I’d gotten away from posting on this, because I got heavily involved in local environmental politics. If you look up big developments and fire in San Diego for the last two years, I’ve been involved in that. Still am, really, which is why I can’t talk about it. Regardless, things are slowing down, and I’ve had a chance to read some interesting articles that might help with science fiction worldbuilding, so I’ll post them here.

And, of course, there’s US politics, which I’m not going to write about. I’m guessing that, if you’re reading this, you want a break from it? Regardless, it’s not clear whether we actually have any right to privacy at the moment, so I’m not going to post detailed diatribes over whether it would be reasonable to doxx certain high level judges in the US at the moment or not. I assume the answer is no, incidentally, but we’re not talking about that here.

Instead, this is about a new paper. There seems to be better evidence for what caused the PETM. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 56 mya is currently one of the better models for anthropogenic climate change. This article shows there’s some decent evidence that it was caused by volcanism, specifically, Iceland.

This didn’t surprise me. Iceland’s odd. Basically it’s a hotspot volcano like Yellowstone or Hawai’i, and during the Paleogene it was tracking across Greenland and into the widening north Atlantic. Now the hotspot is under the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and I’m not sure if it will stay stuck there or keep moving. That hotspot X spreading center combination is unique in the world as far as I know. What’s a spreading rift, you ask? Well, in some models, it’s a row of hotspot volcanoes that…nevermind. I don’t know why some volcanism makes rifts (East Africa) and others make hotspots (the Pacific high islands).

It’s the details that matter, both for our current climate change nightmare and for worldbuilding on ancient SF planets.

–First off, the PETM carbon emissions were significantly higher than our fossil fuel supplies, so we could (if incredibly stupid) burn all our fuel and not get that hot. Since we’re burning fuel on the order of 300 years (most in the last 50 or so) and the PETM took 3,000-6,000 years, life WILL NOT adapt to our terafart as it did to the PETM. This is was incredibly stupid means. We’re not slowly boiling the climate frog, we’re microwaving it, and we need to control our emissions ASAP. Still, +8oC in the next 500 years seems to be off the table. Which is good, seeing how civilization’s rivets are starting to pop at a +1oC increase.

–Second, the clathrate gun hypothesis seems to be less supported. That’s the idea that methane released from the ocean floor can flood the atmosphere and rapidly raise temperatures. As the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout showed, when mass quantities of methane are released into the ocean, they get gobbled by methanotrophic archea and bacteria before they make it to the surface. So this isn’t (thank Gaia) as likely a doomsday scenario as it was 20 years ago.

And then we get to the proposed mechanism for how Iceland blew carbon, and it’s kind of cool. It’s also relevant for worldbuilding on a science fiction world.

The general problem with terrestrial worlds is that a biosphere that can support multicellular life has a limited lifespan. It requires oxygen (long story) and our planet, it took billions of years for that atmosphere to form (mostly because a huge amount of iron, sulfur, and other elements needed to be oxidized before surplus oxygen could flood the atmosphere). Another trap is that keeping carbon in the air requires active plate tectonics. Unfortunately, as planets age, absent some other source of energy, radioactive elements in the core decay, the core cools, the crust cools and thickens, and volcanoes and plate tectonics grind to a halt. This traps carbon underground, and multicellular life becomes impossible.

Thing is, our planet already has old rocks, and the PETM event shows an interesting way carbon can be blown back into the atmosphere.

From the article:

“CO2 and other gases can bubble out of tectonic plates as they dive into the mantle, percolating up into the underside of thick crusts like Greenland's, and forming carbonate formations that can be stable for millions or even billions of years.

“If the crust is ever pulled apart by rifting, however, the trapped carbon can spill upward and erupt as rare carbonatite lava, which contains far more CO2 than standard lava. Indeed, such a process appears to be underway in East Africa right now, where a rift has begun to tear the horn of Africa away from the rest of the continent…”

“Similarly, the hot spot that burned through Greenland starting 60 million years ago could have mobilized any carbonate under its crust, Gernon says. When the rifting began to open up what today is the northeastern Atlantic Ocean, ‘you'll have a huge amount of carbon venting.’

“Evidence of the carbon-rich melt is abundant on either side of the North Atlantic rift, the tectonic division that marks the old boundary between Greenland and Europe…”

The worldbuilding point of this is that, even on worlds with thick crust and little active rifting, carbon-rich lavas are possible (Ol Doinyo Lengai is the current example), and that’s how carbon will come back into the air.

If I had to guess, this will turn out to be the major mechanism for Earth’s mass extinctions: massive volcanoes hitting carbon-rich rocks. It’s almost certainly what caused the End Permian (the Siberian Traps burning through a huge, young coal field). The end-Triassic extinction is associated with the rifting open of the Atlantic (more thick, old rock getting cooked), and so on.

So, as long as flood volcanism and rifts can continue on a planet, both short term mass extinctions and long-term life may well continue. It will turn out to be both interesting and obnoxious if the long-term survival of life on Earth and Earth-like worlds is inseparable from the geology that also causes mass extinctions.

I’m supposed to be writing about the upcoming election right? Because my job as an American citizen at this pivotal moment in our nation’s history is to help spread all the psychological warfare tactics being deployed by all sides to get us to be afraid and either vote or not.

Screw that. By the way: Vote! That’s all I’m going to say right now. It’s not that I’m not busy with local politics (hence the silence on this blog). Rather, it’s that I suspect that your adrenal glands are getting worn out by the psywar, so I wanted to give you a little respite. Over the last month, I’ve read two very different visions of space for the 21st Century, and I wanted to share them.

One is the US Space Force’s “Capstone Publication”: Doctrine for Space Forces. It’s an interesting mix of apparently thoughtful “how do we fight a war in space” analysis (which happens to be useful for SFF types at least), combined with a certain amount of macho posturing and “boots in the sky rhetoric,” to make it look like they’re more than a bunch of satellite jockeys working from home and keeping their cats off their laptops. Which I’m sure they are. This is good stuff to read if you’re interested in the putative realities of warfighting in near-Earth orbit and how it fits together with all the other various and diverse ways we have of hurting each other. But much of it is perhaps too familiar for precisely those reasons.

On the other side is something (apparently) completely different: JP Aerospace, aka “America’s Other Space Program,” a little outfit in the Sacramento area that seems to be developing its space hardware as a non-profit running on donations and contracts. The JP is John Powell, and I’m a bit late to his game. For the last 20 years or more, he’s been promoting what he calls “The Airship to Orbit Program” (you can buy his 2008 book at his website. Or Amazon–it comes out of the same warehouse. It’s worth reading, not just for the program, but if you want to learn about all the upper layers of our atmosphere). His vision of how to get to orbit is a slower, safer, three-step operation using ginormous airships.

Stage one is an A-shaped “Ascender” that’s around 900 feet long. The arms of the A are helium or hydrogen-filled polypropylene balloons inside a wing-shaped nylon sleeve, while the crossbar of the A has a couple of electric-powered high altitude propellers. It’s a semi-blimp with a keel that’s a large carbon fiber space frame truss, while the top of the wing-bag is a carbon fiber deck that mounts thin solar panels and carries the pipes and pumps for moving the lifting gas between internal gas bags. Semi-blimp means its halfway between a blimp (which has no hard internal structure other than the nose cone and possibly fins) and a dirigible, which has a full internal structure. Or you could call it a keeled airship. This beast can carry about 20 people up to 140,000 feet in about two hours. Basically, the Ascender takes off, points its nose up 70 degrees (it’s basically a huge, slow flying wing) and ascends to 60,000 feet on buoyancy alone. At that point, the wings and propellers take over so that it can fly the rest of the way up. It has to be so huge and light to fly at high altitude in very thin air.

At 140,000 feet (space officially starts around 330,000 feet up), the Ascender docks with Stage 2: Dark Sky Station. This is a starfish shaped, rigid-keeled airship/station. Each arm of the star is around 2 miles long, and it can house 100-200 people indefinitely with resupply. Its gasbags are inflated with hydrogen, but there’s so little oxygen at this elevation that combustion is not an issue. The Dark Sky Station (dark because the sky is black at this elevation) is a combination tourist attraction, transshipment hub, and research center. People visit to see the sights, drop a paper airplane, catch Stage 3 to orbit, or go up there to do astronomy, aerobiology, or unload cargo that needs to go to orbit whatever. It’s a commercial venture.

