The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon... Read More.
Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin
"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine
"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review
"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly
"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
I’ve been too busy, traveling, tired/jet lagged, and/or sick (fighting a little cold) to catch the Wolverine or Star Trek movies. I may well get to Star Trek today. I was planning to write a “science of” after watching it, but Phil Plait at badastronomy.com beat me to it. I’ll watch it and if I catch things he didn’t, or disagree with his assessment, I’ll post an entry about it.
I should be settled back in Porto Alegre this week and things should settle down with more regular, focused blogging.
In the meantime, I was surprised the other day over the Mind Meld post about the disagreement concerning Sunshine, and also on sfsignal.com about Outland (see comments at the link).
Some comments about why some of the movies are on the list. Usually there will be many other problems that what I note here. Mission to Mars has leaking liquids freezing solid like icicles. Outland has people living in the deadly radiation belt of Jupiter without problems or mention, as well people exploding in space. The Core is legendary. Independence Day has the Macintosh infecting alien computers with a virus. Signs may or may not be a science fiction movie, technically, but there was a lot of dumb stuff in there. Superhero movies in general all have ludicrous science, and I tend to watch them as fantasy, but often they try to be half-way serious by invoking genetics, nanotechnology, radioactivity, cosmic rays, but the laws of physics, pretty much never.
I haven’t watched a lot of recent TV shows, or seen every movie that’s come out. I’ll focus on some of the serious movies and TV shows that are especially good or bad with the science and consistency. For the most part I’ll ignore comedies and shows that are really unabashed fantasy.
First, the movies with realistic science. The king is 2001: A Space Odyssey, with every scientific detail meticulously rendered, from artificial gravity to human exposure to vacuum, to the silence of space. Other films with realistic science include Contact, Gattaca, Predator, and Minority Report (if we ignore the future-seeing psychics). Contact enjoyed the technical expertise of Carl Sagan in the way 2001 benefited from Arthur C. Clarke. I love Predator for its realistic portrayal of high-tech camo and alien vision in the thermal infrared, with the plot turning on these points.
There are more movies with bad science than good. Armageddon averages over an error per minute, and the opening minutes get so many things so badly wrong I couldn’t believe anything in the whole film. Utterly ridiculous. The Core is the geological version of Armageddon. I didn’t even watch Sunshine since the premise was so unbelievable: the sun has stopped burning (?!) yet humans can restart it with a manned mission (?!) to deliver nuclear weapons to restart it. Dumb, dumb, dumb. I understand they had a science consultant to handwave something plausible, and I read an article about this, and still thought it was totally dumb. I might watch the movie if it comes on TV and I’m drunk and bored. Reign of Fire looked so cool with its dragons — I love a serious dragon movie — but they’re supposed to eat ash? ASH? After all the chemical energy has been extracted by burning? And the entire species had a ridiculous evolutionary niche and reproductive cycle that was completely implausible. XXX had a set of binoculars that could look through walls, and when that scene happened a new low of stupid had been set. But rising to that challenge is John Woo’s Face Off, which features a face transplant that somehow renders perfect copies that make it impossible for people to tell the difference between John Travolta and Nicholas Cage. I don’t think anyone needs to see their faces to tell them apart. Oh, the James Bond movies, like XXX, have often slid into silliness with Q’s gadgets.
As for television, my first thought was that I couldn’t think of any tv shows with consistently good science. After some more thought, I still couldn’t. I’ll list some shows that often try and sometimes do a good job, although non consistently in my opinion. Battlestar Galactica has some intrinsic flaws, such as the way Vipers zip around solar systems in hours or less without very much fuel, but the ships also fly through space silently and vacuum is treated realistically. CSI has ridiculously sophisticated expensive tests available and occasionally makes some gaffes (e.g., giving the acceleration due to gravity as a velocity), but has plots revolving around science and logic. ER gets its medicine and procedures correct, everything very realistic for a hospital show. The Big Bang Theory is a comedy, but they do a good job avoiding science errors and do provide some clever jokes. Star Trek, for all its boner episodes (like when Spock’s brain was stolen, or the Enterprise was almost hit by a chunk of white dwarf star), does try and sometimes gets things right.
