Just The Caffeine Talking

Godel Operation Minus One

Eight . . . seven . . . six . . . 

The promotional juggernaut for The Godel Operation rolls on with one day left before the official release date for the book. If you like you can read Marshal Zeringue's "Q & A" interview with me about it on the Campaign for the American Reader Web site. Read the interview here.

. . . four . . . three . . . two . . . 

Godel Operation Minus Two

Counting down now to launch. One early promotional effort: my guest article at the 'blog My Book, The Movie — in which I discuss who would be best to play the characters in The Godel Operation if it ever makes it to the screen. You can read it here.

Writing that piece was surprisingly difficult. I wrote The Godel Operation with fairly vivid mental pictures of the characters, and consequently I had to do a fair amount of research to find actors who looked like my own imaginings. 

I actually think The Godel Operation would make a splendid film. It's full of exciting action and entertaining plot reversals. The future setting of the Billion Worlds might take a fair amount of computer animation to put on screen, but in a time when even historical dramas have green screens behind the actors to dub in renderings of past landscapes without power lines and jet contrails, that should hardly be an obstacle.

If you're interested, let's do lunch.

 

Godel Operation Minus 10

Ten days from now is the official publication date of The Godel Operation. The clocks are running, the pumps are powering up, and the gantry has been rolled back. Be sure to get a copy because this launch is going to be spectacular.

If you want to read more about The Godel Operation, see my recent guest post at Sarah Hoyt's 'blog According to Hoyt. In that post I talk about the problems I've had in writing an optimistic far-future science fiction series at a time when it's hard to be optimistic about anything. Read it here.

There are many other Godel-related events in the works. Watch this space for more announcements!

Hanson on Fermi

I've posted at great length on the Fermi Paradox — the simple question "Where are they?" in regard to extraterrestrial civilizations. One element of that paradox is simply that the time it would take for an expanding civilization to spread across the Galaxy is relatively short in geological terms. Or so we assume.

Now Robin Hanson has actually tackled the question in a pair of posts on his own blog, analyzing how long it would take for civilizations to bump into each other. It's not an easy read — the math is pretty rigorous, and Hanson uses graphics to show his results which aren't easy for non-specialists to understand. But it's worth the effort.

His analysis does seem to support the idea that we are a very early civilization in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is why we don't see any others. It doesn't really explain why we don't detect any traces of civilizations in other galaxies, unless life on Earth is so unlikely that we're not only the first intelligent species in the Milky Way but the first one in all the nearby galaxies. Which doesn't fit with what we know.

It's a paradox . . .  

Son of Great Filters

Robin Hanson, who invented the term "Great Filter" in the first place, comes back to the topic in his own blog for a look at a couple of neglected aspects of the topic. You can read his whole post here.

One of the key issues he raises is whether or not a given planet (for some reason he uses the term "oasis" in his post) gets more than one try at passing through a given filter, or whether it's all or nothing. This matters because, obviously, if you have enough time and can make enough attempts, eventually you succeed. So, most relevantly, if a planet has the right conditions for life to evolve, complex molecules in its oceans (or on shoreline clay beds, or wherever) can keep bumping into each other and reforming until finally something becomes self-replicating and we're off to the races. That's what he calls a "Try-Try" filter. Failure doesn't prevent you from trying again.

Whereas if a star system doesn't have enough metals to form rocky planets, it doesn't matter how long one waits, it still won't have rocky planets. That one's all or nothing.

The question of trying again until you succeed relates to his second major point, which is that for any given world there is a certain window of time during which life might form. There was a time when Earth was getting pounded by large impacts, when liquid water on the surface was scarce and life impossible. There will be a time when the Sun is too hot and Earth's oceans will boil away. The time between those points is the window during which life can evolve on Earth. So even though life evolving is a "Try-Try" filter, no world gets unlimited tries.

A note on teleology: needless to say, no star system is "trying" to form planets, no planet is "trying" to spawn life, and no life forms are "trying" to become intelligent tool users. Conversational English is a terrible medium for discussing scientific concepts some times.

A Prediction

If you read this article — "The Bias that Divides Us," by Keith Stanovich — you will nod sagely about the cognitive bias it describes. And then you will spend ten or fifteen minutes reassuring yourself that you aren't affected by it.

Hanson Again

No, I don't have some kind of Internet stalker crush on Robin Hanson. I know I've spent six weeks writing 'blog posts about an idea he had a decade ago, but that doesn't prove anything. Posting a link to a recent piece by him about technological progress (or the lack thereof) doesn't prove anything either.

Tomorrow: more Great Filters!

A Pirate's Life for Me!

With the approach of Talk Like a Pirate day (Sept. 19) I'm pleased to be able to talk about pirates. In this case, space pirates. Baen Books has just released a new anthology of classic space-pirate yarns, called Cosmic Corsairs. It's edited by Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio, and features some excellent piratical science fiction — including a Fritz Leiber story which has never been reprinted since it appeared in 1941. 

I'm particularly excited because the volume includes my short story "To the Barbary Shore," which eventually grew into my second novel Corsair. You can read my own "How I Did It" post about the genesis of that story, and you can listen to the Baen Free Radio Hour podcast about the new anthology.

The book's available everywhere, so go get it!

New Story at the Decameron Project

Seven centuries ago, the Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a series of stories, presented as tales told by a group of travelers seeking refuge from the Black Death in a house near Florence. The tale-telling takes place over ten nights, giving the work it's title: The Decameron.

In the present era, our plague isn't quite as deadly, and people are taking refuge in their own homes (though I might risk a case of COVID-19 if I can spend a couple of weeks in a villa outside Florence). It's a good time to read some stories.

A group of SF and fantasy authors have created the Decameron Project, a Patreon operation to raise funds for Italian Coronavirus relief. There's a new story every day, with an ongoing frame story written by Jo Walton. And today's story is a brand-new piece of my own, called "The Code of the Expats."

It's based very loosely on an anecdote my mother used to tell, about something that happend to a friend of hers in Mexico in the 1950s. I hope you all enjoy it, and please drop a donation in the plate at Patreon.

How Risky Is Your Gathering?

In a time of alarm over virus transmission, how dangerous is a gathering of people? This post from Tyler Cowan's blog features a risk assessment calculator, giving the probability that someone at an event is carrying the Wuhan Coronavirus, based on the size of the event and the number of carriers nationwide.

It's reassuring to see that gatherings of up to about 30 people are pretty safe even if there are 100,000 carriers nationwide. This particular calculator is scaled for the USA, with 300 million people. For smaller countries, I think it would scale by reducing the number of carriers for a given risk level in proportion to population. I think.

Prince Prospero could have used this calculator when making up the guest list for his famous Masque. He invited a thousand other nobles to his event, but at the time the number of Red Death carriers in his kingdom was extremely high relative to population, so naturally the party guests got infected. If he had limited himself to a small dinner-party he might have made it through the epidemic alive.