Finally …

Different things hit us different ways. Today has been a biggie. I’ve been reading sci-fi for … well … probably longer than most of you have been alive. I watched the space race from its inception, watched primitive probes live on TV as they were intentionally crashed into the moon, paid attention as we flew by the inner planets and out to Mars, was listening and watching as we first orbited the earth, performed the space walks,  and then orbited the moon. And then we landed people on the moon – and brought them back! I gathered with friends to watch the Jupiter flybys in color, and then the swings past Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, followed the Viking landing on Mars … all the while reading sci-fi and dreaming galactic empires and interstellar adventures.

Today it’s official: Voyager 1 entered interstellar space.

We’re so jaded, I think, spoiled by technologies that are universally beholden to the science that made the moon landings and robot explorers possible. It seems quaint, old school … a by-our-standards hopelessly obsolete spacecraft that is doing things no one dreamed.

I dunno if we’ll ever get a second act, given the way we are treating our planet and environment, but it remains amazing that we went from a time when chiseling an axe-head with stone was considered high-tech, to reaching the realm of deep space, leaving there an artifact that will wander the ink black night between stars far past even the memory of our species.

As long as Voyager survives, something of us will, too.

I think that is pretty amazing. Haunting, maybe a little sad, but amazing nonetheless.

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Our Discussion

A brilliantly helpful guide to discussing things. Don’t know where this started, but it is genius.

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For Your Consideration

This is a really GREAT picture!

NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Three things to think about:
1. North America is shown in fullness.
2. The picture was taken on January 4, 2012
3. Where is the snow?

————-

High resolution version of photograph found here. The photograph is large, and takes time to load. Maneuver using direction keys.

This entry inspired by a piece written by Bill McKibben.

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How to Build a Dark Puppy, Part 7: Dark Puppy Physics

Dreamtime

Morning. High tide. You can’t hear anything over the sound of the waves.

The hounds decide to take a walk. I follow, taking the opportunity to work out the kinks in my bones and muscles left by the night-time cold. The sky overhead is gray, thick with featureless clouds, and there’s a chill wind blowing in off the sea. The waves are active, thundering on the surf, the oily-looking water surging up the sand, leaving a dirty-brown line of foam behind to mark the limit of its reach.

Here and there a body has washed ashore, and the living clump about, attending to the deceased. Dark pup trots over to one assemblage, Li’l blonde pup in tow, sniffing things out, here and there, both being petted absently by the congregates. They tire of the routine quickly, the odor emanating from the bodies too much of a downer so early in the day. He knows the smell; it’s as old as the idea of him. The yellow pup, more animated of the two, lets lose a few barks, then quiets down, head hanging, looking sad. He knows there are endings everywhere this day; he prefers not to think about them.

We climb the sandstone cliffs to get away from the death, carefully picking our way along eroding paths, making our way to the top. Once there, I stop to catch my breath, gazing out over the turbulent surf. A couple of the unlucky ships are still visible, caught on rocks, their bottoms ripped out, their masts down, slowly disintegrating under the relentless pounding of the waves. I fancy I think I see some movement on one of the twisted hulks, survivors, still alive, or else ocean-born predators, feasting on the unfortunate. I look down to the dark pup, now squatting at my side, taking a dump. He looks back, his expression “Yeah, so what do you want me to do about it?” He finishes his business, sniffs things out, then moves off, chasing after the blonde pup.

“Nothing,” I whisper after him with a resigned smile.

“Nothing…”

===============

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded – here and there, now and then – are all the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

“This is known as “bad luck”. “

– Robert A. Heinlein

Scientists are smart and clever people.

They have to be. Unlike almost any other profession you can name, if you are going to be a good scientist, you really can’t take any short cuts. This is particularly true of Physicists. As a lawyer of my acquaintance once remarked, physicists are the smartest guys in the room. They just are.

“Physics is the only real science. The rest are just stamp collecting.”

-Ernest Rutherford

So where does that arrogant certitude come from?

Carl Sagan outlines what it takes to study quantum mechanics:

“Imagine you seriously want to understand what quantum mechanics is about. There are mathematical underpinnings that you must first acquire, mastery of each mathematical subdiscipline leading you to the threshold of the next. In turn you must learn arithmetic, Euclidian geometry, high school algebra, differential and integral calculus, ordinary and partial differential equations, vector calculus, certain special functions of mathematical physics, matrix algebra, and group theory. For most physics students, this might occupy them from, say, third grade to graduate school – roughly 15 years. Such a course of study does not involve learning any quantum mechanics, but merely establishing the mathematical framework required to approach it deeply.”
~Antiscience, from The Demon-Haunted World

Okay, so 15 years to get to the point where you start tackling quantum mechanics. 15 years to become a good enough physicist to tackle the heart of physics – quantum theory.

So why are we here, on the beach, talking physicists?

Endings.

Let me explain.

Sagan again, discussing understanding Quantum Mechanics:

“The job of the popularizer of science, trying to get across the idea of quantum mechanics to a general audience that has not gone through these initiation rites, is daunting. Indeed, there are no successful popularizations of quantum mechanics in my opinion – partly for this reason. These mathematical complexities are compounded by the fact that quantum theory is so resolutely counterintuitive. Common sense is almost useless in approaching it. It’s no good, Richard Feynman once said, asking why it IS that way. No one knows why it is that way. That’s just the way it is.”

~Antiscience

So how do we – you and me – confirm things?

Predictions:

“The answer is that even if we cannot understand it, we can verify that quantum mechanics works. We can compare the qualitative predictions of quantum theory with the measured wavelengths of spectral lines of the chemical elements, the behavior of semiconductors and liquid, microprocessors, which kinds of molecules form from their constituent atoms, the existence and properties of white dwarf stars, what happens in masers and lasers, and which materials are susceptible to which kinds of magnetism. We don’t have to understand the theory to see what it predicts. We don’t have to be accomplished physicists to read what the experiments reveal. In every one of these instances – and in many others – the predictions of quantum mechanics are strikingly, and to high accuracy, confirmed.”

~Antiscience

=====================

“Physicists are the smartest guys in the room.”

I was waiting in line to see The Dark Knight a couple of years back in Union Station (Washington D.C.) with an intellectual property litigator I am acquainted with, a senior partner of a large, international law firm. We’d had dinner in the micro-brewery in the building adjacent to Union Station and after, with the taste of burgers and bitter ale still fresh, made out way into and down stairs to the underground movie complex. (So totally the cool place to see a Batman movie, underground, just a suggestion of dank and cool on the humid July day, rough rock walls with the dullest sheen of moisture adding to the ambiance, like really being in the Bat Cave to see the damn flick). Killing time as we waited, we chatted about this and that and the conversation wandered to science. We were discussing different science disciplines and when the subject of physics came up, he uttered those words with a tone of finality that made it clear there was no argument as far as he was concerned.

Suffice to say I agree.

Physicists ARE the smartest guys in the room.

