Up and at 'em = down and out?

Thanks to the film Gravity the Kessler syndrome is getting plenty of discussion at the moment. That's the idea that objects colliding in orbit could trigger a cascade, with the mass of debris produced potentially rendering spaceflight very hazardous, keeping us on the ground, grounded.

It's easy to imagine it used as a weapon, but for sci-fi and fantasy it could make for a strange new world - one not so far from the world we're in now.

Billions of 'actual banknotes' found in unsold clothing?

I'm thinking of running an occasional series on arguably dodgy science writing, with stand-out snippets. It may or may not be good for sly-fi.

I found this title at the website of a generally well-respected British daily newspaper.

New 'life in space' hope after billions of 'habitable planets' found in Milky Way

Note how the inverted commas suggest the phrases 'life in space' and 'habitable planets' are either quotes or questionable. So far so standard. But why not mark the word 'found' in the same way? Have they really been found in the usual sense, i.e. observed directly?

Not yet. The science itself is also interesting. It seems that indirect observations - and arguably very indirect observations - gave a number for the possible planets orbiting a specific set of stars, and that this number has been scaled up for a much larger set.

It looks a bit like me finding what feels to be a banknote in a jacket I have on and betting I'll find one in a pocket of every item of clothing I own, and maybe items not bought yet.

Is it reasonable to wonder whether our 'knowledge' is based on overeaching, whether it's a house of cards? If you can imagine ulterior motives in things like this, a corruption of language say, or generation of support for a project, it could be used for sly-fi after all.

Using concepts like that in gaming is fairly simple, in roleplaying campaigns especially, maybe as the central idea, and some settings do suggest mass unawareness. I have a setting-specific sci-fi plot table here, but a general old school table also seems possible.

Although fitting it into wargaming is tougher, I should have a loose proposal for the next part of the look at Devastation Drive-In, and I expect that up in the next day or million.

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Read any good sly-fi?

More inspiration for gaming and wider fiction, like the space plasma and symbiogenesis posts, but more like those on geoengineering and warming, and maybe even comment forms teaching an AI.

This time it's about helium, a gas with a range of applications, some arguably critical.

But there's not much on Earth, and even less because the market price has collapsed thanks to a timed sell-off of stores. The good news is the moon seems to have a lot...

The fiction? What if a sell-off was designed to cause a shortage and create an economic incentive, in this case for private spaceflight? Providing transport to the moon for helium extraction could be highly lucrative, and a decade or so is good lead-time; a consulting role in exchange for support might seem a smart career move. For bonus plot strands, some of those involved might want to cut funds to projects for ideology or appropriation.

More? From the blogs, how about this suggestion of western self-deception re Chinese military development, or this challenge to a buttress of modern physics, Mr Einstein's special relativity, or this look at the failings of reason itself in contemporary culture?

I need a label for these posts, so I'll propose a possible new genre. Here's a definition:

sly-fi (n., pl. -s)  a fictional genre consisting in the interpolation of feasible secret histories from reported facts and their elaboration in other settings

That's the label I'll use from now on, so you can find all the posts, including this, here.

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Magnetising the cosmic rayguns of a cloud city?

Given all the talk of the coronal mass ejection due today, and the idea of the sun waking up, I thought I'd do a quick post to follow those on plasma cosmology, symbiogenesis and potential for supervillain geoengineering, for fresh inspiration in fiction and gaming.

If the thinking discussed in this video is close to the reality, it may be that cosmic rays increase cloud formation. The link to the sun? The Earth's magnetic field is believed to shield against the rays, with the field being forced back as the solar wind picks up.

Which is to say that if the sun has been dozing, we might have had less cloud recently, and maybe more heating. Do current climate models account for the possibility? There are billions of currency units and lives involved. But then, as laypeople keeping up via mass media, can we trust what we hear about this research more than any other?

How could the fiction run with all of this? World building and campaign ideas abound...

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Are we helping an AI learn its ABCs?

Pause for thought re commenting verification. If this new system is getting us to identify hard-to-read words - see here - we may be part of something needing more discussion.

In this article, on a modified history of the computer, Freeman Dyson's son tells us:

In 2005 I visited Google's headquarters, and was utterly floored by what I saw. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI," an engineer whispered to me.

It makes perfect sense, if we want to make the fictions real. But do we? And which AI? How soon? Whose vassal will it be - or is it? What do we all owe to a lifeform like this, and - getting back to the mundane - what does it mean for our use of the verification?

At novums we get a reminder of where this could be going re Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question", but that's one of the more optimistic views, and the literature has others.

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Goodbye, Mr Blofeld

Many of us know space debris exists. There's a lot of it, and even flakes of paint do damage at high speeds. But is this the optimal solution?

Sending up a disposable satellite, with all the cost launching objects involves, to catch it up, grab hold of it and bring it down to burn up? Could there be more efficient options?

I'd bet we could think of a few more to look at. Even if ground-based lasers might have nefarious uses and send pieces further out, why not nudge the junk say, or set it on a downward course using gravity, or attach tiny thrusters, or repel it with the hunter's thrusters and even use the reaction to help the hunter transfer to the next piece?

This gets me tinkering more with micro-G rules, like the Derelict set. Why do so few games use set-ups like this or have even basic rules for playing in these conditions?