Dream Dance

Day 1010 - Message from Beyond the Light Cone

On February 19, 2318, 11:31.1 universal time, the L4 Gravity Baseline Telescope detected a special kind of transient, a type that doesn't occur in nature. Most gravity waves are produced by exploding suns or colliding neutron stars -- distant events of enormous energy, and most importantly, events that can be traced causally to prior events along the same timeline.

There were only two types of events that might be the source. The first are quantum-scale events, like proton decay, that occur spontaneously without cause, but are too small and chaotic to be detected. The other is the large-scale resonance of super-luminal matter -- heavy, powerful, and man-made.

The telescope had detected an incoming starship.

The comings and goings of interstellar vehicles is a technical and logistical nightmare. They need huge gravity wells from which to operate -- typically a pair of Jovian planets, one for departure and one for arrival. Energy levels are constrained by the tuning of the loop drive, which means that there are a narrow range of orbits that can be used, most of them quite close to the Jovian body. Outbound is bad enough, orbiting close and seeking the proper force lines in the short time window. Inbound is much worse. Anything occupying the same space as a starship falling out of resonance will either displace, alloy or annihilate. As result, interstellar travel is scheduled to the second years in advance, except for emergencies. In that case there's little to do except work to keep the space clear.

So what of the gravity transient? When a starship departs it basically disappears. Its mass instantly stops having any gravitational effect on nearby matter, but that change propagates at the speed of light. An a-causal gravity transient -- a gravity wave. What gets weird is that these also happen when a starship arrives, but in reverse. The universe "anticipates" the pending effects of a new mass and sends inverse transients speeding toward the location where the starship will appear. When the ship finally does materialize, the gravitational field has already adjusted to the new state of affairs.

It seems like all that advance warning would be useful for clearing a space for incoming ships. Warned ahead of time we could get anything else out of the way, right? The LGBT was 48 light-minutes from Jupiter when the transient was detected. But there was no way to send a signal to Callisto station that would be helpful. Even with nearly an hour warning, a radio wave or laser from L4 would still lag the gravity wave, and the ship would appear before anyone at Jupiter could have heard the alarm.

On the other hand, the LGBT is always eight light-minutes from Earth. Less than a quarter hour after the first telltales tripped at the telescope, the Roam was buzzing with the news. Multiple observers had crunched the numbers and knew the identity of the ship -- because of the mass, energy and direction of the wave -- without a doubt.

The E.O.Wilson was returning. The scientists exploring the Crab world were coming home nine years early.

Some people argue that the inverse transients prove that free will is an illusion. If gravity waves from future starship travel are even now making their way across the universe to converge on the location where ships from the far future will finally arrive, then how can anything we do now be able to change anything? I feel like, who cares? I can't really change the future regardless. Some future unfolds for me, but there's exactly one and I don't have any ability to pick a different one. It's just that I don't know what it will be, and if anyone did they're too far away to send a message in time for me to do anything about it.

All I know is that the events of that day cannot be reversed, and I would never want them to be. That unexpected arrival foretold for me a destiny far better than the one I was starting to picture for myself.

Day 999 - Days of Boredom and Change

It's been a long time since I updated my personal journal. Things have been much the same -- long on work and short on results -- and that's been the problem. I feel I've lost my incentive to keep logging my progress when it's just turned into a long, and seemingly pointless, slog.

It's not that I haven't been making progress. I have. In fact I've begun some major inroads into experiments planned years ago where I've only recently gained a foothold. It's funny how proposals from expert opinion lightyears away seem sensible, but then crumble at first contact with the reality on the ground. But I've kept them in the back of my mind, and finally I figured a way to get the cultural vector study off the ground. That's why I'm here -- I'm an experimenter, and I can improvise.

First results are starting to come in, and they're robust. Problem is they're also the exact opposite of any expected outcome, and incompatible with any theory. Typical.

Likewise my life on Earth right now has entered an equally boring and/or frustrating phase. I've spent months in the Crab Lab executing Brel's pointless protocol, bored witless and ignored by fo-Weirmen and his upper-level staff. Basically in a holding pattern, doing what I need to do but not really making much progress.

Like here.

The only real spark of interest in my old life on Earth were my sessions with Pi. She would call for me, and I would spend short but intense sessions trying to answer her seemingly endless and rambling questions, and then She would send me away again with a giant reading list. Economics, philosophy, history -- especially history of the Reawakening -- material not only uninteresting to a bio grad student, but a potentially dangerous distraction from my core studies if She really claimed She wanted to help. Nonetheless I can see now it was all important.

