Jar Jar Abrahams Wants To Kill My Childhood And This Is Odd Because I Never Did Anything To Him As Far As I Know

OK, that's enough of the "virtues of critical thinking" and "oh isn't moderation just wonderful" posts. Nope, I'm going on a merciless ad hominem attack rant that will achieve precisely nothing but I don't care, you can't stop me, and it's Christmas. So there.

J. J. Abrams knows diddly-squat about good storytelling. He has no more grasp of the ethos of a show than Michael "ADD MORE EXPLOSIONS" Bay, and he couldn't tell a morality tale if his sick grandmother's injured cat's life depended on it. Watching an Abrams movie is like watching a train crash, except instead of a train what I'm watching is everything I value in good storytelling being slowly and inexorably crushed and violated and the train is derailed so slowly that until it bursts into flames and people start screaming I'm not quite sure what the hell is going on. The Hindenburg might be a better analogy.

There goes my childhood, betrayed and murdered by a young director known as Darth J. J.

Take the Star Trek movies. No-one would accuse the original ten of being masterpieces of realistic science fiction or high drama. They aren't exactly subtle either. For their time they were big, flashy effects films... but the characters and their actions are firmly rooted in the left-wing liberal ideology of the show. The films are generally well-paced, if anything verging on the slow side. Action sequences only happen at climatic moments - most of the time the characters are doing what you'd expect : exploring. They might get into scrapes and japes but there's usually a good narrative reason for it. Nothing explodes unless it's supposed to.

And no-one gets off with anyone unless they're supposed to. Take note of that, young Spock.

Then along comes J. J. with all the subtle wit and sophistication of Billie Piper's mercifully short-lived singing career, or possibly a glacier except that this glacier is somehow on fire and travelling at 900 mph. Nothing about it makes any sense. All the characters are now aged fifteen and everything explodes at random. Kirk has been replaced with Zapp Brannigan - if you've ever watched the original show you'll know that the man is a worrisome bureaucrat and very far from the gung-ho womanising oaf of legend. And yes, the original series relies heavily on technomancy, but it was not stupid enough to ever have claimed that replacing a supernova with a black hole in any way improves the situation.

Don't even get me started on the sheer vastness of the Trek universe and the total non-necessity of revisiting the Kirk era. It's over. It took three seasons and six and half movies - it's done. Then there were three and a half incredibly successful spin-off T.V. series. To say, "No, let's start over" is about as intelligent as hacking off one's foot with a lawnmower. No. Just no. There are just too many things wrong with that to bother giving a sensible response, so here's a kitty instead.

Please JJ, no more ! Pleeeease !

But there was one saving grace to the Abrams, "let's crap all over Rhys' childhood inspiration" movies : they were somewhat similar to the Star Wars prequels. Trek is very much science fiction, even when it gets the science badly wrong or just makes stuff up; Star Wars is a fairy tale in space. So it doesn't bother me when physics is treated with all the respect I'd normally reserve for Donald Trump's codpiece. I accept the need for random explosions and action sequences in Star Wars. I want Obi-Wan Kenobe to solve his problems with a lightsabre instead of a tricorder. The Enterprise hiding in a lake ? No. The Millenium Falcon ? Possibly.

So, even though I spit upon Abrams Star Trek, burn it, scatter the ashes to the four winds, collect the ashes, eat them, then violently regurgitate them on his face, I did have some hope that he might make a decent director for Star Wars. And it did have a very good trailer.

Abrams doesn't fail with episode VII as heroically as he did with Trek. I'm biased though, because Star Wars didn't play any role in my career choice. So I didn't emerge from the cinema in a tremendous nerd-rage and go and buy the box set of all of the original movies like I (really) did with Trek. I just left feeling empty inside and with the very distinct feeling that even the Star Wars Holiday Special felt more like it belonged in the Star Wars universe than The Force Falls Flat. And that's got twenty minutes of Wookies watching a cookery show without any subtitles.

No really, I wasn't kidding. Don't watch it. I'm just putting this

here for the sake of completeness.

I didn't get on with TFA from the word go. Even the opening text felt somehow forced. The rest of the film suffers heavily from what I call the Babylon 5 syndrome : you're dropped into the story with insufficient explanation of what the hell is going on. None of the other SW films feel anything like that - you always know who everyone is, what they're doing and why. Even with the original episode 4, all the essentials are instantly clear. It's not actually that simple a story : the downfall of a democracy, the rise of a rebellion, the moral ambiguity of the central character (Vader, not Luke), an enormous range of characters and environments, the power of fear and hate to control a population... but it's told in a very simple way.

