My brother, who is retired, spends a lot of time looking over the internet. He also has friends that do the same. As a result I sometimes get the most interesting things in my inbox. This morning was one of the most interesting of all. This little gem was called The Scale of the Universe 2. This is a scalable animation from the visible Universe down to the Planck Length, the smallest possible measurable length there is. Developed by Michael and Cary Huang, who from the name of their site ( http://htwins.net) must be twin brothers, it is one of the most amazing representations of the scale I have ever experienced. Now I have seen plenty of scaling pictures in the past, but nothing of this scope. Almost every imaginable object is represented. Quarks, viruses, ants, dinosaurs, planets, stars, nebula, star clusters, galaxies and galactic clusters. And clicking on any object brings up a box of information about that object. Did you know that ants make up 15-20 % of all animals on Earth? I didn’t.
Now I am a very visual person. I like to see the things I write about. I draw things to scale to get an idea of what they might look like to a character who is viewing them. This little webpage is a wonderful resource for my visual brain. Just looking at the scale from 10-6 to 10-9 started ideas flowing about nanotechnology that would not have come otherwise. Oh, they might have eventually materialized. But not in such numbers as appeared within seconds of looking at the objects in relation to each other. I highly recommend this page to anyone who has an interest in either the very small or the very large. It gives a truly personal look at all of reality. It shows how we are almost infinitely larger than the smallest, and almost infinitely smaller than the largest. And how everything is almost all nothing, which gives sense to the ideas of Neutron Stars and Black Holes, cramming so much of what we consider to be real into such small (in the case of black holes infinitesimal) areas. Give this page a look and see if you feel the same wonder I do.
The Scale of the Universe 2
Nanotechnology
All posts tagged Nanotechnology
Before I starting writing novels I used to read the work of others and wonder at the brilliance of their plots. Somewhere near the end I would come across something in the plot that was pointed to much earlier in the work, and I would think, wow, how did he think of that link. And then there were the Red Herrings, the plot points meant to lead the reader astray so that when the plot surprise comes it is a real surprise. Of course I naively thought that the writer had plotted this all out in advance, or had the talent to write along on his first draft and plant the perfect clues, or herrings, along the way. Since writing I have found that this is not the case, as least in my own work, and from what I have read not in the work of most others. Currently I am working on the first draft of, of course, my Work In Progress, otherwise known as a WIP. It should be finished by the last day of this month. At least that is the plan. It is a science fiction novel concerning a man who transports himself by way of nanotechnology in an experiment meant to open up the solar system. His body is disassembled on one end and reassembled on the other from different components. During this process the original is destroyed and the copy is reassembled missing something. Working title is Soulless, which should give you the idea of what was missing. A kind hearted man is turned into a complete psychopath, out for himself and himself alone, with the technical knowledge to make himself a superman and construct an army of supermen. When it is finished it will be put to bed on the hard drive and backups, not to see the light of day for at least a year. This is my normal mode of operation, since a year’s separation makes the manuscript look to my eyes the work of someone else, which I guess it is, since I will have changed some in that year. Currently I am working on rewrite for agent submission of a novel I wrote in 2010, which I processed through a first rewrite in 2011, and is now going through the second and final polishing.
Anyway, while writing soulless I have created new characters later in the book that were needed to fill certain parts (that’s the problem with killing characters off earlier in the book that served those roles). So now I am thinking of new scenes near the beginning that really introduce those characters, while also adding plot points that foreshadow the scenes that I have just written. In one scene I am currently working on I introduce animals that have been remade into killer beasts as a way for the antagonist to escape a situation that would otherwise be inescapable. But I said nothing about killer animals in the past, so now I have to go back and write something that foreshadows them. And on and on, adding maybe ten thousand words to something already completed, so that the plot makes sense all the way through, without introducing a totally unexpected tech or character to the story in a manner that seems artificial, just a way to get out of a corner I have painted a character into. Hopefully when this book comes out, either with a publisher or on the net as a selfpub, people will read it and say, how did he think of that? Or, wow, he foreshadowed that in chapter three. And not realize how I cheated, using my author’s control of time and space in the realm of my work.
