Tag: culture

Squeee, squeee, squeak. The Welcome Centre desk attendant scanned, squeegee in hand, for more spots on the perfectly transparent exterior window and its freshly shined, centrally placed intercom. The Welcome Centre was an essential hub for all units arriving at Mercury Station III, regardless of their programmed duties. Here, mechanical citizens received assignments that collectively provided a crucial service to the human race: the maintenance of solar-energy turbines. The attendant proudly scanned the landing terminal through the window. “Starting the day off right: dust free. What’s this? Travellers approaching?” Astronauts, two large and two little, descended a ladder positioned underneath their craft, half-way across the terminal.

The travellers waddled clumsily through the terminal, looking down, struggling to make sense of the surrounding foreign signage. Directly in view of the window, a little one slipped. Feet flung into the air. They wriggled their limbs like a child making snow-angels. Low gravity and puffy, vinyl-coated space suits are a poor combination for stability. The information attendant gazed at the family, both amused and concerned. These were unlike any units the attendant had ever seen. The largest traveller knocked on the window. Their visor retracted, revealing leathery wrinkled skin and a few grey hairs. He shouted quite unnecessarily at the intercom, “What’ll y’all know about there being a hotel nearby?”

Mystified, the attendant took control of the situation. A silver cable protracted from its chest and connected to the intercom. “Human, your presence beyond Venus is concerning. State your business.”

“Of course. My business! Yes, my family and I are en route to a resort —”

The attendant interrupted: “Human travel beyond Venus is not allowed. You are clearly lost. We can chart you a path to Mars … Please hold, I’ll need a moment to coordinate your travel.” The attendant hastily disconnected from the intercom with a loud ‘Plug’, then shuffled cables around various terminals. The travellers watched the attendant speak into a terminal but heard nothing.

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The family conversed. “Sarc, what are we doing here? The little ones need to go potty and I don’t see anything here. No restaurants, no hotels. And you didn’t mention this was a Mercurian society! Are we safe? Oh, what you’ll do to save a buck.”

The attendant signalled the family’s attention. “Mhmm, yes … yes, thank you.” Plug. “Travellers! Thank you for waiting. Right now, it is early morning. The next possible Mars transport won’t begin loading until pre-evening. We can put you up in the Subsurface colony for the time being. I’ll arrange for your descent. One moment, please.” Plug.

The family resumed squabbling. “See? Subsurface Colony! I think we’ll really have a chance to bond during this trip.”

“Did you even call ahead, Sarc?”

“Hun, I thought you wanted to travel someplace warmer this year, and the Subsurface colony has great ratings.”

“4.1 out of 5? That’s not very high.”

The attendant, eavesdropping, smouldered with frustration. These tourists were oblivious to the struggling society around them.

Plug. “Travellers, you’ll be able to enter the colony soon. We are still locating a room for you. There are several vacancies, but that’s because the ceiling partially melted during the last flare up. You’d be directly exposed to the photosphere.”

The little ones oohed and aahed.

“Those rooms sound lovely. Our kiddos love science-y things,” Sarc boasted. “I paid extra for that view.”

The attendant, stunned, continued: “I must also apologize that our cafeteria is currently under construction. A crater suddenly collapsed above the previous dining hall. The patrons were liquefied by molten salt, and all that remained became crystallized.”

“A salt cave! Oh Sarc, you’ll be sure to book us a couple’s massage there at some point during our stay?”

The attendant could no longer maintain its professional demeanour. “Do you humans even have ganglia? People can’t come here. Can you comprehend the resources you waste by pretending to be explorers where you cannot live? Do humans ever consider the burden we would bear of deciding which planets should have power? Ugh!” Plug.

“Sarc, I will not be spoken to in this way, certainly not by a Mercurian. I’ll take the little ones out of earshot. Handle this.”

Sarc leaned into the intercom. “Look pal. I fully intend to contact your supervisor about how rude you’ve been. We, the customer, are paying your salary. I expect some compensation for this god-awful treatment.”

The attendant fell quiet for a moment, confused.