As far as I can tell, TFA has no moral messages, not really any underlying story (except for something superficial that could have come from the Jeremy Kyle show) to speak of and certainly nothing that logically follows from Return of the Jedi. It is at best a very simple story told in a very complicated way. It is not in the least a fairy tale, it's just a bunch of people doing stuff in a highly derivative way from the originals which doesn't advance the story at all. Things seem to happen because the writers wanted them to happen, not because one thing follows another naturally.

It's not all bad by any means. It's just not anywhere near good enough. Even The Phantom Menace feels like it's in the SW universe. Some of the characters in TFA feel like they've been dropped into a completely different society and had a lobotomy, or at least a nasty blow to the head.

The villains are probably the worst problem. They do villainous things, but again it feels like they're only doing what the writers told them to do - they utterly lack menace even when they're doing menacing things. Kylo Ren wears a mask, but for no particular reason. Underneath he looks for all the world like he's a member of Slytherin House. His boss is some guy named Snook, or Snookie, or Sookie, or something - who is a CGI character only ever seen as a giant hologram (ah, but is he really a giant ?). Somehow that seems to completely sap any sense of threat.

You might think Sookie Stackhouse is from completely the wrong franchise, and you'd be right, but it isn't anywhere near as wrong as choosing JJ to direct.... well, anything.

Perhaps it's the lack of the superlative aspect that makes them feel like such a damp squib. Palpatine was always at the top of the pile in the SW universe and he planned his attack over a very long time. It was clear that this guy was as evil as you could ever get - there's an almost pantomime quality about him and Darth Vader. You imagine that in their spare time they probably torture badgers or something. Ren probably just sits in his room being emo and painting everything black, while his boss most likely broods pitifully about wishing he wasn't made of CGI.

Ren has bursts of rage because his lightsabre clearly isn't working properly. Was anyone else bothered by the fiery edge to the sabre blades ? All the others are clearly energy, so why is this one a flamethrower sword ? Not saying it isn't cool, just odd in context.

Even the villain's organisation - the First Order - just doesn't feel right. The Empire was set up by the cunning machinations of a single individual over a period of around fifty years or so, but by smoothly manipulating the existing systems into something new : a very careful master plan that was brought to completion. The Order just turned up. Opportunists who took advantage of the Empire's downfall are just never going to be as threatening as the original Empire. What's their underlying goal ? Do they even have one ? How are they different from the Sith ?

Like the movie itself, they're trying to be the bad guys but don't really quite get it - even when we see them doing much more evil things than what we saw in the original movies. In fairness, they are much more real than the Sith - but in the fairy tale universe of SW this is not a good thing. It's a bit like what would happen if Gandalf the Grey had turned up in Apollo 13. Adding more realism isn't necessarily a good thing if the established world isn't the slightest bit realistic.

Then there's the new Death Star. It's much bigger and more powerful than the last one, but how the Order managed to construct it given the inevitable chaos and financial crisis resulting from the Empire's defeat is anyone's guess.

The visuals. It must be said that some of these are very nice. The Falcon flying through a wrecked Star Destroyer is well done, as is (in particular) the scene where a tethered TIE fighter escapes from a hangar. Both the Order's and the Alliance's equipment look the way it's supposed to. The spaceships fly the way you expect them to. Nothing happens that's more outlandish than what's already been established is possible in the SW universe... except possibly the Big Star Sucker (aka the Death Star III) which just doesn't look convincing to me. Might have to do a science write-up on that one. Still, I would praise Abrams on the small scale stuff.

It does look cool, I have to concede that.

The characters. These too (villains aside) are not without merit. BB8 is obviously the star of the show, because he's cute and... umm... he can roll ? Yes. Rey is also cute and provides a much-needed strong female character without the need for a love interest. Fin may or may not be cute, you'll have to ask someone who's not me for that, but he seems solid enough (his continuous heavy breathing is presumably to continue SW long tradition of helping asthmatics feel important). But like the First Order, he's missing a serious amount of backstory. You don't really need this for archetypes like Luke and Leia, but it's not something you can just skip for characters like Fin and Ren.

I want one as a pet.