Almost everything on TV has worse science that knocks me out of my suspension of disbelief. For a while I enjoyed Heroes as a fantasy, but they kept pushing the science side so hard I finally had it. Almost everything on the show fails to make sense when any thought is applied. I found Northern Exposure similarly implausible as the science-oriented character, the doctor, failed to believe fantastic events week after week (as opposed to the X-files where Scully evolved into a believer, with good reason). The rogue moon of Space 1999, flying past a different alien world every week, made no sense whatsoever. The Six Million Dollar Man should have torn his body apart about six million times. And finally, a fan favorite, Firefly, had terraformed moons and some sort of planetary system that still makes no sense to me, and as an astronomer and science fiction writer I can’t even figure out how to make it all plausible.
They have flight, super strength, super speed, telepathy, invisibility, super senses, and immortality.
That’s a pretty good list of basic powers, although “immortality” seems to be in a different class to me (traditionally Claire in Heroes is good at escaping by jumping off buildings, ouch).
It’s a pretty interesting and funny article, but I have some criticisms. Most of the powers don’t require science to be ruined. Common sense and reason alone will do that. Kind of abusing the word science. Having said that, science does ruin super strength, super speed, and invisibility. The other powers merely suffer from control issues (senses, telepathy), engineering (flight — add a visor for god’s sake, and avoid bug in your teeth!), or the evolution of our sun and universe (immortality).
There is a class of movies that is supposed to be set in the contemporary, modern day, real world and aren’t supposed to be science fiction. Technically not, anyway, and not marketed as such. Or at least have elements so far beyond what can easily be done today, elements glossed over and not even questioned, that they’re ridiculous.
I was reminded of this again reading a review of Crank: High Voltage, a movie in which the hero’s heart is stolen by the mob, and he’s given a replacement artificial heart in the meantime, with all sorts of implausbile results. Here’s one quote from the review:
Artificial hearts are pretty poor, primitive devices. They supply enough cardiac output to keep you slowly plodding around, but they certainly don’t allow for martial arts and sprinting. Overcharging them won’t give you super-speed, either.
Unfortunately, there are lots of other examples of this. I don’t know if it is just sloppy writing, sloppy research, or creators who just don’t give a shit and assume their audiences won’t either. A movie like Charlie’s Angels doesn’t bother me much in this sense — they basically wink at you while the impossible things are happening and let you know this is a fantasy world and not supposed to be anything close to reality.
B-movies seem to suffer from this flaw more than most. I assume that’s because the stakes are lower, they get less scrutiny, and are made by lesser talents. Furthermore, the people who watch B-movies (guilty too often) are very forgiving. There is almost the expectation that the movies will be entertaining as a result of their flaws. I saw one recently,I Know Who Killed Me, starring Lindsey Lohan. There was some ridiculousness with separated twins, but the bit that got me was the bionic limbs that she gets that were handled very, very badly. But hey, amputation isn’t really a big deal and can’t slow down a plot, you know?
But how about John Woo’s Face-Off? While there have been operations akin to face transplants, we’re supposed to believe that you can just instantly do such a good job that people will ignore the rest of the body? I kind of enjoyed the movie, but the silly premise almost made me walk out.
Most movies with computers have been implausible to impossible. Remember War Games? The graphics alone were not something computers of that era were set up to do, let alone a self-aware game playing program. Watching TV shows like CSI would make you think that you can just make computer animations of crimes and crime scenes in about three minutes or less.
Or how about movies/tv shows with robots that are perfect copies of people? We’re decades away from getting a humanoid robot that can walk around on its own and do anything coherently, let alone one that can fool a person into thinking it is human, let alone a specific human. I can just see writers sitting around going, “I got it! She can be a robot duplicate!” (Something like Stepford Wives doesn’t quite count, because the robots were the point of the story which was clearly science fiction.) Even Buffy had this nonsense, but given the nature of that show that brings me to a solution.