Stage 3, the Orbital Airship, is assembled at the Dark Sky Station and flies to orbit. This is another A-shaped, keeled airship, except each wing is around 6000 feet long and there’s no cross-bar. It has electrical propulsion units (design TBA, but anything from VASIMR to advanced ion is possible), and it’s so large because it has to fly in *really* thin air. It climbs to 270,00 feet on a mixture of buoyancy and wing lift. Above that, level, it flies using its wings for lift, gradually picking up speed (over most of a day or 5) at the top of the atmosphere until it achieves orbital speed at 17,500 mph and is flying on propulsion alone. At that point, its job is to either rendezvous with a spacecraft or space station or possibly release satellites. To get back down to the Dark Sky Station, the orbital airship merely tips its nose up, and its enormous surface area acts as a really nice, gradual aerobrake without heating too hot. It drops and slows until it can match velocity with the DSS and do it again. This ship is not designed to ever land. To fly at that altitude, the gas bags are about the consistency of vegetable bags at the grocery store, and the nylon skin is not much thicker. It would break apart in the lower atmosphere, but it can get lift out of what would have been a decent vacuum at sea level in the 19th century. It’s also so big and ponderous that even a simple turn would take something like an hour to execute. This flies like an oil tanker, not a jet fighter.

Now about the practicalities: JP has flown over 100 development missions consisting of balloon rigs and sounding rockets, and built Ascenders up to 160 feet long for the USAF, so he’s not blowing smoke. He’s designed high altitude propellers and demonstrated that they work on rigs launched up to 100,000 feet. He’s flown a number of small dark-sky stations (10-30′ wide) and demonstrated that the five-armed starfish is the most stable design. He’s recycling a lot of the same designs and technology for all three designs, and he’s testing them out as he gets funds to fly missions with his crew of merry space pioneers. One of his basic workhorse designs, the two-balloon, two propeller “tandem” design was developed and flown for around $30,000. While he ran his company on government contracts prior to the 2008 crash, he’s currently running the whole thing as a non-profit. He’ll haul your stuff up into the upper atmosphere for quite affordable rates (or free if it fits in a ping-pong ball), and he does several launches a year, testing his technology a piece at a time and flying other people’s stuff to pay the way.

A couple of other design challenges: how can balloons fly at Mach 22 (escape velocity), and what happens when something hits an airship?

Balloons flown by the NASA and the USAF have already gone Mach 10 in the high atmosphere/near Earth orbit, so it’s not impossible. No one apparently knows if a balloon with mile-long wings can pull off the stunt, but our intuitions about friction and lift get weird in near-vacuum conditions.

The other common concern is “what if it gets a hole?” And the simple answer is this isn’t a problem. The gas is in multiple bags, not one . This is a normal dirigible design going back a century. The problem with having one gas bag per wing is that gas can slosh around, and once it gets to one end and the ship goes vertical, things get hairy. Blimps have multiple gas bags inside the outer envelope as do dirigibles. They also normally have air ballast bags inside them to keep the gas where it belongs (outside air performs the same function as water ballast in a submarine).

Anyway, getting back to safety, if a gas bag gets holed, it can be replaced in flight. They’ve been testing having large gas bags on reels and unreeling them as they get inflated. It works well enough. Another line is the WW I bombing of London by Zeppelins. It took some time to figure out how to shoot down the dirigibles. The problem wasn’t hitting them with bullets, it was that the bullets simply passed through, rather than igniting the hydrogen inside. The holes leaked slowly enough that the airships didn’t go down, and sometimes the bags could simply be patched in flight. The Zeppelins weren’t shot down until the British figured out special incendiary bullet pairs to pierce the bags and physically ignite them from the inside. Then, once they got the right fuel-air mixture from the holed bags, the hydrogen finally ignited and brought down the Zeppelin.

In the case of a meteor hitting an orbital airship at Mach whatever, the space debris passes right through, and the crew patches up the hole. The ship’s shape is inflated by nitrogen (at very low pressure, I suspect), so it’s a matter of patching holes and replacing stuff. The carbon fiber truss is probably also fairly easy to replace, and it looks like the ships will have multiple trusses per keel. According to his book (and the enclosed pictures), a 100 feet of the truss he uses as airship keels weighs around 20 lbs. Having multiple trusses and carrying spares on the ship isn’t that hard. Patching it in a freezing vacuum gets interesting, but that’s not the same as the shuttle breaking up over Texas.

So that’s two visions of space overall. On one side, we have a very colonialist take of shredding treaties and militarizing space before the other side does it to us. Which sounds depressingly familiar, but I’m a well enough trained nationalist to feel a faint patriotic stirring at the thought of boots in the sky. On the other side, we’ve got this scrappy little outfit with a really different take on how to get to orbit, that’s shoestringing successes at a tiny fraction of what the rocketeers are charging to light candles and launch stuff. They may be dreamers, kind of goofy, and definitely not suits, but they’re getting stuff done for cheap, which is more than we can say for most aerospace companies.

These worlds aren’t mutually exclusive: JP Aeronautics did build its early Ascenders under contract to the Air Force. In the book Powell says that the biggest Ascender he built for the USAF was destroyed because the officer in charge ordered them to fly the airship in a high wind (which the prototype wasn’t designed to handle at that early stage). The resulting fiasco destroyed the airship, after which the USAF cancelled the contract and JP figured out how to launch balloons in high winds regardless. However, in an interview, Powell says that some of his work was given to the military and ended up in places he doesn’t know about. So it’s possible that the USAF (or even the Space Force) is flying ultra-high altitude airships based on JP Aeronautics designs. They may even be manned observation platforms. After all, even the Stage One Ascender is designed to operate at 140,000 feet, while the SR-71 allegedly has a ceiling of 85,000 feet and the U2 operates below 70,000 feet. Yes, these airships are slow. However, they don’t have a lot of metal in them or much that can burn, so it’s not clear to me how you track or even shoot one down. If a missile puts a hole in an airship that’s 900 feet long, unless it shatters all the keel, it probably can just be patched in flight.

But I think the vision of JP Aeronautics is a bit closer to sustainable than the jet, rocket, and missile crew are. While the airships would need square miles of plastic sheeting, they’re low-energy and electric-powered. In the worst case scenario, they can be inflated with hydrogen too. Figure out a way to make them out of sustainable materials and they can still fly. It’s a lot harder to do that with a metal and ceramic rocket.

Couple these airships with Brian McConnell and Alex Tolley’s spacecoach, and you’ve got the rudiments of a sustainable solarpunk space transportation system. And perhaps that’s an alternative vision you can play with for a bit, before descending back into the high stress memescape the politicos want our day to day lives to be.

I’m doing fine, asymptomatic at the moment and hoping to stay that way until a working vaccine shows up.  Hope you’re the same, or better yet, that you had a mild case and are now immune.

Anyway, good wishes aside, I wanted to say something I haven’t dared say for weeks: as bad as this crisis is, I suspect it’s a training wheels exercise for what we’ll have to do to deal with climate change.  What I think right now is that if we seriously try to flatten the curve on greenhouse gas emissions, that effort is going to be like what we’re going through now, but longer and more thoroughly disruptive.  It pretty much has to be if we’re going to avoid a mass extinction.

However, if you’re an artist looking for inspiration out of the darkness, that isn’t a bad thing.First, the bad news.  No, not the Covid-19 economic induced coma.  I’m talking about the Nature paper that came out yesterday (link to an article about it).  Basically, it says we’ve got about 10 years until we see tropical ocean ecosystems (coral reefs) start to collapse wholesale.  If you know anything about mass extinctions, you know that the disappearance of biogenic reefs in the fossil record is the classic sign of a major/mass extinction event.  So that’s maybe 10 years off, although the reefs are mostly in bad shape now.  By 2050, the ecosystem disintegration will reach the temperate zone, and the mass extinction will swing into high gear.  When I talk about bending the curve, trying to avoid a mass extinction in 10 years, with which will start with the loss of a huge amount of fish that’s feeding hundreds of millions of people, that’s what I’m talking about avoiding.  It’s about stopping the death of the coral reefs, and stopping the spread of the disaster.

