Entries by Matthew Mather

Interstellar Earth

February 20, 2020 /1 Comment/in , /by

There have been many books and movies illustrating the idea that the Earth is part of an ecosystem of asteroids and comets, moons and planets that all spin around our sun.

What hasn’t been explored as much is the effect of an ecosystem on a much larger scale—the effect exerted on the Earth by objects in our interstellar and even intergalactic neighborhood.

How’s that possible? 

Sitting and reading this, you might think you’re not moving--but you are.

Let’s start with the Earth rotating around its axis like a spinning top. Our planet is eight thousand miles in diameter, or about twenty-four thousand miles around its equator, and one rotation each twenty-four hours means you’re moving at a thousand miles per hour as you speed around the Earth’s axis.

And we’re not stopping there.

The Earth itself is orbiting the sun at a speed of about 67,000 mph. The sun is rotating around the Milky Way’s galactic core at about 518,000 mph, the Milky Way moving around the center of gravity of our Local Group of galaxies at 90,000 mph and the Local Group is moving relative to our Super Cluster at a speed of about 1.35 million mph.

So how fast are you moving while sitting still?

As best as we can estimate, you’re moving at about 540 miles per second. If you went back in time by a year, you would need to travel more than twice the distance to Pluto to get back to the same physical spot in space you are now.

Over time, spaceship Earth travels a lot of distance.

And all that “space” out there isn’t empty, but kinda cloudy. As in, giant molecular cloudy. There are upwards of 8000 giant molecular clouds in our galaxy, ranging from twenty to two-hundred light years across, and as the Earth and sun orbit the Milky Way, we tend to run into “cloudy” galactic weather every few hundred millions years.

The effect can be dramatic, depending on the density and composition of the cloud, leading to kinematic heating and seeding of our atmosphere to form clouds, probably leading to “snowball Earth” scenarios where ice extends all the way to the equator--which scientists now think has happened at least once or twice. The timeline might seem impossibly huge, but in the time that complex life has existed on Earth, about a half billion years, we have completed two complete orbits around Sagittarius A (the supermassive black hole at the center).

In fact, many of the events we’d attributed previously to chance, like the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, might not be random at all, but the direct result of the interstellar interactions the Earth has with passing stars or giant molecular clouds. In school, we’re taught that the closest star, apart from the Sun, is Proxima Centuri, at just over four light years away. It may seem like the interstellar neighborhood is static. 

But it’s not.

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In February of 2015, researchers were amazed to realize that just 70,000 years ago, near enough in time that our direct ancestors would looked up in the sky and seen it, Scholz’s star, a red dwarf, passed about a half light year from us. 

This led to a flurry of data crunching, leading scientists to discover that, for instance, four million years ago, a giant star, more than twice the mass of the sun, passed less than a third of a light year from us, and in just over a million years from now, another star will pass at just over a hundredth (yes, a hundredth) of a light year from our sun, grazing the solar system itself and affecting the orbits of the planets.

Scientists are now speculating that Sedna, the 10th planetoid of the Sun, the one after Pluto, isn’t even an original planet of our Sun. It was captured from a passing star over a billion years ago, when our solar system collided with an alien star’s planetary system. Hundreds of objects in the Kuiper Belt, the collection of planetoids past Uranus, are believed to have been captured from passing stars. 

And, of course, we had our the first interstellar visitor, ‘Oumuamua, which transited the solar system in 2017, followed close on its heels by the second, 2I/Borisov, in 2019. Which leads to the realization that we’re literally floating amongst interstellar debris, some of which is settling onto the Earth as we flash through space.

So we are continually mixing together with others stars and interstellar objects, and not on a time scale of billions of years, but on a regular basis every few million years—some scientists now even think that alien stars transit our solar system’s Oort cloud as often as every few hundred thousand years.

The gravitation effects of passing stars change the orbits of the planets over the course of millions of years. A change in Earth’s orbit might have triggered one of the biggest global warming events in its history. A massive ice age, started 35 million years ago, might have also been caused by another shift in Earth’s orbit, and that this same event disturbed the asteroid belt enough to precipitate several large asteroid impacts, one of which formed the Chesapeake Bay. 

And we haven’t even talked about the 95% of “stuff” floating around us, dark matter, that we can’t see or detect, other than knowing it’s there from its gravitational signature. With upgraded sensors and increased power in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2015, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, many scientists had hoped to see evidence of dark matter.

