March 2011

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Anti-Gravity . . . What If?

I’ve always been a huge admirer of the works of the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke. One of my favorite aspects of his writing lies in his use of real world, or at least theoretical, physics in his storylines. He never went off into flights of fancy with plotlines that could only happen in a magical universe. (Disclaimer: that doesn’t mean I don’t love Star Wars. Like every other red-blooded American male that came of age in the late seventies, I too am a big fan of the ‘Force’.)

I tried to emulate his approach in my novel. In the book I tie the physics of the UFO encountered in the first scene with an obscure but very exciting branch of theoretical physics known as Heim’s Quantum Theory, or HQT.

In the 1950s, 60s and 70s Burkhard Heim, a German self-taught theoretical physicist developed his unified field theory (HQT). Now before your eyes glaze over let me tell you the exciting part. If proved viable, HQT opens the door to gravity manipulation and faster than light (FTL) travel.

In 1957 he became an instant celebrity (in Germany) when he first presented his work. In the 1960’s Wernher von Braun, the famous German rocket scientist (think: father of the United States’ rocket program, aka NASA) approached Heim about his work and asked whether his Saturn rockets were worthwhile.

In a 1964 letter, relativity theorist Pascual Jordan, a member of the Nobel committee, told Heim his plan was so important “its successful experimental treatment would without doubt make the researcher a candidate for the Nobel prize.”

For multiple reasons his theory was never put to an experimental test. Primarily because the cost, scale and technologies involved exceeded his abilities.

This leads back to my book. Without giving away too much of the plot, it asks the question:

What if Heim was right?
What if the boys in Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories tested it?
What if the US Government already has craft that fly using an HQT inspired drive?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we have a fleet of faster than light anti-gravity ships. But it might make for interesting fiction…

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Dean M. Cole

Multi-Lingual Website

I’ve brought the power of Google Translate to my blog. You can now select your language in the drop down window at the top of the right sidebar on any of my pages.

Beware, if you can’t remember what flag to click on you may have a hard time getting back to your native language. It can be a challenge if you pick one you can’t read or at least guess how they represent your language. But don’t worry, it only translates my website. You wont be stuck trying to interpret Egyptian hieroglyphics as you surf the information superhighway … unless that is your ‘native language’.

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Dean M. Cole

How Humans Will Become Computers.

I think one of the biggest challenges in writing Near to Distant Future Science Fiction lies in finding a common point of reference for today’s readers. Under the mantra that fact often eclipses fiction, I believe the world as it will look a millennium from now will be so alien to today’s culture, any fiction that truly captures the likely changes might be a difficult read.

Most authors (me included) limit the ways future technologies change those cultures, leaving the human condition relatively unchanged. This allows the reader to identify with the story’s characters in ways that would be difficult with the truly alien culture that a millennium of “progress” would generate.

What could so radically change our culture, you ask. Say one day someone implants a chip in a brain for a simple memory augmentation. No big change right? Let’s even suppose that becomes a commonplace treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. In the next step, having perfected nanotechnology, we learn how to implement these changes without surgery. The surgeons or scientist need only inject a solution teaming with millions of nanobots programmed to seek a certain location and self-assemble into the same circuits that were previously surgically implanted.

Now say someone gets tired of doing rudimentary calculations and decides to utilize the same painless, non-invasive technology to implant those memory circuits along with an integrated circuit. Ah hell, throw in a modem while you’re at it. Now you have upgradeable memory in a powerful PC—or Mac—built into and integrated with your mind. (Kind of gives a whole new slant to the “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” commercials.) All of that incorporated with a low powered Electro-Organic modem. Talk about the information superhighway.

The biggest impediment to seamless computer access is the interface. With a thought-integrated computer, instantaneous internet, email, and tweets are only a thought away. Think the Internet has had significant social implications? What will happen to our society when we’re all linked together with no information bottlenecks.

Now, let’s take our thought experiment a little farther. The next logical brain enhancement would be the implementation of thought expanding circuitry. You have all of this data coming through your Electro Organic Network (EON as it’s called in my book) but the organic part of your brain can only handle so much at a time. Some hacker or scientist figures out a way to reprogram intellect into your memory or integrated circuits (EON). This would enable you to shift some of your thought processes into a network that runs exponentially faster than your organic computer (read: brain). This assumes that Moore’s Law will have made computers much more powerful than the human mind, currently they are not.

Unhappy with the status quo, people add more and more mental functions and thought processes to their EON. Eventually the silicon-based thoughts exceed the carbon-based.