Now if you use the paradigm I’ve used for the last ten years, you can assume this disaster will definitely happen, and that leads to Hot Earth Dreams land and the high altithermal starting in a decade.

But let’s look at the other side, where people survive however many waves of Covid-19 we go through until we get to a vaccine, and that breaks the inevitability, makes us think that maybe we can actually make a difference in the world.  Scientists get respected enough again, and air quality improves so radically that people decide, not as a unified movement but en masse, to get serious about not dying due to climate change.  The air quality improvement is quite real, and there’s enough footage of nature bouncing back (pandas mating, coyotes howling in San Francisco’s North Beach) that it’s just possible that people will get the idea that we can actually make a difference.

And so we start to bend the curve on climate pollution, let our fasts from consumerism get longer and longer, listen to the experts more than the reality stars, alternately slack and scramble to survive.  Fantasy?  You’re living it now.

I’m not going to portray this as easy.  People are going hungry right now, whole careers and industries are in limbo.  People are dying around the world, and we don’t even know what’s happening in the slums.  While we have serious economic disruptors, people taking science seriously, and people showing their best in times of adversity, we also have predatory capitalism at it’s worst, with the current U.S. administration possibly behaving more like mafiosi than leaders.

And that’s the point, especially if you’re looking for disaster to inspire art, trying to figure out what will get made out of the broken shards of 2019 consumer culture, starting in 2021.  Take all the disruption right now, the kleptocracy and vulture capitalism, the suffering of the essential workers keeping us alive, the kindness, heroism, and acts of creativity, the disruption of whole economic sectors surplused and gone, the world gone strangely silent and healing itself.  Now ramp that up by orders of magnitude.  That’s what flattening the curve on greenhouse gases will look like in the 2020s.

Now it’s not easy, but it’s not dystopian either.  It’s a bit different: science is in charge, people are struggling to make a better, solve the problems that are killing us now.  That’s a classic science fiction theme.  But I’m pretty sure that struggle will involve as much suffering as failing and letting the world die.

As the sign in the psychotherapist’s office says, either way it hurts.  Death from climate change will be slow, horrible, and painful, with you living to watch everything you care about get destroyed around you.  Fighting climate change will be slow, horrible, and painful, as you watch everything you grew up with either fall apart or change into new forms that will survive.  If they’re equal, why not choose change.  Why not struggle against huge forces to keep the world from being totally destroyed, give the coral reefs a chance to come back, the forests a chance to regrow without migrating to the poles.   Why not struggle for a civilization that doesn’t kill itself?

Why not let this inspire you?

There’s not too much I can say about Covid-19, but there are some things that need to be said.

First, stay safe.  This is going to go on for months, and it’s unlikely we’re going to go back to things they were the way before even after there are effective vaccines, treatment, and herd immunity.

Second, right now, the scale of the response to Covid-19 appears to be greater than what we’d need to adapt civilization to climate change if we started right now.  So if anyone posits that we’re all doomed because we can’t mount such an effort, point to what’s happening now and ask them about the basis for their belief.

Now granted, the Covid-19 response is not sustainable, for reasons I go into in Hot Earth Dreams.  In that book I compare cities to coral reefs.  Both are metastable, composite, living structures that depend on the constant input of energy and circulation of nutrients and organisms (often the same thing for the carnivores consumers).  Cut off the circulation and especially inflows and outflows to the outside, and both systems will fall apart in short order, simplifying down until they’re sustainable within their new boundaries.  For reefs, that means that, if you boxed up a reef in a tank without circulation and food inputs, almost everything dies and what’s left is largely microbial life.  For a city under a dome, almost everyone dies, and if anyone does survive, they’re in a village farming the ruins.  This is the extreme, but the problem facing pandemic control is to keep the virus from spreading by minimizing human movement and contact, without so strangling necessary movement of food, water, and supplies that people starve.  Striking this balance successfully for months to a year or more is going to be really interesting. Doable, but really interesting.

No matter whether polities pull it off while minimizing loss of life or not, the result will shape politics.  In some places, strong men will use the emergency to boost their own power, whether they’re effective or not.  This is apparently happening in Israel right now, where Netanyahu is clinging to power on a platform of something like “don’t depose and prosecute me while I’m dealing with this heaven-sent new emergency.”  Other countries may look at how Singapore, South Korea, and China dealt with it, and more emulate their system of a surveillance state with local democracy overseen and limited by a higher level bureaucracy.  Indeed, if Biden wins the election and the US Congress doesn’t manage to find it’s ass with at least one hand, I expect something like this to be installed in the US, again because we’re going to be dealing with the problem of rapid-moving pandemics as long as there are billions of people in the world and cheap air travel, and we’re getting an epic-level demonstration of why a lack of good governance is a very bad thing indeed.

Third: one big, unsolvable problem is that Chinese horseshoe bats (multiple species) reportedly have thousands of endemic coronaviruses circulating and recombining within their populations.  It’s something like their version of colds.  Almost all of these viruses are not capable of infecting humans, but some are, sort of.  This is where SARS came from originally (SARS and Covid-19 are as close to each other as strains of flu).  However, the viruses closest to SARS-CoV-2 in horseshoe bats don’t produce Covid-19 exactly.  They’re also transient in the bats.  The virus appears to have jumped to an intermediate host (perhaps a pangolin, although the pangolin coronavirus found so far isn’t SARS-CoV-2 either) and jumped from there to a human.  Or it’s entirely possible that the final SARS-Cov-2 recombined into being inside an early human host.  Getting confused?  Well, the same process happened with SARS too, with an ephemeral bat virus infecting a civet that got sick with SARS (the intermediate host that made lots of copies of a single virus) and passed it to a human.  And Chinese people who live near horseshoe bat roosts apparently show antibodies to various bat coronaviruses.  In other words, bat coronaviruses infecting humans appears to be a natural process that’s been happening for…centuries? Millennia?  Up until now, it was a rural problem for a few villages, but with global civilization, it can now spill over and rapidly blow up into a pandemic.   Getting rid of the bats almost certainly won’t solve a problem, either, because that problem is ultimately too many people moving around the world too fast and in too close contact.  Worse, there are other viral sources in the world, and we do desperately need the insect-eating ecosystem services that bats provide, because insects transmit a whole host of illnesses on their own.  We’re entirely embedded in the biosphere, and randomly killing off bits of it for greed or fear backfires, often lethally.

Finally, as many know, I’m fond of the metaphor of the Four Horsemen: Epidemic Disease, Famine, Social Unrest, and Death, that ride together.  This is NOT to say that Covid-19 is the start of the apocalypse, but it does show how the metaphor works.  When there’s an epidemic, or food shortage, or a war, the other two problems show up, and if they’re not dealt with rapidly, a lot of people die.  So for example, if a pandemic showed up and went uncontrolled, a few people would hoard resources for the purpose of price gouging and profiteering (the normal causes of famines), as people got sick and died there would be a breakdown of social order, potentially extreme enough to lead to a civil war, and a lot of people would die, some from the disease, but perhaps more from the resulting famine and war.  Or you could start with the war.  Or you could start with the crop failure.  For any of the three causes, the way people actually died as a result (for instance, being shot while looting because they’re desperate for food) might have little apparently to do with the ultimate cause (the pandemic that shut down food shipments and the resulting hoarding).  With Covid-19 so far, we’ve seen a very mild version of this play out, with people hoarding toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and food.   Don’t take this lightly, because in a more serious situation, the Four Horseman can bring down civilizations (as apparently with the classic Maya–this has been used as an explanation for how the lowland Maya collapsed, starting with an epic drought and going from there). Rather, look at it as a worked example of another endemic human problem.

The effective responses to these problems as they arise, oddly enough, are very Christian: band together in community (even if you have to maintain physical distance), take care of each other, share what you have, punish and exclude people who would cause problems, or welcome them in if they stop causing problems and make restitution for what they’ve done.  That’s what we need to do, going forward.

And stay safe out there, okay?