When we think of physics, the likelihood is the first thing to come to mind are images of Einstein, the atomic bomb, the symbol for the atom, E=MC2. We think of astronomy (astrophysics), nuclear theory, relativity, the Big Bang …

But physics casts a much wider net.

More and more, you can’t do ANY science without at least a conversant grasp of physics. Why? Because no matter what field you can come up with in the sciences, physics have become an integral part of the research done to examine it. In paleontology or geology, for example, dating techniques grounded in physics are necessary to unlocking understandings of the age of things. Similarly, biophysics is the study of physics in living systems. Chaos theory, fluid dynamics, electronics, geophysics, acoustics, light, cosmology, cryophysics (low-temperature physics), crystallography, nanotechnology … it’s everywhere in science.

Here’s another field that relies heavily on the science of physics:

Climatology.

The study of climate.

Not the study of weather.

The study of climate, the thing that makes weather.

One of the more fallacious arguments promoted by Creationists and AGW Denialists (and there were MANY fallacious arguments) was that science gets things wrong all the time. To support this contention, they often cite examples like the Piltdown Man as “proof” … ignoring the fact that, in the end, it was scientists that exposed the frauds.

Science get things wrong, yes. But science also provides that best tool for correcting its own mistakes. There is nothing like scientific inquiry in human experience that comes close to its track record for getting things right.

Nothing.

So I want to take a moment to discuss something that serves as a classic example of science getting things wrong, and why this example underscores why science gets things right.

In the first chapter of “Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe”, Simon Singh does a bang-up job explaining the history of the science of astronomy. In particular, he very clearly explains how science works as an observational tool, the rules it adheres to, the dependence upon hard evidence and careful observation to validate or discard theories of the way things behave in nature. He discusses the scientific evidence that fueled the discussion and debates over whether the Steady State or the Big Bang model of the universe was the more valid theory, and as he does so, he walks you through the process of discovery.

For the purposes of this discussion, though, I’m going to concentrate on the other example he uses to discuss the operation of the scientific method – Geocentrism v. Heliocentrism

Singh lays out how the Heliocentric model evolved from hypothesis to theory, and illustrates why even though Copernicus’ model made excellent sense in terms of proposing a superior and simpler alternative to Geocentrism, Heliocentrism did not fully demonstrate it had replaced the previous model until long after Copernicus died because contemporary astronomers were unable to confirm certain aspects of Venus’ and Mercury’s orbits. Even though the idea of the Heliocentric cosmos seemed more straightforward and compelling, more correct, there were still missing final confirming proofs – because the instruments to get that proof didn’t yet exist. In short, there was room for doubt, but it is important to understand that doubt was largely academic – the theory had shown itself to have validity, enough so that those that followed increasingly worked from the assumption that a Heliocentric Cosmos was the most likely model, even though the inner planet observations had not been confirmed.

That’s what theories come down to: the most likely answer based on the data available. And when better, verifiable answers come along, the previous answers are tossed on the scrap heap of science. This is how physics works, how biology works, how any science works. Theories are never 100% perfect – there are gaps, problems with getting data and observations. These “problems” are often latched onto by opponents to an idea out of context and proportion to their actual import, like the Piltdown Man example noted above. The exposure of that error did nothing to invalidate the Theory of Evolution – it simply eliminated an area of inquiry. The theory remains the most powerful (and only) real explanation of the progress of life through time. It is such a powerful idea that most legitimate tests of its predictions lead to a strengthening of the overall theory, contributing new understandings. It serves as the foundation of modern biology, of modern medicine and medical research. Whenever you are treated as a patient, the fact of evolution informs to some degree your treatment. But the Theory of Evolution hasn’t answered all of the questions it poses, and may never be able to to the satisfaction of its detractors in the Creationist community, not because the science is wrong, but because it undermines the dogma that informs what Creationists want to believe.

But we’ll get into this curious disconnect with more detail later; we’re wandering in different, if related, territory …

Winter

I am reminded of a story – possibly apocryphal, though it is supposed to originate with Robert McNamara – relating to the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is said that the Joint Chiefs of Staff approached President Kennedy with a proposal (amongst several) to detonate a couple of nuclear warheads on or above the island of Cuba in order to quickly end the standoff, reassuring him that the CIA was positive that the Russians had not placed any nuclear warheads in Cuba yet. But when the Soviet State collapsed and we were allowed access to the Soviet archives from that era it was discovered that the Russians in fact had somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 warheads in-country, some or all targeted on major cities in the U.S. The scary part is Kennedy gave the proposal to nuke Cuba serious consideration. Needless to say, had he followed through, the thing he longed to prevent – a nuclear exchange that would have been unstoppable once started – would probably have occurred, and with it, the nuclear winter that would have settled upon the planet.

Nuclear Winter. Now there’s a wild theory – who’d a’thunk it? Heck, it wasn’t a hypothesis in the 60s – it was something that came up decades later. Even then, it met with resistance. The discussion on how scientifically “valid” the nuclear winter hypothesis is can be likened to the dairy farmer worrying how he’s going to get the next morning’s shipment to market if the barn containing his milk cows has burned down, killing the livestock. As we’re learning, even a nuclear exchange of the limited magnitude expected could do such significant damage to the biosphere that it really wouldn’t matter a great deal if the climate would have somehow remained unaffected.

The danger isn’t limited to nuclear-induced climate change; there’s also the potential damage a handful of modern cities might cause with all their stored toxins in the form of plastics and chemicals and so forth, burning unchecked into the atmosphere, combined with the radiation that would accompany these poisons on the winds. It’s the potential of millions of dead and decaying corpses breeding fresh plagues. It is the instant famine that will grip regions of the planet and the likely secondary wars over what is left of resources. The effect on our world would be both immediate and long-term, making the burning of Kuwait’s oil fields look like a campfire by comparison.

The Four Horseman would have a field day beyond comprehension.

The true value of the Nuclear Winter hypothesis in terms of public policy – regardless of its long-term viability as science – may be that it opened a lot of eyes and got people to think about the implications of a nuclear exchange in a way other arguments against nuclear war seemingly did not. Then again, maybe not: there was no significant change in nuclear policy. But it shook the public out of a complacency that had settled in its collective consciousness after the stressed-out duck-and-cover 50s and early 60s

Perhaps it comes down to perspective; armchair disagreements of what really would have happened in the aftermath when the actual event would have been so obviously apocalyptic can only make me wonder if people who do discuss this stuff grasp on a visceral level what the heck they think they are talking about. In short, had the nuclear exchange happened, the climate six months down the road would have probably been extremely low on one’s list of priorities – were an individual unfortunate enough to have survived.

Science is a wonderful tool for analyzing and understanding a problem, for explaining how things work; but while it is full of gee-whiz-bang excitement that makes laymen such as myself sit up and pay attention, too many of its proponents get so caught up with nitpicking the details that they lose sight of communicating the bigger picture. Bluntly put, you miss the understanding that sometimes you need to reach out and grab hold of the public by its collective short hairs and give a serious tug to get their attention.