Important for getting me from where I was then to where I am now, although not entirely the way She intended.

Day 940 - A Tale of Bird Brains and Human Hubris

The Portia L2 probe began to redesign its sensors. It was clear that lifeform PN121 -- later known as the Gadget Bird -- was not going to be easy to observe, and the probe wanted to see it. The sensors's recessed switch was removed and was replaced by a pair of conductive contacts that would serve the same purpose. The whole thing was also made smaller and more robust, easy changes that could be made by just looking up existing plans in the database.

The birds made hash of them. A swarm of sensors descended on their groves and they snapped them up, caching them in stockpiles. Not finding the expected switches, the birds instead bashed the units around until tripping a force threshold made them reset. Reset made their LEDs flash, delighting the birds. So they built new devices that beat the sensors against rocks at just the right speed to trip a reset and perform their display.

The probe registered that it had found something interesting, and redesigned the sensors again. But this time it added more LEDs and extra features. By combining the sensors it was possible to trigger several different kinds of red, green and blue flashes. One hunderd twenty-eight altogether, tripped by combinations of force, occlusion, and -- most importantly -- attaching one sensor to another. By placing the conductive tabs of one sensor in contact with another sensor they created a new circuit that produced a different flash.

It took nine days for the first gadget bird to produce all 128 flashes. By 21 days every single bird in the top grove built a device to harness all the modes of flashing.

Undaunted, the probe moved to the third phase. Now the sensors (evolved into general test devices) could not be put together so easily. Instead they required force to assemble, and the probe provided that force in the form of wedges and levers built into a subset of the sensor housings. Now a bird would need to find the right sensor in order to put two other sensors together. And this is where the bird exceeded expectations.

Not only did they discover -- and hunt down -- the right sensor casing to use as tool, they also created their own tools by hacking them from seed pods, bark, and other suitable materials. And it wasn't just the ones who knew the solution; there were quite a few birds that had never seen the parts fit together who nonetheless cobbled together tools to jam them into contact.

The Portia L2 probe ran many more experiments, ultimately dedicating a large fraction of its resources to studying the gadget birds. It has yet to find a limit to the bird's mechanical intuition. There's almost nothing that can be put together to make exciting displays that the birds can't figure out. They combine parts in ways that are not only non-obvious but that stump even humans given the same puzzle. They build tools allowing them to build devices that cannot be made by the simple juxtaposition of elements.

But they have no language. Their ability to construct devices depends on seeing either how parts can fit together directly, or seeing how a tool will allow parts to come together. All attempts using symbols to provide clues to novel combinations have failed, or at least that's the consensus conclusion. The probe is limited, and although there is a plan to send a much more advanced probe with more sophisticated experiments, the result has to stand with what we know now.

On a world with no real night and no real day, a goofy-looking feathered snake about the size of a chicken can use a technology it's never seen before. It makes machines, and it makes tools to make its machines, and in rare cases it makes tools to make its tools. Once again humans have to face the reality that our talents are animal talents, not only not unique, but not especially special.

Day 933 - As Ever the Season for Gifts

I've been pouring over Wald's new paper. He expanded his research on courtship and mating behaviors to cover all of the known dorsofocillus species, and the quality of the data is really fantastic. This is exactly the kind of results that should be coming out of a planetary exploration effort like this. He started with a pilot species, the jijibugs, developed a methodology and core hypotheses, then magnified that effort with autonomous data-collection to generate robust conclusions and a massive set of supporting data.

I wish all our results were as competent as this. Especially mine.

The upshot is that among all the DF species the females expect gifts in exchange for mating. It's a remarkably robust result even though the idea of gifts vary quite a bit between different species. Chochum are pretty relaxed, requiring only that males find them a hole in a tree. Eroniccius finociuum is the most demanding, unwilling to submit to a second insemination until their den is filled pracically to overflowing with food.

But the big story is the exception: the Tanzen. They are also dorsofocillus, and infertile without two sequential matings. Wald's model demonstrated that this gave females the ability to demand nearly anything, and his research has borne out that conclusion brilliantly. Except for the Tanzen.

Why? There are two possibilities. One: the Tanzen operate in a different manner and the model doesn't apply. Or two: Tanzen females do accept gifts in exchange for a second mating, but we don't recognize it.

I'm guessing number two is right. Males and females exchange gifts all the time, but we don't see it. It's the answer to everything, and I think Shell is offering me the key.

Day 926 - Meanwhile Back in the Salt Mines

"Hallo, Meat."