Just finished the first draft of one of the manuscripts I didn’t finish in 2011. Feels good to finish one. And now it will sit in the dark on my hard drives and thumb drives for a year. That gives me some separation from the novel before approaching it again. Now it’s on to the next project. But first some time to reflect on this tale, especially the ending, a line from which actually gave me the working title, The New Armageddon. I originally got the idea from Independence Day, the block buster movie that was all special effects and no intelligent story line. You know the story. The aliens come here in big hawking space ships to take all our resources, as if there weren’t more and better resources for the taking in space. The vibrations of the ships are so damned strong that they shake the footprints of the first men on the moon from the dust, I guess as a foreshadowing of what they intend for us, despite the fact that vacuum does not transmit sound waves. Then the humans, after arguing about the use of nuclear weapons that might pollute the world, despite the fact that the aliens are going to pretty much wipe the Earth clean, use the backdoor of the alien’s Microsoft DOS System and put a virus in the works. This allows a small tactical nuclear weapon to destroy a ship a quarter the mass of the moon by going off in the hanger deck really far from any of the vessel’s power sources. At which point the humongous space ships blows up but does no harm to the planet it hovers over. The intelligence of the script just shines through. I would have thrown more than one of the planet’s twenty some thousand nuclear weapons at the evil aliens and cleaned up afterwards, if there was one. But the movie sparked an idea that I had thought about for years.
First off I thought about using aliens that were traveling slower than light, and they first hit one of our colonies, Tau Ceti. Of course this is set in the future, six hundred years or so. So we know they are coming, we can see them coming, and we have time to prepare our war machine. The aliens are much more advanced than we, in most technologies. They do not have much in the way of medical science and have completely ignored nanotech. And this ties in with the reason they are coming after us. They are death worshipers. They believe that life is bad and their mission is to wipe all life from the Universe, one solar system at a time. And they have stolen their tech from another species that they, you guessed it, wiped out. So we prepare for them and don’t do very well at first. They destroy whole fleets, kill off the populations of planets, and look like they are going to win the trophy. Until…..
Well, you’re just going to have to wait to read the book when it comes out. So on the same day I celebrate finishing a manuscript, always a big deal even it it is number 23, I receive a letter in the mail from an agent. These form rejections used to break my heart. Now that I am self publishing it is not such a big deal. I still feel compelled to put each book through the agenting process. And then if they are rejected I go on and publish that book online, then move on to the next agent submission. This agent’s form letter stated that the novel, a High Fantasy that has been read by professionals and amateurs who thought it good enough for publication, was not for their list. That’s OK, because it’s now for mine. Another favorite response is “it’s not for me,” to which I can now respond to myself, “no, but it’s sure for me.” So I will continue down my path, and the gatekeepers have become minor players in my career. Still important, but not really such a big deal.
This last weekend I released my fourth self pub novel, the science fiction adventure The Scorpion. The plan is to have eight novels up by summer, the fruits of many years of production. The Scorpion is a near future novel, set in 2047. I really prefer writing far future novels, though near future are much easier when it comes to research, and I expect people will pretty much be the same in the mid 21st Century, while they might act in completely different ways four centuries from now. There may be different slang, different fashions, different entertainments, but they will still be the mostly selfish and greedy b#*stard ruled by the same kind of leaders as today. Or maybe I’m just being optimistic.
The Scorpion came from an idea of what the world might be like if fusion power was developed into a workable technology. Power would be cheap, which means hydrogen produced by the electrolysis of water would be cheap. Which would mean that oil and coal, dirty sources of power to say the least, would fade from the economic scenery, except in those countries that cannot afford the new tech. How will this affect the Opec countries? They will again become poor third world countries outside looking in. And they will be mad as hell, spawning a new generations of terrorists to shout their rage to the world. This will result in an increase in the security tech and resources of the have nations as they try to combat the have nots. And tech will make the difference, just as it does today.
The military has always jumped on the chance to get an edge on the potential enemy, even when that jump is a knee jerk reaction in the wrong direction. I don’t see how they will fail to take advantage of emerging nanotechnology and genetic engineering, and the integration of the two, to get a leg up on the opposition. The militarization of space will proceed, despite all the rhetoric against it. The world will continue to teeter on the edge of wars. Genetic engineering will result in designer pets, including new security and home protection animals. I didn’t really touch on the affects of climate change, maybe from an optimistic viewpoint that fusion will save us. The big hocking airships for military and commercial use? I just thought the idea was really cool, so I put it in there. Yeah, the big assault ships might be too vulnerable, but maybe with high tech systems they could be defensible. But either way they are a cool image.