Maybe this is our biggest impediment to working up AGW responses (in addition to addressing the obfuscators, neo-skeptics and denialists): there is no immediacy to this threat, no sense of our being intimately involved in a way that will have a short-term world-changing effect (because this isn’t about short-term problems), no ability to see things from a global perspective, no way to imagine or communicate the idea that every time you start your car’s engine or run the air conditioner you are taking aim at your future with growing detrimental – and quite possible mortal – consequences.

Coming up: Dark Puppy agendas …

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How to Build a Dark Puppy, Part 6: History … and Stuff …

Dreamtime …

The bonfire burns, its light brilliant in the ebon night, brightening the sand to dazzling whiteness, revealing the hull of the nearly finished boat we’ve been helping build. The three of us have moved back from the flames and intense heat, laying on a bedroll tucked in to a depression on the side of a high dune. Up and down the visible length of the beach are more fires, small earth-bound suns on a starless night.

We lay there, in the sand, soft breeze washing over us, listening.

We can hear the crackle and roar of the fire.

We can hear the sounds of the waves washing the shore.

We can also hear the desperate cries of the people still alive out there in the darkness, trying to swim to shore, or clinging to wreckage or some barren rock.  There were fewer and fewer coming ashore as sunset approached.

Li’l blonde puppy found us a week ago. He’s decided his job is keeping the dark puppy company. Had no idea what he was in for’ He’s curled up in the crook of my arm now, sleeping, his slumber fitful, unhappy. Someone screams in the distance and he moans, flailing his paws. The other, the dark pup, lifts his head at the human sound, stares into the distant night, looking like he sees, like he actually sees whoever it is was screaming. Maybe he knew her; he acquainted himself with everyone on our segment of the beach. His eyebrows drop and he softly whines. A moment longer and then he lowers himself, resting his head my stomach, his snout pointed at me now. He blinks once and sighs through his nostrils, the sound long and resigned, then closes his eyes.

Ten ships set out.

There were still three left when their sails disappeared below the horizon. The dark pup watched it all, never making a sound. Ships crashing on rocks, swamped by rogue waves, it didn’t matter. He sat on his rock, li’l blonde puppy sitting beside him, wanting to leave … but he stayed. We all did. We couldn’t not watch.

The beach is all there is. No going back.

Going back was never an option …

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“I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.”

From The Optimism of Uncertainty, Howard Zinn

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Dusting Memories

I recently had what I call a Tony Perkins moment. No, nothing involving motels, showers, chef knives, desiccated mommies or spurting chocolate syrup.

It’s like this: a few years back my former wife and I (she’s the sweet lady Reg stowed away with to get to Antarctica) were cleaning house one crisp Spring morning. Now, the apartment we lived in overflowed with books and electronics and art and knick-knacks and stuffed puppies and critters, making it a very warm, cluttery place, even on this cool day in the South Bay. And so, pausing in the middle of one task or another I happened to look up and around at all these things, all this stuff we’d accumulated, and for no particular reason I can recall, I was reminded of a movie, of a scene in a movie featuring Perkins and Donna Anderson. It was a simple, almost boring domestic scene as he makes tea for her and prepares to go to work. Anderson seems normal, nothing out of the ordinary, if a touch distracted, and Perkins seems similarly in place. But there is a look to him or, more specifically, there is a manner of the way Perkins seems to be looking at things that came back to my imperfect memory of the scene. Later on in the movie, of course, it becomes clear why he has this air about him, this way of taking things in. And then again, maybe I was projecting the subtext of his actions on him.

But it was the effect, the underlying sense of the impending, that impressed.

So on that fresh Spring morning, conjured by this scene in the theatre of my memory, I sort of felt the sense of how Perkins’ character saw things, understood that look at the world. This recognition channeled and inhabited my being, becoming something akin to the overused cliché regarding the sensation of someone walking on my grave, if you will.

More important, that was the moment I understood and, more important, accepted something that was becoming obvious, and inevitable.

=======

I think I sorta had a sense of things early on. Maybe it was all those stories I read by Andre Norton about life after the end and survival after a collapse … or the prospect of no survival. Star Man’s Son, (retitled Daybreak, 2250 AD), The Stars Are Ours, the aforementioned Star Rangers (The Last Planet), Lord of Thunder, Galactic Derelict, Sea Siege, Dark Piper … all good, hard SciFi with a common element: the plot device of a failed or failing ancient civilization, or humans dealing with the prospect of the loss of modern civilization.

At 14, I picked up Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and pretty much read it over the course of a day.

After, I lay awake nights, thinking of endings.

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Reading

I don’t know where the reading started, where it came from, not really. Probably the comic books, with wanting to know what the heroes were saying in the word balloons. But I always was a reader. From the age of 7 through 11, every Saturday, my father would drive into town with me, drop me off at the library,  run errands and then go hit a bar. Sometimes – when I was really lucky – he’d leave me there for until late afternoon.

Being in the cozy basement of that old, small-town library was like living in heaven. If I have one regret, it is that I do not have my daughter’s talent for reading books at breakneck speed. I had to take my time. But I read. I read and read and read. I read books about anything and everything, stories about ponies on Islands off the Carolina Coast, about surviving in the American wilderness in the dead of freezing winter during the time of the Revolution, murder mysteries in sunken gardens in South Africa, books about planes, trains and automobiles, short story collections of the macabre and horrific (Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery was my Bible – I read it over and over and over, never tiring of it).

And then there was war, a subject near and dear to most boys’ hearts. I read all I could find to read about war. Anything and everything. Toward the end of that magical time I inhaled Churchill’s history of the Second World War. I knew all there was to know about the American Navy up to and including World War II. I was thoroughly fascinated as only a pre-adolescent boy could be.

And then I found Welles and Verne. I read The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine,  20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and was utterly captivated by the adventure … and then I read The Mysterious Island, a story that was to me at the time the grandest adventure imaginable, and remember being stunned and amazed to learn that Captain Nemo was alive, and was responsible for the existence of the island. (The concept of a character living on past the conclusion of one story to unexpectedly reappear in a second in such a fashion stuck me as incredible!)

Again, though, more endings. Nemo apparently perished and his story ended, a dream of the future lost to the uncaring whims of fate and nature, and I was, in a sense, deeply saddened. Verne’s submariner had come to represent so many things to me that I didn’t have the words or concepts at the time to articulate: the potential of science for man; the mystery of human existence; the deep longing for what is good as a counterpoint to the inevitable darkness of mankind’s nature.

Dad was in the Air Force, in SAC – Strategic Air Command – and during my so-called formative years were planted the memory of military alerts broadcast on TV and radio, of seeing him get in uniform and report for duty. The Cuban Missile Crisis: we had no real idea of what was happening, but there was no escaping something huge and potentially dangerous to everything alive was occurring.

And then, in 1968, at 14, I read On the Beach.