As for the regulars, C3PO also feels like he's been forced into the role - though I couldn't for the life of me say why. Chewie is always Chewie, so that's good. Leia seems to have been smoking about twenty a day for the last few decades, although since the actress did have serious problems I can't hold that against her. Han has flashes of the old Solo magic, but a lot of the time he feels more like Harrison Ford. Again I can't really explain why.

The music, unfortunately, is a firm no. Every previous SW film has included at least one wonderful new hummable theme, but not this one. With the exception of the original SW music (which is not really used to its full potential), all the new stuff is minimalist and boring. I like minimalist, but it doesn't work here at all. You don't want tinkly piano music with a sweeping desert vista, it's just wrong. It further saps the fairy tale vibe and just makes me think, "oh look, more emos in space again, damn those pesky angsty goths always trying to be miserable hipsters". Like Casino Royale, it feels like sucking the fun out of what should fundamentally be a fun movie.

I really wanted to like this film. I thought, surely this time Abrams must be due for a film I actually enjoy. Nope, not a bit of it. It's not the worst film ever made by any stretch, but it doesn't feel like a Star Wars movie to me. There's no magic in it, no joy. What good moments it does have are destroyed by the overarching crappy storytelling - a bunch of miserable people in space with a dull soundtrack trying to stop some boring villains from being sort-of threatening, in a way that feels every bit as forced as I always though a sequel would. There's no rhyme or reason to anything that happens. Like Star Trek, the soul of the original films has died.

You have failed me for the last time, Abrams. Next time someone tries to get me to watch one of your stupid movies I'm going to cut myself with a spoon instead.

The Time Machine, again (III)

Part Three : Socialist Fiction

Let's recap. In part one, we looked at the surprisingly good science of The Time Machine. The most important aspect of which is that the Earth in the year 802,701 has been terraformed into a self-sustaining paradise. So perfect is the environment that the need for any kind of labour whatsoever has been eliminated.

In part two (which I strongly advise reading before this one) we looked at the effect this had had on the humans. Bereft of any requirement to work even to sustain their basic existence, humanity had degenerated into the stupid (but happy) child-like Eloi. We examined the plausibility of this and looked at why sating all our desires leads to a glorious utopia in Star Trek, but a ruined dystopia in The Time Machine. Star Trek posits that human ambitions will simply keep expanding as our mundane tasks are removed, and that universe has many reasons why intelligence must be maintained. The Time Machine does not. With no outlet for intelligence, it becomes a weakness.

But we also saw that this last point looked like it was on very shaky ground. Even with the mundane chores now a thing of the past, there's no obvious reason why intelligence should be a hindrance or why evolution would select against it. Or is there ?


Enter the Morlocks

The Time Traveller soon discovers that this false Eden really does have more in common with Star Trek's Risa - an artificial pleasure planet - than he first suspected. The conquest of nature is far from as perfect or as complete as it seemed (which doesn't invalidate the initial speculation - it just so happens that the world didn't turn out that way). Neither intelligence or the need for it has been eliminated after all:

I must confess that my satisfaction with my first theories of an automatic civilization and a decadent humanity did not long endure. Yet... I could find no machinery, no appliances of any kind. Yet these people were clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need renewal, and their sandals, though undecorated, were fairly complex specimens of metalwork. Somehow such things must be made. There were no shops, no workshops... They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping. I could not see how things were kept going.

The Time Traveller soon discovers the source of the Eloi's clothing : a foul race of pale ape-like creatures known as Morlocks who shun daylight and live underground. The Morlocks operate machines, although exactly what the purpose of the machines is is not made clear (beyond providing for the Eloi), and so are clearly more intelligent than the Eloi. But the extent of the underground caverns is vast (likely global), and the machines equally so. And how many sandals can they Eloi possibly need ? Have they also evolved into a race of shoe-hungry crazy people ?

MOOOAAAR SHOES !

My impression is that mankind hasn't managed such a perfect, self-sustaining Eden after all - it's the machines which are keeping everything balanced. If Wells were alive today, I think he would probably have them be devices for climate control.

Humanity, then, has split in two. The decadent Eloi have everything they need brought to them on a whim. The servile Morlocks are condemned to a life of squalor, servitude and darkness. The rich have gotten richer, and the poor poorer - it's the absolute epitome of social inequality, a speciation event. Yet, in an ironic twist of fate, while the Eloi are the masters of the Morlocks, they are also absolutely dependent on them. While the Eloi may initially have been the more intelligent of the two, that situation has long since been reversed. The Eloi have become so dependent on the products of the Morlocks that they have almost completely lost their own intelligence, while the Morlocks are still maintaining a global network of machines.

