Achievable Technology.

"But iron!"
"Hell, we're not savages, Devan, are we? When we came to this place we didn't revert back. We still have our minds. All we need is a blast furnace, some iron ore and a fire, isn't it?"

Jerry Sohl, Costigan's Needle

I've just finished re-reading my battered copy of Jerry Sohl's 1953 novel Costigan's Needle - I own the 1968 edition, so it's not as battered as it might be if I owned one of the original paperbacks.* I suspect I first read my mother's copy in my early teens, but I can't remember if I found the concept as unlikely then as I find it to be now.

For those of you unfamiliar with what Mr. Sohl considered to be his best novel**, the titular Dr. Costigan invents a device which creates an opening into another place, an opening which only allows the transmission of living matter. The device is damaged by angry Christian fundamentalists, and the resulting overload sends every living cell within a two-block radius into another world, sans clothing, shoes, glasses, fillings, pacemakers, and all of the other crutches for everyday life that technology has provided.

Naked and shivering, their first decision is to rebuild the device and return. Ten years later, they turn on the power to the new Needle and prepare to send everyone back through its Eye, only to discover that no one wants to leave.

Impressively, after ten years the inhabitants of Sohl's New Chicago have all the conveniences of life: steel for hammers, nails, and wire; glass for bottles, windows, glasses and light bulbs; plastics for dishes and insulation; tobacco and paper for cigarettes - and phosphorus for matches with which to light them. Their dentist fills teeth with gold and their doctors use ether as an anaesthetic, and their power plant provides the electricity for the new Needle.

I'm sorry, but I'm skeptical. Quick pop quiz: how many people reading this know how to make iron? We all know that glass is made out of sand - but how? It's got to be more complicated than just heating up some sand, or else there would be little glassy pits every time someone lit a fire on a beach. For that matter, if you were dropped naked into the woods, would you even be able to start a fire? How about building a cell phone and calling for help?

Now, I realize that Sohl has loaded the dice, in that the inventor of the Needle and a room full of scientists and technicians get transported, but even then I have to question the ability of 395 people to recreate enough of our civilization to be able to build log cabins that don't leak when it rains, let alone to the point of constructing complicated electronic devices. I strongly suspect that in reality all 395 of them would be involved in a constant struggle to get enough food on the table,with very little time left over to start figuring out the right impedance for a capacitor.

However, I must be the only person who feels this way. The something-from-nothing technological meme is fairly common in science fiction, with Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court getting the ball rolling. All sorts of people seem to get transported or displaced into other dimensions or other times where their knowledge allows them to either revolutionize society or to build a new one from scratch, and a surprising percentage of these people know how to make gunpowder.

One of the more plausible amateur chemists is Calvin Morrison, the protagonist of H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. However, Calvin - or Kalvan - realizes immediately that he's not going to be able to convert the late-medieval society in which he finds himself into the equivalent of the industrial revolution in order to help them win a war. What he can do is to help them move about a hundred years further ahead: better gunpowder, rifled barrels, trunnions on cannon, and so on, which I find far more believable than having them build Sherman tanks.

Similarly, William R. Forstchen's "Lost Regiment" series presents one of the few "rebuild society from nothing" scenarios that worked for me. His characters are a shipload of Civil War soldiers whose ship gets swept out to sea and ends up going through a dimensional portal in the Bermuda Triangle. Forstchen loads his dice by having the ship loaded with a variety of useful military and engineering supplies, but even without that I'd accept the idea of a group of Civil War soldiers being able to start with almost nothing and recreate their society.

Why is that? I think that there's some kind of break point around the end of the 19th century after which the number of steps between phases of technology grows larger and larger. A miner in 1865 might well have known how to smelt down the ore, after he'd extracted it from the mine with pick and shovel. Or a blacksmith might have similar knowledge of what was involved with the ore before he began hammering the iron into nails. In current technology, the people who make the parts that are used to make the machines that make the parts for the machines that make the nails are unlikely to have ever seen the process of nailmaking, let alone have any idea of what iron looks like in its natural state.

The final joke for me is that if you sent 395 science fiction fans into another dimension, they might well do better than the average, just from having read so many variations on the theme. Oh, and the formula for gunpowder is 75% saltpeter, 15% sulphur and 10% charcoal. You might want to memorize that, just in case.

- Sid

*I have the impression that my sister Dorothy owns a copy as well, although I suspect hers may be in worse shape.

**Presumably everyone but Dorothy.

And also to you amen.

Architecture penguin catalogue misanthrope boilerplate unnecessary bus recent multiple random generation reply your neighborhood here meaningless modern decay ware idiosyncratic polymath and also to you amen typo giveaway subjunctive sesquipedalian dance.

