21 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 4/26/24 A Pixel Lives Forever, But Not So Files And Scrolls”

1. Thanks for the Title Credit!

   (11) We never did get that novel (or am I forgetting something obvious).

2. Still here. Cider and I have had a rough week, as she’s been ill, and we’ve made several visits to her veterinarian. She’s much improved, and it may be all over but paying the vet bills.

   (9) Apophis is a very bad neighbor. Brave and noble of OSIRIS-APEX to take on this new mission.

3. (1) I’ve given the answer a thousand times, and I’ve yet to see anyone pay attention. It’s really, really simple: if their tech isn’t within 150 years, plus or minus, of ours, either we’re never going to hear them, or they’re never going to hear us. And they haven’t “found us”, because we’ve only been making noise for about 125 years. Now, the odds on them being that near our tech level, within that distance? Really? Trust me, if the comet hadn’t hit, the evolved dinosaurs wouldn’t hear us.
   (2) Um, isn’t it “Space Cowboy Books“, not “Boys”?
   (3) And then there are the utopias that never had a chance, because their neighbors’ religious or economic preferences led the neighbors to destroy them.
   (9) As I’ve been proposing since I pushed it in the early nineties on usenet, I say we meet it, and slow it down, and push it into geosync orbit. THEN we’d have a real space station to work from.

4. (3) My parents had a book on American utopian communities. They all failed, in one or another way. (I can’t remember the name of the book, so I can’t point anyone at it. It was from the 60s, IIRC.)

5. 7) Harrison is a really powerful writer. I think he’s going to be an E. R. Eddison, a Greer Gilman, or a Clark Ashton Smith—an unfortunately obscure author who will be rediscovered with joy in the future.

6. @mark: And they haven’t “found us”, because we’ve only been making noise for about 125 years.
   We haven’t even done that: there have only been a handful of man-made signals powerful enough to be detected** at the distance of even the nearest stars, mostly military radar systems used in the 60s through the 80s.
   **Assuming technology comparable to ours.

   (7) Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy (Light, Nova Swing, and Empty Space) is also singular and amazing.

   Not to be that guy, but both ISDB and Wikipedia list Harrison’s birthday as July 26, not April 26.

7. @mark: I agree completely. The universe is not just bigger than we can easily imagine, it’s older than we can easily imagine, and our little over a century of using radio doesn’t even count as an eye blink. The dinosaurs lasted far longer than we seem likely to, and they never developed radio at all. The Fermi so-called paradox consists of making a bunch of assumptions, without evidence and with no way of estimating their probability, asserting that they must all be true, and then wondering why the predicted result isn’t evident.

   Also, however our hypothetical aliens explore the universe, it won’t be using Bussard ramjets.

8. 9) “Rendezvous with Apophis”… yes, that sounds like a good idea, and absolutely not like the title of a Lovecraftian SF/horror novel that ends with everyone on Earth being eaten by demons. Not in the least.

9. There is no doubt that the simplest answer to the questions “Why the Great Silence? Why don’t we hear any SETI signals?” is that we don’t hear signals because no one is sending them.

   … No.

   Space is really, really big.

10. (11) It’s long been known that RAH was researching this and that no book resulted from him, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an explanation of why. The muses didn’t cooperate, or Heinlein got distracted in some other direction? Plenty of other writers wrote on the theme before and after, however.

11. Pixels make the world scroll down, the world scroll down, the world scroll down….

12. (3) Ellen Klages wrote Harbin Hot Springs: Healing Waters, Sacred Land, a history of a community centered around a Northern California hot springs. It was her first published book, and it is a gem. Klages’ writing sparkles, and the facts she dug up are amazing. Harbin Hot Springs has been the site of more than one utopian community, in-between more ordinary uses such as hotels, and a boxing camp. More recently, the Harbin Hot Springs was devastated by wildfire, but the springs are still flowing, the community is still there, and they are rebuilding.

    SF fan Robert Lichtman, editor of Trap Door, wrote about living on The Farm, a counter-culture utopian community that is still going.

    Ray Nelson told me about the bohemian artists colony in Carmel, California. It lasted for only a decade, but the amount of drama it produced was epic.

13. @Patrick: Thank you

14. “There is no doubt that the simplest answer to the questions “Why the Great Silence? Why don’t we hear any SETI signals?” is that we don’t hear signals because no one is sending them.”

    I agree, and here’s why:

    The history of life on Earth is so full of random chance: a planetoid of just the right size hits Young Earth at just the right trajectory to create our moon and our tectonic plate structure; five mass extinctions, some resulting in an entirely different biosphere (oxygenation); countless environmental upheavals (including a billion-year long deep freeze); not to mention that Cretaceous-ending asteroid….

