You can email that and I will hopefully remember to check it Nicely done, but you can also find us on social media and such as well if it's not hard to find me or John and get in touch Yes, it's really easy to find Jamie So I'm gonna I'm gonna go by I've got one more Series to talk about before we finish up and that is remembrance of an earth's past Which is the book series that includes the three-body problem. Oh, it's trilogy. Have you read the three-body problem? That's a Point in time to talk about it because Netflix has just come out with a series for the first book three-body problem It was alright. It wasn't too bad. I think the tone could have been better I think the tone in the book is moves you a bit more than the TV series at least but Chinese author I Want to say probably pronounced completely wrong, but there's a lot of good concepts in those books The purse and it was the first sci-fi that I'd read from China Specifically and just having a different flavor to everything was really interesting. It's just different Culturally mindset on things but still sci-fi was an interesting to look at some tropes of sci-fi But have this other flavor to them. They really enjoyed it. I it's hard to explain too much without going into major spoilers But I can say with the first book just the opening few chapters of the book hooks you immediately because essentially theoretical physicists all around the world are killing themselves and they're going crazy and Essentially, the reason they're going crazy is that physics is broken particle colliders all the data is just going random so like at the subatomic level the universe is being completely random and Nonsensical and it's driving everyone crazy. Oh man. Okay. Thank you. I will read that soon. Thank you Yeah, and it's fun. He only he takes he there's a lot of philosophy in it as well like foundational philosophy Like what is the philosophy of worlds are different because a lot of our philosophy is tied to the heavens the early early thinkers Philosophers were the scientists throughout human history and a lot of it's always tied to the sky and looking up and trying to make sense of the heavens What happens if you're on a if your civilization grows up on a planet that's different and there's a lot of good Interesting things around us a bit clunky in places with some of the ways it goes about it. But overall it's just fantastic the second book Proposes something that's now kind of getting more colloquial in Answer to the Fermi paradox, which is a dark forest theory. I don't know if you know about the dark forest theory That's his second book dark forest. No, yeah It's an explanation for why we don't hear from other civilizations and it's the idea that keep your mouth shut because the second you show that you exist and you might be a problem later on because if just take a few notions if Advanced civilizations can advance rapidly and exponentially then The distances in time of planets away from each other. Basically is the second you know about them There are X amount of light years away that means in their rapid development They will have the power to wipe you out. So it makes sense acts first wipe them out first So the second you hear from anyone get them out Yeah, the Fermi paradox is very cool and it's one of those questions that people have been arguing about Yeah, you're a long time and rightly so it's it's it's precisely why some people said do not send out space and Stephen Hawking famously as well put his name out there and said maybe let's just be quiet proceed with caution Yeah, sort of the opposite of what does it fail fast? Yeah. Yeah I don't mean to interrupt your discussion of that series just because you said it's interesting To read this Chinese perspective of science fiction. I have to ask if you've ever read Isha guru No, the Japanese science fiction writing. No, no read Clara and the Sun. Okay, it's a fair I've heard of that Fairly new novel. It's about AI. It's about robots It's about how different will we be as a consumer society when you can bring a robot home and it's told from the perspective of the robot Nice it is so beautiful. Yeah. Yeah Heartwarming story and heart melting story. I would say I have consumed a lot of Japanese media probably less of books more movies films that animate TV series and whatnot, but yeah books less so That's tangent Spend some time on that in another podcast. Yeah. Yeah, so Okay, you were about to discuss the third book second book is the deep forest dark forest it's interesting how he Considers general how generations think he calls Oh, yeah, he has names for generations of people and periods of time where the ways that people are thinking like there's a pessimistic error an optimistic error and Defining these errors of humanity and their optimism and pessimism how it affects everything Super interesting and fun the other main overarching theme that isn't a lot of this is cosmophobia absolute fear and dread of the universe and the energy and darkness Out there which almost feels in line with Lovecraft Okay, absolute kind of Lovecraftian fear of the unknown but