Fiction in progress: Annihilation

The question is not whether it is possible to wipe out a considerable part of the world population, but how long it will take before someone will find it worthwhile to even try it.
Apart from the insane points of view of religious and/or ideologic fanatics that have often been depicted in cheap novels and unrealistic B-movies throughout recent history there isn't a sane reason why anyone would want to kill each and every living soul on this planet.

Why? Earth would become a very harsh place to begin with, without all the complex chains of industry that are needed to provide even simple things like our daily bread, but even more importantly (and, suicidal fanatics, pay attention here) there's nobody left to appreciate the hard work that has gone into it. So there is no good reason to try it. But it might occur to someone that - while killing everybody isn't that smart - killing only half or at least a few billion of everyone would be a lot less stupid. Most of the machinations driving the world would still continue to churn on, and a lot of people would remain to appreciate, or at least remember in a very profound way, what happened.

So let's settle on three billion people. What would that bring us? What would be a decent reason to get rid of half your family, your town, your coworkers, etcetera?

Well, money and power of course. How would it feel to blackmail half of the world into oblivion and own the other half after the fact? Ethics aside, it might appeal to a very small fraction of mankind. And alas, a very small fraction is enough, being with 6 (almost 7) billion people in total. What would knowing that you will survive the next couple of years be worth to you? What price would you put on being certain that you and your loved ones would survive an approaching global disaster? Anything you have? Good. Now multiply that by three billion an you know what's at stake. The question how to collect all that wealth is something else entirely, but we will come to that.

So let's get working. The easiest way to kill a lot of people would be to throw something unhealthy into the air or into the water. All people need water and air all the time. It is not that hard to poison or pollute some small bodies of water unnoticed and history teaches us that many have once succeeded in doing so. We could choose to poison the world puddle by puddle, but this might be detected before we ever really get the hang of it. Timing is very important, because we don't want to spill the beans too early.

On a global scale however, this would mean an unpractical and expensive logistic nightmare. Expensive because of the necessary involvement of a lot of co-conspirators and the massive quantities of poison one would need to make or purchase and deliver. Unpractical because even one mistimed word of one of your partners in crime might put an untimely end to your dark plans.

Back to the drawing board. First problem: the enormous amount of unhealthy stuff we need to effectively kill 3 billion people. Three billion is a lot. To even feed each of them one teaspoon of whatever you fancy to do the trick, you would need 15.000 tonnes of it. Though this conveniently equals the cargo capacity of a Typhoon class Russian submarine, and thus also provide us with a stealthy delivery mechanism, it  might be hard to maneuver such a monster through small rivers to reach even the remotest of people. If you had access to the distribution of drinking water, you would even need a lot more, because only a tiny fraction of that water actually is being drunk.

Luckily, there are poisons of which you'd only need a few nanograms per capita. This would lessen the transportation burden considerably, but we would still need the same distribution network to get it where you want it at the time you need it. That is, is we take it as a given that the chemical has to be produced in advance. But even this is not quite necessary.

We can make our own little portable production facilities instead. And even better, they can reproduce, so we wouldn't need a lot of it to begin with. The most toxic chemical in the world, botulin (also know for its application in cosmetic surgery under the alias Botox), is manufactured by a nice little bacterium. So people would not only die from it, they would also look good afterward. The only real problem is, we don't need it right away, but all at a certain moment in time. Can we pull that off? Yes we can. It is possible to let the gene that takes care of the botulin production express itself after a certain amount of generations. This can be programmed uncannily well if you know how to do it.

At this moment science hasn't progressed enough to postpone expression for more than two generations without bringing external stimuli to the game. You are undoubtedly familiar with the common wisdom that some treats skip one generation. This effect should be stretched to skip a lot more generations (and bacterial generations are short, mind you!). But a little more tinkering might very well enable us to time the manifestion of this property years into the future. The nice thing about it is that the bacteria can take their time to spread themselves all over the world without anybody knowing until it's much too late. And they aren't that hard to feed and keep alive.

Fiction in progress: Alt.History

[Please read NDE first]

We are familiar with temporal inertia, which is basically the same as the familiar inertia associated with mass in space. Since mass equals energy equals information, and space and time have become roughly one thing since Einstein came around, we know that we a)  can travel through time, provided that b) we don't mess things up too far. Good.

Now on with the storyline. Something went horribly wrong. And when I say wrong, I mean a serious major mother-of-all-fuck-ups in which almost all humankind dies horribly and slowly and/or the world becomes a very nasty place to live. Things have to be put right, but in the past rather than in the present. Luckily one time machine (see NDE) did survive, but there's only energy left for two interventions.

We also learn that, while similar, the timeline of this world isn't exactly the same as the one we live in. The slowly revealed big difference  being that christianity, judaism (and islam) never caught on. Never in fact even happened.