What I’d swallow better, to tell the truth, is magic. Just stop faking the science and technology. People who can write this shit and still sleep at night have no clue about the real world that science describes. It’s already all magic to them, anyway. Please, just make it magic. The hit man with the missing heart can have it stolen via a gypsy curse powered by a lightning storm. The face exchange can be done by a deal with the devil. And Lindsey Lohan can just have a wooden leg to match her acting.
Science papers get reviewed by other scientists in the field before publication. I’ve written down some thoughts on peer review in the past. Peer review is far from perfect, but it keeps cranks out of legitimate journals and improves papers generally. Some ridiculous anti-science people (like deniers of evolution and global warming, see here) like to say that since peer review isn’t perfect, there’s no difference between papers published in peer-reviewed journals and papers put on the web, popular magazines, or rants posted on bulletin boards.
That’s stupid, of course.
But I was talking with my colleague here in China as we were trying to decide how to handle part of the data that we’re preparing to publish. There’s a right way of doing it, and a quick and dirty way of doing it, that’s probably about as good, but we were trying to evaluate that “probably.”
My colleague said, “I just worry what the referee will say if we can’t justify this decision.”
I said, “Fair enough. Let’s do it the right way.”
Just the fact that we know we’re going to be submitting the work to a peer-reviewed journal makes us more careful in the first place. We don’t want to do something twice if the referee doesn’t like the first way we tried, so we want to avoid that even if it takes a little more effort in the first place.
There’s something similar in writing, and almost anything that takes real skill or craft. You learn by being critiqued, and having experienced critique countless times, you start anticipating it, and it makes you better. I mean, the referee of our paper might not say anything about the section we’re worrying about, either way we do it. But just because there’s the chance, we are worrying about it even more.
There are some people I know, mostly young hotshots in astronomy who want to publish something first, or who just like to be fast because it’s a good career move. These people sometimes do cut corners, I’m aware, because, they say, “The referee can catch mistakes.” I don’t know too many older astronomers who think this way. Referees note who is sloppy and that impression carries over to all sorts of things. Also, referees are not perfect, and having to issue an erratum or show your face at a meeting over a very wrong paper is personally embarrassing. You learn to be more careful.
Anyway, I guess I’ve known this for years but it just struck me how powerful just the knowledge that you’re going to be peer reviewed can be in science.
Last week I asked whether or not the Star Trek future was possible, the part of the series that postulates human beings can set aside their prejudices, solve their problems with each other to eradicate poverty and war, and to join together to explore the universe.
Well, that exploration part is very challenging to do the Star Trek way with foreseeable technology.
Seth Shostak, of the SETI Institute, describes an alternative in Boldly Going Nowhere for the New York Times.
He says, rightly I think, that while solar system exploration is going to happen and will involve human astronauts and settlements, interstellar voyages seem out of reach for our species without technology and resources far beyond those we have today or can expect to have in the next few centuries, or longer. (This is why for my novels, in which I want to have human characters exploring distant worlds in a few centuries, I do what Star Trek did: bring in some not-so-foreseeable technology.)
So, what is the alternative? How can humans explore worlds orbiting distant stars, according to Shostak?
Telepresence.
The idea is that we send robots. Tiny robots, small enough that they can be sent at some fraction of light speed (Seth suggests 10% is possible). They do the exploring, do the mapping, picture taking, sample analysis, and tell us what those worlds are like in as much detail as their technology permits. Then we — all of us — can virtually explore these worlds. Stellar astronauts would not put on space suits. They would put on virtual reality suits.
Now, the lack of real-time interactivity is a problem with this sort of experience, but if you’re like me, exploring real worlds virtually (e.g., Google Earth) or imaginary worlds (online games like World of Warcraft) can be a lot of fun.
