Dream Dance

Day 455 - Publishing Leads to Partying

Earthdate: June 24, 2313. Wednesday -- publishing day. Technically our paper had been published for months: 64 days ago on the department Roam for comment and amendment, and then 32 days ago on the University Roam when we were still making tweaks. But today was the big reveal -- global Roam, final text. We were officially done and all we could do now was relax and hope that we were well received.

There were some good early signs. Some at the University -- friends and colleagues, but nonetheless people whose opinion I respected -- had indicated that they thought this was one of the most significant recent papers in Crab biology. Their reviews generated interest that resulted in a lot of activity on the day it went fully public. Crab hubs were buzzing with comments, analysis and confirmations. Paal and I were ecstatic.

We had been doing almost nothing but work for months, and our existence as a couple had faded. Tonight, however, we had nothing to do but let loose. We planned to meet our friends at Biergleichung, our favorite dive, to celebrate. Paal was in rare form, attacking me as I came out of the shower, but I was ready for him. Even our spontaneous bumping didn't make us late -- not this time.

We met up with Shek and Shem and found a booth near the front where we could see people passing on the street. I met Shek my first days at the University when she not only helped me find my dorm but introduced me to nearly everything and everyone that I still depend on today. We always tease them about being able to share monograms on their towels.

Paal is not normally a big drinker, but when he decides to get drunk he goes through three consistent stages. At first he's the annoyed non-drunk. Unhappy that he's not yet happy, he downs beer after beer and grouses crankily about anyone else that seems to be having more fun than he is. He laughs too hard at dumb jokes and then curls his lip and curses when the pitchers aren't refilled fast enough.

Pretty soon he moves to the long second stage -- the funny drunk. Paal has a great wit when he gets over himself. He spent the longest time convincing us that the song Greensleeves was so named that because Henry the Eighth suffered from chronic sinus infections and wiped his nose on his garments. We questioned him in classic oral-exam format and he defended his thesis against all historical evidence. It was gross, but he had us all in stitches.

After we finished our meal and were getting tired he kept drinking, transforming him into stage three -- the stupid drunk. First he embarrassed himself by talking loudly about things that we had already discussed at length at the start of the meal. Next he insulted Shek, implying that her lab was staffed by people who were idiots or perhaps just lazy because they hadn't been as successful as he was tonight. Finally, as I helped him stumble into the warm summer night he decorated the sidewalk with a colorful spray composed of bits of his dinner.

My main thought as I wrestled him home was that he needed more practice. He was such a lightweight. I undressed him, cleaned him up and put him to bed. "The hard part is done!" he proclaimed, pushing the sheet off. "Yes dear," I said, tucking him back in, "the hard part's done. Now just go to sleep. The cites will be rolling in tomorrow."

Day 450 - The Politics of Biochemical Populations

Lexocytes had shown up fairly early in the human research on Crab biology, and it's now clear that the probe itself had initiated a line of inquiry that would have discovered them in short order as well. Lexocytes are fundamental to the Crab life cycle, development, evolution and society. One cannot understand Crabs without understanding the role of their microscopic symbiotes.

It's well known that microbes can alter behavior, even human behavior. The feline protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii has an affinity not just for cats but for any warm-blooded mammal. In mice and rats it reduces fear of cats -- and only cats -- the more the parasite can re-infect its primary host. Human infections exhibit a sexual dimension, making women more outgoing and promiscuous and men more aggressive and jealous. One can only wonder what this says about how the relationship between humans and their feline pets has affected parasite evolution.

Lexocytes ceased being parasites millions of years ago and instead established a symbiotic union with Crabs of unprecedented intimacy. The team on the E.O.Wilson painstakingly broke it down to its simplest details. Lexocytes live mostly in Crab brain tissue. Crab neurology is complicated, but the role of the Lexocytes can be explained in relatively simple terms. Each Lexocyte cell sits at the junction of Crab neurons, mediating the signaling between them. Sometimes a signal will come to the synapse and the Lexocyte will do nothing, letting the signal pass. Other times a signal will come in and the Lexocyte will throw up a chemical smokescreen to block it.

But how does the tiny microbe know which signals to allow and which to block? Fortunately this was a technology with which humans are well-versed -- genetics. Lexocytes contain a huge amount of kRNA. Some of it is used for normal purposes, like keeping the cell alive, but the rest operates quite differently. Instead of being transcribed into proteins like ordinary genetic sequences, these are converted into what the team called "tapes". Tapes bind with enzymes called "read heads". Excitation from the giant neuron triggers the read head to move ahead one step on the tape. The "symbol" -- like a codon in Earthly genetics -- can represent one of six possible states, and the read head enzyme either emits a hydroxide ion or doesn't depending on the state. Ultimately it's the pH of the cell from the tens of thousands of simultaneous read heads ticking over that determines if the signal is inhibited or not.