Below is an excerpt from the book, which is available on my website, Amazon and Smashwords.
Jackie Seager had been a water works technician for the City of Omaha for going on twenty years. In that time she had gained the ultimate security clearance needed to access the heart of a system that provided clean drinking water to hundreds of thousands of citizens. She was up before the sun to commute to work. As a technician in a very hands on industry she did not make herself up for the job. But she still took her appearance seriously, and wanted to look sharp in front of her subordinates.
Her long brown hair was not responding this morning to her efforts. The mirror showed a youthful face under the unruly hair. The face was the benefit of exercise, diet and the most modern of rejuvenating treatments. She knew she could look forward to making it to at least a hundred, with one twenty being a very real possibility.
Jackie promised herself that she would have the hair cut short as she walked out of the bathroom and finished dressing in her coveralls. She grabbed her purse and headed for the door.
“Bye Pudding,” she said as she stooped to pet the cat that had rubbed against her legs. “You be a good kitty.”
Jackie turned the old fashioned dead bolt on her door, then pulled the door open. She had been looking down as she went through the doorway, and almost ran into the person who had been standing outside it. The first she knew that someone was there was when shoes appeared in her vision. With a start Jackie looked up into the face of the person, noting with relief from the swelling of breasts under the shirt that it was a woman. Relief turned to shock when the face that appeared before her was her face.
“What the hell?” said Jackie, shuffling back.
The doppelganger exploded into action, springing forward, striking Jackie in the nose with the palm of her hand. Jackie grunted in pain as she fell back, then huffed out the air in her lungs as she hit the floor with her back. Pudding hissed in alarm as she ran from the room to seek cover.
Jackie pulled air into her lungs to let out a scream as a small pistol appeared in the look alikes’ hand. She was looking down the barrel of the mag gun as she attempted to force the scream out of her mouth. The gun phutted in near silence and blackness fell in front of her eyes. A blackness that she would never come out of.
* * *
Al-Agrab closed the door and grabbed the body by the ankles, grunting with the effort as she dragged the corpse out of the living room and into a bedroom. She pushed the body up next to the bed and pulled the comforter off of the sleeping platform, draping it over the dead woman. She then washed her hands in the bathroom and rifled through the closet. Finding another work coverall she climbed into it, then put on a pair of Jackie Seager’s work shoes.
The Scorpion pondered the trail of blood leading from the living room to the bedroom, the result of Jackie’s life blood leaking out of her ruined skull. With a curious shrug of her shoulders, left reaching up to her ear while the right barely moved, the Scorpion decided nothing could be done at this point. They were liable to be on to her soon, and she would probably be dead by the evening, so covering the evidence of a murder didn’t seem that important. Picking up the woman’s purse the Scorpion was out the door, locking it behind her.
Moments later Jackie’s late model Chevrolet pulled out of the building’s parking garage, the woman inside waving at the camera. It accelerated onto the parkway and headed out of Omaha, toward the water works.
* * *
“McMann,” Kestrel subvocalized into his com link as the unit woke him. Sharone groaned for a moment beside him as he sat up in bed.
“This is Sulu,” came the voice of the FBI Agent over the link. “We have a situation in Omaha.”
“Hold on a moment, Agent Sulu,” said McMann as he dug an elbow into Sharone’s side. The Israeli agent sat up with blurry eyes as McMann switched the incoming channel to his house system.
“Go ahead, Agent Sulu,” said McMann, motioning for the Israeli to be quiet.
“A powerful genenged bio-toxin was released into the Omaha, Nebraska water supply this afternoon,” said Sulu. “It has infected and killed over two hundred people. Almost four hundred more are in the hospital. The system identified a concentration of the toxin and shut down, or we might be looking at tens of thousands of casualties.”
“My God,” said McMann, springing out of bed while signaling the wall mounted Trivee to activate. CNN was immediately on the screen, with the caption Omaha showing below the talking head.
“Do you have a suspect?” asked McMann. Sharone pulled herself out of bed and he found his attention straying to her tight naked body. She threw a grimace at him while she grabbed her bra and panties from the floor and looked at them as if she didn’t know what they were.