At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position... even now there are existing circumstances to point that way. There is a tendency to utilize underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization; there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, there are new electric railways, there are subways, there are underground workrooms and restaurants, and they increase and multiply. Industry had gone deeper and deeper into larger and ever larger underground factories, spending a still-increasing amount of its time therein, till, in the end--! 

While the mere stupidity of the Eloi was enough to turn mankind's dream of an effortless future into a sad, ruined Utopia, this splitting of the species is altogether different and darker.

Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people--due, no doubt, to the increasing refinement of their education, and the widening gulf between them and the rude violence of the poor-- is already leading to the closing, in their interest, of considerable portions of the surface of the land.

And this same widening gulf--which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational process and the increased facilities for and temptations towards refined habits on the part of the rich--will make that exchange between class and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of social stratification, less and less frequent. So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. 

The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape in my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and general co-operation as I had imagined. Instead, I saw a real aristocracy, armed with a perfected science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of to-day. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over Nature, but a triumph over Nature and the fellow-man. 

The Morlock's likely experience the same evolutionary selection pressure to keep their machines running as in the technologically-dependent societies of Star Trek. It's just that here they are compelled to remain in perpetual servitude to the now brain-addled, over-privileged Eloi. But how can this be ? If the Morlocks are now more intelligent than the Eloi, surely they have the advantage. Of course, this turns out to be exactly the case.

The Time Traveller's initial speculations about the Eloi weren't exactly wrong - they do have all their desires fulfilled - just incomplete. And it's not an absolute triumph of man over nature, more an ongoing war. But although the Eloi have indeed degenerated, this is only in part because they no longer need or want much of anything - it is very far from a full view of the year 802,701. Something much more sinister is going on.


Om nom nom

The first scenario, in which the entire species has degenerated due to technological dependence, might be tenable if natural curiosity could be selected against. But the Time Traveller has only vague notions of why this might be, and indeed that turns out to be wrong. However the second scenario, of having a race of intelligent workers in perpetual servitude to stupid people, is far more difficult to support - the Eloi possess not one single advantage over the Morlocks. And of course, we soon find that the Time Traveller was being too hasty in his conclusions.

The Upper-world people might once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical servants: but that had long since passed away. The Eloi, like the Carolingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They still possessed the earth on sufferance: since the Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find the daylit surface intolerable. And the Morlocks made their garments, I inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs... They did it as a standing horse paws with his foot, or as a man enjoys killing animals in sport: because ancient and departed necessities had impressed it on the organism. 

But, clearly, the old order was already in part reversed. The Nemesis of the delicate ones was creeping on apace. Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back changed! Already the Eloi had begun to learn one old lesson anew. They were becoming reacquainted with Fear. And suddenly there came into my head the memory of the meat I had seen in the Under-world.

The Morlocks are carnivores who rear the Eloi like cattle. It's the ultimate revenge of the downtrodden masses. Most likely, the reason intelligence never re-evolves in the Eloi (or for that matter they never become any stronger or faster, which would give them an edge over their Morlock predators) is because the Morlocks eat those who pose any sign of a threat. They are the selection pressure keeping the Eloi docile.

Importantly, the Eloi haven't fallen from grace because of some political revolution : they have fallen because of their own over-privileged position. Their utter dependency on their Morlock servants has been a fatal weakness. Sheer, unchecked wealth inequality has proven fatal not because the Morlocks objected to it but because it is an inherently flawed system.

One important detail that's somewhat glossed over is that initially the Eloi were indeed more intelligent than the Morlocks : "this same widening gulf--which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational process". How then is it that Eloi have lost their intelligence ? While the Morlocks could easily maintain their Eloi flock in docile servility by eating the smartest, it's difficult to see how how they could have caused this state in the first place. Perhaps, as their lives got easier and easier, the Eloi stopped bothering to invest in the now-unnecessary education of their young - they all became like the twerps one might see on My Super Sweet 16. Maybe the Morlocks were consciously working toward this final state : after all, they think on global scales, so perhaps they think on long timescales as well. We'll have to let that one go.