Plug. “I am afraid I have been too indirect regarding the precarity of your circumstance. A precisely guided transport to Mars can only happen if you survive this day. We never know when for sure, but at any moment, a solar flare will turn us into dust. For us, Mercury is a one-way ticket. Our society has safeguards for regeneration, of course. I replaced the prior attendant early this morning. You should’ve seen the dust on this window …”

Sweat appeared on Sarc’s face. “If we’re in danger we will, of course, leave. You said a transport could get us to Mars as early as this evening?”

Now the attendant was truly taken aback, having once again overestimated what humans knew about the societies that maintain their infrastructure. “You eat and sleep on a 24-hour cycle, correct? That daily schedule does not exist here. This side of Mercury won’t turn away from the Sun for 1,563 hours. On your cycle, that’s about 65 days.”

Sarc signalled the family to return. The family huddled.

“So? What did you say? What’s gonna happen?”

“Well first, I gave that Mercurian a piece of my mind. To compensate us, they’ve extended our stay by two whole months.”

Tyrone felt uneasy questioning Professor Flowers. Decades ago, as a student, he had worked in her space-studies group, and the human colonization of Mars had caught his imagination. His mind had changed since then, but hers had not. Now, he found himself conducting a hearing for the Global Climate Control Commission on future human activity on Mars.

“You have requested a waiver of greenhouse emission limitations for the launch of Mars Colony Two,” he said. “It has been 20 years since Mars Colony One landed. As a private space programme, it was not covered by the existing emission regulations. That is no longer the case. So I must ask what would justify waiving the present rules.”

The ghosts of Mars Colony One hovered invisibly above the directors of the commission in their hearing room. The colonists had been 20 of the world’s richest people, who had spent trillions of dollars from their personal fortunes to blaze a new frontier for humankind. Their leaders had said they expected to die on Mars. They had not expected that all of them would die 18 days after landing.

Professor Flowers looked at Tyrone with unreadable eyes. “The first Martian colonists were heroes who risked their lives to open a new refuge for humanity,” she said. “Those were troubled years. Heat was killing the whales. Coastal cities and island nations were slipping below the waves. The world’s richest technologists decided to spend their own fortunes to reach a new world. No one else would spend the money or take the risk of sending humans to Mars, so they took it upon themselves.” The strain showed when she paused for a deep breath. Tyrone could see her 80 years weighing upon her. “When they landed and we saw them on our screens waving to us from Mars, people around the world cheered and had hope. We need to get people back into space to fulfil our destiny.”

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“No one can deny that they were brave,” Tyrone said. “But neither can we deny they were foolhardy. They chose not to send robotic probes to test for survivability. We still do not know how and why they died, or if something on Mars might have killed them.” He looked around the room. “And these are still hard times. We have slowed the growth of greenhouse emissions but not stopped them. To do that, the commission had to suspend most space activities and limit aviation to 1990 levels. We know how much it would take to send people to Mars again, and we know we can’t afford the emissions.”

“The heirs of the Mars Colony will pay for a second mission. They are hugely wealthy, and have designed a second mission that will make tremendous contributions to scientific knowledge. But we have to start here on Earth.” She looked at Tyrone, her face pleading for his support.

“That is the problem,” said Tyrone. “We live on a thin edge of further disaster. We were stopping coal burning when the first Mars Colony launched. We keep trying, but we don’t know when the next giant glacier will break off from the shore of Greenland or Antarctica. We have no safety margin.”

“We must have a dream. We need one to go forward,” the professor said. “You were born after Apollo, but during the 1960s people rightly feared a nuclear war that could wipe out the human race. John F. Kennedy promised the US would land a man on the Moon, and people around the world celebrated after they saw Neil Armstrong walk on the surface in 1969. We could dream of travelling in space and building a better life for humanity.”