Not that I’m a fan of Trump, but the move to establish a US Space Force caught my attention.  There are two points of interest.  The lesser one is what apparently happened.  Of greater interest to me is how someone could use it in military science fiction, and what it might say about the future of space warfare.  And space cadets.   What apparently happened, and why the democrats agreed to founding the USSF.  Here’s ye olde Wikipedia page on the USSF, and if you dig into the details it’s a bit less revolutionary or boondoggle-y than one might first guess.  There were two things going on for the last I-don’t-know-how-many-decades (six decades?).  The bigger fight was the perennial one in the US Department of Defense, over which branch of the military got to control which resource.  The related fight, within the US Air Force, was how many resources went into their space division, versus resources to pilots and planes.

I got a peanut gallery seat, because in San Diego, right next to the I-5 freeway on the way into downtown, is this huge Navy building prominently labeled “SPAWAR.”  I’d always assumed that, in addition to running the Navy’s program on using dolphins and sea lions as patrol animals (among other things), it held some important chunk of the Navy’s space warfare command.  And it did, until June 2019, when it pivoted into Informational Warfare.  Long story short, the fight over whether each service had its own space arm, or whether one service got to bogart the satellites (so to speak) was finally settled (for now!) in favor of the US Air Force becoming the US Air and Space Force in all but name.

Trouble is, the satellite intelligence Force of the USAF was apparently not getting sufficiently funded, presumably because jet pilots are cool while others drool, and more importantly, because fraternal funding battles are where the echelons above reality get their combat experience and promotions.  Anyway, long story short, the funding and independence battle between air pilots and space cadets had been going on for decades, and in 2019 the solution (first proposed in the early 2000s) was to split of the space wing of the USAF into a semi-separate US Space Force which would run the military’s space efforts.  However, the USSF is under the Secretary of the Air Force, just as the US Marine Corps is under the Secretary of the Navy.  So the USSF is a separate force, but not very separate just yet.  I suspect the cadets in Colorado Springs who go in for the new BS in Space Operations are going to get heartily sick of the “space cadet” label.

So that’s the US Space Force.  It’s not boots in the sky just yet (or weapons deployed in space).  Right now it’s about flying satellites and doing things with them.  This IS a critical part of the US military, regardless of whether there are weapons up there or not, so I’m actually okay with them being their own force.

The fun part is going forward, what this means for science fiction, specifically the military culture of space.  To begin with, although I only watched a few episodes of Stargate, I’m perfectly aware that the USAF already has been represented in milSF quite successfully (for those who don’t know, the Stargate of the series was run by the US Air Force, who apparently cheerfully cooperated with the filming of the series).  While I’m not a military SF expert, my major exposure has been to a certain Honor Harrington, whose military is based rather more on the British Royal Navy of centuries past.  Basing a military SF story on the memes swiped modern USSF will be *extremely* different than something aping the Honorverse, possibly in useful ways.

Let’s start with the parameters of space warfare.  Assuming interstellar spaceships are possible, and especially assuming FTL is possible, how do you shoot at a spaceship?  It’s moving far too rapidly for a human to perceive, and probably far too small to see due to extreme distances.  Star Wars and kin notwithstanding.  bodies in space normally move 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than a bullet, so in real life, you don’t hit them by firing guns at them.  At best we’re looking at machines firing lasers or missiles at each other and maybe occasionally hitting, sort of like WW 1 torpedoes.  The idea of Cpl Luke or MSgt Han swinging a gun, acquiring a target, and hitting with the shot is orders of magnitude too slow.

Anyway, that’s space warfare interpreted as conventional warfare, 20th Century style.  And it works in stories. David Weber, to his great credit, made a lot of fun and profit in the Honorverse, through making space naval broadsides cool again.

However, we’re in the 21st Century, and hybrid warfare is the thing these days, rather than battleships or even aircraft carriers.  Can you destroy a starship with physical sabotage, cyber warfare, or social hacking?  Why yes, yes you can.  The speed of the spaceship is not only irrelevant to such attacks, it actually makes sabotage more dangerous and harder to detect in the resulting debris field.  And not so oddly, the USSF strongly appears to be a  hybrid warfare force.  It’s lack of guns in space may be completely irrelevant to its legitimacy or even its deadliness.

If someone wants to do military SF about interstellar warfare now, it is, yes, possible, to unlimber the gimbal-mounted laser cannon and go pew pew pew, as has been done for over 40 years.  Or you can create a universe where starships in full flight are moving too fast to hit with anything except maybe an exceptionally lucky shot with a laser, or perhaps a really well guided, really expensive rocket (and even then, the chance of a hit is fairly abysmal, considering how much the munition costs to launch).   Therefore, if you want to wage successful warfare against an enemy starship in flight, you attack when they’re in orbit around planets (moving slower in predictable paths) or on the ground.  Or you attempt to hack them, boobytrap the information going into, and hack the social networks running the ship, using every weakness you can find about the crew.  Countering such attacks, as we know now, is hard.  It also can make for interesting storytelling.  Is someone aboard ship a mole, a kamikaze saboteur, or just cracking slightly faster than everyone else under an unending bombardment of psychological warfare?  Therein lies part of a story.

There are parallels in older science fiction.  Here, I’m thinking particularly of James Schmitz and his psionics.  I suspect one can draw memes from Schmitz’s psionics stories and repurpose them to our emergent AI era, where you can use big data and machine learning to get inside someone’s skull almost as effectively as a budding telepath could.  Perhaps not so oddly, Schmitz served during WW2 in the US Army Air Corps, the predecessor to the USAF.

Then there’s the whole military culture thing.  I’m not a veteran, but I do like to read, and one of the books I’ve reread several times is  Carl Builder’s 1989 The Masks of War: American Military Style in Strategy and Analysis.  It’s obviously a bit obsolete, but it’s still relevant, because it talks about the different ways the Navy, Army, and Air Force go about dealing with reality. For universe building it’s a worthwhile read, combined of course with other, more modern sources (I’d suggest Chris Hadfield’s An Astronaut’s Guide to Life On Earth for one)

For example, SF traditionally has space admirals, because space ships are independent commands like ships, and…But that’s not how the Generals of the Space Force would work, if you believe Masks of War.  They’re less about crusty tradition, and far more about technological superiority, creating doctrine to implement long-term strategies, and using technical analyses to inform their opinions (I don’t think they’ll ever just trust their feelings, whether the Force is strong in them or not).  If this sounds like corporate America, Builder noted the similarity.

As an example of the cultural difference,  US naval aviators identify as Navy officers first, pilots second, while an Air Force aviators identify themselves by the kinds of planes they fly. It’s a different mindset, and it leads to a different culture of warfare.  Again, you can see this a bit in Schmitz’s writing, where battles are often less about naval engagements in space, and more about quick shoot-outs using highest tech guns, with a large side order of skullduggery.

Incidentally, that skullduggery has historical roots.  If I remember correctly, CIA officers who were required to be military officers often got themselves commissioned in the Air Force rather than the other services, and there’s currently a big overlap between the US Space Force and the “civilian” (hah!) National Reconnaissance Office, which does US satellite espionage.  The USAF and the black world of clandestine military activity have been closely associated for a very long time.

I could certainly go on, but if you’re interested in writing military SF, or even writing SF stories about interstellar flight, it’s worth taking a long, even sidelong look, at this new US Space Force and seeing whether the difference sparks your creativity.  Yes, you can still go from windjammers to sunjammers if you must (with space marines doing drops instead of landing on beaches! And crusty admiralty politics among the Lords of Space!).  But if you want to be new and different, maybe get into mind-hacking in space and starship sabotage, and see where that leads you.  If you’re writing your ToE chart,  instead of having the captain of the starship reporting to a commodore or the space admiralty, you might, alternatively have the captain of a flight (in USAF terminology, about 100 people, or 3-4 craft, perhaps a starship and attached drone crews) reporting to a lieutenant colonel running the squadron, who in turn reports to the colonel running the wing (in increasing size), who in turn reports to a general running the numbered space force .  And that’s just a trivial example.

Yes, yes, I know the USSF is really just a boondoggle.  Nothing here to see at all.  Whatever.  I figure it’s grist for the mill, and if it doesn’t fight, maybe it will still inspire something fun to read.