Buzz Aldrin, when he said that science fiction had dampened enthusiasm for the space program, was right in the sense that science fiction teaches us we can have the stars, soon, and we can’t. If human civilization is not so long-lived in the astronomical sense, we never will have them, except for perhaps virtually like this.
I’m an optimist, however, and think we will be around a long time and will develop technology advanced enough to take us to the stars, in one form or another. That might take a while, but we’ll get there if we want to badly enough. I want to badly enough, and I know I am not the only one.
But in the meantime we can play Star Trek virtually, and let that experience inspire more longing.
A few days ago I put out a call for information about non-English science fiction writers, perferably hard science fiction writers getting translated into English. There are a few suggestions there and in the comments. Valentin Ivanov wrote me a very informative email I wanted to share:
Here are a few more names of foreign writers, worthier than mine:
– Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, more or less from the same generation as Lem. They are considered (together with Ivan Efremov) the fathers of the modern Soviet/Russian SF. A few of their novels and stories were translated in English in the 70s and 80s but didn’t have a big commercial success, too heavy and culture dependent, I suppose (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkady_and_Boris_Strugatsky and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic). They are my personal favorites.
– Sergey Lukyanenko (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Lukyanenko), the author of the Night Watch books. He writes in Russian, there are translations in English, German, Spanish, Japanese, etc. He is a former psychiatrist. In my opinion he alternates between books that pay the rent and books “for the soul”.
– Jetse de Vries – I think he is Dutch, writing in English. He is (or was?) an editor at Interzone. Very interesting character, see for example his editorial work: http://shineanthology.wordpress.com/
Generally, very few SF writers have made a successful translation from a foreign language to English. The only example I can think comes from the mainstream – Nabokov.
Well, I don’t know that I think of Nabokov as a science fiction writer. Certainly lots of foreign writers who write other types of speculative fiction and who have had success in translation. Paulo Cohelo, Borges, and others come to mind. The pure science fiction is much rarer and strikes me as quinissentially American in its roots and history, although non-Americans like Verne, Clarke, Lem, and others have played major roles.
There’s a really interesting article over at space.com about prospects for life on planets in the habitable zone of red dwarf stars. Most stars in the galaxy are red dwarf (type M) stars, and will live forever, more or less (hundred billion+ years, much older than the universe’s 14 billion years so far).
I want to pick on one item wrong in the otherwise good story, and then highlight some things I think are really neat.
Here’s the wrong thing, from the very first sentence, which also contains a clue about the correction:
Roughly three quarters of the stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs, but planet searches have typically passed over these tiny faint stars because they were thought to be unfriendly to potential life forms.
Did you see it? The clue is “faint.” These are faint stars and hard to observe with sufficient signal-to-noise ratios to detect planets. The observations are hard enough with brighter stars, and required years of refinements to the techniques to do at all. Let me tell you, the first serious planet hunters like Geoff Marcy and Debra Fisher didn’t skip over M stars because they were thought “unfriendly to potential life forms.” Hell no. I think I even asked Debra about why they didn’t look at the lower mass stars some ten years ago when we shared a night working at Lick Observatory. Anyway, planet hunters started out thrilled to find any planets anywhere around any kinds of stars, and for the most part still haven’t found planets likely to be friendly to be lifeforms. This is quite misleading, but may simply result from not talking to any of the people who actually do the planet searches.
It sounds like, from reading the article, that a viable life-bearing planet around a red dwarf would be either tidally locked or slowly rotating, and that winds would keep the dark side from freezing to ridiculous temperatures. After the first few billion years the intense and frequent flaring would have subsided. The sun would loom large in the sky, perhaps a little orangish rather than blood red. (See what I wrote last year about this in The Red Light District and Part 2: The Light Bulb Paradox).
Anyway, I think such a world would be a tremendously cool setting for science fiction stories, if handled with accurate science.
I got an email request for suggestions for hard science fiction writers who are “international.” That is, they’re not American (or British, Canadian, Austrailian, etc.), and write in a foreign language, but have been translated into English. Specifically:
But I would also like to explore science fiction from other countries like Germany, Japan, and Russia. Do you know of any authors who have translated their novels?