“… what makes On the Beach nevertheless one of the most compelling accounts of nuclear war ever written is its almost unique insistence that everyone–without exception–is going to die. Shute directly addresses the most primal fears of the human race, which has spent most of its history denying or compensating for the fact of personal death … For once, there are no distractions: no invading aliens, no super-fallout shelters to protect the protagonists, no struggle back from a dreadful but exciting postwar barbarism. There are simply a man and a woman reaching the agonizing decision to kill their only child in its crib and commit suicide as the rest of the human race expires around them.
… Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, Paul Brians

At 14, given what I’d already lived through, I was no stranger to imagined endings. At the same time, fed by my science fiction reading, I had a strong sense of the value of the world, the potential for what we could be … and then this book sort of brought it all together for me.

But life goes on and eventually the effect of Shute’s novel faded. I joined the Army when I turned 18. While there, I ended up aiming nuclear weapons at the Soviets. You might say I was in my element, though you would miss the irony of the situation if you did. Dunno what I was targeting, but I was in Germany and I could guess … and I soon realized it really didn’t matter; I knew what would happen if the decision were made to use those missiles. My mates used to laugh about how we were such an obvious and easy target that, if a war ever started, we were high on the list of people who would disappear in the first minutes.

To myself I would sometimes think “And we’d be only the first.”

Years came and went and in the fiction I continued to read endings played out: Lucifer’s Hammer, Swan Song, The Stand … all were enthralling, high-octane reads – all apocalyptic fiction. But they never had the effect of On the Beach for me. Maybe I was jaded by my experiences, adulthood, blah, blah, blah. Maybe having lived in the modern world for so long with the concept of the apocalyptic immediacy of nuclear war burned my generation out to the idea. It was all so much of the same, the lingering aspect of annihilation, year after year … and I had a life to live.

But in 1990, I read David Brin’s Earth* and something sparked and I started thinking about endings again. I had a baby daughter, and as I was pushing the threshold of 40, the future was less of an abstract to me.

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Quick Fails

We think in terms of quick fails.

In ancient times a city falls, its men are put to the sword, goods snatched, women raped and sold into slavery. The final drama plays out over a few days or weeks (in John Norwich’ History of Byzantium, he notes during all the religious wars that marked the evolution of the Western and Eastern churches there was the quaint custom that once a city falls, there followed a 72-hour period of sacking, including the requisite raping and pillaging, after which the survivors were more or less allowed to pick up the pieces). Of course, in modern times we are more concerned about plagues, atomic devices, 3-day wars, rogue superpowers rolling over countries they don’t like … that sort of thing …

But what we really need to look at here, really discuss, is the history. The history that gets us to that point where a trigger gets pulled and the shit hits the fan. Earlier, for example, I noted the last century’s wars started in 1914 and lasted 75 years. Of course, we were taught there were two big wars and a bunch of little ones. But this is wrong, because  what we’re really dealing with is a series of connected events and decisions that perpetuated the global conflict. Moreover, it could be argued this war started earlier, perhaps when the HMS Dreadnought, an entirely new weapons system – the modern, big gun battleship – came into being in 1906, triggering the arms race that led to the war. Or you could go back further, identifying events, conflicts, brush wars dating back to Napoleon … or the conflict between the European powers over the new world … and when you think about it, you can trace events back to before the transcribing of the Old Testament or the writing of the Athenian Constitution.

The point (an obvious one, of course) is that 1) everything we do was affected by what came before and 2) it takes a long time for these events to unfold – which, in turn, makes them extremely difficult to impossible to stop once everything is set in motion.

In history, everything is connected. A city is sacked, yes, but only after a torturous series of events, many offering the potential for the city to remain unharmed, having played out over months and years and decades and centuries. Actions taken influence actions to come. The true bookends to historical events are more likely akin to the Dreadnaught example I cited above, which tipped a balance of power that in turn moved the world closer and closer to what would become an inevitable, near century-long war that saw different powers emerge and fall, finishing with the fall of the Berlin Wall, which in turn marked the end of one era while heralding this new one we find ourselves in.

Another example, perhaps a tad less defined in terms of starting points, is the Industrial Revolution.

Which brings us full circle to endings.

… and physics …

Next: A Dark Puppy explains Dark Matters.

* It should be noted that in Earth Brin made predictions of the planet’s future for the 50 years that followed publication, many of which that have panned out with unsettling accuracy…

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How to Build a Dark Puppy, Part 5: Color my World

Dreamtime …

I’m standing on a cliff, gray sky overhead. I am at the edge of a dark ocean, looking down on the surging, white-capped waters. Now I know I’m dreaming, that this is all an illusion, but the understanding doesn’t matter because in its own way this moment is as real as anything in my waking hours, even though everything around me has as little substance as the metaphor it is discussing.

I look behind me, over my shoulder and then turning so I can take it all in. The journey. The trip here. Not just mine, but everyone’s. In spite of the impossibility, I can see it all. Everyone that ever lived, there they are, and I see each and every one. Cumulatively, it’s a hell of a story.

And they’re all headed here, and most of them never arrive. Doesn’t matter, still a lot of folks coming; good thing there’s lots of beach on this shoreline, stretching as far as I can see in either direction.

I turn back and take in the sea. It’s an unknown quantity. It looks impassible; stormy, gray and foreboding. I see big rocks and small barren islands dotting the turbulent waters. They look hungry for some reason, like they’re waiting for us to send them out a snack. Soon enough, I figure. I get the urge to eat something. There is wild grass all around me, wet with the damp of the shore. I pluck a blade, put it in my mouth, chewing, tasting the bitter tang of its juices. There’s something nice about the taste, triggering memories I’d long forgotten, childhood days wandering fields and forests, streets and alleys. A greener world, a fresher world, a newer life.

All long gone; nowadays it’s like we’re going through the motions.

Below me is a boat … at least, it will be a boat. Some men and women are building it … slowly, taking their time, getting it right, I suppose … they’ve asked me if I want to come along … I look out over the expanse of water … it’s all so uncertain … we know: me, the people down below … we know … the odds are stacked … against us.