What did I miss?

Vance’s Dying Earth Series (1950-1984) is one of the more famous series in fantasy, influential not least by killing off loads of magic users in Dungeons and Dragons with the Vancian “fire and forget” magic system.   However much you love or loathe the books, there’s a bunch of stuff Vance got wrong.  If an enterprising author wants to play in the far future of Earth/Dying Earth subgenre, given what we know now, it would be quite different than Vance envisioned.  And <i>Hot Earth Dreams</i> can help.  First, about the Dying planet genre:  It’s not just Vance.  There’s Burroughs’ Barsoom, Clark Ashton-Smith’s Zothique, Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, and many others.  Still, Vance’s is probably the best known (possibly after Barsoom), and it’s the one people think of.  Sun’s going out, civilization is decaying, magic has replaced science, and morality becomes, erm, more transactional.

What Vance got wrong was the idea of the sun going out like a guttering coal.  As we know now, the Sun instead is going to get hotter, ultimately evaporating off Earth’s oceans and making surface life impossible before (probably) ultimately it grows into a red giant and probably swallows our planet.  So pale white people wandering around on a shady world is almost certainly not going to happen.  But the sun sterilizing Gaia is around a billion years off, and there’s a lot of future between now and then.

Then there’s the whole supercontinent (“Zothique?”) in our future.  That may be 150-350 million years hence.  Here are four separate scenarios for how that supercontinent might form.  Here’s two views of a fifth, and there’s a sixth I can find a link to that’s totally different.  Also, there’s good reason to think that we don’t really understand plate tectonics as well as we might, now that we’re getting a better understanding of “Earth’s interior continents” and what happens after continents subduct.  Anyway, if you believe in the whole supercontinent cycle thing (tl;dr, supercontinents form every 300-500 million years, details endlessly argued over), we’ve got enough time for another two Pangeas in the next billion years.  Just because they’re so alien to us, I’m going to focus on these going forward, but the future could be just about any arrangement, given what we know now.

Here are some things to understand about a supercontinent-ish planet.

• Earth has two modes, icehouse and hothouse.  We’re currently in an Icehouse, and the climate change disaster is disastrous only because we’re rapidly and temporarily shoving Gaia into hothouse mode.  While Earth has spent about 80% of the last 500 million years or so in hothouse mode, we are children of the ice, and most hominid evolution took place in the context of repeating ice ages.  Worse, perhaps, the last time the Earth jumped from icehouse to hothouse was the end of the Carboniferous, so we don’t have an “evolutionary memory” of living species that have gone through this. That’s what makes Hothouse Earth so dangerous to us and especially for global civilization.
• Getting back to Pangea Nextia (a name chosen because it hasn’t been published for a model, unlike Pangea Proxima, P. Ultima, or P. Nova), it’s almost certainly going to be a hothouse, with no polar ice caps, a fairly low temperature gradient from the equator to the poles (meaning hot poles, hotter equator, large dead zones in the ocean deeps, really hot subtropical deserts, few if any everwet equatorial forests, and most of the diversity in the large number of para/sub/dry seasonal tropical forests everywhere from near the equator to around 50o north. Minus the deserts around 30 degrees north where the Hadley Cell comes down (except for islands, mountaintops, etc.).
• Pangea Nextia will have a super-Saharan desert at the same latitude (north or south) as the current one, because that’s the way global climate works.  It will also likely have Himalayan-style mountains where continents plowed into each other (The Himalayas are where India plowed into Asia), Andes-style mountains where oceanic crust subducted under the edge of a continent, and Alps/Zagros/Mediterranean/etc mountains where large continents coming together crushed a bunch of ocean and a small continent between them.  The cordilleras will be sort of like the stitches on Frankenstein’s assembly scars, and for much the same reason.

Why is this all important?  Climate dictates how and where people live, so knowing how supercontinental biomes work helps set the scene.  Mountains are water towers, not just from mountain glaciers, but because water percolates into mountains and comes out in mountain springs.  This is probably why they’re so important in so many religions.  They’re not just places to get closer to god, the waters coming off mountains keep people alive, as well as providing refuges for all sorts of life.  Your scenario likely has rivers running from mountains, deserts, and/or monsoonal forests in it.  Understand why they’re important, and you’ll understand why people revere, fight over, and take refuge in them. Hint hint.

Speaking of life, what does the future hold?

• The first question is about mass extinction events, and how many the Earth will experience before your Dying Earth scenario starts.  We may or may not trigger a mass extinction in the next 50 years (it’ll be submassive if not truly mass).  Other likely extinction triggers are large igneous provinces and asteroid impacts, of which the former is much more common.  If I had to guess where the next large igneous province is going to emerge under the African Rift  or the Canary Islands (look at the simulation in this article, and see where the big blobs of magma are close to the surface).  It’s possible a fat LIP will emerge well before the next supercontinent forms, so that’s one, if not two, mass extinctions prior to the scenario time.  And possibly a third if the suturing together of continents causes another mass extinction from radical amounts of mountain building.  If you want to go most of a billion years, that’s possibly another seventeen extinction events, including two asteroid strikes, any number of LIPs, and petroleum-based civilization recreating itself from resequestered petroleum at least five if not ten times (every 100-200 million years).
• How does life survive extinction events?  The quick answer is underground, which is why the super-rich building tunnels for trolls survival bunkers may be evolutionarily significant.   I think there’s a decent case that animals and plants that can live extended periods underground tend to survive mass extinctions.  Animals do this by, erm, making their burrows part of their extended phenotype (see the book referenced above), while plants normally hide seeds underground, which is why plant evolution really doesn’t show the changes during extinction events that animal evolution does.  What tends to get erased by extinction events are complex ecosystems like coral reefs and forests.  Forests after an extinction event are often quite different than prior, not just because the large herbivores are missing, but so are the specialist symbiotes (pollinators, pathogens, and parasites).  These all take 5-20 million years to re-evolve, depending on the severity of the extinction event.  Ditto for coral reefs.
• Going forward, as the Earth warms we can expect C4 photosynthesis to start dominating over C3 plants (the current norm).  C3 photosynthesis evolved billions of years ago before there was a lot of oxygen in the atmosphere, and when the sun was dimmer.  As a result, the key enzyme (rubisco) has a bad habit of screwing up when it’s too hot or there’s too little CO2 around.  Plants have a lot of cellular machinery to deal with this (see photo-oxidation, heat shock proteins, and others).  C4 basically adds a turbocharger to the photosynthetic cells to boost the level of CO2 encountered by rubisco (the “turbo” is a mnemonic, because C4 plants have a distinctive type of ring anatomy in the cells of their leaves which gives their nature away).  The way it works is that some cells do C4 photosynthesis, creating a 4-carbon compound that is passed to other cells doing conventional C3 photosynthesis, adding extra carbon that gets broken down.  C3 photosynthesis in the receiving cells then produces 3-carbon building blocks that get turned into 6 carbon sugar molecules.  Anyway, C4 has evolved a number of times, but entirely among angiosperrms and entirely in the last hundred million years or less.  The most familiar examples are maize, sugarcane, and sorghum, but it shows up in a number of dicot plants, mostly (but far from entirely) in the Caryophyllales and Euphorbiaceae.  With the exception of a few rare trees on the Hawaiian Islands, C4 plants are entirely herbaceous, and the Hawaiian species are probably an example of the phenomenon of insular woodiness, which is incredibly cool if you’re a plant nerd (look it up).

The reason for C4 plants being herbaceous, often weedy, is actually important to scenario building for two reasons.  One is that, in plants, radical new adaptations (flowers, compound flowers, etc) tend to pioneer their shtick as vagrants (e.g. weeds) in highly disturbed areas.  Once they succeed in in these edgy venues, they start colonizing more complex, intact ecosystems, eventually evolving into dominant forest species and the like.  This shows up in plant clades often starting off with small, wind- and gravity-dispersed seeds, then evolving towards bigger seeds and animal-dispersed fruits that are more suitable for competing in a forest.  If you’re thinking about how plants evolve from weeds to forest giants after extinction events, this is how they do it, and this is why C4 plants are among those that will likely become more dominant in the future–many of our currently really obnoxious weeds are C4 plants.