Brel reveled in his thick, Teutonic accent. He felt himself the direct descendant and heir of the German scientific legacy. Probably it just meant that he learned English the old-fashioned way, by talking with friends or relatives, and a few weeks with an Orlando-Hamra modus would give him the same bland, clipped accent of all the other students who learned scientific English later in life. That he chose to keep his natural accent could have given him distinction, but then he wouldn't have been Brel.

When I first started in the lab he called me "New Meat," presumably because I would be yet another grad student he could rope into his pointlessly elaborate protocol. He didn't, as Dr. fo-Weirmen instead allowed me to index the lab's research notes with the Crab Database Project where I had been one of the top auditors. That had been Pi's recommendation, pointedly offering that I might focus on those areas where I had done the most corrections. After eight weeks my work had been connected to every study in the Crab lab.

Eventually Brel started to call me just "Meat," which I think was intended to be more personally insulting. The enhanced talk about the "meat body" and the "made body," and since I was almost all free-range human I didn't have much in the way of "made" body. (Some days I might twinge at the mention of meat for more intimate reasons as well, but I don't think he was making that reference.)

"Hi, Brel," I replied. "Did you get my proposal?"

He sat on his high lab stool and squinted at me. "I glahnst at it," he said slowly. "I don't think it would verk. If ve change da protocol ve have to throw out months of data."

"The Bayesian analysis was on page two," I said. "It seems pretty clear that an alternate approach can be integrated with a minimum of tweaking. Also, since it's faster it should be able to provide a great deal of supportive evidence."

He continued squinting. His eyes seemed very small, but that was no doubt just because they were dwarfed by his skull. He had the biggest head I'd ever seen, perching like a balloon on his relatively short e2 body.

"No," he said finally. "Ve stick with what verks."

I had expected that. "OK," I said. "I'm in."

"What?" he asked, a bit taken aback. "You'll help with da experiment?"

"Yes."

"Well, great. Ausgezeichnet! I'll have Naha map you into da dataspace."

It was also Pi's suggestion that I ingratiate myself with Brel by doing his monkey work. Not something I really looked forward to, but too often that seems like what one has to do to get along in this so-called meritocracy.

Day 908 - Comiserating with Strangers

Earthdate September 20, 2315: My surgery was more than a week later. The procedure is now so rare, I was told, that the hospital had to fly in a specialist who wasn't immediately available. While the bulk of the operation would be done by perfectly competent robotic software, it was always necessary when dealing with human life to have an expert overseer. Thus I had to wait.

I stayed in my dorm, worked on papers, did some auditing, and continually kicked myself for getting into such a funk about this whole thing. It wasn't the end of the world. It wasn't even all that important, really. I'd been stupid; I'd made a mistake. But it wasn't going to have any long-term consequences. Why then was I so depressed?

Monday morning I rode the train to the hospital station, walked 15 minutes to the building, and followed the helpful directional modi to the surgery center. I know as soon as I entered that the attendants were informed of my arrival. One walked over the greet me, but I could see her expression turn as she saw in her screen why I was there.

Same with the nurse who checked me in; I could read it in his eyes. Everyone I met ranged from somewhere from cool professionalism to quiet disapproval. At least that's what I felt.

Until the surgeon came to visit. Dr. Raph de-Sebrino, a gentle man in his fifties, smiled warmly at as soon as he saw me. He welcomed me, asked me about my trip there, joked about his flight, told me a silly story about the passenger next to him who wanted to stand at the worst possible moments.

And as we were just done laughing over that he placed his hand on my shoulder and asked "How are you, my dear?"

My stock answer caught in my throat, as I somehow felt this generous person deserved more honesty, and then I started to cry. Everything I had bottled up began leaking out in hot, painful tears. Sadness, anger, but mostly terrible lonliness. I had no one. Not a single friend to hold my hand or comfort me this whole time. Nothing but rivals to use this against me. One little mistake and my professional life was a leaky boat and I had no one to help me bail.

The surgeon waited by me until I began to stop myself. He patted me gently and said "We'll get you home as soon as we can, OK Su?" I nodded weakly. I think at that point he must have activated the anethetics, because I don't remember much after that.

Day 900 - The Shock of the Inevitable

Earthdate September 12, 2315: I sometimes wonder if I knew. I was nervous, anxious even, but hospitals always make me nervous so perhaps it was nothing more than a memory. I spent a lot of time in them as a child. I always used to picture the mechanically active building as a huge robotic organism, and all the sensors and test equipment that would scan and probe me as soon as I walked in the door was its immune system. It would restlessly sniff and poke me until it determined if I was an invasive particle or friendly tissue. I always felt like the foreign particle.

