The Evanescent Muse

Hari Seldon, a brilliant psychohistorian predicts the fall of the Galactic Empire, casting mankind into thirty thousand years of suffering.  Seldon believes that the solution is to catalog the entire galaxy’s knowledge into a massive Encyclopedia Galactica.  By avoiding the loss of this important knowledge they can reduce the inevitable dark ages to a mere thousand years. 

But to talk of the fall of the Empire is blasphemous and Seldon along with his scientists are under scrutiny.  Seldon convinces the Empereror to allow his scientists and their families safe passage to a new world at the fringes of the Empire where they may continue their work and not cause problems for the Empereror.  The Foundation is established on the planet Terminus, a rather ominous sounding name, and they struggle to prevent their own destruction for the next thousand years in order to bring about a new and better second empire.

The Foundation focuses on the use of wits instead of force to maintain power and prevent war.  Initially, the Foundation uses a nuclear based religion to control potential enemies on surrounding planets.  Later, they use traded goods that foreign citizens decide they can’t live without.  It becomes intolerable to go to war with a world when your economy is inescapably intertwined with theirs. 

This trilogy was written in the 1940s when the dangers of nuclear power were being realized, but while Isaac Asimov does acknowledge the destructive potential, he focuses on its productive potential more frequently.  Foundation scientists can harness nuclear power on a very small scale, creating one man force fields and other little gadgets used for trade.

Foundation only covers the first two hundred years and is followed by Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation to complete the trilogy (both of which I am reading and will review later). It was originally published as eight short stories in Astouding Magazine, which explains why the “chapters” feel segregated.  It’s akin to a political drama, not an action packed space opera, so don’t pick up the book with false ideas, but don’t let it deter you either.  The Foundation trilogy is considered one of the best SF trilogies of all time, winning a Hugo Award in 1966 for “Best All-Time Series.” 

While Asimov doesn’t focus on any one character enough to truly get attached, after all he has a thousand years to cover in three books, how the history of the Foundation plays out is just too interesting to pass up.  You might think that the story gets bogged down because Asimov is covering a lot of ground, but he keeps the story moving forward at all times.  He brings the reader up to speed on the intervening history through dialogue.  There were a few times where that dialogue bordered on the “As you already know, Bob,” kind, but overall, I thought he did a good job.  But I also thought the writing lacked enough description.  While I don’t want to be wading through unnecessary detail, I felt my brain straining to fill in the gaps too often.  The excerpts from the Encyclopedia Galactica had the potential to be interesting, but they were not full articles and cut off in mid sentence, which I found frustrating.

Despite my few quibbles, I think Foundation is a must read for any serious SF fan.  Asimov plays with some interesting concepts, the most pronounced being the psychology of human nature and evolution of societies, both on a massive and personal scale.  Two themes stand out in this first book.  No matter how far we spread into the galaxy and how advanced technologically we become, humans will always seek power through brute force.  But the more resonant theme is that knowledge is power and has the potential to defeat any brute force if used wisely.

A little sad, but such a cute robot.

Why is so much of the night sky black?  Isaac Newton, along with many other astronomers, believed that the universe is infinite and uniform, but if that’s the case, why is our night sky not lit up with stars?  Everywhere you look there should be an infinite number of stars providing light, setting the night sky ablaze. 

Currently, astronomers aren’t sure whether the universe is infinite or even uniform.  (That’s a discussion for another post.)  But on the vast scales we use for cosmological purposes, the universe is quite uniform and considering the visible universe is 100 billion light years wide, our short life spans make the universe quite infinite.  Within that framework, it is estimated that there are as many as 10²⁴ stars in the universe.  That’s a septillion of stars!  Why aren’t all these stars filling up our night sky with light?  It seems like a simple paradox, but astronomers struggled with it for centuries.    

Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku discusses this concept.  I was not only intrigued by the answer to this question, but the person who answered it.  It was called Olber’s paradox after Heinrich Wilhem Olber, who thought he had the answer.  In 1823, he proposed that dust clouds absorb the starlight so that it does not reach us.  The problem with this idea is that if dust clouds were absorbing light from an infinite number of stars, then the dust clouds themselves would begin to glow.  Our night sky should still be filled with light.