The other thing is that C4 plants do better with bright lights and high temperatures than do C3 plants, but only up to a point.  Corn, for example, overheats around 45oC, with grain production dropping rapidly as temperatures rise in this region and plants dying when they go past their limits.  As a result, corn production is likely to take a huge hit in the next century, as areas that grow corn in the summer find it too hot to deal.  C3 winter wheat production is modeled as being less harmed, because this cool season crop doesn’t hit its upper limits during climate change, and indeed it might do better.  A century from now, cool season corn might be the thing, but the bigger point is that every plant has its upper limits.  C4 stretches but does not eliminate those limits.  That’s what keeps C3 plants around, in cooler and shadier areas.  But yes, monsoon forests dominated by salt-oaks (the big-seeded descendants of todays chenopod salt bushes) could easily be a thing on Pangea Nextia.  So could giant sugar cane brakes.

• Now let’s look at human evolution.  Why expect humans to be around in hundreds of millions of years?  This is what Hot Earth Dreams is about, and if you’re reading this blog, you may well have read the book.  The tl;dr version is that I think that humans have two inheritance systems: genes and culture.  We do evolve genetically, but culture evolves radically faster than genes do.  If we want to become oceanic piscivores, we don’t evolve webbed feet, we learn how to build boats and create and use fishing gear.  And if that no longer works as a lifestyle, we fisherfolk  can go ashore and go into symbiosis with large ruminants (become cowboys) or whatever.  The speed at which cultures adapt buffers what would otherwise be strong selective pressures on our genes, meaning our genetic evolution gets slowed.  Since I don’t think people get to be fisherfolk for hundreds of generations (or civilized, or farmers, or cowboys, or artists, or whatever), this slows our genetic evolution down, which is why I think it’s plausible to assume that humans could survive into the very deep future.

This doesn’t mean that I think humans won’t evolve.  In fact, some of the biggest genetic selection pressures on humans come not from evolution but from coevolution, from our relationships with other organisms.  These show up in things like the rapid spread of lactose tolerance (due to our symbioses with dairy animals),  various disease tolerance genes (due to exposure to epidemics due to living in settlements linked by long-distance trade routes), and possibly some genetic tolerance of things like alcohol and sugar (due to our symbioses with yeast and sucrose producers).  I’m using the terminology of symbiosis because I really like Thompson’s geographic mosaic theory of coevolution (read about it here and here), but it’s basically that evolution proceeds through interaction among species within particular environments, so it’s about genotype 1 affecting genotype 2 while both interact in ecosystem A. Different interactions happen between other populations of the same organisms in different environments, and Mosaic coevolution is (IMHO) a really handy theory for worldbuilding, because it helps you understand how every place becomes different.

Humans domesticating other species and doing agriculture, forest management, hunting, fishing, and so on are all examples of how we interact with particular populations of various species in different, geographically bounded environments.  Right now, at Peak Civilization, coevolution to deal with humans is the major selective force on a huge number of species.  Either they must become a symbiont/pet/agricultural species, become a pest, a commensal, or become utterly useless and ignored.  Oh, and they must survive with climate change, pollution, and anthropogenic habitat loss.  Our current, relentless evolutionary pressure will change drastically over the course of the next century, most likely as our civilization crashes, but possibly if we figure out this quasi-mythical sustainability thing and calm down. Regardless, it’s a huge thing now, and coevolution with humans across all the habitats we occupy will continue to be a big thing into the future.

• Now imagine life coevolving with humans for hundreds of millions of years.  Right now, a lot of animals don’t really understand humans the way domesticated species like dogs and horses do.  But going forward, it’s likely that a wide variety (possibly a huge majority) of animals will evolve to become able to decode our signals and hack our cultures, again, the way dogs do.  They won’t be smart in a human sense, but they’ll be clever like Clever Hans. Plants and fungi will do their own versions of this adaptation (you can read about it in Botany of Desire).

This may seem abstract, so let’s talk about the difference between Africa and Papua New Guinea.  Modern humans first evolved in Africa over 300,000 years ago, while they got to Papua maybe 50,000 years ago.   Africa sustained the fewest megafauna extinctions of any continent, while Papua had only a few megafauna-type animals (bear-sized) that were wiped out tens of thousands of years ago.  However you feel about the whole Younger Dryas extinction thing, Africa seems to be a place where the wild animals know how to deal with people a lot better than just about anywhere else other than maybe south Asia.  It’s reasonable to think this is due in part to the animals coevolving with evolving humans for a really, really long time compared with what animals in most of the rest of the world experienced.

Going forward 200,000,000 years, with humans continually present, and what animals in Africa do now in the way of dealing with humans will seem quaint.  Animals will have coevolved with humans starting when they were rat-equivalents who had just survived an extinction event by hiding in bunkers with us.  And they may have evolved to elephant size over the ten million years afterwards, also in continual proximity to us, despite, or perhaps because, of all we did to them.  Whatever their relationships with us (partners, food, social parasites, predators, commensals, amensals, parasites, etc.), they will know us very, very well. And we’ll know them.

In the Papuan mountains, you can sit around a campfire, even go hunting at night, without worrying about anything more than an accident, getting malaria from a mosquito, or stepping on a snake.  In the African bush, you’ve got all that, plus lethal encounters with lions, leopards, hyenas, and hippos (among others), so you surround your campsite with a boma of thorny branches to keep the problem species from eating you (or at least you keep the fire going all night), and you don’t hunt at night.  The deep future will look like Africa, and it’s quite likely that the local megafauna will have coevolved with us.  A boma may be the minimum needed.  Or perhaps you’ll be able to make an arrangement with the equivalent of a local pack of hyenas to not eat you in exchange for you cooking whatever they catch and tending their den for them.  The possibilities are endless.

And that doesn’t even include crops.  There are several authors who argue (I think wrongly) that the rise of and continued existence of civilization depends on the extensive cultivation of grain, specifically barley, wheat, rice, or maize.  I’m not going to regurgitate their argument, or why Hawai’i disproved it, but we humans have intimate and complex relationships with the grasses, including corn, sugar cane, bamboo, rice, wheat, barley, rye, sorghum, millet, tef, and so on (even lawns!).  Given 100 million years or more of continued coevolution, and we may be as intimately connected to our grain crops as leafcutter ants are to their fungal colonies.  Or not.   But with crops, it’s not just worth considering what exotic new crops will evolve and what old crops stay, but also think about how our symbioses with plants will deepen and become richer and possibly more necessary over hundreds of millions of years.  And if grains bore you, think about 200,000,000 years of caffeine or alcohol coevolution.

As for human culture, in Hot Earth Dreams I mentioned the theory that languages effectively randomize (with the exception of baby talk) over maybe 10,000 years.  We’ll never know the languages of the last ice age, let alone the first human language, and in 10,000 years or less, English will have utterly vanished.  Second, archaeologically and culturally we seem to have a window of around 5,000 years where we can know anything at all useful.  Prior to that, we’re increasingly limited to whatever rare artifacts were randomly preserved.  Looking at the first 300,000 years of human existence, there is very little we can know about most of that history, and it grows less every year.

Going into the future this erasure will get worse. Humans will have to recycle the ruins of old cities, because we will have exhausted readily available ore bodies, so we’ll have to remix the resources of the past to make the present.  Do this for hundreds of millions of years, and that will be future culture.  People will likely know that humans have been around “forever,” and they’ll likely have some idea of how long “forever” was (American Indians had some notion of deep time, because they had both exposed fossils and geologic evidence of past climates that was obvious enough for them to get it).  But they won’t remember us.  Mass extinctions and cultural erosion will see to that.  Even things like race and ethnicity now appear only a few thousand years old, so they won’t look like us either.

For me, at least, the notion of hundreds of millions of years of coevolution with a world that complexifies the blurred boundaries between wild, feral, tame, domestic, and civilized is one of the chief appeals of a Far Deep Future scenario.  The world may well be slowly dying, and humans will certainly be as flawed as ever, but we certainly won’t be alone.  Instead, we’ll be surrounded by a full panoply of species, megaflora to nanofauna.  Some of whom will work with us, more of whom will live with us, increasing numbers of which will live on or in us (stirges!), and still others will have evolved so that they are useless to us and avoid us completely.  And some will love us for what they get from us, whether or not we reciprocate their feelings.  Humans that survive into the deep future will be recognizably human, definitely understandable, but they won’t be us, and the world they live with will think we’re standoffish, isolated, and socially inept (wild even, feral at best) compared to them.