When a signal comes in, all the read heads advance a symbol on the tape and cast their vote. Majority rules.

But what decides which tapes to run? The Lexocyte genome is enormous, dwarfing the genetic sequence of their Crab hosts. That mechanism is also very simple. The pattern of accept/reject answers that the read-head enzymes generate alters their chemical structure. As they release hydroxide ions a structure called the "hydroxyl tail" can change to take on different configurations. As the tape completes it is released by the read head, but not before it binds with the tail. The tail and the tape form a new complex, and that -- by decoration with potassium and a set of other markers -- has a role in determining which tapes among the millions possible will be selected next.

As each tape's term expires, it elects it's successor.

In general, in fact, most tapes elect themselves. The tail only has 12 states so there are very few possible outcomes given the accessible pool of tapes. The other common outcome is a pair of tapes, with tape A electing tape B and B electing A. Biologists called this a "nepotistic mobius," although it seems very familiar to anyone who understands politics. But these are just molecules, so we shouldn't imbue them with any motives beyond replication of their genotype.

Tapes may run over and over again for hundreds of cycles, but eventually they change. The outcomes start to become unfavorable for the current population of tapes and new tapes start to be selected. Eventually they bring in all of their related tapes and a new population dominates, at least for a few milliseconds. They then give way to a new population and so forth. Typically one population is stable for a while until there is a shift, and then populations change one after another in quick succession until a new equilibrium is reached.

But what's the point of all of this detailed biochemistry? This is just organic molecules doing what they do based on nothing but eons-old genetic programming. And yet, this simple biochemical churning is why the Crabs are different from their closest ancestor. The latter scavenges the shoreline for trash, the former builds spaceships. It behooves us to understand the difference.

After all -- that's all we are too. The difference between us and chimps is some small biochemical activity that can be described in no less simple terms. Sometimes it seems like we understand Crabs better.

Day 446 - I Spake as a Child

Jargon has been an ongoing political problem for as long as I can remember. Despite scholarly theories that scientific knowledge would unify over time, different fields of endeavor have become even more disparate. It's reached the point where it's almost impossible for researchers to talk across interdisciplinary lines. It was thought that improving people's minds would solve the problem. But it didn't -- it made it worse. Jargon overlap goes down as measures of mental enhancement go up.

Two months ago Ramandeep made a comment about something quite opaque to me. Reviewing the records it was "mod 4-neuro". I asked him at the time about it and he translated it roughly as "common animal nerve model", which was very exciting to me. I would love to know about how the biochemistry mavens understood the neurology of the native life forms. So I looked up their research.

I may as well have been staring at a blank wall. Jargon modi simply don't adapt fast enough, and there may have been a lot of new coinage since we came to this planet. It was as impenetrable to me as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This was probably the main way that Pi made her reputation. In face to face meetings she assured that there were always enough experts of the right type to act as translators. It was at her parties that top researchers were able to find a way to communicate with those in related fields, or even in the same field but from a different jargon tradition. It's ironic that as science has reached a zenith of understanding we have also reached a nadir of simple talking.

I've been pestering Camil for weeks. She knows that her group needs to prepare a paper for general understanding, and yet somehow it's never quite done. It's nice to know that I'm not the only one behind schedule.

In any case, I finally have a draft of their preliminary report on "Neurological Modeling in Common Animals". It's still a bit dense, but the modi do a pretty good job with it. It opens up a lot of interesting research questions.

Day 440 - Headcase on the Sports Team

Coach had promised a bit much. He had at first described a comfortable system where I could run normally on a treadmill and he could slowly change the gas mixture without interfering with my workout, like a big glass cabinet that in no way impinged on my daily life. It was a nice fantasy. As it turned out, when it came time to breathe Martian standard atmosphere -- at that point I had to wear a mask. A big bulky mask with a long hose.

To give him full credit, he had managed to arrange passage to Mars. This was non-trivial, given a proposal that involved nothing much more than training an e0 to perform like an e1. Everyone I knew in what they thought of as serious biology would scoff at the luxuries of these lesser so-called "bio-mechanical" sciences -- research related to, you know, sports. I did too, at first.