Tyrone could see tears starting on her face. “It was never that simple,” he said. “The race to the Moon was never sustainable. It was a race for America to show the Soviet Union that they could beat them in space. We needed more than half a century to get back to the Moon. And by then scientists knew we had to get the global environment under control. Storm intensities kept climbing, oceans warmed faster than we had expected. We had to shut the Moon bases and limit new satellites other than climate missions. We aren’t sure if we can stop it.” Professor Flowers cast her eyes down, looking weathered and ancient. “That’s why the Global Climate Control Commission has again rejected your plan for the Second Mars Colony.”

She stood silent for so long that Tyrone worried she’d been taken ill. He saw her pain when she finally spoke. “Please tell me there will be a time in the future when we can launch a second Mars Colony mission? Please tell an old woman that her dreams will not die with her body.” She stared at him.

“I hope so,” Tyrone said. “But now we must focus all our efforts to control the climate crisis so sometime our children and grandchildren can have those dreams.” He shivered, all but certain that neither he, his children nor his grandchildren would ever see that day.

In a golden shimmer, the bland government man materialized on the pad, coming alive in his cheap suit, carrying a faux leather case. Right on time, of course. My nose wrinkled as a wave of ozone rushed outwards from the pad. As usual, he said, “Hello, Mr Mayor.”

“Welcome back to the reservation,” I replied, completing my part of the ritual. We walked to the office building, his wingtip shoes giving him problems in the sand.

“Why is the telepad so far away from everything?” he asked. I took his question as rhetorical, but it wasn’t an accident. It was one of the main goals when the founders drew up the plans for this place, years before I was born. The walk didn’t bother me. The res is the only home I’ve known in my 65 years, and I still enjoy walking in the sands I played in as a child.

Getting no reply, he tried to engage again. “That breeze feels like opening an oven door.”

My only response was mopping my crinkled brow with a handkerchief. I managed a small smile despite my nerves. I’d deceived him before, and I could do it again. Everything depended on it.

The admin building was no shabbier than it was on his last visit. But the car museum in the lobby was dustier. When I was a child, the museum got a few visitors — the reservation’s primary source of income — but now it was the rare researcher or eccentric enthusiast that toured the old vehicles.

I suppressed a grimace at the baby doll just outside the door. Everything was supposed to be put away, but I didn’t want to call attention to it by kicking it aside. His attention was either elsewhere or nowhere, and the doll faded behind us as we headed upstairs to my modest office. Later, I would find out who had left it and give them a stern lecture.

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In the office, my thumb on his pad certified my reports. They were lies, but I was well-practised, and the government man wasn’t one to ask real questions. It was a necessary deception to keep our community alive. Next, I used my thumb again to acknowledge the transfer of money — the handout — to the reservation’s bank account.

Every time, I dreaded the question, and it arrived as expected. “Are there any residents who wish to leave?”

There’s a thin line between overselling and appearing too indifferent. “Why ask? The old people are all staying, and there are no more young people. You know that.” My cheeks were burning with indignation. “You took them.” If he was ashamed of that, he didn’t show it.

The man was oblivious to my anger. “I’m required to ask,” he said in a flat tone of disinterest. “Besides, why not leave? Why wait here to die off? You and your friends could go anywhere. The world is full of beauty and culture. Have breakfast in New Orleans and lunch in Paris. Fish the Yangtze. You can still be home for dinner.”

“The minute I leave here on that pad, I’ll be dead. You will be, too.” The thought of his molecules being torn to pieces didn’t make me feel that bad.

His attention was mostly on reorganizing the contents of his case. “So I wasn’t here last time?”

My temple throbbed with my rising blood pressure. That happens when I’m being patronized like a child talking about an imaginary monster. “You aren’t even the man who woke up in your home this morning. He died teleporting to work. Then again, when you came here. You’ll die again when you leave.”

“I … see,” he said, looking at me with eyes that called me a crackpot. It had been several years since he’d tried to convince me that teleportation didn’t kill you and replace you with a duplicate.

My contempt for this fake spilled out. “My people are the only real humans left in the world. You are all copies. Fakes!” The lid of his case closed with a snick. “Even the babies teleport home from the hospital, I hear.” Thinking of those poor babies made my eyes sting with nascent tears.