What did I miss?

It’s almost the end of the year, so here are some predictions for 2020 and the 2020s.

Let’s get the easy ones out of the way:

• Climate change will continue to accelerate.
• Greenhouse gas emissions will continue to increase, and the rate of increase will be positive, possibly more positive than in 2019.
• We’ll see extreme weather events, including extreme snowfall, extreme winds, massive cyclones, record-breaking drought, and extreme wildfire. Somewhere.  I don’t know which will occur when or where, though.
• Business will continue to look for ways to profit off climate change, instead of stopping it.
• People will continue protesting about climate issues, but since the movement leaders seem to be still reinventing the wheel and using ideas, tactics, and strategies that The Establishment has good counters to, they won’t get as much done as needs to be done.  And that will really and truly suck.

I’ll stick my neck out make some political predictions:

• A billionaire will win the 2020 US election.
• Trump will ultimately be indicted on counts they didn’t bother to impeach him over (either in 2021 or 2025).
• Mitch McConnell will win his re-election.
• Billionaires will continue to gain control.  Also, billionaires will continue to demonstrate that wealth is a good substitute for intelligence and character.
• I will continue to be a contrarian pessimist who delights in giving reality opportunities to demonstrate how wrong my political prognostications are….

On the science and technology front:

• Facebook and Social Media in general will increasingly become “so last decade,” especially as political, social, and hacking issues mount.
• The truism that anything connected to the internet can be hacked will be demonstrated in a new way (this is going to be annoying to check in December 2020).
• AI’s potential and shortcomings will become more evident.
• Skeet- and trap-shooting will become more popular among non-hunters.  In possibly unrelated news, people will publish thought pieces about how to deal with the problems drone pose (checking this will be tricky too.  Oh well.).
• There will be new battery technologies tested in labs and covered breathlessly by the tech press.  I’ll stick my neck out and say that one new battery technology actually demonstrates it can scale up to commercial use.
• Disputes over lithium and sand will continue.  Phosphorus shortages will get coverage as a growing problem.
• The fishing industry will get some horrific expose, either about working conditions, effects on sea life, and/or looming extinction of favorite food fishes.
• Some tiny advance in nuclear fusion will be trumpeted as heralding the dawn of nuclear fusion as a power source.
• A company focused on finding new antibiotics and bringing them to market will go out of business.

And a few more random predictions:

• Some people (other than me) will call the decade we’re leaving “The Terrible Teens.”  Perhaps the decade we’re entering will be called “The Howling Twenties”?
• Habitat gardening will increasingly become a thing (I’m cheating, because the group I’m active with is holding a workshop on this in a few weeks).
• There will be a recession in the housing industry.
• I will be able to post more on this blog.
• I’ll be posting about the results of my predictions came to reality next December.

Anyway, congratulations on successfully escaping 2019. I hope your 2020 is no worse, possibly even better, than 2019 was for you.

What are your predictions?

Just some positive thinking–what’s happening to me?–for the holidays.  This is another in my series of alt-histories I wish someone else would write, and it’s kind of in the spirit of DC’s famous Watchmen comic.

The idea is pretty simple: how do you write an alt-history where people take climate change seriously enough to do something about it?  I’ve butted heads long enough to know that most people in the Baby Boom and Gen X (at least in Middle and Upper Class America) are not interested in dealing with climate change if it causes them any serious inconvenience.  I sympathize with the kids of “generation omega” (they’re now hitting college, and I hope the GenO doesn’t catch on).  They’re scared and furious, and they should be.  I’m getting sick of how many ways I’ve heard people find ways to not do anything.  Either we’re all going to hell anyway, or there’s no problem, or there’s a problem but nothing we do as individuals matters, or –look, squirrel/nuclear power/don’t eat meat/distract/disrupt/distract/bullshit….–I get this a lot when I talk with people.  Trump’s rubbing off on everyone.

So anyway, I’d suggest a different take on cli-fi.  It was sort of done in Watchmen, but it could be done better.  The idea starts with someone leaking all the research the petroleum companies did on climate change back in the 1950s and 1960s, with the document leak happening in the 1970s if not before.  At the height of the environmental movement, Boomers start taking climate change seriously, putting us decades ahead of where we are now.

I don’t think it would necessarily be blue skies and blooming roses, but it might be pleasant for writers and environmentalists to think about what might have been, had we given a shit when we had the oil to really rebuild global infrastructure instead of going on a mad, metastatic building spree as we did in the real world.  Heck, if you’re interested in writing this story universe, have Timothy Leary get run over by a hippy’s bus, so that LSD becomes legal too, while you’re at it.

As with any of my crazy ideas, feel free to take it and run with it.  I’m working on something entirely different.

Back on December 27, 2018, I posted a set of predictions.  I haven’t posted much since then, because I’ve been annoyingly busy with conservation work, fighting a bunch of leapfrog sprawl developments in San Diego County.  Most of that I can’t really talk about due to litigation issues, but I can at least go over the predictions I made a year ago and score how well I did.

Here they are.

• That I'll write a column in December 2019 about what I got right and wrong.  This means, among other things, that I won't die in a pandemic or nuclear war in 2019, and that civilization won't collapse.

Got that right.  Yay!  It’s always good to start of a set of predictions with a win.

• The US president as of December 2019 will be either Pence or Trump, most likely Trump.  This isn't because I'm a Trump supporter, but for two reasons.  One is that the US Senate is Republican, so they're not going to vote to impeach him.  Also, the US looks like it can weather having incompetence-in-chief, so long as we don't get into a war, and since he's smart enough not to start a nuclear war, I don't think the US is going to get invaded.  Rather, I think it's to a lot of peoples' advantages to dump liquid oxygen on the bonfire of his vanity, to make him unable to wage the struggle for reelection for 2020, even while he's roped into it as the only Republican candidate running.

To no one’s surprise, Trump’s still president.

• Hard, no-deal Brexit won't happen.

Oh how I wish I’d gotten this right, but after Thursday’s election it looks like English Nationalism looks to North Korea for a model for cordial international relations.  Is this sour grapes for losing the empire?  If so, please do look at how France has handled their transition with rather more aplomb (and rather more islands still under their control)

• There will be lots of disasters linked to climate change.

Such as the Midwest US floods, massive fires in Australia, methane bubbling from the east Siberian Sea…And I’ll make the same prediction for 2020.

• Nuclear fusion will be announced to be 30 years away at some point during the year.

Kinda maybe?  The Lockheed baby fusion reactor of 2015 is on its fifth design, but still hasn’t gone live.   On the bad side, this shows their initial PR was so much BS (sadly, no surprise).  On the other hand, they’re actually working on it, which I guess is a good thing.  If fusion’s going to play any role in dealing with climate change, we needed it 30 years ago, really.

• Suburban sprawl will largely stop in California and San Diego (this is part of the stuff I can't talk about further).

I was pretty sure, going into 2019, that this was a safe prediction, and I was largely correct.  However, it’s not a permanent stop.  What’s going on is that there were a bunch of highly problematic leapfrog sprawl developments.  Most of them were approved, and the ones that were approved ended up in court as their opponents sued.  There are three left in the queue, and they’ll all get the same treatment.  But wasn’t unanimous.   A couple of developments (notably Paradise Valley in Riverside County) were ignominiously shot down, after much work by the local environmentalists.  Local county supervisors (courageously) stood up against the corruption that’s generally accompanied the sprawl.  The problem with these projects is that they’ll gross hundreds of millions to billions of dollars at full build-out, so the cost of financing elections and other shenanigans is a minor part of the budget.   Kudos to the Riverside Supervisors for doing the right thing regardless with Paradise Valley.  I could only wish that the majority of San Diego Supervisors had similarly developed notochords.  If we’re really lucky, the judges will say some good things about not putting people in harm’s way from fires and earthquakes.  Perhaps their rulings (perhaps!) will make it harder to build in dangerous areas.  I’m skeptical about this last, because right now the trend on hazard analyses is to lie and hope that your opponents can’t sue (or pay for the appeal) to make you tell the truth.  Even if a judge sternly tells developers that they need to not hang people out to fry, they’ll likely do it anyway, while claiming on paper that they are not.

