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It’s All About Light

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In just three years from now, we will mark the fifty-year anniversary of man’s first setting foot on the moon.  Fifty years!  It’s gone fast.  Too fast.  The 70’s and 80’s were full of visionaries projecting that we would have bases on the moon and burgeoning tourism by now.  Alas man hasn’t set foot on the moon again since our last Apollo mission in 1972.  Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon and that was almost 44 years ago!

For those of us who grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars, our effort in getting off the planet and into space has been agonizingly slow.  Instead, we watch as NASA sends rover after rover to investigate nearby bodies, while mumbling amongst ourselves “how hard can it be?”

But as it turns out, it’s pretty hard.  Physics is the most obvious problem, especially for technologies that haven’t been invented yet.  And the more we learn about space, the more obstacles we discover.  Problems like radiation.  Or lack of gravity.  Or social isolation.  The problems continue to grow based on the most fundamental human traits imaginable.  And things we’ve taken for granted for millions of years.

Even with today’s technologies, we only have “ideas” on how to solve some of these problems.  And it can be a very long time between initial concepts and working models.  Which paints a pretty stark picture.  The unfortunate reality is that it may be a very long time before we have a ship capable of going anywhere.

Light beams

So the question then is…do we even have to?  We all know the fastest speed possible (that we know of) is the speed of light.  And while we’d love to venture out and see other places and new planets, it all really boils down to just one reason.  After all, if you’ve seen one sun, you’ve pretty much seen them all.  And I don’t think anyone is all that excited about seeing a planet comprised of nothing but barren rock or clouds of deadly methane.

No, most of us prefer to venture through space with one single, monumental goal in mind.  To find life!  Any kind of life.  Sure, a friendly alien waving back at us, waiting to share their knowledge would be great.  But even just seeing plant life on another planet would be incredible.  Or knowing that life “exists” beyond our own Earth would change everything.  Not just textbooks, but it would validate so much of our beliefs.  Even the Drake Equation, as simple and realistic as it is, is little more than scientific “faith”.  And knowing that our assumptions and extrapolations were right would fill so many of us with a profound sense of eternal satisfaction.

But we have no ship.  And we won’t have one that can help us make these discoveries for a very long time.  Most likely after the vast majority of us have long since been laid to rest.   Although there is one way.

There is one way that is within our grasp.  And it’s possible right now.  It doesn’t require huge leaps in technology, or exotic solutions that we can only imagine in diagrams or books.  A way that may just be able to answer the question as to whether we’re alone, long before we pass on still clinging to our scientific faith.

I’m talking about planet hunting.  The search for distant Earth-like planets, visible to us now thanks to the wonders of light.  You see, instead of us having to figure out a way to make the trip, light has already done that for us.  And when that light has bounced off a distant planet, it carries with it signatures of the elements that it bounced against.

In other words, by examining the faint rays of this light, even using today’s technology, we can see what molecules are in that planet’s atmosphere.  Which means we can determine what caused it.  Things like methane and carbon dioxide can be caused by many things, but one thing that is a sure signature of life is oxygen.  Oxygen, in large quantities, is unquestionably the result, or byproduct, of a living organism.

This all means that we can potentially answer the biggest question of all, without ever having to leave our planet.  At least for now.  Because while a plant or forest may not sound interesting, we simply need to remember that those are complex organisms.  And to find complex life out there means we will eventually find more complex and potentially intelligent life.

Light is the key.  Light doesn’t just provide illumination.  It provides information.  Like nature’s fiber optic cables, with bits of data that has already traversed the universe, it can help us verify that we are not alone.  And that as Frank Drake posited many years ago, there are likely thousands of other civilizations out there.

This is why we all love science fiction.  Because deep in our hearts we know we’re right.

And with any luck…simple photons are about to prove it.

Michael C. Grumley lives in Northern California with his wife and two young daughters where he works in the Information Technology field. He's an avid reader, runner and most of all father. He dotes on his girls every chance he gets. His website is https://www.michaelgrumley.com

Prophecies and Science Fiction

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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.

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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.

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