After I fell silent, he glanced up with a smart-alec grin and said, “They should walk home? My daughter was born in Asia, and I live in old South Africa. How else would you get her home?”

“Have you ever heard of the Ship of Theseus?” I asked.

With a slight sneer, he shook his head, “I’ve never been interested in any of your old vehicles. From the look of the museum, I’m not alone.” He glanced up at nothing — I imagined it was a message from some unseen implanted display. “I’m afraid I have to go, Mr Mayor. A pleasure as always,” he said unconvincingly.

We shook hands, and I wordlessly escorted him through the deserted museum, across the sand, and back to the telepad. With another upward glance, he murmured a command to an unseen person.

With a second whiff of ozone, he died in the usual golden shimmer, and I turned to go home. It is against my nature to lie, but we have far fewer of us old-timers than the government thinks. We must keep our handouts to support the children they will never know exist. The real children.

Accidental

Tim James Robinson (2024)

Science often progresses through step-by-step discoveries. But major breakthroughs still happen. Science writer Tim James smartly retells stories of such “spasms of serendipity” that happened through moments of accidental “clumsiness”, “misfortunes and failures”, “surprises” and “eurekas”. For example, in 1903, chemist Edouard Benedictus dropped a dirty glass flask and noticed it did not shatter because of its cellulose nitrate coating. In 1909, after reading of dangerous shattered glass during car crashes, he invented laminated glass.

Facing the Unseen

Damon Tweedy St. Martin’s (2024)

Over the past two decades, the US suicide rate has increased by 30%. The US National Institute of Medical Health estimates that mental illness affects about 20% of US adults, yet many physicians are averse to psychiatrists. This leads critics to question psychiatry’s “status as a legitimate medical discipline”, writes US professor of psychiatry and staff physician Damon Tweedy, who formerly shared their aversion. His compelling analysis of this desperate situation draws on vivid encounters in outpatient clinics, emergency rooms and hospitals.

The Importance of Being Educable

Leslie Valiant Princeton Univ. Press (2024)

Intelligence lacks a clear and agreed definition in science, leading to confusion about IQ and the potential of artificial intelligence. Leslie Valiant, a pioneer of machine learning, prefers to define human intellectual uniqueness as educability instead of intelligence. “Educability is the capability to learn and acquire belief systems from one’s own experience and from others, and to apply these to new situations”. Perhaps inevitably, Valiant links educability to computation, exploring this connection in his complex but jargon-free book.

Alien Earths

Lisa Kaltenegger St. Martin’s (2024)

The Milky Way contains about 200 billion stars. The number of potential extrasolar planets is mind-boggling. Surely other Earth-like planets must exist? Astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger agrees, noting: “So far, despite wild claims to the contrary, we have not found any definitive proof of life on other planets.” She launched the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, to search for life in the cosmos, alongside experts in fields ranging from astronomy to the performing arts. Her book is an authoritative and enjoyable read.

The Afterlife of Data

Carl Öhman Univ. Chicago Press (2024)

Printed books can immortalize the dead. But what should happen to posthumous online presence, asks political scientist Carl Öhman in his stimulating, sometimes spooky book. Imagine if we could access French general Napoleon Bonaparte’s Facebook messages or the data patterns of people in 1930s Germany, he remarks. “The lessons learned would be endless.” But if we simply leave it to businesses to manage “our collective digital past”, he argues that it will surely be used to make money.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

1. Be patient with each other

Ms Anaria is not a United Earth government official. She was not informed of the tri-system parliament meeting to address United Earth trade overreach. She does not know why your docking instructions mysteriously sent you to the public education ship (the one farthest from the government’s parliament ship), nor is she completely fluent in both Hechian and Theloss. Confusion over what is happening, frustration with the lack of information, even outrage that your government is attempting to bully the tri-system via a clandestine meeting against voter approval — all are natural responses to the situation, but we must still be patient and calm with each other.