But they’ve found nothing so far. 

Despite all of our technology and hundreds of years of peering into the cosmos, we still have no idea what makes up the vast majority of our universe. 

It was Stephen Hawking who first proposed that the missing dark matter may be in the form of invisible “primordial” black holes that were formed when our universe itself was created in the Big Bang.

Primordial black holes might have formed when the Big Bang created a super-dense soup of particles, with densities high enough to spontaneously form black holes. Recent research results using the Kepler satellite have restricted the size range of possible “black hole dark matter” candidates, but it is still a viable theory. 

Some theorists think it’s possible that these intermediate-sized primordial black holes coalesced into the super-giant black holes that form the cores of galaxies, with the left over matter of the universe cooling around them to form stars. If so, some of these primordial black holes might still be wandering the cosmos, ejected at high speeds from galactic cores during the process of merger by something called gravitational recoil.

Which leads back to one of my books.

If you want to read more, my series Nomad details the effects of a close encounter with a primordial black hole, and you can read the whole series in a discounted box set that was just released this week. Click here to check it out.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this little spin!

Matthew Mather

Matthew Mather
With over a million copies of his books sold, translated into eighteen languages, with 20th Century Fox now developing his second novel, CyberStorm, for a major film release, Matthew Mather’s books are sold worldwide.

He began his career at the McGill Center for Intelligent Machines, then started several high-tech ventures in everything from computational nanotechnology to electronic health records, weather prediction systems to genomics, and even designed an award-winning brain-training video game. He now works as a full-time author of speculative fiction.

You can follow Matt on Facebook, Twitter and his website.

Nomad wins “Science Fiction Book of Year” award

July 16, 2016 /1 Comment/in /by

Matthew Mather‘s novel Nomad was just announced as the winner of the Authors' on Air coveted “Science Fiction Book of the Year” award for 2015. The winner was determined by an online polling of the close to two million active listeners in forty-six countries that Authors' on Air is active in, and earns Mather a title as an international award winner. Nomad has already sold over a hundred thousand copies in a little over a year since its release, and has over a thousand mostly five-star reviews on Amazon.

How Space and Cyberspace are Merging in the 21st Century Battlefield

June 7, 2017 /1 Comment/in , , /by

CYBERSPACE AND OUTER space are merging to become the primary battlefield for global power in the 21st century. Both space and cyberspace systems are critical in enabling modern warfare—for strike precision, navigation, communication, information gathering—and it therefore makes sense to speak of a new, combined space-cyberspace military high-ground. From the moment Sputnik was launched in 1957, and everyone’s head turned skyward, space has occupied the military high-ground, defining much of the next fifty years of global geopolitics. Space-based systems, for the first time, broke the link between a nation’s physical territory and its global ability to gather information, communicate, navigate, and project power.

In the 1980’s, the rise of information and communications technology enabled the creation of the internet and what we’ve come to call cyberspace, a loosely-defined term that encompasses the global patchwork collection of civilian, government and military computer systems and networks. For the same reasons that space came to occupy the military high-ground—information gathering, navigation, communication—cyberspace is now taking center stage.

From a terrestrial point of view, space-based systems operate in a distant realm, but from a cyber point of view, space systems are no different than terrestrial ones. In the last decade, there has been a seamless integration of the internet into space systems, and communications satellites are increasingly internet-based. One can make the case that that space systems are now a part of cyberspace, and thus that space doctrine in the future will be heavily dependent upon cyber doctrine. The argument can also be made that cyberspace, in part, exists and rests upon space-based systems. Cyberspace is still based in the physical world, in the data processing and communications systems that make it possible. In the military domain, cyberspace is heavily reliant on the physical infrastructure of space-based systems, and is therefore subject to some of the same threats.

Space and cyberspace have many similarities. Both are entirely technological domains that only exist due to advanced technology. They are new domains of human activity created by, and uniquely accessible through, sophisticated technology. Both are vigorous arenas for international competition, the outcomes of which will affect the global distribution of power. It is no coincidence that aspiring powers are building space programs at the same time as they are building advanced cyber programs.

