It happened in class. I was quietly sitting in the big lecture hall, surrounded by some fifty-odd other students (this was Friday, and no homework due in class, and a beautiful day… about half the class didn’t bother to show up). I was writing, because the character I’m weaving a story around likes this class. It reminds her of her undergraduate days, and she starts talking about the things she’s working on, so I write. Only I needed to stop and think a little, because in the story, there are colony planets, and she’s traveled to one. I wanted to know how she got there in only three weeks, and was looking up space drives. My knowledge of the FTL possibilities is rather limited to the fictional.
She didn’t know, and didn’t care. She was much more interested in telling me about the tweaking of her microbiome in order to make her safe to live on a new colony because four human generations is practically a millennium in genetic shift of pathogens. For her, the ship was simply a container that got her from point A to her new lab, where her employers betrayed her… But I digress. I suspect that for most of us, even those who aren’t quite so focused on one topic in the way she is, don’t think a whole lot about how we get from point A to point B.
Going to look at NASA’s site yielded this, initially, which was fascinating, but as far as I can tell, strictly pie-in-the-sky. I knew I’d seen something recently about an ‘impossible drive’ recently, so I kept digging at the site, while the lecturer began. I’d read her powerpoint slides before class, so I skimmed through the paper while listening to her describe the differences between RNA and DNA (the sugar backbone and one of the pyramidines, uracil, if anyone following along was curious and didn’t know). The results of the tests NASA performed on the flying microwave? “Test results indicate that the RF resonant cavity thruster design, which is unique as an electric propulsion device, is producing a force that is not attributable to any classical electromagnetic phenomenon and therefore is potentially demonstrating an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.” I don’t see how this makes interstellar travel more possible, but anything to get us off this mudball and out into the Solar System to explore new ground will be good. Exploration is vital to growth, development, and giving the next generation something to strive for.
And then the professor got my whole attention, by stopping talking and starting a video. A TED talk with a gripping title, I watched and let my brain kick into overdrive while the guy talked. What’s left to explore? he was asked by a middle-schooler, and the idea he came up with was to look inward, literally up one’s nose, and discover biological dark matter. We know there are bacteria, and viruses from the time we are school children. Then archea were split off and the whole domains of life as we know it rearranged. Sometime not too long before I was born, the weirdness that is prion disease as postulated and proven. Now… what else might be sharing our world with us?
Which led me back to the article I’d first opened this morning in my tabs, and the story I was working on. If a tiny handheld DNA sequencer is possible, and we extrapolate based on current trends, how far in the future can I set my tale of plague and bioengineering without having my story begin to fail the plausible science tests in the general public’s mind? What can we find here on Earth with us, living in us and on us, that could affect human development, and even if we know, what does it mean? I’m trying to delicately fold all this into the story without destroying the plot, the characters (especially one pedantic scientist who has moments where she really doesn’t care about humanity, she’s much more interested in what’s growing in her vats), or my reader’s delicate suspension of disbelief. It’s like making a souffle. One wrong move, and the whole mess is dense and inedible. I don’t know if I can do it. But I can sure have fun trying, and the research is fascinating.
Mad Genius Club 
17 responses to “Biological Dark Matter”
There was a proposal in 1899 to close the patent office because everything had been discovered or invented. This is illustrative of the axiom “not only is the future stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine.
Yes! And when I’m writing SF I sometimes wonder how I can possibly predict something when half the time if I look it up, it’s already happening. I heard a while back that Moore’s Law was kicking in but I’m not seeing it yet.
Just remember a master like Heinlein missed microcomputers and Moore’s Law. So just give it your best shot
I’m trying. And really, I keep telling myself, it’s about telling a fun story. The sciency stuff is window dressing. Well… sort of.
I was thinking earlier about modern technology (like cell phones) that when I was a little girl were so far out there that we scarcely could imagine a world where nearly everyone actually owned and used such things, and I wondered what is left to imagine for contemporary sci-fi (and yes, I haven’t read much sci-fi since I got out of high school! So I’m sure I’ve missed some stuff.). What sci-fi I have read seemed so dark and ugly that I just didn’t want to go there (mind control, nanobots, and so on).
So, leaving the dark side behind, what are sci-fi writers imagining for future technology that might really come to be?
I believe we’ve already had multiple advances which were essentially unexpected or were not considered likely, which have extended Moore’s Law much further than anyone but the most optimistic from the 90s would have believed possible. While the specific structural implications of Moore’s Law may be reaching a limit, other advances are promising to keep the spirit of it alive and well for some time to come, and quantum computing may very well come into play before we reach the end of it.
The steep growth may switch to other fields. Biological is one of them, all sorts of manufacturing, 3D, (possibly biologically based) nano assembly and all sorts of stuff that looks interesting with carbon fiber and sheets. Medicine, life extension, genetic repairs, artificial wombs, vat grown replacement parts, in-vivo stimulation of regrowth.
Steep growth is definitely hitting other fields, but Moore’s Law is specific to Computer circuitry. If it continues, along with the related advances in storage, a simple extension for 35 years will give us phones more powerful than today’s top supercomputers (the same as today’s phones are more powerful than supercomputers 35 years ago), base free cloud storage will be about 500 Terabytes, and your computer will be able to hold rather sophisticated conversations with you.
All this computing power is part of why the other tech is advancing so fast. Look at the distributed computing projects and what they are doing for biology and medicine (though humans are still better – check out the game called FoldIt, which lets you play at folding proteins, and has been used for some radical advances lately).
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Whoa. I had no idea sequencing tech was changing so fast.
As to your FTL, Space Opera seems to come in two varieties, those that wallow in tech details and those that don’t. With FTL being completely theoretical, I find excessive attempts to explain it a bit irritating unless it matters to the story.
On the other hand, I find the idea of prepping for a new planet by changing one’s internal flora fascinating. But if your character isn’t interested, no doubt she can just begrudge the three days before landing where they take antibiotics to kill all the old stuff, and take capsules or suppositories of the “approved for this world” biota.
No, no, she’s very interested in the changing of her microbiome. It’s the space drive she could care less about. And she’s stubborn, so my research on that subject is wasted 😛
LOL – this book is a pain, can you tell?
check some of the stuff Doc Taylor has written about space travel, as he does work in that field. That reminds me, I need to finish his “A New American Space Plan” . I wandered away a while back …felt a need for a fiction and forgot to go back and finish it
As someone who has worked with sequencing tech for the past 9 out of 10 years, it has been changing incredibly fast. There are kits to do extractions in a day that used to take almost a week.
I have also, in my past, inadvertantly killed off all my gut bacteria and had to re-populate it. That was an unpleasant few days.
Sometimes the tiny details are compelling. I remember being fascinated by the details of a nuclear device exploding in Tom Clancy’s ‘Sum of All Fears.’ The process included a very important plot detail, the fizzle of a multi-stage device to a simpler a-bomb explosion, but it was really, really compelling regardless. So, maybe your characters are right about what’s important, and by that I mean what will make for a smashing good read.
Oh! I remember that, and yes, you are right. coolness…
Yes, if it’s an important plot point, you need details. Cedar, is your character trying to tell you that either this specific process is important, or that her biological expertise is critical to the plot somewhere?
I know her biological expertise is vital to the plot. What I’m trying to do is keep her from boring the readers by droning on about the details. But having heard from you all, I think that bit is staying in 🙂