2. Keep your appendages to yourself

Ms Anaria’s classroom was designed to hold 25 human children with only four limbs each, not 16 adult Hechians with 7 tentacles apiece and 17 fully assembled Thels of 220-centimetre average height. To respect each other’s space and boundaries, everyone must remain on their assigned colour square of the Rainbow Story Rug. If you cannot perceive the colours on this light spectrum, please raise your prominent tentacle and/or robotic interactive piece and Ms Anaria will help you locate it. As surely everyone here has learnt during their own childhood, or from what has apparently been several months of their cease-and-desist orders being ignored, moving outside your borders and into someone else’s without permission is very rude and should not be tolerated.

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3. Only one being speaks at a time

Unlike the government ships, Ms Anaria’s classroom has only one inter-ship communicator, and poor Ms Anaria quite suddenly cannot remember how to use the video call feature that would alert the United Earth government to the fact that we are all here in the same room at the same time. Therefore, each group will have to select ONE representative to speak ONE AT A TIME to the government liaison on the communicator. When one being has the communicator, the others must be quiet, respecting the speaker’s time on the communicator by not letting their own voice, or any other auditory evidence, indicate their presence in this room. Once each representative has had a chance to speak individually to the liaison and the communicator is turned off, they are then free — and encouraged — to speak, using inside voices/voice boxes dialled down to 50 decibels. If anyone finds they need to express some sentiment or emotion or primal scream of frustration in the face of government bureaucracy that exceeds the limit of inside voices/50 dB, they can make use of the pillows in the screened-off Quiet Corner.

4. Share the classroom resources

As we wait the four hours for the transfer ship, some of us might grow bored and want a distraction. There is a limited amount of carbon-based-lifeform-friendly snacks, a single-occupant bathroom, two high-powered charging stations, and various markers and colouring pages available. Together, we will work out a system to share these resources, dividing them up fairly, negotiating access and working out disputes calmly and respectfully, with Ms Anaria as the tiebreaker should an agreement be unable to be reached. To make it fair, whatever Ms Anaria has to make a decision on will be unavailable for her use, either in totality or for a specific duration of time, depending on the resource in question, because, as the self-declared leader of this room, she has had unrestricted access to it for a very long time and really doesn’t need this many resources. If anyone sees how this practice might be particularly relevant and potentially applicable to future discussions with other friends and/or tri-system leaders, they can have a gold star sticker.

(Ms Anaria is aware that stars do not actually look like these stickers.)

5. Respect each other’s feelings

Because she is not a government official, Ms Anaria does not have the clearance to listen to discussions on the topics of the parliament meeting today, and hearing them might make her sad or anxious or filled with righteous fury. She therefore does not want to talk about how the tri-system charter clearly outlines border lines and protocol for crossing, or how the resource-rich planet Bargio is technically in Theloss space and subject to full tri-system approval for mining, or anything about how the United Earth’s spurious overpopulation of Bargio’s orbit with its own mining ships can be legally interpreted as an intimidation tactic in violation of the tri-system charter. All such topics would greatly upset Ms Anaria and are off limits. However, Ms Anaria is more than happy to discuss the soundproofing qualities of the adjacent music room.

6. Clean up after yourself

The transfer ship has arrived! We had a lot of enlightening discussions here in the classroom and generated many notes and recordings we now need to clean up. Before anyone leaves, everyone is to form an orderly line at the data station to upload today’s information to your personal, preferably encrypted, device. Once uploaded, please return to your assigned colour square to await the Earth liaison. Ms Anaria will then delete the files off the ship system, for privacy, of course.

7. Be kind to each other

Remember: the tri-system area of space is a community, and communities are kind and helpful to each other. We need each other so we can all thrive. Selfish behaviour should be gently, but firmly, discouraged and corrected, perhaps by a two-thirds majority.

Thank you for following Ms Anaria’s Classroom Rules!

When she heard the boom, Millie set aside her knitting. Through rain cascading down the dark living room window, she could see flames reaching up above the trees. The fire had to be extraordinarily hot to burn in this storm. These crashes were becoming more common and usually there were no survivors.