Space and cyberspace are both seen as a global commons, domains that are shared between all nations. For most of human history, the ability of one group of humans to influence another was largely tied to control of physical territory. Space and cyberspace both break this constraint, and while there is a general common interest to work cooperatively in peace, there has inevitably been a militarization in both domains. As with any commons, over time they will become congested, and new rules will have to be implemented to deal with this.

Congestion and disruption are problems in both space and cyberspace. Ninety percent of email is spam, and a large proportion of traffic over any network is from malware, which clogs up and endangers cyberspace. Cyberattacks are now moving from email as the primary vector, to using customized web applications using tools such as the Blackhole automated attack toolkit. Cyberattack by nation-states is now joining the criminal use of spam, viruses, Trojans and worms as deliberate attempts to attack and disrupt cyberspace.

The congestion analogy in space is that entire orbital regions can become clogged with debris. Tens of thousands of objects, from satellites and booster rockets to smaller items as nuts and bolts, now clog the orbital space around Earth. The danger of this was dramatically illustrated when an Iridium satellite was destroyed when it was hit by a discarded Russian booster in February of 2009. The situation can be made dramatically worse by purposely creating debris fields, as the Chinese did when they conducted an anti-satellite test in 2007 using a kinetic kill. Over time, entire orbital regions could become unusable.

Another similarity is that while traditional the air-sea-land domains are covered under the UN—Law of the Sea, Arctic, Biodiversity—outer space and cyberspace still operate under ad-hoc agreements mostly outside of UN frameworks. They both expand the range of human activity far in advance of laws and rules to cover the new areas being used and explored. Because space can be viewed as a sub-domain of cyberspace, any new rules brought into effect to govern cyberspace, will also affect outer space.

If there are many similarities between space and cyberspace, there are some critical differences, the most important being that space-based systems require massive capital outlays, while in comparison, cyberspace requires very little. As James Oberg points out in his book Space Power Theory, the most obvious limitation on the exercise of space power is cost, with the astronomical cost of launch first among these. Cyberspace, on the other hand, has a low threshold for entry, giving rise to the reality that governance of an extremely high-cost domain, space systems, will be dictated by rules derived from the comparatively low-cost domain of cyberspace. Space power resides on assumption of exceptionalism, that it is difficult to achieve, giving nations possessing it a privileged role in determining the balance of global power. In contrast, cyberspace, and the ability to conduct cyberwar, is accessible to any nation, or even private organizations or individuals, which have the intent.

Cyberwar has already started, and is beginning to gain in frequency and intensity. To most people, the term cyberwar still has a metaphorical quality, like the War on Obesity, probably because there hasn’t yet been a cyberattack that directly resulted in a large loss of life. Another important defining characteristic of cyberwarfare is the difficulty with attribution. Deterrence is only effective as a military strategy if you can know, with certainty, who it was that attacked you, but in a cyberattack, there is purposeful obfuscation that makes attribution very difficult.

The first cyberattack can be traced back to the alleged 1982 sabotage of the Soviet Urengoy–Surgut–Chelyabinsk natural gas pipeline by the CIA—as a part of a policy to counter Soviet theft of Canadian technology—that resulted in a three-kiloton explosion, comparable to a small nuclear device. Titan Rain is the name the US government gave a series of coordinated cyberattacks against it over a three-year period from 2003 to 2006, and in 2007 Estonia was subject to an intense cyberattack that swamped the information systems of its parliament, banks, ministries, newspapers and broadcasters. In 2011 a series of cyberattacks called Night Dragon were waged against energy grid companies in America. This is significant because of the Aurora Test conducted by Idaho National Laboratory in 2007, where a 21-line package of software code, injected remotely, caused a large commercial electrical generator to self-destruct by rapidly recycling its circuit breakers, demonstrating that cyberattack can destroy electrical infrastructure.

A new breed of sophisticated cyberweapon was revealed when the Stuxnet worm attacked Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facilities in June of 2010. It was not the first time that hackers targeted industrial systems, but it was the first discovered malware that subverted industrial systems. Another game-changer was the 2012 Shamoon virus that knocked out 30,000 computers at Saudi Aramco, forcing that company to spend weeks restoring global services. Shamoon was significant because it was specifically design to inflict damage, and was one of the first examples of a military cyberweapon being used against a civilian target. The more recent Wannacry malware attacks in 2017  were reportedly initiated by North Korea and directed to disrupt Western commercial and logistics networks. It is only a matter of time before a cyberweapon targeting space-based systems is unleashed, if it already hasn’t happened.