But they will happen this time, because wise men in our alternate timeline decide that an economic cause is to be blamed for the current situation. That economic cause must be cured radically.

After studying history, our wise men decide that only two insertions need to be carried out. The first one will insert Moses into Egypt. He will lead the jews out of Egypt and start a religion, for it is calculated that this will restore the world economy. Regrettably a very rigid legal system must be enforced to ensure success. This sounds like a nice solution, but back in the future, it soon becomes clear that around the year 0 (CE) the romans will undo the effect of the insertion, while the same time the jews will happily undo their religion by interpreting the aforementioned legal system even more rigidly.

Calculations prove that this is counterproductive to the plan. So a new plan is drawn, this time involving Jesus being inserted into Israel. He saves the day loosening the rules, with christianity as a side effect, and leaves the place using some nifty 2300 century techniques, baffling the locals.

The second insertion got us back on the right path, but temporal inertia has been violated on a major scale. To prevent a cosmic breakdown of spacetime (and to enable one more essential insertion) our wise men first need to clean up the mess they created, so they plant a third guy, Adolf. He is tasked with getting rid of all the jews in an organized manner, so they can harvest the information. But that doesn't work out as planned (as we are well aware). He did however collect a lot of information, so a final insertion can be made, which will bring X. to the start of the twentyfirst century to do Y. Now things can start getting really interesting.

Fiction in progress: NDE

As is already suspected, time travel is very well possible. There are some technical challenges to overcome, and we would have to live with some fundamental functional limitations, but those are no reasons not to do it. The only problem is that it is very, very expensive. And a bit dangerous as well.

The first working time machine will be invented somewhere around 2300. According to common twentyfirst century science, time travel is either not possible or would require all or most of the mass in the universe to get you somewhere, depending who you ask. It would at least be very inefficient. Well, that's not true. Science is just not looking in the right direction at this moment.

The other myth is that time machines can only be used to travel time that lies in the future of the machine's invention. The common 'proof' for this being: If it were possible, why didn't we meet tourists from the future? Also not true. Twentythird century time machines (and in fact, all time machines) could travel back and forth to anywhen they'd be programmed to travel, even to a point in time before the big bang (which by the way actually never happened).

Two hundred years from now, someone will look in the right direction, and build a very nice time machine. But even though it will not require all the mass and/or energy of ou universe to operate, it will follow the law of temporal inertia: Every change applied to spacetime will require an amount of energy proportional to the amount of change in the information topology of the universe. If someone would go back in time and kill a certain toddler named Adolf, there would be a major shift in information. Half the population of the world would live entirely diffent lives than they would have otherwise, provided that they even lived at all. This would cost so much energy, that the enterprise wouldn't be possible even with twentythird century technology and ditto energy budgets. You know what a gallon of petrol costs these days and no new fossil fuel deposits will be found in the next two centuries, trust me.

But energy can also be won back with information. Information tends to degrade over time. Normally this is a slow and predictable process you may experience yourself when you try to play an old video tape. Years ago, the image and sound were crisp and clear, but now it is ridden with random bands of static and hiss. This is called entropy. Entropy is the way of the universe to revert itself to a more chaotic state in order to conserve itself. It is unavoidable and as unreversable as baking an egg. The strange thing is that creating order costs as much energy as creating chaos, so why the universe has this 'preference' for chaos, we don't know.  Since order requires awareness and purpose to be appreciated, and the universe (for all we know) lacks both, we can profit from this.

If we can prevent or at least postpone the entropic process, we can borrow energy from the universe that can be converted to energy later on and then used in any form we'd fancy. But how do we intercept entropy in its finest hour? The human brain is one of the densest (and meaningful) places for information to be found, and luckily for us, it has a very distinct moment of total entropy. One moment one breathes, thinks and talks, the next moment one is completely and unreversibly dead. Entropy takes place in mere seconds, destroying petabytes of information that has taken decades to form.

Also, the moment of death of most people is recorded minutely, so it would require a time traveler only a small envelope of time to witness a very valuable moment and profit from it. Two hundred years from now, reading the contents of a brain is as easy as plugging a flashdrive into your computer is today.

To be continued.

Extract from my future reading list (1)

1. A book about someone who experieces all kinds of things that have 7 billion to one odds .
2. Though brains are very complex in their physical structure, the true rise of intelligence was greatly assisted by the attached hands and legs. This book is about a less fortunate life form. It has the brain, but no mobility, agility and other useful properties. Enter the cauliflower.
3. Image one has a time machine, but you must use it efficiently. What would you do?
4. To be continued

The end of all traphic jams

A simple proposal: every motorist on public roads has a radio on board his vehicle. On a nationwide frequency, a tape plays this message "one....two...three....now!" on a ten second loop, just like the old machine one could call (does it still exist?) to learn the exact time.