this Cosmic unknown just when we were talking about ether. I remember specifically in one of Lovecraft's stories There's these beings from another world. It's just it's always kind of interdimensional unexplainable the completely unexplainable There's these beings that are just outside this guy's house that are coming in and out and they have wings and their wings flap in The ether and that's how they can just travel through space But but the in this book series remembers of their remembrance of their paths There's there's just so many big concepts that are absolutely terrifying like we seem completely small Bugs and the view of the cosmos and the energies out there that really were absolutely nothing And it can be used against us in terrifying ways. That's wonderful But overall does actually there was a lot of optimism in it to Balances out these two nice. Well, I think the balance is important. I worry when we get too scared. We've become too violent spider Robinson who I mentioned earlier said anger is always fear in disguise and I think that's a really good phrase to keep in mind People are so angry these days so quick to anger including myself sometimes which just surprises me. I'm not an angry person Lately I've been feeling anger in situations that would usually make me just laugh It's a bad state to be in yeah, you can see it people forget that it's not just a line of Growth things get better positivity positivity. Like it's it's not a line. That's just guaranteed it takes work and commitment and serious professionals at the top of everything to maintain things and And understand where things can go wrong and not play so recklessly with our civilization Ultimately people in power across the world Absolutely. Just taking things for granted forgetting why their grandfather set things up in specific ways and Forgetting that their grandfathers were trying to make things better than what had come before Maybe the right way to respect that is to go on trying to make things better Yeah, it's it's it's a strange state. We're in right now where misinformation and disinformation is so much more prevalent Yeah, then it's ever been before it's much more easy and quicker to spread a lie than correct things Yeah, it truly is which is another good reason to fact check and sort of yeah Yeah, which is why we're we're trying our best to fact check on the fly You know Misinform you with incorrect authors or titles or whatnot or by leaving people out. We're not trying to misinform you by omission I think that the two of us could sit here Yeah, 20 other books I'd like to talk about but I was actually going to be using this as a The start I was going to be talking about habitation specifically in technology of habitation That's why I was going into the orbitals and whatnot. And then I even when I was writing my notes, I was going off in attention I'm trying to keep it together. It's the one thing but there's too much good science fiction out there Have you ever heard of the hominid series by Robert Sawyer? there's a parallel universe in which Neanderthals evolved to our current state and a Neanderthal scientist and a human scientist start communicating across this void and it's it's so it's it's really Compassionate and it's really about learning to accept the alien and it it's it's just beautiful It's so cleverly done. That's where in the last last podcast you were saying it's stuck with me and the more I'm thinking about it the more I want to tell stories is that I the stories where whoever is the enemy you actually end up becoming friends and working together with and I didn't say at the time But when I thought about after is like Ghibli Ghibli films are always that spirited away you look at spirited away you star off with That film you're like, this is scary. Everything is mean and antagonistic and every single antagonist in that story ends up becoming not it's just a friend Oh the river monster. Yeah. Yeah the river the river monster them the math no face Yeah, yeah everything just as scary initially, it's like it's a child's perspective. This is scary. I don't know what this is Oh wait, it's it's your uncle. It's your friend. It's a Yeah, yeah, yeah Studio Ghibli is so clever specifically Miyazaki. I know just everything he's done is Incredible. Yeah. Yeah, and that's a theme throughout a lot of his stories are yeah. Yeah, that's terrifying transition to adulthood Yeah, and all right. I'm gonna have to cut out. I've got a hard deadline now that I've passed 20 minutes ago Oh, okay. This has been great. Absolutely. I would love every time So if you have listened all the way through here, thank you again Remember you can get in touch with us with by emailing podcast at Jamie Son dance let us know how you feel about the podcast if you think we could improve in any ways Or you would like to be a guest or have any topic suggestions for us Please do let us know and we will see you next time. Yeah. Thanks everybody. Come on back I Salk Talk is a production from the Robert Gardner University School of Computing Today's episode was brought to you by the letter pi and the number pi