It is worth it to back up and explore the core issues surrounding internet security. The internet was originally designed as a redundant, self-healing network, the sort of thing that is purposely hard to centrally control. In the late 80’s it evolved into an information-sharing tool for universities and researchers, and in the 90’s it morphed into America’s shopping mall. Now it has become something that is hard, even impossible, to define—so we just call it cyberspace, and leave it at that.

First and foremost, there is the issue that while everyone runs the internet, nobody is really in charge of it. ICANN— The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers—exerts some control, but the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), convened by UN in 2001, was created because nations around world have become increasingly uneasy that their critical infrastructures, and economies, are dependent on the internet, a medium that they had little control over and no governance oversight. The issue has still not been resolved. To the libertarian-minded creators of the internet, decentralized control is a feature, but to governments trying to secure nuclear power stations and space-based assets, it is a serious flaw. A large part of the problem is that we are trying to use the same internet-based technology for social networking and digital scrap-booking, and use this same technology to control power stations and satellites. Not that long ago, critical systems—space systems, power grid, water systems, nuclear power plants, dams—had their own proprietary technologies that were used to control them, but many of these have been replaced these with internet-based technologies as a cost-savings measure. The consequence is that as a result, now nearly everything can be attacked via the internet.

When it comes to software producers, while they would like their products to be secure from hackers, they have a competing interest in wanting to able to access their software installed on customers’ machines. They want to be able to collect as much information as possible, to sell to third parties or use in their own marketing, and also to want to update new features into their software remotely. Often, this is to install patches to discovered security vulnerabilities, precisely because code is poorly written to begin with, because they realize they can update it later. This backdoor into software is a huge security flaw—one that companies purposely build into their products—and is one that has been regularly exploited by hackers.

There are many consequences to all this.

The first is that, because we use the same internet-based technology to support both the private lives of individuals and operate critical infrastructure, there will be a perpetual balancing act between these two competing interests when it comes to security. Another is that until the general public really sees cybersecurity as a threat, many of the fixable problems will not be addressed, such as setting international prohibitions on cyberespionage—making them comparable in severity to physical incursions into the physical sovereign space of a nation-state—or forcing software companies to get serious about secure coding practices and eliminating backdoors into their products.

Because of the extremely high value of space-based assets, and because they are already a seamless part of cyberspace, when a major cyber conflict does emerge, space systems will be primary targets for cyberattack. Even if space systems are not directly attacked, they may be affected. There can be no known blast radius to a cyberweapon when it is unleashed. Even the Stuxnet worm, which was highly targeted in several ways, still infected other industrial control systems around the world, causing untold collateral damage.

A more difficult threat to consider than simply denying access or service to a space system through cyberattack is the problem of integrity. In the cybersecurity world, the three things to protect are confidentiality (keeping something secret, and being able to verify this), availability, and integrity of data. Integrity is by far the hardest to protect and ensure. If a cyberattacker, for example, decided on a slow (over time) modification of data in a critical space junk database, they could influence moving satellites into harm’s way or worse, drop satellites from orbit into populated areas.

Over the last fifty years, a comprehensive strategy based around deterrence was developed in conjunction with the idea of space power theory. In the future, a comparable framework and space-cyberspace power theory will need to be developed. Many questions need to be answered, most especially regarding how the international community will establish rules for cyberspace, the definition of rules for cyberwar, proportionality of response, and how to deal with the problem of attribution. Exactly how the developing cyberwar doctrine will affect the way outer space is governed remains to be seen.

Matthew Mather is author of a fictional account of the first major cyberattack, CyberStorm, which has sold close to a million copies, been translated in 23 countries and is in development for film by 20th Century Fox. You can find CyberStorm on Amazon.