A dog barks … there, near the boat … he’s standing on a rock, looking out at the sea, acting all huffy and shit … stupid puppy … dark puppy … barking … not excited barking, though – no, not this guy; no anger, no alarm, nothing territorial … it’s a matter-of-fact, ‘that’s-just-the-way-it-is-fuckers’ kind of bark … he’s telling them … telling us … this venture probably isn’t going to have a good outcome … but they – the people standing ‘round, working on the boat, ship or whatever-the-fuck it is going to be – they don’t speak dog, so they don’t pay him any heed, they keep on working, smiling, laughing at the dark pup’s ‘tude, occasionally petting the wiseass if they happen to pass close … but paying him no heed … none …

… doesn’t really matter …

… someone tosses the pup some scraps, a bone … he gathers them round, finishing off the small bits and pieces of food, then settling down on his belly, bone between his paws, gnawing away … he looks up, see’s me staring down … he winks … then, paying me no more heed, he devotes his full attention to the bone … the bone’s the important shit, as far as he’s concerned …

… fucker knows … he knows I know, too … doesn’t matter … we both know … the whole endeavor is probably doomed … we know it, he and I … they probably do, too, the folks putting together that boat down there; they know in the back of their minds, maybe in their waking dreams … doesn’t matter … we’re all going; all of us … we don’t have a choice …

Falling Down

“Lately I’ve come to the realization I’ve fewer days before me than behind me.” -Patrick Stewart, Star Trek: Generations

I wonder if cynicism – and an associated dollop of irony – has something to do with learned perspective, the collection and digestion of all the experiences and knowledge accumulated over half a century of living. Long past the casual arrogance of youth, beyond the unconscious immortality that informed our relationship with the world about us. That whole ‘I’m-gonna-live-forever’ thing was never a keeper, anyway, because somewhere around the age of twenty-five you have your unavoidable epiphany:

You fall down …

… and, for the first time in your life, your automatic impulse is not to jump back up. Instead, you think about it, do a quick mental checkdown.  “Everything okay?” you hear yourself whisper oh-so-fleetingly at the edges of consciousness …

THEN you get up. And that’s the day you begin to grasp getting old.

The next big moment – a much bigger moment – is the day you realize, in the deepest core of your being, in a place without thought or comprehension, a place without love or compassion, without hate or anger, that you ARE going to die … and that is the one thing in a changing world that will never change

Everything becomes simpler …

Knowing things

“Perhaps the most wrenching by-product of the scientific revolution has been to render untenable many of our cherished and most comforting beliefs. The tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors has been replaced by a cold, indifferent Universe in which humans are relegated to obscurity. But I see the emergence in our consciousness of a Universe of magnificence, and an intricate, elegant order far beyond anything our ancestors imagined.. And if much about the Universe can be understood in terms of a few simple laws of Nature, those wishing to believe in God can certainly ascribe those beautiful laws to a Reason underpinning all of Nature. My own view is to understand the Universe as it really is than to pretend to a Universe as we might wish it to be.” -Carl Sagan, Billions and Billions

“To stay young requires the unceasing ability to unlearn old falsehoods.” – Robert A. Heinlein

I miss Carl Sagan.

I really, really … REALLY miss Carl Sagan. Truly. He’s one of the few humans I’ve shed tears over their passing. He was so important – he helped you see things, if you just took the time to listen. And there really hasn’t been anyone come along in 30 years who comes close to his talent of making science – and the human story – so obvious.

September, 1980. I was an undergraduate, taking Astronomy and the associated lab class. Really getting into the science, the planets and stars, learning about the stuff keeping everything tied together. Watching Cosmos on PBS at the same time. I’d loved science fiction, but never really delved too far into the realm of science fact … and then that series came along, piggybacked on the astronomy course. It was like seeing things … seeing reality … from a different place.

One of the strengths of the series – of Cosmos – is that it remains relevant and immediate in spite of so much science that has occurred in the intervening decades … things we have learned about the outer planets, the nature of reality, how our biology exists within its environment … so many changes occurred that in the 1990s Sagan filmed updates to tag onto the end of the episodes to clarify and put into perspective all these new things scientists were learning.

But the show keeps getting watched. I have a set of the episodes on disk and watch them once or twice a year, just stick them in the DVD player on weekends while I’m cooking, doing chores … a comfortable background noise that will grab me at unexpected moments, hold my attention, make me listen to the explanation of an idea, its relevance, importance, how a thought, a revelation or discovery changes the nature of how we see things.

He took us places, that Sagan guy. Places where we were required to think. And the thing was, he made it easy for us, the thinking part. We just needed to follow along, and he’d break down concepts and ideas so smoothly we’d wonder why we never realized this or that thing before.

He was that good.

Those hypothetical aliens I talked about in that last installment? He could have been one of them, so detached his ability to step outside of things and look back at us seemed. I think he could have helped my aliens make sense of this world, all the while participating in and enjoying the abduction pranks played on those college kids – though Carl might not have figured out the whole Lady Gaga connection. Some things are beyond anyone’s ken. Minor stuff.

The thing was, Sagan made sense of it all. He did it simply, brilliantly and well. And he could get us to listen.

I wish he was around right now. Sharp as ever. Looking at things, seeing problems for what they are. Communicating easily, no drama, no talking down, no sense of scolding or self-righteousness … just calm, steady explanations helping us to see things with all the bullshit stripped away.

We all know things. Some stuff we know is important. A lot of it is useless. A good portion lives somewhere in between important and useless … it’s there, it probably has value, but we’re never sure until a need for particular bit of knowing comes up.

We need a roadmap, guideposts, something – its just so damned confusing sometimes … and so simple … yet still seemingly beyond resolution …

… but one thing is neither confusing or beyond resolution: endings.

Endings come, and we go …

“Contrary to the fantasies of the fundamentalists, there was no deathbed conversion, no last minute refuge taken in a comforting vision of a heaven or an afterlife. For Carl, what mattered most was what was truth, not merely what would make us feel better. Even at this moment when anyone would be forgiven for turning away from the reality of our situation, Carl was unflinching. As we looked deeply into each other’s eyes, it was with a shared conviction that our wondrous life together was ending forever.” – Ann Druyan, on the death of her husband, from the epilogue to Billions and Billions

Next: On the Beach Again

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How to Build a Dark Puppy, Part 4: A Knee-Jerk Species

I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine, looking round. The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on their south-eastern face. It was the same rich green that one sees on forest moss or on the lichen in caves: plants which like these grow in a perpetual twilight.

‘The machine was standing on a sloping beach. The sea stretched away to the south-west, to rise into a sharp bright horizon against the wan sky. There were no breakers and no waves, for not a breath of wind was stirring. Only a slight oily swell rose and fell like a gentle breathing, and showed that the eternal sea was still moving and living. And along the margin where the water sometimes broke was a thick incrustation of salt–pink under the lurid sky…

…’I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea, the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the uniform poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one’s lungs: all contributed to an appalling effect.”

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, Chapter XI

It’s a given we – homo sapiens – are going away. Another given: complex life will survive long past us. Well, for a while. If astronomers and stellar physicists are correct – and I have no reason to believe they aren’t – the sun is going boil away our atmosphere in another .5 billion years or so and eventually expand and swallow the planet in a billion. Nothing I want to stick around for, of course.

We never really think about that, though – the ending stuff. We just don’t. Not in our make-up. That’s stuff for scientists, philosophers and science fiction writers (Hello!) to muck about in.

Homo sapiens.

When you look at our history, the history of homo sapiens as a social animal, one thing seems to stand out: we’re a reactive species. It’s built into our code, it’s who we are. Sure, we have the ability to plan things and obviously do. Foresight goes into the construction of buildings and similar engineering, with an eye to function and stamina, as well as aesthetics. But big stuff, things that are disruptive, emergencies, wars, population movements, famines, migrations, earthquakes, cyclones, Cylons – we invariably react every time, even when it is obvious something is going to happen. Planning always seems spotty where the potential for huge collapse is concerned. That’s the reactive thing in our nature. If we’re in a comfortable niche in terms of existence, what the heck – we’re gold – planning is so blase.