She flicked light switches and poked buttons on her phone, more to rule out any possibility of outside help than because she thought the power or connectivity would work. The washed-out bridge at the end of her driveway meant she couldn’t drive for help. For a moment she considered picking up her knitting and waiting until the morning to visit the crash site. With her husband gone for two years, she was alone in her forest. Her old dog lifted his great brown head from the worn rug in front of the wood stove. He whined at her, but didn’t lumber to his feet; his old joints were arthritic. She used to rely on him to jump up barking to warn her of strangers coming down her long driveway into the forest, but he was past that.

“I guess it’ll have to be me then,” she told herself sternly. “I can’t decently leave anyone out in this storm.”

She moved stiffly to the cold mud room and pulled on her boots and raincoat. She filled her pockets with candy and grabbed her big flashlight.

The storm pushed needles of rain into her face and her feet slipped across dark flows of mud. The trees moaned and reached in the wind and she couldn’t hear anything above them. The tree-topping flames had died down, but she could see a glow above the field by the river. She didn’t hurry; she wouldn’t be able to help anyone if she fell and broke her own leg.

She came out of the forest and saw a dozen large and small figures silhouetted by the flickering orange glow.

She waved and called, “Hello! Do you need help?”

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The figures turned towards her, and she pulled down her rain hood and angled her flashlight upwards to cast a glow onto her own face to show that she was just an old woman. She sensed, rather than saw, the figures tense and move closer together.

She couldn’t tell if they understood, but she kept up a low stream of comforting nonsense as she moved towards them, as if to calm a nervous animal. “It’s OK. I live up the hill. You can come in out of the rain. Here, I have some candy.”

She held out jellybeans on her palm. A tall figure stepped forward and took the sticky, wet candy. He (or she, Millie couldn’t tell) sniffed it, and handed it to the small figures who stuffed it into their mouths.

Close up, Millie could see that some of them were shivering, and they had scrapes and cuts showing glistening blood through rips in ragged clothing. The rain poured down on them. Millie gestured back towards her house, not sure if they would understand. But when she turned to walk back up the hill, the group stumbled after her, some carrying others.

Inside the house, the huge dog rose with a growl. “Settle down, Angus,” Millie said and the beast came over and sniffed the strangers. He waved his stump of a tail and lay down at their feet.

Millie gestured to the couch and pushed more logs into the burnt-down fire. She gathered mounds of blankets from the hallway closet. She stretched out a faded blue blanket decorated with bright cartoon trucks and wrapped it around one of the smaller figures huddled into himself in the corner of the couch. She thought he smiled at her with his eyes and she remembered wrapping the same blanket around her small son decades ago.

She bustled into the kitchen and grabbed crackers and cereal and nuts; anything that didn’t need to be cooked. She couldn’t imagine what the strangers ate. She remembered a pan of left-over soup; it would be all right; the fridge had only been dead a few hours. She put it on top of the wood stove to warm. The strangers were still huddled together so she moved over her knitting and spread the food out across the coffee table. They came closer and talked among themselves, and their language sounded to Millie like the twittering of birds.

She sat on an armchair and watched as they consumed all the food she had put out; they must be starving. She went back to her pantry and opened cans of pineapple and tuna; they ate everything, except the Spam, which they wouldn’t touch.

When nearly all the food was gone, the small figure wrapped in the truck blanket came over and leant against Millie’s legs. His huge dark eyes looked into hers. She picked him up and sat him on her lap and she had an image of her own son, now over six feet tall. The small stranger snuggled against her chest and put one of his seven fingers in his mouth under his beak. Millie smiled and stroked his grey cheek, his skin slightly sand-papery, like a cat’s tongue. Two sets of eyelids fluttered down over his huge round eyes. “Aren’t you a sweet little one?” she said.

His stranded and lost alien family spread out their arms and bowed their heads at Millie in a simultaneous gesture. They twittered in their own language. Millie had no hope of understanding the words, but she felt their gratitude and warm approval. The child put his small head on her shoulder, sighed and went to sleep.