The Brink of a New Age of Discovery

April 29, 2016 /0 Comments/in , , , /by

Do you remember those old posters from the 1950's that had people in flying cars and robots doing the dishes? It must have been an exciting time. Test pilots had just broken the sound barrier, followed by a breathless rush into the dawn of the Space Race that led to the moon landings just 66 years after the first time Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the first airplane. At that time, nuclear power seemed ready to offer limitless cheap energy, and the boom of microelectronics was just beginning to dazzle.

flying-car

 

What happened to my flying car? While it's true that electronics have gotten smaller and faster beyond the wildest of imaginings of 40 years ago, it's also true that the 747 airliner first flew in 1969, and that's probably the same plane you'd take to fly today. Same speed, same altitude–the 747 was an amazing feat in the 60's, but by now we were supposed to be vacationing in the vast donut space stations of Arthur C. Clark's 2001. And speaking of 1969, that was 47 years ago…if we went from the first airplane to the moon in just sixty years, fifty years after that shouldn't we be taking warp-drive spaceships to Betelgeuse? What happened?

For instance, what about dark matter? This is the stuff that makes up about 90% of the mass/energy of our universe, but so far physicists have only been able to narrow it down to (a) massive subatomic particles that we're literally swimming in although have never detected, or (b) primordial black holes that invisibly glue together galaxies. So 90% of everything is either something subatomic or something unimaginably massive and large. That's a pretty big gap for something rather important.

Dark_matter_stride_by_tchaikovsky2

Or how about eels? If you live in North America or Europe, you've most likely encountered an eel in your local river. Yet all North American and European eels originate from a single source, the mysterious “Sargasso Sea” somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean where eels spawn each year and migrate outward. Despite knowing this *has* to exist, not one person has ever witnessed a spawning eel, or found the location of the Sargasso Sea that has to exist.

eels

Two obvious things that have to exist, and yet we've never seen them. I believe this is called faith. So keep the faith, my friends, because our future is fast approaching.

Just a few years ago, I remember feeling depressed when NASA made tired-sounding announcements of sending humans to Mars in thirty or forty years. Ho-hum, ho-hum. And then this week, SpaceX makes a surprise announcement saying they plan to send an unmanned Red Dragon capsule to Mars in 2018 (TWO years from now, not twenty), and in September of this year will they will release serious plans for colonizing Mars. Holy Buck Rogers! And this comes just a few weeks after they butt-landed a rocket on a floating drone ship in the middle of the Atlantic. Does this sound like something from a science fiction book? Cause it's not. This is happening, folks, not to mention the slew of other private space enterprises going on.

In other news, big corporations are now creating their own endemic artificial intelligences–witness Siri from Apple, Alexa from Amazon, Cortana from Microsoft, and reports of just about every major hedge fund in Connecticut starting up their own AIs to run their core businesses. It's not quite the android Replicants of Mr. Philip K. Dick, but it's more than halfway to HAL of 2001…and pair this up with the walking robots from Boston Dynamics. And speaking of AI disasters, when Microsoft recently unleashed Tay–Cortana's AI cousin–free and unfettered into the world a few weeks ago, within hours she became a Hitler-loving racist asshole, which I feel perhaps doesn't bode well for humankind over the long term (bear fealty now to our robot-AI overlords before it's too late).

But this isn't the big news. No. The big news, I think, is that we're on the brink of TOE–and by that I mean the Theory Of Everything. Without getting stuck in the details, for the last forty or so years, we've been stuck with quantum-electrodynamics theory on one side (the merger of quantum, electromagnetics, and strong and weak nuclear force theories) and gravity-relativity on other, and never the twain shall meet. Nobody has been able to devise one coherent physical model of our universe that includes the four fundamental forces together with quantum theory–but I think scientists are on the brink of a breakthrough (witness the discover of a new, previously unsuspected particle by the LHC) that may create a new fundamental picture of reality.

Esoteric?

How can this possibly affect us?

Perhaps.

But “quantum theory” only really emerged in 1924 as a discipline unto itself with Heisenberg and Schrodinger (it did exist as bits and pieces in the 1800's, but only hints of something unconnected), and at the time, sitting on a steamship deck and sipping your coffee, you might have been excused from wondering what possible application it could have. Fast-forward sixty years, and it fueled the technical underpinning of the electronics boom that has birthed the Internet, AIs, and worldwide instantaneous communication networks.

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What could a new theory of the ultimate nature of reality make possible? I have no idea, but I'll bet you that in fifty years it will be something amazing that we can't even imagine now. Tired old NASA is even funding a serious research project into faster-than-light travel–the idea isn't to really travel faster than light, but to bend space (and thus time) to punch holes through it. The physics say it's possible, but the energies required are either vaster than a hundred suns, or not much at all–what's needed is an understanding of the real physics behind the ultimate nature of our reality, and our lab-coated friends may just be on the edge of supplying it. So dust off your Mars suit, boot up your personal AI, and step onto that warp-drive spaceship, because the future is fast approaching.