We are also creations of this biosphere we live in. Our stuff, our matter, our DNA, originate out of the bio-environment, and our lives are both threatened and sustained by elements of that biosphere. We are dependent upon it.

But we forget, we don’t think about it.

We go to sleep … we even force ourselves to go to sleep …

[Klaatu begins speaking to Mr. Wu in Mandarin]
Klatau: You’ve been out of contact for a long time.
Mr. Wu: I had a dangerous assignment. This is hostile territory.
Klatau: I’ve noticed. I was hoping I could reason with them.
Mr. Wu: I’m afraid they are not a reasonable race. I’ve been living amongst them for seventy years now. I know them well.
Klatau: And?
Mr. Wu: Any attempt to intercede with them would be futile. They are destructive, and they won’t change.
Klatau: Is that your official report?
Mr. Wu: The tragedy is, they know what’s going to become of them.
[Both Klaatu and Wu turn to look at Helen, Jacob and Wu’s grandson who are seated at another table]
Mr. Wu: They sense it. But they can’t seem to do anything about it.

– The Day the Earth Stood Still [Remake, 2008]

Does her clone sleep alone...?

You’re from another planet (Sucky cliché, I know – humor me). Your objective is to conduct a science survey, study the dominant species: beyond that goal you have no vested interest in outcomes where Planet Earth (Terra of Sol in Geek- & Alien-Speak) is concerned. You look around, conduct some tests, take some time off for R&R, get back to work and make objective observations, more R&R (sightsee, take in some local color), collect data from remote stations, attend a revival concert of a band you heard 20 light years out, conduct some more tests, take in some TED talks in Monterey, clone Lady Gaga (because she’s so drama), conduct even more tests, tie one on in a cantina in Mexico and engage in alien prank ‘abductions’  of American college students on Spring Break (a.k.a.: ‘fucking with the natives’) … all-in-all, a low-key, fun-filled time is had by all (even the senior staff, who’ve gone gaga over the re-imagined Ms. Gaga).  The day finally comes and all the data is crunched, all the numbers run – and the intrepid team has its conclusion: The inhabitants (you, me, everybody else) are rattle-the-cage nuts – and may be screwed.

But the most fascinating conclusion: A large percentage of the dominant planetary species (Yup – you, me, everybody else) appears to understand there is a problem. The majority of those in the know (paying attention) seem aware of the ramifications of doing nothing … but also seem unwilling to do anything to address that problem in any significant and unified, coherent fashion. More amazing: there is a huge subset population of the dominant species willing to oppose what is so obviously needed to be done, apparently because they don’t want to threaten the status quo and associated profits … or they just do not want to believe it, and because they don’t, they embrace any idea opposed to the data they hate.

(The team threw away one set of data as non sequitur: the amazing population of folks who desperately want an ending for the species, based on interpretations of some ancient texts … The conclusion was this apparent insanity was probably a manifestation of some sort of cultural in-joke.)

Regardless, to quote Mr. Ed: “WTF, Wilbur?”

Next: Beachcombing

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How to Build a Dark Puppy, Part 3: Trade-Offs

Some things I think I know:

In 2001, when the new millennium got underway, the human race found itself in an interesting place in its history. To review: between 1901 and 2000 we’d unlocked the atom, landed on the Moon, visited nearly every planet in the solar system and send back stunning pictures, and looked nearly thirteen billion years into the past thanks to the Hubble telescope. We’d made incredible strides in medicine and biology, in agriculture, scientific research, engineering – you name it, we made it better … or invented something to replace it. We were freakin’ incredible!

Computing – in particular personal computing – came out of nowhere to reshape our worlds in ways obvious, subtle and yet to be understood – a development few Science Fiction authors saw coming. One thing we definitely know: coupled with the internet, computers allowed us access to a good chunk of the world’s information. In the late 1700s, little more than 200 years ago, it was said Thomas Jefferson owned the most comprehensive library in the Western Hemisphere, 150 years later, by the mid-1900s, millions owned personal libraries that rivaled his. By the dawn of 2001 the literary and scientific archives of the written words of the world were available to billions thanks to the magic of dancing electrons, personal computers and the internet … and the contents of Jefferson’s library could probably be stored on a thumb drive.

How we lived our lives changed. The New York World’s Fair of 1939 advertised a bright future with robots and flying cars on the wish list – those dreams didn’t come true in any practical form … yet … but so much has. Spare time: recreation and entertainment has become so intertwined with the daily lives of humans that one could argue the biggest problem we have is deciding what we want to be entertained by. The advent of electricity and light eroded the barrier between night and day, further altering and overlapping schedules.

And food … with the growth in agriculture … so much food, so many kinds and varieties, provided to us cheaply and with little effort on the part of individual consumers … to where we wouldn’t know hunting and gathering if it slipped up and kicked us in our collective rear-ends

We were – ARE – living in a manufactured Paradise.

Well … sort of.

There were … are … costs, trade offs.

TANSTAAFL.*

While all the good stuff was happening, the century that just ended also experienced a global war that went on in one form or another from 1914 to 1989 – 75 years … not that the world is a more peaceful place now. And while there was a lot of invention and innovation that came out of the conflicts that benefited mankind, there’s no escaping the uncounted millions who died from the violence of that time – maybe a hundred million, maybe twice that when you consider the ‘peacetime’ purges in Russia, China and Cambodia. Hundreds of millions more suffered from depravations brought on by the global conflict: in 1945, in Europe and East Asia the homeless were legion.

Not that we noticed. At least, not as a species. Estimates are we’d passed our first billion in the early 1800s, and were well past two billion when the Guns of August got to blazing, signaling the initiation of global hostilities. But we kept happily procreating – our species closing ranks and moving forward, to borrow an illustrative metaphor Heinlein was fond of – to where when the 100 year anniversary of WW1 rolls around four years from now, we’ll be seven billion strong or thereabouts …

… and choking on our own waste …

Lucky U.S.

We were all lucky from the get-go. I mean all of those fortunate humans displaying the good sense to be born in the United States in the second half of the 20th Century, the most technically advanced country of the face of the planet at that time.  If that observation comes off a little hoo-rah nationalist, it wasn’t meant that way. I’m just bespeaking the obvious. Not that I hate my country. How could I? This was the country with the highest standard of living in history, due in no small part to the fact foreign armies never overran its cities and countryside while Eurasia was getting slammed. If you had to be born somewhere, it was hard to find fault with here. And while my family wasn’t rich, we didn’t miss meals, were clean, clothed – and my siblings and I had access to a good education allowing us to do things with our lives to where we could eke out a comfortable living, which put us in the top 1% of people anywhere, ever.