One of the reasons I wanted to share this was because it turns out a famous horror author determined a solution before scientists, although I don’t know how much credit he receives for this discovery.  Edgar Allen Poe had a serious interest in astronomy and published “Eureka: A Prose Poem” in 1848 soon before death, detailing his observations and conclusions.  The work was not received well by critics, but one passage is intriguing.

 ”Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy–since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star.  The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.”

To put it in more simple terms, the universe is 13.7 billion years old.  There are stars so far away from us, so much farther than 13.7 billion light years that the light has yet to reach us.  In fact, there are stars so many light years away that the Sun will have long burned out its fuel and Earth will no longer exist by the time that light reaches this part of the universe, if it ever does.

But while Poe was correct, there’s one more twist to this idea.  The night sky isn’t truly black.  It’s filled with microwave radiation from the Big Bang itself, but that wavelength is beyond our eyes’ ability to perceive.  Who knows?  Maybe there’s an alien species out there that can see microwave radiation and their night sky is filled with the colors of the birth of our universe.

So the next time you look at the night sky, remember there are stars filling every square inch of that sky.  They’re just so far away we can’t see them yet.

I highly recommend Parallel Worlds if you’re interested in a discussion of current astrophysics and cosmology.  Kaku does a wonderful job of explaining concepts in terms that non-physicists, such as myself, can understand.  This discussion was pulled from that book and is only a scratch on the surface of the topics he covers.

Okay, I know this isn’t science fiction (or anything to do with it), but they’re so funny looking they could be aliens.

Meet the sloths from Amphibian Avenger on Vimeo.

Beth has a problem.  There’s something in Lake Michigan that wants her roommate and even though she doesn’t like her roommate, Beth feels compelled to help.  And then there’s Paul, a man who seems to know all about the past Beth is trying to escape.  This story will grab you right from the start.  The writing style is haunting and engaging.  Coates recently sold her first novel to Tor and after reading this short, I will be maintaining a vigilant eye for it.

“What Makes a River”by Deborah Coates at Tor.com.

Who can’t admire Marvin’s determined, but ill-fated attempts to blow up the Earth? After all, it’s obstructing his view of Venus.  This is his first appearance, “Haredevil Hare” (1948), so his voice is different than later cartoons.

Unfortunately, the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is still stuck in a sand trap. They’re testing small movements of the wheels to see what will work, but there has been no measurable move forward. The animation above shows a test of the wheels and how bad the situation is. The wheel on the left is almost buried in sand and the wheel on the right looks dangerously close to digging itself into the soft material. But let’s keep our fingers crossed. NASA hasn’t given up on this exceptional rover just yet.

To read more, click here.

Discovering the secrets that lay beyond Titan’s cloud cover has been the goal of astronomers for years. While there are many more secrets to be found on Saturn’s moon, a recent discovery shows us that Titan is more closely related to the meteorological processes on Earth than any other planet in our solar system. Scientists have observed the development of clouds in the tropics of Titan, a very significant find.

Remember the water cycle on Earth taught to us in our elementary science classes? Evaporated water forms clouds that are in turn carried around the planet and fall back down to Earth in the form of rain. Well, this is the same idea, except on Titan, it’s methane instead of water, although there is a lot of frozen water on the surface. Instead, Titan is so cold that methane can condense into liquid form.

The awful stench aside, the point is that even though it’s based on a different molecule, Titan has an atmospheric cycle. So far, Titan is the only other terrestial body in our solar system to exhibit this process. Scientists have also found liquid hydrocarbon lakes the size of our Great Lakes in the polar regions of Titan and there is much evidence on the surface to indicate the presence of a liquid cutting through the terrain.

Observing Titan over the next few years will only prove to get more interesting since Titan is approaching it’s spring season. The new season will cause rapid climate change, a welcomed opportunity for scientists since season changes on Titan are slow. It takes 30 Earth years for Titan to complete one year.

To read more, click here.
For NASA’s official site with a great interactive exploration of Titan, click here.

This image is actually a composite of many images taken over an eight hour period and it makes a beautiful computer background. For an explanation of how the image was created and links to all different sizes, click here.

Two quick, fun animated short films.