But I doubt we'll ever find out where eels come from.

Prophecies and Science Fiction

February 19, 2016 /2 Comments/in /by

It’s an amazing experience when a prediction from a science fiction writer’s book comes true. I had this happen to me last week when gravitational waves were discovered, in almost exactly the way I predicted in my book Nomad (when two colliding black holes were discovered).

How did it feel? Surreal would be the best word. Frightening. Then surreal.

Dozens of fans sent me copies of  articles describing the use of LIGO, a laser interferometry device,  to find the black holes—which was exactly the plot device I’d used in Nomad. It felt like I was reading something from my own book when I read online about real scientists. And not only that, but the size of the black holes were almost exactly as I’d described as well. The critical difference was that these black holes weren’t on a collision course with Earth. (ed. note: Now THAT would have been frightening! And that was the point of Nomad.)

gravity waves

To be fair, much of the credit for this goes to the long list of astrophysicists that I consulted with as I constructed the plot (and I credit them right at the start of the book, thank you very much, gentle-men and -women). Still, it felt like I’d done my own little part in the rich history of science fiction writers making predictions about the future.

Reading Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, first published in 1865, really provided my inspiration in wanting to write books like this. If you're a fan of science fiction, I'd recommend reading it. Amazing. Of course, he made predictions about a manned space flight to the moon almost 100 years before the Apollo program, but I wonder how many of the engineers involved in Apollo might have been inspired by reading science fiction to do what they did?

And the term “robot” was first coined in science fiction (originally appeared in a play called Rossum’s Universal Robots in 1921 by Czech writer Karel Čapek, and popularized by Isaac Asimov in his Robot series, which if you haven't read, please stop reading now and go do your homework), which is an interesting example of fiction creating reality—but the list goes on and on, from space travel to submarines, sliding doors, laser guns, invisibility cloaks and more. All of these were once the realm of science fiction, and are now reality. So what's next?

And that’s one of the reasons I became a science fiction writer in the first place. To do something like that. To become a part of the tradition.

Each of my books makes an attempt at this, to educate as well as entertain. In CyberStorm, I took readers on a realistic journey into what a major cyberattack might look like. In Darknet, I explored the merger of modern financial networks with artificial intelligence–and within a year after publishing Darknet, I got a flood of emails from fans talking about the announcement of an AI program at the world’s biggest hedge fund.

With Nomad, the idea I wanted to explore was how the earth wasn’t separate from our interstellar environment, and just after I finished writing it a year and a half ago, I had another surprise in the news.

In February of 2015, researchers were amazed to discover that just 70,000 years ago, near enough in time that our direct ancestors would have seen it, Scholz’s star passed about a half light year from the Earth (in comparison, the star currently closest to the Sun is Proxima Centuri at 4.2 light years).

This led to a flurry of data crunching last year, leading scientists to discover that, for instance, four million years ago, a giant star–more than twice the mass of the sun–passed less than a third of a light year from us, and in just over a million years from now, another star will pass at just over a hundredth (yes, a hundredth) of a light year from our sun, grazing the solar system itself and possibly affecting the orbits of the planets.

Now scientists are saying that Sedna, the 10th planetoid of the Sun, the one after Pluto, might not even be an original planet of our Sun. New data suggests it was probably captured from a passing star about a billion years ago, when our solar system collided with an alien star’s planetary system. Hundreds of objects in the Kuiper Belt, the collection of planetoids past Uranus, might have been captured from passing stars.

nomad 5

A change in Earth’s orbit 55 million years ago might have even triggered one of the biggest global warming events in its history. And a massive ice age, started 35 million years ago, might have been also been caused by another shift in Earth’s orbit, and this same event might have disturbed the asteroid belt enough to precipitate several large asteroid impacts, one of which formed the Chesapeake Bay. Some now believe these sorts of events might have been caused by the gravitational effect of a passing star, now we know that they're literally swarming around us.

And that is exactly the kind of event that I described happening in Nomad–which is free today on Amazon.

nomad4

All my best and thanks for joining us on our journey to Discover Sci-Fi!