The movies Armageddon and Deep Impact featured nuclear bombs to divert asteroids headed for Earth, but this is really not the best way to deal with this threat. This story was originally published in Bulgaria, in the annual almanac “Fantastikaâ€, the 2007 issue. Publisher: “Human Library Foundationâ€, Sofia. ISSN 1313-3632. Editors: Atanas P. Slavov and Kalin Nenov. Keywords: Killer asteroids
Are there some science fiction writers who write in languages other than English, available in translation? Stanislaw Lem comes to mind, and he’s not exactly contemporary these days. I also get the impression than a lot of native-speaking writers have a tough time in the marketplace because foreign publishers do buy a lot of American/British books and have them translated. I have some friends that couldn’t make livings as writers without the foreign sales.
I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to sell stories, to make a living as an artist, and how there are parallels with how hard it is to publish papers and to secure grants in science. There are some key differences, of course, but there’s something powerful in common, too.
As an artist, a writer, and a scientist, I believe I have some insight.
There’s a certain level of craft involved in all of these activities. It’s the mechanical things. An artist can draw what they see with some level of skill, make a pleasing composition. A fiction writer can arrange description, dialogue, and characterization into a plot that moves. A scientist can conduct an experiment, estimate the uncertainties, and draw conclusions and write them up so everyone understands what they did.
Those are essential tools for success, but they are not sufficient. Far from it.
Imagine a painter rendering banal picnic photographs with great skill. Imagine a writer giving a terrific description of brushing teeth. Imagine an astronomer dutifully measuring the light curve of a known variable star with greater precision than ever done before, and adding a few decimal points to it’s period.
Who cares?
I don’t.
And no one else is likely to either.
I remember one art teacher in high school going on about how subject didn’t matter. A great artist could take any subject and make it compelling. That’s bullshit. Great artists find compelling things, often in things everyone else overlooks, and shows us what makes them compelling to them.
We’ve all seen great writers, artists, and scientists do mediocre work from time to time. I have seen myself do it, too, and can tell when I’m doing it and when I’m doing something really good.
It’s excitement.
You can tell when you’ve got an exciting idea, something compelling, and it’s just a matter of showing everyone else what has gotten you excited. If you’ve got the craft, you can do it.
Almost everything I’ve had great success with in art and science has been flagged by this excitement. I’ve tried to train myself to recognize it and follow it. Simultaneously, I’ve tried to resist working on things just for the sake of working. Probably has hurt me from time to time, being “blocked,” but I don’t usually work fast enough for it to be a problem.
It helps a lot to go through workshops and to sit on review panels. It’s a little hard to learn to consistently recognize the excitement in your own ideas, and how they play to a broader audience. Workshops/reviewing helps train you with positive feedback. It starts becoming obvious that when someone captures something novel and exciting, and expresses it well, that everyone gets infected.
When writing proposals or begining writing projects now, I have a simple test. Am I excited to do this? If the answer isn’t a sure “yes,” I don’t do it. I look for other ideas. The best way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas, and to train yourself to recognize which ones are the best, and not to work on the boring ones.
For a change, I’m not talking about science here. I think some of the Star Trek technology will be realized in the future, and some is pure fantasy. Still, I give them credit for trying on that front. I just wish they’d avoid the time travel…but I have already digressed.
The issue I want to write about briefly is the aspect of the show, at least from The Next Generation onward, that suggests that we can learn to live in peace, all races, all types of people, in harmony.
Adrien Veidt from Watchmen, “the smartest man in the world,” whichever weird world that is, would say that we could but only if given an external enemy. Unfortunately, I think there is some truth to that, but fortunately I think it’s also not the complete truth.