“We have dozens of suspects, Agent McMann,” said Sulu. “We’re going to start rounding them up within the hour and question them.”
“Any suspects who have been out of the States in the last year?” asked McMann, going to his dresser and pulling a clean pair of briefs from a drawer. “Particularly to the Middle East.”
McMann turned to look at Sharone sliding her bra over her small breasts. She saw him looking and stuck her tongue out at him.
“Let me see,” said Sulu. “We have four that have been out of the country in the last year. Two to the European Union, one to Australia, and one to…, Israel. That would be Jackie Seager. She’s a long time employee and a department director at the water works.”
“Leave that one alone if you can,” ordered McMann as he slid into a pair of pants. “Keep her under close surveillance and don’t let her out of sight. If it looks like she’s gonna bolt arrest her, but otherwise leave her to me. I’ll be up there in less than two hours. McMann out.”
“You think they might have something?” asked Sharone as she sat on the bed and pulled on her own pants.
“Maybe. The perp didn’t get killed this time,” said Kestrel as he pulled his shirt over his head. “That might be a break if we can get them in custody and get some information out of them before they suicide.”
“And you don’t trust anyone else to do it?”
“Of course not,” he agreed as he slid his shoulder holster onto his arm and buckled it. “Would you trust someone in another agency to do something you could do better?”
Many years ago, when I was in the Army stationed in Germany, I remember seeing an album cover by a local band called Nektar. The title of the album was Remember the Future. I always thought it was a cool cover and a really cool title. But what did that title mean, remember the future? I believe we all make up our futures depending on what we see around us. We predict, we plan, and most times we are wrong. Each generation makes its own future. Edgar Rice Burroughs, in Beyond The Farthest Star, envisioned a world where great air fleets battled the skies at supersonic speeds, with props. That was what they saw as the ultimate in aerial technology, so they pushed the envelop with what they knew. Back in the Golden Age it was thought that we would have moon bases in the 1960s, space stations in orbit, maybe even flights to Mars and beyond. It was also thought that the world would have three or four massive computers and everyone would send their data in to be crunched. Sure, we have mainframes, more than they imagined. But no one saw the billions of smaller computers, desktop, notebooks, even intelligent phones, and the international net that links them together.
The future of my childhood was shaped by the space program. From the west coast of Florida I watched the launches of Saturn Vs across the peninsula, their sun bright flames pushing them into orbit and beyond. Man walked on the Moon. There were plans to push the envelop, Moon Bases, Space Habitats, trips to the outer Solar System. 2001 came out in the 60s, a science fiction novel written by a real scientist. It predicted Howard Johnson’s restaurants in orbit, regular flights into orbit (though Pan Am didn’t survive much past the novel), a major complex on the surface of the Moon, even a voyage of exploration to Saturn (the original destination, which was changed to Jupiter in the movie and subsequent books). So WTF happened? I think it was the Cold War that sucked all the funding out of the planned space programs of the two superpowers. Fortunately the other prediction of the time, Nuclear Armageddon, also didn’t come to pass.
This generation’s vision of the future includes genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and virtual worlds. Again we predict the future we think will come, as well as the future we hope to hell never rears its ugly head. The old mainstays of scifi are still there. Space travel, FTL, Interstellar Empires. Most are set so far in the future that the writer does not have to worry about his world being destroyed by time. Some still make the mistake of wishful thinking and make the technology come too fast. My old mentor Charles Sheffield wrote novels in the early twenty first century that predicted an explored and settled Solar System in 2080, a date most thought was much too optimistic. As far as more Earthly technologies, everyone’s guess is as good as any others’. We can make predictions based on what we know about the here and now, and the logical progression of trends and technologies. What we can’t always predict is the new and the unusual, things which come without warning out of laboratories and Universities. The things which generate new trends, industries and cultures. But we still take a shot at developing the future, the settings for new stories, new characters, new history.
Follow Future Trends on PhutureNews, a blog of some hot scifi writers and new comers. Link on the side of the page.
Find my books, The Deep Dark Well, The Hunger, Diamonds In The Sand and soon The Scorpion on Amazon, Smashwords and my website, Imagination Unlimited.
Doug BrotherofCats Dandridge 