Pi apparently wasn't satisfied with the efficient but parochial clinic that served most of the grad students and faculty. She had arranged for my physical at W.K.Windelband Krankhaus, a 20 minute train and city shuttle ride and another 15 minute wait in the queue. The nurse was polite but severe, her old high German full of clipped T's and CH's that hurt my throat to listen to her speak them.

The examination itself was brief: a few minutes in a scanner, even fewer minutes being prodded gently by automatic instruments, and a shockingly short visit by the attending surgeon. I don't remember her name.

The first words out of her mouth were, "did you know you were pregnant?"

I think I might have said "no," but honestly I don't recall. I do recall a feeling of falling, like a sudden free fall that unmoors your organs from the rest of your body.

The anxiety was gone. What feeling I had at all, after the falling, was sensitivity. Sensitive to touch, sensitive to light, sensitive to sound, sensitive to the simple existence of my own skin. I hung in a twilight world between clarity and confusion. Clear in my answers to questions: yes, I know who the father is; no, I don't want to have the child. Yet confused about who was answering these questions; who was that person and what did they want from my life?

I left presently, and began my long trip home. I mostly stared straight ahead, afraid of the judgment in other people's faces.

Day 893 - Measuring Sentience: The Philosopher's Question Game

What's it like to be a child? We can all answer that question; we were all children at one time and remember what it was like. And it was like something. That's not universally true. What's it like to be a rock? We might imagine our human bodies curled into immobility, responding eternally only to erosion and moss, but that's not what it's like to be a rock. That's what it's like to pretend to be a rock in a sophmore drama class. What's it really like to be a rock?

Nothing. The question "what's it like to be?" has no answer when the object is "rock." Rocks exist, but they have no experience of being.

Children exist also, but unlike rocks they embody an experience we can share. We can ask "what's it like to be a child?" and expect to generate useful answers.

One can also ask "what's it like to be a member of the other gender?" To be a man if you're a woman or a woman if you're a man. We may not exactly know, and maybe can never know, but we know there is an answer. We can, by successive approximations get closer to understanding the experience of another being with language. They can read our responses and correct our misapprehensions, at least if we are willing to listen. We know they can because they are there, being what they are.

It gets a little more tricky as you move toward smaller, less capable life forms. What's it like to be a newborn? Where does that experience lie between rock and child? Presumably closer to child than to rock, but who is there to correct our confusions? Is it possible that when we imagine life as a newborn we are making the same error as when we imagine existence as a rock?

What about other forms of life? Can we answer with any level of certainty not just what it's like to be a chimpanzee or a rat or an ant, but whether it's like anything at all to be a chimpanzee or a rat or an ant? We cannot, and yet we know that for many life forms the question has no more meaning than for a rock.

This is perhaps the best answer that philosophy can give us for the question of sentience. Sadly it's almost no answer at all but instead a series of questions of roughly escalating difficulty. Typical for philosophy, and yet I find the discipline to be useful.

So the question I have been posed is this: What's it like to be a Tanzen? A clear answer to that question -- or rather the fact that there was some kind of answer -- would resolve the issue of Tanzen sentience. If we could say that it "was like" something, however alien, we could conclude that Tanzen had an experience of being. At that alone would make them brothers. If we could say that being a Tanzen was as to being a rock, then we would have the negative answer.

Unfortunately this line of questioning is impossible to resolve. The only way we know the experience of another is through language, and the Tanzen have none. Some philosophers would tell us that this means that -- by definition -- Tanzen are non-sentient. And yet how can they be so sure? Isn't it possible that there's another way for a sentient mind to exist in the world, one that we just haven't grasped yet?

Day 884 - The Cleverness of the Horny Bird

Interstellar probes are like factories. They consume raw materials in the target system and churn out the thousands of instruments and sensors necessary to explore a planet in detail. Most of them are very small and relatively passive. The simpler they are, the more there can be.

The reconnaissance cameras mass-produced by the Portia L2 probe were thin black wedges about a centimeter across with little more than optics, a transmitter and a little bit of logic. To deploy they were packed into a simple descent package and released at altitude to drift to the ground using only subtle piezoelectric actuators for guiding their descent. As result of this arrangement they were also built with a recessed switch and a red LED. The switch was depressed while the units were packaged tightly together keeping them turned off. When released the switch would open and let power flow to the circuits, flashing the LED briefly as confirmation during their initialization.

That flash turned out to be more important than for mere diagnostics.

The probe AI noticed that the sensors in a certain part of the noontime day region were disappearing, but had no model of why that would be important so it just deployed more to bring up the averages. Those disappeared too, even more quickly. Then sensors from nearby areas started to go dark, their last images sometimes capturing the shadow of something approaching.