-Anonymous, spam

Today at work I was chatting with Paul the in-house courier, an affable and entertaining young fellow, and we were discussing some random word spam that had made its way past the new Printing House spam filters. The spam in question had absolutely no sales pitch of any sort, it was just word salad, and we were speculating as to why anyone would send it. We agreed that it was probably just some sort of low-pass reconnaissance by the spammer community, just testing to see what would get through, but I presented the alternative theory that they were net dreams - the nascent consciousness of the Internet manifesting itself as the same sort of garbled metaphor that any of us might experience during a run of rapid eye movement.

Obviously, it's the first explanation, but imagine, imagine if it was the second one. The nature of consciousness is elusive at the best of times, and investigations of the phenomenon are hampered by that elusiveness. Recommended reading here would be Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he suggests that consciousness bears the same relationship to reality that roadmaps do to the landscape - a duplicate in another medium that allows us to find our way.* The Internet, with its odd connections, its millions of nodes, and its constant flow of information, would seem to be an acceptable start in the process of creating a digital analog of the human mind, a "duplicate in another medium".

But will that lead to consciousness? Science fiction author Vernor Vinge has suggested that there is a point in our future where the combination of humans and computers will cause the creation of some kind of superhuman intelligence, leading to a leap in our evolution that will defy description. He refers to this shift as the Singularity, and is understandably (or perhaps sadly) vague about how it will take place and what it will mean to us. In his defense, how could he be specific? What sort of leap of imagination could predict the nature of post-humanism? In his novel Marooned in Realtime, Vinge sets his scene by having a small portion of humanity that has been in stasis for a variety of reasons emerging in a post-Singularity world where the rest of humanity has vanished, leaving behind only vague clues as to the nature of the transcendent experience that has led to their disappearance.

I have to admit to being sceptical about the concept: jokes about internet dreams aside, I don't think that we are one step closer to the creation of technological sentience than we were a thousand years ago. Well, to be fair, we're one step closer - I suspect that in 1008 no one was thinking about it at all.

- Sid

* Yes, I DO own a copy of Mr. Jaynes' book, for the doubters among you. And, just to completely establish my geek credibility, I stumbled across it in a used book store and purchased it because I'd seen the Beast reading it in an issue of X-Men.

Three thousand tubes of what?

I'm currently reading Arthur C. Clarke's Prelude to Space, written in 1947 and set in 1978, which describes a first mission to the Moon. Clarke points out in his introduction to the 1977 reprinting of the novel that, "On July 20, 1969, all the countless science-fiction stories of the first landing on the Moon become frozen in time, like flies in amber. We can look back on them now with a new perspective...for we know how it was really done and can judge the accuracy of the prediction."

Clarke's description of the mission varies considerably from the final result, but not so much that the novel has the anachronistic feel of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. (Actually, I find that Wells holds up much better than Verne over time, but that's another topic.) However, the part that really jumped out at me, sixty years in Clarke's future, was the following conversation after a tour of the ship's cockpit:

"It's a bit overwhelming, but not so very much worse than a transcontinental jet's cockpit."

"It is if you know what goes on behind all those panels," said Matthews grimly. "Arnold Clinton - that's the electronics king - once told me that there are three thousand tubes in the computing and control circuits alone. And there must be a good many hundreds on the communications side."

Three thousand vacuum tubes? I almost laughed out loud - relying on a system like that to go to the Moon would be like having someone say that a battleship would only be able to sail if none of the light bulbs on board burned out. Now, admittedly, when Clarke was writing the book, state-of-the-art computing was represented by ENIAC, which had close to 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighed 27 tons. The next time that you have a problem with your computer, remember the gentleman in the image at the left of this paragraph, who is troubleshooting a problem in ENIAC by looking for a dead tube - see, Vista's not that bad after all, is it.

Coincidentally, the needs of the Apollo program for a more reliable system for use in the Apollo Guidance Computer led to concentrated research into the development of the integrated circuitry that replaced the vacuum tube and which is now used in virtually every piece of electronics in existence. Sadly, the AGC crashed five times - only in the computer sense, fortunately - during the landing approach to the Moon by the Eagle module.

- Sid

(Insert Star Trek cliché here.)

 

I was having a beer with a friend when his cell phone rang. After reassuring his wife that he was certain to forget to buy milk on the way home, he hung up, looked at his phone contemplatively and said, "Do you think that cell phones would look like this if it wasn't for Star Trek?" 

 

Well, actually, no, they wouldn't. Apparently Martin Cooper, the chief engineer at Motorola who developed the cell phone in 1973, is on record as stating that Star Trek was his inspiration.

- Sid