• A bunch of new bench-top battery technologies will be published and then disappear as someone tries to create them on a commercial scale.

Oddly enough, this article just showed up, so yes, and I didn’t even have to keep track of the battery news in 2019.  This was a safe prediction.

• Something vital we thought was correct about social media and its inevitability will turn out to be completely untrue in scary ways.

Since I was silly enough to throw “inevitability” in here, I have no idea how to score this one.  Definitely the glow is off social media, and I think a lot of us are getting sick about the “lock-in” it’s so far achieved with much of society.

• There will be a lot of politicking around the Green New Deal.

Yes, and I’m not going to link with it.  While the words of the actual Green New Deal are quite inspiring, what I’ve seen about how it’s being organized on the ground…how do I say this?…could use some improvement.  The other thing I could say is that I started out involved, then I stopped being involved, and I sincerely hope that what ultimately comes out is better than what I saw earlier this year.

• San Diego will start working on the third edition of their Climate Action Plan, as the first two have been thrown out by judges.

I was wrong.  The County has so far lost five times on this in court, but they decided to appeal again rather than just getting on with writing a new plan.   There’s a Forrest Gump saying that adequately covers their behavior.

• The 2019 rainy season will be drier than the 2018 season.  And I'll wash my car a lot in the next few months too.

This one I can’t score.  We’ve had more rain than we had at this time last year, which was extremely fortunate, as it ended the fire season before it could properly get going.  The critical question was whether those few inches are all we’re going to get this rain year, or whether there’s more coming.  It’s impossible to tell, as rain in southern California almost always comes in a few storms, and we get rain or not depending on whether the storms hit us or miss us.

Given that I’m a vocal pessimist, it’s kind of embarrassing that the stuff I got wrong, like the English doing Brexit and the behavior of the San Diego supervisors, was because I was too optimistic about their behavior.  Guess I’ll have to work on that.

Happy holidays, all.

Just a quick note for those who, like me, need to fiddle for a few hours while the world burns.  Oh wait, that’s not quite what I meant, but anyway, if you want a distraction, here’s one: the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.

The basic idea, as noted in the Wikipedia link above, is that around 12,800 years ago, a bolide either fragmented above the Earth in sort of a super-Tunguska, or an asteroid hit (possibly under the Hiawatha glacier in Greenland, near where the Cape York meteorite was found.  And yes, possibly the Cape York fragments are part of it).  I’m personally partial to an asteroid strike because one of the (to me) more solid lines of evidence is a spike in platinum around the world dating from around 12,800 BP, found most recently in Africa, but basically on every continent except Antarctica.

This hypothesis is controversial of course–it should be, given the way normal science works.  But I think it does clear up some mysteries.  For example, it may explain why the megafaunal extinction happened around then in America and norther Eurasia, and not thousands of years earlier.

Anatomically modern humans were around for at least 300,000 years, and we evidently tried agriculture around 22,000 years ago near what’s now the Dead Sea.  While people like to hypothesize that ancient humans were more primitive than moderns, and that’s why they stayed few in number and simple in lifestyle, but I disagree.  I personally think that the reason that humans didn’t take over the Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago was that the climate in the ice age fluctuated too radically to allow the rise of civilization.    There’s little point in depending on crops if they fail most years.

Anyway, during those 300,000 years, humans lived alongside big animals (megafauna), except in the Americans (settled 10,000-20,000 years ago), in Australia (settled 65,000 years ago) and New Zealand and the Pacific (settled less than 3,000 years ago–we’ll ignore this for now).  My personal hypothesis before I started thinking about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis was that megafaunal extinctions were due to human predation and habitat change.  While that’s unambiguously true in the Polynesian Islands and Madagascar (which I hate saying), it’s not clear what happened in Australia and the Americas.  In Australia, the aboriginal population first settled around 65,000 years BP, but the megafaunal die off happened “rapidly thereafter”(per the biologists)  starting around 46,000 years BP.  This is a classic example of why biologists need to do more math.  19,000 years of coexistence is NOT rapid.  Similarly in the Americas, humans lived alongside the megafauna for at least 2,000 years, if not 8,000 years, before the megafaunal extinction started “rapidly” happening.  We don’t blame Europeans or Asians for wiping out their mammoths and other megafauna (do you ever hear the Chinese criticized for wiping out the elephants and rhinos around Beijing 3,000 years ago?  That was considerably more rapid.).  That’s why I agree with the Native Americans and Aboriginals who say that accusations of ancient ecocide are just veiled neo-colonial attempts to justify taking their land.  They’re right: thousands of years of coexistence is not a short time.

And that leaves the Younger Dryas Impact. If it happened,  it presumably did not play a role in the Australian megafaunal extinction (it’s around 33,000 years too late), but it could have played a major role in the megafaunal extinctions in the northern hemisphere, and possibly into South America.  All that platinum had to come from somewhere.

One criticism leveled against the impact hypothesis is questioning why the proposed impact only killed big animals, not little ones.  That’s easily answered, at least if you believe Anthony Martin, author of The Evolution Underground: Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean World Beneath our Feet (BigMuddy Link, in case you want to read this really fun book).  He makes a point that during extinction events, mass or otherwise, animals that can shelter underground survive disproportionately well.  So if a smallish asteroid struck, especially during northern winter, it would harm everything living above the surface (e.g. the megafauna) but animals hunkered down in burrows, especially under the snow, would be proportionally less affected.    That’s not quite what we see, as things like bison and moose survived the possible impact, but it’s a reasonable hypothesis that can be tested.

Anyway, you can want to dive down the rabbit hole for shelter, you can waste  happy hours on something other than obsessing about national meltdowns in the US or UK.  That’s  one reason I’m posting this.

The other reason to post is that I don’t know of much, well any, alt-history SF that explores worlds where the impact didn’t happen and the megafauna of the Americas and Eurasia didn’t go extinct 12,800 years ago.  As an alt-history, the changes are rather subtle, more about setting than plot, in a No Younger Dryas (NYD) world. But they could be fun.

I’m pretty sure that agriculture and civilization would have arisen in NYD as they did in our timeline, although possibly 1,000 years or more earlier  (the Younger Dryas lasted around 1,200 years).  There are multiple reasons for this confidence:

• Agriculture arose in West Africa, Ethiopia, China, India, and possibly Southeast Asia in places where there were lots of megafauna (elephants, rhinos, lions, tigers, etc.), so having big herbivores around does not preclude people inventing agriculture.
• Someone tried agriculture back during the preceding ice age at least once that we know of, and that was with a full panoply of biggish critters around.  They most likely failed due to climate change, not rampaging mammoths.

What would be different in a NYD world is that mammoths, rhinos, cave lions, sabertooths, and all that ilk would either be present in modern times or recently extinct in civilized lands.  This would be particularly true in the Americas, if only because the classical Mediterranean civilizations, the Medieval Europeans, and the Chinese were all pretty darn good at getting rid of their megafauna.  Colonizing the New World would have been a bit more like attempts to colonize Africa than what actually happened, with the Hudson’s Bay Company equivalent trading as much in mammoth or mastodon ivory as in beaver furs, and livestock kept at night in kraals of, perhaps, spiny osage orange branches or similar, to keep the lions away.*

Anyway, it’s something for creatives to play with, if they want to distract themselves from the current chaos.  Heck, you could combine NYD with the Alt-Chinese colonizing (or attempting to colonize) the west coast of North America and introducing iron-working, first generation firearms, and a full complement of Old World diseases to the peoples of the Pacific Coast.  That would make things much, much weirder, especially if the Europeans colonized the east coast of the Americas centuries later in timeline, so that both the diseases and the technologies had their chance to rampage around the continent.

Have fun!

*Actually, there’s a whole post I could write about beavers as ecological engineers and about how their loss from the US just prior to European settlement has given us a really distorted idea of how this continent is supposed to work.  Maybe later.