Once people get stuck in slow traffic, they tune their radios to that frequency, and as soon as the tape reaches the "now!" part, everyone kicks down their accelerator simultaneously. Bam. Everybody driving again. Problem solved.

Lichen

"That slowly? Really?"
"Yes. Each of these large spots would have needed years or even centuries to grow this large."
"And all that structure! It seems so complex."
"It sure does. But it isn't. Those lines are just the most convenient way of transporting nutrients throughout the organism."
"Wow. Just wow!"
"Actually, it isn't even a single organism. It's more like symbiotic life. Do you see that green hairy patch? That's half the puzzle, we think. Produced oxygen. Still does, by the way."
"I see. But that couldn't have sustained itself, could it? Not like that. It would have had to rely on more mobile organisms for their food supply, maybe even something fungal."
"Exactly. But you know what's really strange?"
"No?"
"We couldn't find any of those fungi anywhere. Or residue of it, for that matter."
"Strange. And what are these pointy structures on the left?"
"We don't really know. Might be sediment left by those same missing symbionts."
"They look so beautiful and full of detail! But still, they are so flat! Why didn't they use the available height? That would have given them so much more efficiency."
"I agree. But apparently one doesn't become a dead end in evolution without some considerable blind spots."
"And how did they multiply? Did it have spores or something that could be spread through the atmosphere?"
"What I've discovered so far, indicates they never even left this single surface. The just spun those tiny lines and created more spots in empty spaces. Do you see them?"
"Barely. It's just so intriguing. I feel almost sorry that we have to clean it out. Even a boring life deserves a chance."
"Well, we need to get the silicon back. We don't want it contaminated with all kinds of sticky stuff."
"Just imagine they would have known."
"What?"
"That they lived on an old burnt out computer core."
"They couldn't. This is a very primitive life form."
"You really wouldn't have to be that smart. Everyone knows silicon is a very rare element. And the cooling water should have definitely given it away, even when there's almost nothing of it left."
"Okay, you win. Let's rub it off."

Fiction in progress: Early birds

What if everything around you isn't what it seems? What if 65 million years ago not only the dinosaurs disappeared. Something went missing along with them. The only remnants of a civilization being the omnipresent birds you see all around you. Clues aplenty: The incredible information density of bird song. The uncanny ability of some birds to perform complex behaviour, even making tools. Overly complex mating rituals that look not unlike human dance. Recent research even points to birds that do agriculture and retinal head-up-displays with navigation overlays. Really, google it.

Could it be that birds are degenerated or even transcended versions of a highly intelligent civilization that preceded ours by just a few million years? We've only been around for 20,000 years, which equals the blink of an eye in cosmic terms. And if they were around, where did they go, and most importantly: Why did they go and leave no trace?

Well, what if they happened to clean up after them really well or what if we just didn't look in the right places? As more and more scientific evidence piles up, an image is forming with some considerable holes in its center.

I just might be writing about that center.

On buses

Earlier I wrote about my daily bus trips. I told you they are boring. Ok, nothing much interesting might happen to the outsider, but to the watchfull eye some interesting things happen almost without reaching the conscious level of ones mind.

So. This morning i got on my bus again. As on most mornings, i am the only person to get on the bus on its first stop, so i get to be the only one (apart from the bus driver) to witness the filling of the bus. More and more, i get detached from the other people's on the bus and their lives. Though every day i see more of them, it seems like seeing more is to feel more apart. Distance gets important.

And i am not the only one thinking that way. Take a random bus stop and an empty bus approaching. Several people standing at the stop. When the bus stops, it will always come down to the following: Person 1 steps on the bus. He is the only traveller who gets to choose between two equal alternatives. It depends on his opinion on the driver of the bus. If Person 1 doesn't like the driver, he will undoubtedly walk through the entire bus and take the seat nearest to the rear window. If he considers the driver a part of the bus, or he doesn't have a negative impression of him, he might also choose to sit directly behind the driver. Person 1 is however the only one who has this luxury. The moment he has taken his seat, all the other people are bound to a very strong bus law:
The Law Of Maximum Distance.

Let's pretend that Person 1 has some grudge against the driver, and decides to sit way in the back of the bus. Obeying the Law Of Maximum Distance, Person 2 will take his seat near the driver (despite any grudges he or she might feel against the driver). Person 3 will see Person 1 and Person 2 and take a seat at the exact center of the bus. This will continue until all benches are occupied by one person. Then, once again, one person gets to choose (because now all seats are equal again), but this is not really the case, for to gain maximum distance, not only location is of importance. There also has to be a proper means to escape. Thus, the first of the remaining seats that will be taking, will be the seat in the direct vicinity of the exit door. That one being taken, The Law Of Maximum Distance will take over again and all other seats will fill evenly according to the law.