Wrap your brain around that idea for a moment, really sink your teeth into it and thoughtfully chew, letting the flavors wash over your mental taste buds. In the history of Homo Sapiens, no one had access to a majority of the things we did and do, the important things. Not even close. There was was a huge sense of optimism, of hope and promise of the future: no population had anything close, in any one place, any one moment in history.

Not even close.

Time keeps doing its thing and we see other countries elevate their own populations’ standards of living, slowly at first, but eventually with a sense of real, unstoppable momentum, and the increasing improvements that keep popping up get you thinking the future of the human race looks pretty hunky-dory.

That is, if you aren’t paying attention.

Or don’t want to.

Numbers game

Doing a little math reveals something of an imbalance.

In the three hour discussion of the natural world that was tagged on to the Planet Earth series (you got it as part of the BBC edition of the DVD set; the U.S. edition left it out), biologist E.O. Wilson remarks that to sustain the current planetary population at an economic level akin the that of the United States would require the natural resources of 3.5 planets (maybe 4.5 – my recollection is a touch hazy). Of course, we’re short a few planets.

We accumulate a lot of stuff. We also consume a lot of stuff: material goods, energy, food. We have an incredible, sophisticated and physically massive infrastructure that sustains our civilization to varying degrees across the globe. We throw stuff away, too. In the U.S., that means trash tossed, gas passed, energy burned, toilets flushed, industrial waste dumped, water run … and it all runs downhill, into landfills and waterways … the ocean … in our atmosphere … the biosphere …

John Conner: We’re not gonna make it, are we? People, I mean.

The Terminator: It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves.

John Conner: Yeah. Major drag, huh?

– Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Okay, it’s a movie. Things are, like, really not that bad, right?

Right?

Hello?

… more to come …

*TANSTAAFL: ‘There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch’, an acronym coined by Robert A Heinlein in “The Moon Is a Hard Mistress”

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How to Build a Dark Puppy, Part 2: Rocket to the Moon

My Granddad was born in 1884, in England. Queen Victoria was still ruling strong. He began his adult life at 14 when he joined the British Royal Navy. The first eight ships he was assigned to were square riggers, the last of the sailing ships that once dominated the high seas.  In the unfolding of his lifetime he, like so many in his generation, lived through so many firsts, significant stepping stones that served as road signs leading to the world we live in, where in our recent history we sent a ship sailing to the Moon. Think about that. In his lifetime, which spanned a century, the human race made a quantum leap forward in almost every area imaginable. At no time in history was there anything close to that hundred years in terms of what the human race did … up to and including making war upon itself.

In fact, you could probably argue what the human race did – what it learned and achieved in that one hundred circuits of the sun – outshone the combined achievements of all of human history that came before it.

And he was there, a privileged witness to all: the first powered airplane flight, the first man to summit Everest, the conquest of the North and South poles, the discovery and use of the atom as a tool and weapon … the first submarine to sail under the North Pole  … and then, to cap and trump it all, we landed on the Moon.

Science Fiction.

Okay, I’ll own it upfront. Enduring geek that I am, once upon a time – a once-upon-a-time lasting a few decades – I loved Star Trek in all its incarnations. I was a trekkie before it became fashionable (and stopped when it did). I saw my first episode – Shore Leave , a particularly insane, Alice-in-Wonderland romp – when it was originally broadcast (yes, I’m that old) and was hooked by the combination of SciFi elements and the general sense of fun that the show communicated as part of its personality – I’d not seen anything like it in the short time I’d been alive, and I was bedazzled.

Star Trek arrived at the peak of a very special time in American history. Less than ten years before, space travel was in its infancy; mankind had not yet put anything in space, let alone in orbit. But we were already dreaming about what we’d do when we got there.

Chesley Bonestell was giving those dreams substance with his paintings of outer space, visions of mankind’s fancied destiny in this new frontier. By the time I was 10, the country was enthusiastically embracing the effort to get into space. Space travel was still in its raw infancy; we’d sent only a handful of spacecraft in orbit,… but we had the Moon in our eyes – John F. Kennedy had promised a Moon landing by the end of the decade.

We were going to the goddamned Moon! Holy Spit, Batman!

Fly Me To The Moon

Think about that a moment. Our comfortable, reliable neighbor: beautiful Selene, a heavenly body constantly reminding us of her presence, a silver sphere orbiting our home thirteen times a year. Her ongoing journey was nature’s version of an eternal bubble dance: revealing a little bit of herself every night for two weeks, then steadily cloaking her features for another two, a constant tease in the collective imaginations of earth-bound homo sapiens. So many aspects attributed to her: celebrated (and sometimes cursed) in song and myth; an way to measure the passage of time; a source of madness and passion. Everyone who ever lived that had eyes to see shares the vision of the moon. There is no greater commonality for humanity.

Selene was there, steady, immutable, an ever-present reminder of things outside our grasp, an age-old metaphor for knowledge beyond our reach and understanding. One of mankind’s biggest dreams. In a sense, the ultimate goal.

A century before this incredible time we live in, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs were plotting ways to get to the Moon. Before them, Cyrano de Bergerac, Dante and Lucian dreamed fantastic stories of attaining the impossible goal. In our century, Fritz Lang, George Pál and Stanley Kubrick made movies where moon landings figured prominently in their stories. And there were songs that dotted our collective consciousness: “By the Rising of the Moon”, “Moon River”, “Man on the Moon” … it’s a fairly long list.

I discover Science Fiction.

1965.  I was living – if you want to call it that – in Albuquerque, New Mexico. More accurately,  I was existing on the northern fringe of the city, on Sandia Base in military housing. Long time ago. Walking was the thing I remember most about those two years I was there. I walked everywhere, near and far. Walking to school in the dead of winter, across open fields, snow on the ground, freezing … my feet, dressed in sneakers, slowly, painfully turning to ice, finding relief propping said icicles on the water heaters in the classroom, feeling blood turn to thawed sludge and sensation grudgingly returns … well, you get where I’m going with this … nowhere …

One day, in that school’s library, probably while on detention or something akin, I picked a book off the library shelves. Written by Andre Norton (whom I later learned was a woman) entitled Star Rangers. Orange/brown cover, an illustration burned in the leather of a toppled, broken spaceship and … some guy in a spacesuit, helmet off, standing on a rock, looking noble, gazing off at something in the distance. Cheesy title, yes … it would eventually be renamed The Last Planet ……but the story itself was inventive, imaginative and well-told; the narrative was rife with sub-plots: race and species discrimination dominant amongst them, as well as semi-philosophical musings on why empires fail.  I must have read it five times in a two week period – I couldn’t put the damn thing down.