First, some background from a study I thought was highly illuminating (and for which I’d love to rediscover the link, but not today apparently). People stereotype. It’s useful to do so, as stereotypes have some basis in reality and knowing something about somebody you’ve just met has advantages. It’s not foolproof by any means, but evolution works based on probability, not perfection. Anyway, the study indicated that people notice three things when they see someone (in this case in photos): gender, age, and race. It’s easy to understand that age and gender will be useful to recognize in evaluating a person’s relationship, or potential relationship, to one’s self.
The race thing is something of a red herring, as it turns out. The study continued and had a phase where the people in photos had a clear affiliation of some sort, as in wearing clothing associated with a sports team. Then the third thing people noticed changed from race to that association.
What people are actually looking for is markers identifying someone as “on my team” or “the other team.” In other words, tribe. Race, historically, has been a quick way of identifying someone as different. If you don’t have race, you look for other clues, which may be obvious like fan clothing, or subtle like facial features, grooming, other clothing choices, etc. We really want to sort out people as fast as possible, to pigeon-hole them, and while I applaud people who think they don’t do that, or try not to do that out of respect for individuals or some sense of fairness, I am not sure I’d believe them. It’s hardwired. We make these snap, instinctual judgements.
As someone who has travelled a lot outside the United States, and who has plenty of foreign friends from all sorts of places and of all sorts of races, it is still ridiculously easy to make friends with almost any random American you find abroad. Ex-pats have their own hangouts in cities everywhere and even though they may have turned their backs on Nationalism in a way that few do, there’s still a strong urge to recognize the tribal tie.
So, in a way, all we have to do is get people to think of fellow humans, all fellow humans, as being on the same team. The same tribe.
That’s hard.
Threatening aliens that want to kill humans would certainly do it. I hope we don’t have that in our near-future, but it is the case in the Star Trek universe. What it would seem that happened in the series was to go from Kirk’s era where humans banded together against a large and dangerous universe, with different races all serving together on the Enterprise, to the Next Generation, where the team expanded to the Federation in an even more obvious manner and new alien races were viewed not necessarily as threats, but as potential Federation members.
I don’t mean any of this to say that humans aren’t capable today or in the future of being monsters. Slavery, murder, rape, even genocide, are things that happen today. They used to happen more regularly and were more acceptable in the past, so I think we’ve made progress. People can be conditioned to accept almost any reality, no matter how horrible, but the flip side is that we can also be conditioned to expect the best from ourselves and each other. The fraction of people in the United States, if not the world, who find various forms of hate and discrimination continues to drop. Not as fast or as steadily as most would like, but it is a different culture than past decades and the good guys are winning.
The biggest problem I see to this in the end is not racism. Racism ceases to be that third thing as soon as you don’t recognize it as what defines someone’s tribe. Melting pot countries like the United States, Brazil, and many European countries have a step up on this, although still have a lot of problems with it (and I’ll come back to one big problem with the US in a second). Places like China lag behind given the past history of isolationism combined with steady control of information.
I was talking to my Chinese buddy here yesterday, and he told me about growing up in the Cultural Revolution. The government told them that China was the best country in the world, that it was the best place with the best system and the best of everything. These were lies by any objective measure, but people believed it because they didn’t have any place else for comparison.
This, unfortunately, is the case too often in the United States, too. Most Americans don’t know much about other countries. Most Americans do feel like the United States is the best place in the world. Now, I think the United States does top the list of a lot of categories and is a good place in many ways, but they have more freedom in the Netherlands when it comes to sex and drugs, and many countries on the average have better, cheaper, and healthier food and slimmer, healthier people. I’m not a big soccer fan, but the best soccer is not in the United States, and that is a measure important to much of the world.
So I think nationalism and religion are the huge remaining problems for the Star Trek future. On the Enterprise, Chekov, Uhuru, Kirk, Scotty, Sulu, etc., were humans and Starfleet first. Even Spock was half-human, but fully Starfleet. You don’t tend to see racism as an issue on sports teams today. What you get at the highest level are things like the Olympics and wars, struggles between nations.