So, inside small areas people behave like mindless gas under pressure, and take as much interpersonal space as they can get. In itself that isn't too strange: there are more laws in nature that apply to microscopic as well as macroscopic scale. The really strange thing is, that people act the opposite way when they are not yet on the bus, but still waiting on the bus stop. Though there is space enough (open air, an unending strech of sidewalk in at least two directions), as soon as the bus appears over the horizon, they stampede to a single imaginary square inch on the edge of the sidewalk. All the people know that this is an impossible thing to do, but yet they try it. And they keep doing that every single working day!

My point is: How can it be that being outside or inside a bus determines the human behaviour? Is there some dark force involved? Do we find it so important to be the first on the bus, still knowing that the driver got there first, anyway? What use is it to have free choice, if there is nothing too choose from? And the oddest: Why do people choose to stand in a crowd, pushing against eachother (which they seem to hate), in order to sit in a crowd, trying to avoid eachother's early morning gazes (which they also hate)? What is the point? Hmmm. To be continued...

On time

Wouldn't it be nice if you could see in the past? Anywhere you would want to look?

I think i might have an interesting theory about that, but it depends strongly on the assumption that, given an empty universe in which two bodies (stars or whatever) are introduced, these two bodies would immediately begin to act and react on each other, as if the information about the physical states of the two, like gravitional pull, were swapped instantaneously.

I do however not have a universe at my disposal, nor do i own two considerable masses to tinker with. I fear that the speed of light also binds this theory, but if there is anybody out there who knows that this is not the case, i might have some theory about how we could take a snapshot of yesterday.

Please respond...

On speed

First, I have to disappoint all you addicts: this isn't one about drugs, but about the concept of moving between A and B within a certain amount of time. A few days ago, i was sitting in a bus, and as i am one of those people who prefer not to stare fellow citizens in their faces, it was my duty to keep the bus window semi-opaque with my moist breath, so to protect my travelling friends from the gaze of whoever was standing on the bus stop.

Needless to say that this task didn't ask much of my attention. Therefore, i began wondering about the concept of speed. Basically, we (i, at least) take speed for granted. We walk, drive, travel by several other means, and in the process mostly we don't think about the walk or ride or flight itself, but about what will happen to us once we've reached our destination. And that is a pity. Speed is a remarkable thing.

Remarkable, because i just discovered that speed can only exist in two very distict states, which are: no speed at all, or the speed of light. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to go between those two speeds. And we use these two states every day! Don't let highway patrol get you!

"But how can this be?", you might be asking now. I'll try to explain. As i said, the theory got to me while being on my way home on some bus, and i just now decided to post it, so i had to backward engineer it and regrettably some of the - very sound - theory is lost.

It begins like this: If one wants to walk, he has first to move his leg. But before he can move his leg, he must move a muscle in that leg. However, before the muscle moves, he has to send (i.e. move) a signal from his brain to his leg muscle that tells it to move. To make up this signal, some chemicals in his brain must move, et cetera. Conclusion is that everything that moves, does so because it is being moved by something that is ALREADY moving. Nothing moves by itself.

Imagine a car, driving from C to D (it has driven a lot between A and B, so i decided it was time for a change). Somewhere halfway it encounters a rabbit, and its driver decides to brake, even though he has some very serious business to do in D, and he's already late. To do so, the wheels of the car should slow down, but this can only happen if the driver begins to move his foot. only actually he can't do that. To start movement - to accelerate - a reaction mass is required, moving the other way. But as nothing moves by itself and the reaction mass isn't already moving, the two masses could never reach a speed other than zero. Acceleration is impossible!!

Having concluded that nothing can move by itself, and that acceleration is impossible once we've reached a speed of absolute zero, we can only look around us and say: "But everything IS moving nonetheless. How do we explain that?" Simple. Once we look closer at things (but science doesn't yet have the tools to do so), we could only discover that everything does indeed always move. As the only discrete measure of non-zero speed is the speed of light (this one is proven), it can only be that everything moves with the speed of light, only not all the time. It's more or less like a neon light. When the gass inside the tube is touched by a tiny bit of electric energy, it leaps (without intermediate states) into a light-emitting state, until it lacks the energy to do so and returns to its 'dark' state.

When we move, we move with the speed of light during a very short frame of time, and thus over a very small distance. Then we idle for a while, and move again. The energy stored in petrol tanks, candy bars et cetera, gives us the ability to alter our speed-state. The more energy applied, the longer the speed of light states become.

Now the only thing we need to do is to try to maintain this enlighted state a little longer, so that we can cross the Atlantic in a fraction of a second, or to get ourselves a speeding ticket that even Bill Gates couldn't afford.

In the beginning

Were was I? Did I mention anything about myself already? Guess I did, so I won't bother you with too much of me. Back to the main problem:

What to post??

Don't know yet. I'll get back later.