I perused Coach's data and observations. Even though it was about me, and about my rather goofy training program, the scholarship was quite professional and the conclusions were fairly interesting. I was a case study -- what my own field would have been mockingly called an anecdote. It turns out in the field of human performance case studies are the way a lot of pioneering research is done. It's hard to test implausible theories on large groups because controlled experiments on humans are difficult, and doing something especially arduous cannot be implemented on a large sample size. But a single case study can be like gold, especially if it shows exceptional results.

It was clear that Coach had high hopes for me. Thinking about that was what kept me going during the months I ran in place with the elephant trunk stapled to my face. And that was the easy part.

Day 435 - The Resonance of Fear and Desire

Falling into resonance was one of the scariest things I have ever done. There was nothing to see, there was nothing to do -- there was just the quiet voices of the pilots and their modi muttering checklist items and counting down, and my own pounding heart. The only feeling was vibration as the power output cranked up to maximum and then a slight sensation of falling which was weird since were already in free fall. Our greatest moment of danger was objectively quite boring.

I'm told that our starship briefly became a comet -- a tiny speck of matter with a huge tail of luminous hydrogen glowing against the Jovian tableau. It wasn't rocket thrust; it was just the spent coolant from our reactor. Positrons wheeled around the magnetic donut in one direction, colliding at a predictable rate with normal electrons injected in the other direction. A beryllium/lithium ceramic converted some fraction of the radiation into electric potential and the rest got wicked away as heat, released as a giant plume.

We have enough antimatter for the return trip -- now locked into a perpetual magnetic racetrack in a storage orbit -- but we cannot make any more. The small amount we have was synthesized at the L4 facility, a giant physics lab kept a constant and safe distance from Earth. Starships need vast amounts of power but must also be compact and light, so energy at a planetary scale gets compressed into just a few grams of irreplaceable fuel. We represent the honed cutting edge of the entire human industry.

Remarkably, a single exotic material isn't enough. Interstellar travel relies on one even more strange: QED's, the charged quantum singularities that can be found only deep inside stars or gas giants. The population that powers our loop drive was mined from the depths of Jupiter using billion-Gauss coils the size of small moons. In theory there should be many more in our Sun, but the power to harvest them would be astronomical.

Travel to the stars is cramped, dangerous and enormously expensive. It robs us of our lives by throwing us forward and backward in time, depriving us of any continuity with the friends we may leave behind, or the future humanity that we may seek to join on our return. Yet it's worth it. I still feel ashamed of my cold feet, and of the terror I felt as I risked non-existence at the start of this voyage. The knowledge we have gained over the last century has made all the risk worthwhile.

But there's a final limitation. The Schwartz-deSegas ratio means that loop drive will top out at just under 1000 light years. Tuning the resonance for our own 500 light-year trip was like matching a note exactly using a piano with trillion keys -- it's clear that however great our technical competence we will soon reach the practical limit. Once that 1000 light-year bubble is fully explored we'll have to strike out from someplace else -- from a center other than Earth. We'll need a habitable star system, one with an affinity for humans and the resources we need for our most basic technologies. It should be far from Earth but not too far, and it should have a ready source of QED's for building starships and a suitable jumping off point for future expeditions.

What humans need, to continue their outward exploration, is a planet like Sigma 957.

Day 428 - I Control my Inner Pyromaniac

I'm building an oven. Not a dinky little EM/convective IR oven -- I have one of those. I don't need to explain the energy cost of that thing. Although roasting results in nicer flavor it's far more efficient to boil the blasted things. No, I'm building a real, old-fashioned wood-fired oven.

Sigma 957 is a hot planet, and despite the humidity there is generally a severe fire danger almost all the time. Forrest fires happen, but when they do they are hotter and more devastating than Earthly events. As result the aspergum trees -- pretty much all I have around here, looking like giant asparagus with sticky sap -- are built in layers. Some of the layers are filled with structural polysaccharides full of flame-ready energy. Alternating layers contain flame-retardant polymers. You could use up a whole field of kindling and never get them to burn.

Fortunately Lieff is a pyro, and he worked out in detail a method for building campfires from the native flora. First you cut the trees into logs. Then you age the logs 3 to 12 weeks, which lets natural enzymatic activity break down the polymers. Then you cook the logs to remove any remaining moisture and further break down long-chain molecules. At first you can use your electric oven, but preferably the cooking is done by piling the green logs next to your hot fire. After they are aged and cooked they are ready to burn, and hopefully cook another batch of aged logs.

With an oven running on native fuels I can roast tangroot -- even if it still takes hours -- using a tiny fraction of the energy I'm using now. It's ultimately not sustainable, and yet I think it's worth the small amount of harvesting required. Nonetheless I'm building the oven using local rocks and closer to my blind than my hab. I'm not really sure I need everyone's approval at this point.