I started reading all the Science Fiction I could find; my sojourns to libraries became pilgrimages as I sought out any and all writing that could be recognized as SciFi. Now, at the time (and to a degree to this day) SciFi was largely dissed as a literary genre, but I didn’t care. I liked it. This shit was stimulating! The stories were the kind of stuff that stirred the imaginative fires, birthing daydreams unlike anything I could have conceived before – SciFi was taking me places, waking me up. Along with Norton, in short order I discovered Eric Frank Russell, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and as the years went on, authors like Robert Silverberg, Robert E. Howard, Edmund Hamilton, E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Philip Jose Farmer, H.P. Lovecraft, Niven & Pournelle, Dan Simmons and John Varley.

The Dean of Science Fiction

And then there was Robert A. Heinlein.

Once, when hitchhiking to Marin, sometime around 1969, I got picked up by a guy in a classic, psychedelicized VW bus. Turned out he liked SciFi (the geek population – particularly the hip geek population – was pretty small, back in the day). We got to talking about different books and authors, generally evidencing mutual admiration for each other’s selection. Then I mentioned Heinlein, and the guy started cursing. Shaking his head, he looked sideways at me: “That fucker ruined the goddamned system for me…”

Flash forward two years, to 9th grade.

In 9th grade, if you’re me, you’re looking for answers. The world’s going crazy on you, weird hormones and other natural chemicals are tearing through your body, triggering mood-swigs and acne while stimulating sexual organs at the most inappropriate times. You feel confused, awkward, betrayed by your own biology. Helpless. Adults were no help. In the 60s, parents – let alone grandparents – weren’t all that good with answers … grown-ups were suppressed and hush-hush and downright embarrased about it all … and apparently very confused. You’d have ‘talks’ you’d walk away from wondering who actually knew more about what.

Cover Art for Glory Road

Heinlein had answers. Glory Road’s wisecracking, cynical, what-the-fuck re-imagining of the classic save-the-princess trope was compelling and entertaining; the first-person narrative snappy and fun. And it was sexy. Not sexy like the erotica you might read nowadays (and I hope you do as, after all, you are part of my potential target audience), more suggestion than description, carried off with a sort of wink-and-nudge sensuality that did wonders toward stirring the imagination and libido, particularly for a 14-year-old who’d only recently become conscious of some rather novel functions associated with personal plumbing.

Of course, once I’d finished Glory Road, I started up Stranger in a Strange Land … perhaps the ultimate fish-out-of-water SciFi story. While Glory Road was a romp, Stranger came off like a thesis on everything that made us tick. Through the lens Heinlein created with his characters you got a good look at the underpinnings of things you were only vaguely aware of, stuff like religion in America, social mores, the origin of humor (we laugh because it hurts: a HUGE realization to a kid; it changes everything about what he or she found funny), the difference between assumption and fact. There was all kinds of stuff going on between the covers and the sheets, a lot of which I wouldn’t grok until I was a lot older. And every time you went back to that book you would find new ideas. You’d find more of the same with all his books from that period, the sixties and early seventies; they became platforms where the author examined and critiqued the human species, and offered his own, often outlandish (for the time and society) solutions.

But one thing was inescapable: SciFi was a killer way to tell a story, with a canvas as big as a galaxy to paint it, as much time as forever to tell it in. In this genre, anything went, anything was possible.

Just like getting to the Moon within a hundred years of using wind to sail the oceans.

And so we come to the Tao of a Dark Puppy … anything is possible … anything at all … you need only dream it up and write it down.

… more to come …

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How to Build a Dark Puppy – Part 1: Origins

Joe Stalin died the year I was born.

I don’t make too big a deal of this – after all, Abraham Lincoln expired on my birthday, albeit 88 years earlier, and that’s not anything to get too worked up about, either.

Nothing much of importance appears to have happened the day I emerged. A quick Google of events show WHP-TV started broadcasting in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the Malans National Party won the South Africa elections. Two days earlier, Ian Fleming published his first James Bond novel, Casino Royal, and ten days later, Crick and Watson published their famous paper on DNA. Now, had I been born on the same date a year earlier I could claim I was born when the first B-52 bomber prototype began flying (and has remained in service ever since. At this rate, the bastard might outlast me.) The Red Wings swept the Canadiens for the Stanley Cup, and a nuclear device was set off in the Nevada desert, no doubt to the fatal consternation of the local flora and fauna … what there was left of it, at least, after previous tests.

Cook County, Minnesota, on their courthouse website, goes so far as to note nothing happened the day I was born.  They may be on to something.  After all, the place I was born, Smokey Hills Air Force Base, near Salinas, Kansas, no longer exists. Thus, from a rhetorical perspective, at least, you might say I am technically a non-entity, IRS records notwithstanding … and I can probably name a few ex-lovers who would likely agree.

Not that lack of existence will keep me this blog from being written.

No one is that lucky.

I should also note this state of non-existence is not necessarily a bad thing … for example, my association with the state of Kansas becomes something of an embarrassing skeleton in my closet whenever their manic depressive election process sits a majority of Creationist yahoos on their State Board of Education and said majority immediately decide they can’t abide reality and insist on changing the science standards to reflect their certainty that Evolution and the Big Bang didn’t happen. Yes, I realize they are sincere. But sincerity does not prevent them from being morons. And having allowed this idiocy to happen twice in a decade qualifies the electorate, as well, as morons (and collective candidates for a Darwin Award).

But I digress. I should warn you I do that a lot, so you might want to warm up to the idea.

Anyway, I guess it is time for a quick, Cliff Notes-style biography, given what passes for attention spans and such:

At the tender age of six weeks my father was transferred from Kansas to California, so he and Mom drove across the western states in early summer – with no air conditioning. Happily, I remember nothing of the trip, and I’m sure they wished they didn’t, either. In the succeeding years, we lived the typically nomadic lives of service families, moving every two years until, at the age of 14, I went to live with my Grandparents in San Francisco. It was also 1967, the Summer of Love, and for a naive 14-year-old teen, it was a rather mind-blowing introduction into a new world.

Somehow I survived.

Upon graduation from high school, there followed a stint in the Army where I got to aim missiles with warheads that would ruin the day for large geographic areas, was eventually discharged (honorably, thank you very much), a few years of kicking about, then five years of college and a degree in Theatre shortly after I turned 30. More kicking about, then marriage and graduate school (MFA, Performance), in that order.

And then my daughter was born.

4.5 years later I became a single, full-time parent.

Life got very interesting.

16 years later, here I am. All in all, I have been very lucky.  In the ensuing decade-and-a-half I’ve had an unusual, unexpected and often humbling journey, and an extremely educational one on a multiplicity of levels. It’s been a time of growth, of reflection and realization, and unlearning old falsehoods. I got married again to a good woman, then split up. I lost a great job, spent years bouncing from one temp position to the next, then found another great job. My daughter grew to become a young adult attending my alma matter, San Francisco State University (and who will contribute to Dark Puppy as the whimsy takes her). And I finally moved back to San Francisco after 22 years in the urban wilderness known as San Jose, California.

And somewhere in those 16 years, feeling a need to scratch a persistent creative itch, I started writing, which, in a sense, is the primary reason you are reading this.

But why “Dark Puppy”?

Ah, now that is a story …

… for another post …

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