And yet while the Morlocks are intelligent, they are also horrific. The Time Traveller is far more accepting of the Eloi, who, though stupid, have retained some vestige of warmth and compassion. But Wells was a socialist - why, then, did he make the workers of the far future into ghoulish monsters ? It certainly makes for a gripping story. But perhaps mainly it's a straightforward warning : carry on like this and it's not going to end well for anyone.


Relevancy & Conclusion 

The Time Machine explores several interesting scenarios about the way in which the future could develop :

1. A return to Paradise. The cost of bliss is stupidity. This scenario turns out to be untenable in the novel : intelligence is a genie that's difficult to put back in the bottle.
2. Uber-privilege. An unchecked growth in wealth inequality doesn't end well for anyone - it leads to degeneracy even of those supposedly at the top of the pile.
3. Social "justice". The final, horrifying result of the second scenario is that the masters become the slaves - not through political revolution but simply because the system of massive inequality is fundamentally flawed.

All of these are of course still relevant. I personally don't see some measure of wealth inequality as a bad thing - people like and deserve rewards for doing good. But rampant, unchecked wealth inequality - totally unrestricted capitalism - is insane. One should remember (for several reasons) that the working conditions back in 1895 were considerably worse than today. There was no minimum wage. Child labour was just beginning to be abolished. There was no limit to the number of working hours an employer could set in a week. There was no National Health Service, overall hygiene was poor. These things didn't happen because the market demanded them*, they happened because of campaigns and government action. Without this, it was quite conceivable at the time that the rich would continue getting richer while the poor got poorer, in absolute terms.

* Mind you, it's important to remember while some industrialists were the stereotype oppressors, not all were. 

I don't propose to try and answer the question as to whether there is greater or lesser wealth equality now than there was in 1895, fascinating though that may be. Relative wealth is a difficult concept. But in purely absolute terms, in Western Europe it is simply not true that the poor have gotten poorer (generally speaking), though the rich have certainly gotten richer. The poor have access to a wealth of technology, resources and social safety nets that simply did not exist in 1895; it's hard to imagine Morlocks with smartphones and healthcare plans. It's that vital combination of compassion coupled with technology that Star Trek explores so well - sometimes technology makes manual labour unnecessary, sometimes laws prevent it. And so Wells' dark vision does not look likely to come to pass.

Or does it ?

Both Star Trek and The Time Machine present answers to the question : "What would it be like if we had all our desires fulfilled ?". Because of the details of the futures they explore, their answers are radically different. Star Trek says that we will keep changing our desires so that we always want something new; The Time Machine says maybe not. In both worlds, human intelligence is still required - except in the first scenario the Time Traveller concludes. In that situation, there is no differentiation of the human species but rather the reverse : a continuous trend toward uniformity and stupidity. It's not the horrific future of carnivorous Morlocks farming their Eloi stock, but it's a dystopia nonetheless.

There is currently an ever-increasing trend towards automation, as examined in Humans Need Not Apply. One may argue that the timescales are debatable, but like Wells, one should try and take the long-term view. It certainly will not take eight hundred thousand years to automate a lot of jobs that currently rely on human labour, nor even eight hundred - probably somewhere between eight and eighty, but no more than that. The wealth inequality Wells' feared won't come to pass, but the lack of a need to think just might.

There are possible solutions to the employment crisis posed by automation. One is a guaranteed universal basic income : all your most basic needs to survive provided by the state. And why not ? The point of robots is to prevent people from having to do manual labour; if people don't benefit from this then there's really no point in robots at all. There is surely no moral reason why you should be forced into doing things you don't want to do just to stay alive, especially in a world where everything can be provided for you with no human labour required. Life is short - it is morally bankrupt (pardon the cliché) to demand that people don't enjoy it, to insist that they suffer solely because of your ideology.

I'll admit that I was initially staunchly opposed to the idea of UBI and was slightly outraged by this famous Buckminster Fuller quote. Yet now I find myself in almost full support. I still think it needs more trials, but, when you get right down to it, what exactly is the point of making people do work they neither want nor need to do ? Perhaps a UBI wasn't possible twenty years ago - in another twenty it may be unavoidable.