So I’ve laid out the hypothetical path for a society to transition from organic based thoughts to computer-based without a single huge leap. What kind of social changes would that bring about? The slow-thinking twenty-first century man will look like knuckle-dragging caveman in comparison to the twenty-second century EON enhanced man.

Most people shrug off the suggestion that we may someday shift our thoughts to computers, saying “It’s too big of a leap.” Not in the small baby steps I’ve laid out. Or, “It would be a soulless copy of the real person.” Once again, not in the parallel processing scenario I’ve painted. Although, I’m sure philosophers and theologians will argue ad nauseum.

Those ideas represent a mere fraction of the possibilities of the next century, let alone a millennium. On a geologic timescale a thousand years is blink of the eye. What about 10,000; 100,000; or even a million years (still barely a yawn on a geologic timescale).

But who knows, maybe I’m underestimating my prognosticating ability. Maybe humans several millennia removed will closely resemble what I’ve depicted in my book.

Side note: Just when I thought I had an original thought— While looking for links to tie in real-world data to my theories I discovered many references to Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity. He took this thought experiment to its ultimate outcome long before me.

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Dean M. Cole

It’s so Good to be Home!

I’m finally home after way too many days away from my soulmate.

Here’s a picture I took yesterday from the deck of Ensco’s 8501 drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the background you can just make out the Ensco 8502.

We followed out the weather and arrived at the 8501 just after the line passed overhead. The photo is the sun peaking through the backside of the frontal boundary.

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Dean M. Cole

New Year’s Resolution Slippage?

Fitness, Dieting & Writing Tips.

We’re two months into the New Year. How’s your resolve? Have you stuck with your potentially intoxicated December 31st 11:59PM resolution to do better in X, Y, or Z?

Most of us set fitness goals. January and February gym attendance will attest to that fact. Over the years I’ve watched the ebb and flow of the seasons as marked by said attendance of the New Year’s Resolutioneers, or lack thereof come the third month of the year.

By March—the time of the year when the gym’s switch from trying to woo you to trying to sue you—most people have fallen to the wayside. They either loose interest or just get too busy. Either way, I believe the main reason is because they never established good habits and haven’t achieved the results they’d hoped for.

In this blog I’d like to pass on a few of the lessons I’ve learned over the years as my fitness goals have waxed and waned.

Habits are slow to catch on and easy to break (unless we’re talking crack or nicotine.) It typically takes twenty-one days to mentally transition a chore into a habit. And in my experience less than a week to reverse the process.

So first, in able to make something a habit you have to deliberately set aside time for it on a daily basis, yes that’s seven days a week for at least the first twenty-one days. Even if it’s just thirty minutes. I use this technique to establish habits for everything from writing to working out. (Note to self: better start twenty-one days of blogging.)

After that initial twenty-one day period you’ll find yourself automatically making time for your designated activity. You’ve burned the habit into your neural pathways. It starts to feel ‘wrong’ if you’re not doing your activity on a regular basis. Now you can shift to doing said activity on a normal schedule.

Avoid long breaks! Remember my earlier note; if you go more than seven days without doing your ‘thing’, you’ll break the habit (still not talking crack or nicotine.)

If you find yourself in an unavoidable scheduling conflict, ie: extended travel, then form a mental substitution. Write notes on a notepad, or for the fitness regime, do some sit-ups and pushups in your hotel room.

“You have to measure what you want to improve.” As your old high school coach used to chant (and you’ve heard it at every business seminar you’ve ever attended.) If you want to improve something you have to measure it.

That goes for everything from waistline to calorie-count to page/word count. How do you know you’re improving if you don’t know how much you did or how much you lost?

Like me you probably think, I know how much I ate/wrote/worked out/lost. But as I found out the hard way, the subconscious is very good at deluding you. One only need use a calorie tracker for a couple of days to figure that one out. When I first started dieting I would use some good practices, ie: not eating empty calories, avoiding processed sugar and excess fat. I kept my portions in check too. But I was treading water. After a couple of months I hadn’t lost any significant weight (and I had a good twenty or thirty pounds to loose—happily married weight.) I was treading water.

When I started counting calories—measuring—I discovered I was still overeating. By the end of the first day the list of food FAR exceeded my perception of what I had consumed throughout the day.

So I made counting calories a habit (see 21 days above.) Three months and 25 pounds later my measuring habit has paid off.

So hang in there. You can do it, and it does get easier as it becomes a habit. (Whatever it is for you.)

Good luck!