AI's keep many threads of reasoning active at all times, although only a few rise to the level of action. Eventually this one did. The probe sent UAVs to study the area of the disappearances, and discovered the reason.

Gadget birds build bowers of found objects and fashioned artifacts, whose elaborate displays indicate their conspicuous over-fitness to discriminating females. The tiny camera sensors were perfect. Triggering the switch causes the logic to reset, flashing the tiny LED. The probe found all the lost devices enslaved in sexual light shows.

Typically the gadget bird's elaborate contraption would hold down the recessed button with some slender part of the display. At an opportune moment the button would release, the circuit would reset and the LED would flash. They were everywhere, adding their red winking to a host of gaudy staging. The biggest consisted of nearly 300 cameras triggered in complex sequence, producing flickering fireworks enough to dazzle the ficklest of females.

The probe AI quietly and rationally moved gadget bird research to the top of the queue.

Day 875 - The Evils of the Invention of Money

The very idea that it was possible to symbolize value -- especially in numeric form -- changed human society, human interaction, and human understanding. Homo Sapiens became Homo Economicus: the economic man.

Phillip Princeton, 2089

Money is the root of all evil. Or at least that's what people used to say. The theory was that money and how it operated in human society was, like all technologies invented my man, morally neutral in itself. The evil was in how people used it. It just so happened that if you examined the specific evils of the modern world you would find money somehow at the core of each.

But since it caused so much evil why was the thing itself not considered evil? As Princeton explained in his seminal work The Invention and Destruction of Value, money was incredibly useful. As he put it, the ability to apply mathematics to individual transactions was nothing less than a revolution in social cooperation. A society with money is able to support an enormous increase in cooperative work simply by being able to "exchange a day's labor for a day's bread."

So is money therefore good? It allows human societies to function at a higher level than they could before its invention. Money, and the markets that it naturally produces, are remarkably efficient at optimizing certain types of transactions. On the other hand it de-optimizes other, normally stable social relations. These are the evils directly related to money. It's not all evils, but it's some of the big ones. Princeton enumerated five.

Let's look at the first evil of money: hoarding.

Suppose you have a scarce resource. How should you control it to maximize access among those who want or need it? There are basically three ways. From best to worst we have:

1) Rationing. This requires a top-down decision-making process and a management infrastructure for fair decisions and distribution. If there's a sufficiently complex social network available for publicly vetting decisions then rationing is the very best way to manage a scarce resource. In less optimal conditions it's susceptible to favoritism and kick-backs, but if the rationing is transparent then it's really hard to beat. Or we could try...

2) Queuing. This is like rationing, but instead of making bureaucratic decisions about who should get what, we just put applicants in a list and give the next available resource to the top person on the list. The wait is relative to demand, and everyone experiences the same hardship in terms of the scarcity of the resource. The downside is that perhaps some politically important people would get moved to the top of the list, but they would be subject to the wrath of the mob. Or we could decide it by wealth in which case we would have...

3) Markets. The free market is way down at the bottom of the pile in terms of ways to manage a scarce resource. In a market system everyone pays for the resource in an equal field, but the price is relative to the supply. In theory this should serve to optimize allocation because those with a greater need will expend more of their money to acquire the resource, while those who need it less will do without.

But it doesn't work that way. Wealth is not equally distributed, so those in need may not have the money to buy what they need. But it's worse than that. In fact the incentives are quite perverse.

Recall that in a market system the price for a given unit of resource is relative to supply. That means that by decreasing the supply -- the amount of available resource -- the price goes up. So if you can buy a large amount of the resource and hold it, then it's price goes up because it's more scarce and you can sell it later at a higher price than when you bought it. This is called hoarding, the first evil to come from the invention of money.

Of course actually buying a large amount something and keeping it takes a lot of planning and expense, so hoarding is hard to implement in fact. This is where financialization changes the game for the worse. In a financial world complex mathematical abstractions allow the real price of a scarce resource to reflect the mere threat of hoarding, whether it's physically possible or not. And thus in a financial free market the theory of hoarding becomes a terrible reality.

The Brisbane water riots of 2071 were a simple consequence of using market forces to manage a scarce resource -- in this case water. Speculators swarmed in and drove the price of water up by leveraging impossible hoarding scenarios to the vast detriment of millions of citizens who needed water to live. Thousands died of thirst while those with wealth squandered potable water on their lawns.

It was a perfect example of the theory that Princeton clearly explained, and part of the reason for his popular appeal.