A second approach is to trust technology to solve its own problems : perhaps we will all be able to live entirely independently. 3D printers could allow us to fabricate new items and even food, we might grow our own power sources, transport could be fully automated. Thus in both cases people might not need to work at all, but get on with doing things they actually enjoy. The need for a UBI is circumvented in this case - indeed it becomes difficult to see what on earth money itself would be used for in such a situation. This prospect is probably rather further down the line, but it no longer looks at though we'll have to wait for the 24th Century to reach a moneyless society.

But... both of these overlook the question of artificial intelligence. They assume that there will still be a need for people to maintain all this advanced technology because the robots won't be able to do much for themselves. At the very least, in these scenarios, humans will still be the only entities capable of philosophy and higher reasoning - a situation that many feel is, in reality, only temporary. Basic income doesn't necessarily solve a damn thing if machines can also do all your thinking for you. Can we still maintain human ambition (which as we saw was a vital element in Star Trek's utopian vision) if machines can do everything for us, even our thinking ?

Traditionally, sci-fi explores A.I. through killer robot uprisings. Perhaps a more interesting question would be not what happens if the robots take over, but what if the robots do exactly what we want ? If you had a machine that could answer any question for you, would you become more and more curious about the world, or would you stop caring altogether ?

Star Trek dodges the question since in the Trek universe only humans are capable of understanding. The Time Machine doesn't explore artificial intelligence, but does look at what happens if humans no longer need to think, which is basically the same thing. That is why a 120 year-old novel which doesn't feature artificial intelligence is directly relevant to the modern world. Would we really stop thinking if we didn't need to ? I mean a complete and utter lack of need - literally no problem a computer couldn't solve more quickly than a human.

I don't know. Even though I'm fortunate enough to enjoy it, there are certainly some parts of my job I'd happily let a computer handle all by itself. There are also parts of my art projects I'd like assistance with. But not all. That a computer could have emotions and express itself wouldn't prevent me from wanting to do the same.  But if I could formulate any question, say, "Is ram pressure stripping the dominant gas loss mechanism in galaxy clusters ?" and have a robot go away, plan the necessary observations, build the best possible instrument to answer the question in some time allotted, and knowing that its conclusions would be both better and faster than my own... would I even want to ask the question ? Without any effort on my part, what's the reward of knowing the answer ? That, not killer robots, is the real challenge presented by A. I.

A guaranteed universal basic income coupled with A. I. looks an awful lot like the scenario the Time Traveller first proposed : not just having all humanities needs fulfilled, but all its desires as well. Again, there wouldn't be any selection pressure against intelligence - but there would be essentially the reverse situation of Star Trek. Rather than encouraging intelligence, technology might, in this case, actually encourage people to be lazy, to not bother using their natural abilities and let them waste away. Instead of being born stupid but then educated into intelligence, the exact opposite might happen.

But would a world without any intellectual pressure simply degenerate into nothing but physical and emotional enjoyment, with no drive to self-improvement, no urge to explore, no need to seek answers to higher questions ? I don't know. Yet I cannot imagine doing nothing all day except lounging around eating fruit and having sex. Well, I say that...

I mean, fruit is rubbish, and I've got to watch Game of Thrones as well, right ?

I'm not saying a universal basic income isn't a very good idea in the short term, just that it might not a complete solution to all the problems on the horizon. Something more may be needed.

I don't know if we'll ever reach a state of total utopia or dystopia. There is, however, a glimmer of hope suggested from universal basic income studies : when people have their base needs provided, they don't become fat and lazy. Instead, they generally shift their goals to something more ambitious - entrepreneurship actually increases (video is worth watching if you've got a spare half-hour). Will this also hold when the machines can think as well as doing the dirty jobs no-one else wants to do - when absolutely every task can be automated ? Will we have no choice but to endorse cybernetics - preserving our will, our souls if you like - whilst gaining power that computers might otherwise take away from us ?

Maybe. Advancing technology, of course, doesn't necessitate a moral deterioration. For now at least, academic jobs aren't under the immediate threat that robots pose to physical labour - a UBI is still at least a valid solution. But make no mistake : you can't stop the future. The only sure conclusion is that to avoid a dystopian future, and to have any chance of a utopia at all, we need one thing above all : a beer-drinking cat. Err, compassion, I meant compassion ! Yes. And possibly a beer-drinking cat.