    ..and then, when you do finally get a sapient species capable of creating the technology to get into space… that species turns out to be a murderous, careless, greedy collection of pure appetite that seems inevitably bent on destroying itself and every other lifeform on the planet.

    I used to take it for granted there was other sapient life in the universe. I no longer do.

15. JimJanney: thanks for that link. Oh, gee, what were we just reading recently, about whether sf influences tech… “This detailed analysis was led by Peter Schattschneider, a physicist and materials science specialist with the University of Vienna and a science fiction author.”
    CaseyL: about 100,000,000,000,000 stars in the Milky Way alone… do you want to talk about odds? I’m sure they’re there. They will not, however, look like humans in rubber suits…

16. 6) So young! RIP. :’(

17. mark – I’m distinguishing between sentient and sapient. I have no doubt there is other life in the galaxy, and of course in the universe. There may even be sentient life, since (IMO) just about everything alive and multicellular is sentient: I’m very hopeful there are critters on Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons, deep in their oceans’ depths, similar to the critters who live in Earth’s deep sea vents.

    But sapient life? That doesn’t destroy itself? That’s where I get hung up. Maybe if there were still Neanderthal or Devisonian humans around, we’d have a rosier data set to work with – because, at least that would indicate that our forebears hadn’t up and killed other human species when they encountered them. But there aren’t, and so we don’t.

18. CaseyL: we have no evidence, so far as I know, that we killed the other humanoids. Given that we know we have Neanderthal genes, more likely we interbred, and there were fewer of them, so we’re the result. Come on, humans will do it with anything.

19. The other big assumption the article in (1) makes is “it is only a matter of a few centuries” before civilizations like ours not only can start colonizing other star systems, but will start colonizing them to the extent that we “engulf the entire galaxy” in short order.

    I’m not sure that’s true. Space colonization is an appealing basis for stories, but as many have pointed out (including Kelly and Zach Weinersmith in their recent book A City on Mars) Earth is way better a place for us to live that any other place we’re likely to either get to or build in what’s likely to be many centuries. And even if we do get to the point of building space colonies, it’s not clear there’s be any strong reason to build them outside the local solar system any time soon. (Some note that the sun will eventually become inhospitable, but we’re good on that score for at least the next billion years. The universe is not only very big, it’s also very long-lasting.)

    So if our population stabilizes, which it seems to be heading towards in the upcoming century, there’s not any need to “engulf the galaxy”. Explore it, sure, but I wouldn’t assume that any advanced civilization will occupy all of it, or even reach a large portion of it, let alone cross the vaster distances to other galaxies. There’s room in the universe for billions of civilizations even at the density of roughly one per galaxy. Assuming that density, and considering the vast separations between them, the limited detectable range of most of our communications signals, and the lack of need to colonize over galaxy-scale distances, many of them, including ours, may simply never end up in hailing distance of another one.

20. @CaseyL–

    But sapient life? That doesn’t destroy itself? That’s where I get hung up. Maybe if there were still Neanderthal or Devisonian humans around, we’d have a rosier data set to work with – because, at least that would indicate that our forebears hadn’t up and killed other human species when they encountered them. But there aren’t, and so we don’t.

    We have no evidence of group violence between Sapiens and Neanderthals, or Denisovans and Sapiens, or between Neanderthals and Denisovans.

    We do have solid proof of interbreeding among them.

    We have a tiny bit of evidence of individual, one on one fights, but not a lot of them, between Neanderthals and Sapiens. That’s not what wiped out Neanderthals.

    We also know that Neanderthals lived in significantly smaller groups than Sapiens, at lower density and greater distance from neighboring groups, with apparently fewer gatherings and interactions with other groups than Sapiens.

    That would have meant less genetic diversity in any given group. Lower numbers in any given group, combined with lower genetic diversity, would have made those groups more vulnerable to being wiped out by any virulent new disease that reached them. That danger would have grown as the total numbers of Neanderthals and Neanderthal groups declined.

    There’s a lack of evidence that Sapiens wiped out Neanderthals, and plausible other explanations. I think the one I described is the most plausible.

21. @mark
    ” I say we meet it, and slow it down, and push it into geosync orbit. ”

    Apophis is 6x 10^10 kg, with a delta-V relative to Earth of 6.4 km/s. That’s about 4 x 10^14 kg-m/s of momentum to change. A Saturn V first stage gives about 6.2 x 10^9 kg-m/s of momentum change (2.1×10^6 kg of fuel x 3 km/s of delta-V).
    Ballpark numbers, it would take a minimum of 64000 Saturn V 1st stages and their loaded fuel tanks installed on Apophis to place it into geosynch orbit.

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