Religion was, for the most part, simply eliminated from Star Trek. Religion tends to be quite divisive. Religion, more so than race, is how people from other countries still do group themselves and self-identify. I am concerned that even if we found an external enemy, among the stars or our own creation (Terminator, Battlestar Galactica), we’d still have this sort of religious strife.
I’ve rambled enough. Humans I think are in principle capable of achieving the vision of Star Trek, but our culture must develop in ways to make it standard and children have to be raised with this expectation. Nationalism and religion are inherently enemies of this, as intrinsically powerful and divisive forces. I think they should be kept as far away from the children as possible, but that seems like a pipe dream, as people want to indoctrinate their own kids into their own tribes, and these are the two strongest today.
So I guess until we’re attacked by bug-eyed monsters trying to convert us to their religion, we’re doomed to fall short of Gene Roddenberry’s vision. If only the smartest man in the world would do something…
I was reading some internet forum recently where someone suggested that since parsecs were based on local geometry (how stars appear to move in the sky because of the Earth’s own motion around the sun), no one would use the unit more generally. Except that astronomers, do, all the time. Sometimes movie directors do, too (look about 3 minutes in):
Anyway, astronomers, and people in general, like to use numbers between one and ten when possible, or into the hundreds. So, you pick your distance units appropriately. Here on Earth, we have miles and kilometers which work pretty well for walks, runs, and driving around a city or between cities.
In the solar system, it is customary to use astronomical units, or AUs. An AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, approximately 150 million kilometers or 93 million miles.
Lightspeed units are sometimes used, too, and certainly for distances to other stars. We use the relationship between time, rate (speed), and distance, so that distance is the speed times the time. The speed of light in vacuum is some 300,000 km/s. It’s around a lightsecond to the moon, a bit over eight light minutes to the sun (an AU), and light travels through the solar system in hours. We could express a light-year in terms of miles (about six trillion) or kilometers (over 9 trillion), but you get a silly large number that people can only relate to in terms of the national debt. Still, often science journalists do this because they assume the public knows miles and not light years, and only stick with light years for distances to the most distant quasars and galaxies. Nearby stars are as close as 4 light-years away, and it is something like 100,000 light years across the Milky Way galaxy, and a couple of million light years to the Andromeda galaxy. To keep the distances expressible in terms of numbers between one and thousand, we go to kilo light-years (1000 light-years) and mega light-years (a million light-years). But astronomers tend not to use these units so much. We prefer the parsec, actually.
So, about the parsec. A parsec is a “parallax second.” A star that moves through an angle of one arcsecond as the Earth moves one astronomical unit is at a distance of one parsec. That’s about 206265 AUs, or about three and a quarter light years. The equation relating the parallax p in arcseconds (the angle that a star appears to move due to the Earth’s motion across one AU) to distance in parsecs is simple: d = 1/p. So, the distances to the closest stars first came from measuring parallax angles, and knowing the parallax immediately gives a distance. Going to larger distances, astronomers use Kpc (kiloparsecs), Mpc (megaparsecs), and even Gpc (Gigaparsecs or billions of parsecs) for cosmologically large distances.
The terminology and scales are important to get right and understand. It’s bad enough to hear about aliens coming from “another galaxy” when “another star system” is plenty far enough away, but it’s also just as crazy when the distances make no sense. Knowing how far away stars and galaxies are helps avoid the problem above. Also, translating things into light-years is a good reminder about how long it takes light to travel the same distance, letting you realize that when you look into space you look back into time, as well as the limit on travel time from relativity.
If you’re writing this stuff, and it seems confusing, best probably to stick with light-years which average readers have some intuitive grasp of. Also easy then to talk about spaceship speeds in terms of fractions of lightspeed. You only have to apply relativitity to figure out how long the trip seems to take from the perspective of someone onboard the ship (and until you get above half lightspeed it isn’t a very big factor), but it is easy from an external observer. A ship traveling at one percent of light speed will take a hundred years to go one light-year, for instance. But please use parsecs if you want to! Astronomers do, and it sounds likes such a cool word that George Lucas used it, too, if incorrectly.
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