The Time Machine again (II)

Part Two : Social Fiction

Last time, we left the Time Traveller eight hundred thousand years in the future, on an alien Earth that resembles nothing so much as Risa. In that distant future the Earth had been transformed by man's insatiable quest to conquer nature, and the ecosystem remade into nothing more than a life support system for humanity. Or so it seemed. Actually, as the Time Traveller learns more about the world, he realises he's made some pretty wrong-headed conclusions. Like any good scientist he revises his theories as more data becomes available.

In the novel, the different conclusions the Time Traveller reaches provide the reader with different possible visions of the way the future might unfold. All of which are pretty startling and, given the way technology is making more and more jobs redundant, more relevant than ever. You might pick up The Time Machine for its sci-fi element, but you'll keep reading it for its social commentary. This isn't a book about temporal paradoxes or even time travel, really - it's a book about human behaviour and society. It really is a masterpiece of science fiction, exploring not just interesting technologies, but the ultimate effect those technologies have on us.

To keep things at a readable length, this post will examine only the first conclusion the Time Traveller reaches. The two others are essentially modifications (albeit very important modifications) of this first scenario, and we'll look at them in part three.


This Other Eden

Let's begin with the first scenario the Time Traveller concludes from his initial inspection. The Earth is an artifical paradise. The climate is warm, the soil fertile, and "nature" provides such an abundance of fruits that there is no need to farm any more. The Eloi - the short, happy simpletons of the far future - exist entirely as gathers (not hunter-gatherers because most large animals are extinct, and they're vegetarians). Work has gone the way of the dinosaur.

There's no need to build anything because the grand structures of the previous generations provide shelter from the wind and rain. Heating isn't needed because the climate is much warmer. Farming isn't needed because of the abundance of natural food. All harmful bacteria have been eliminated, so the water is clean and drinkable - no need for advanced sewage and water processing systems, or medical care*. Even fire is unnecessary because it's always warm and there are no dangerous animals to hunt and/or eat. All of the basic needs of man are now provided by this artificial nature, the final, ultimate result of nearly a million years of human technological advancement. In that everyone's material desires are now effortlessly fulfilled, it's strikingly similar to the world's of Star Trek's United Federation of Planets. It deserves a detailed comparison.

* Occasional injuries and deaths result, and the most shocking thing about the Eloi is that they just don't care very much. They don't value things any more, but they don't value people either.


Why Star Trek is a Utopia and The Time Machine is a Dystopia

In Star Trek, we see a utopian society provided for by a combination of advanced technology and human social development. Both work in harmony. Technology has given mankind almost unlimited resources - more than enough for everyone to live in luxury - and the impulses of aggression, greed, and most especially hatred, have all been drastically reduced (though not eliminated completely). That is partially a direct result of the technological development, and partially from other social factors (WWW III and alien contact being the most significant). The utopian society of Star Trek functions and remains functional for several reasons :

1. Access to free, unlimited clean energy (anti-matter).
2. Humans no longer value things above people. They still value things, but, "the acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives". Greed is dead, unless you're a Ferengi.
3. Humans have a fundamental drive for self-improvement : "We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity"; "The challenge, Mr. Offenhouse, is to improve yourself... to enrich yourself. Enjoy it". The determination to do things is now the primary driving force, not the determination to get things.
4. Machines are not sentient. Only humans are capable of understanding, and they possess a strong desire to do so. Machines are never (with rare exceptions) more than useful tools to help with this, and those few that are truly sentient are still essentially defective in some way compared to humans. Most importantly of all, being able to understand how technology works is vital.
5. Everyone is basically on the same page. Although there is exceptionally high tolerance toward alien cultures, in humans there are almost no fundamentally clashing ideologies. When there are, people are free to leave the system and set out on their own.
6. Menial labour is basically non-existent. No-one has to do demeaning jobs or is disrespected because of their chosen career (at least, any stigma attached to certain jobs is nowhere near as dramatic as in today's world).
7. Competition is still high. It's possible to "win" by, say, getting a job on the Enterprise, but if you end up on the USS Tedious, no-one thinks much less of you - hey, you still made it into Starfleet ! You can be rewarded for success, but not punished for failure.

In short, Star Trek features a potent combination of technology (free energy), social equality (a direct consequence of the lack of greed), whilst maintaining human ambition and the need for humans to do things machines can't - especially the need to think. It's the combination of the social and technological factors that make the Federation a utopia, not one or the other.

Now in this first scenario of the Time Traveller's imagination, points 1,2,5, and 6 are all realised. But it's much more than that. Points 3 and 7 are utterly gone : humans have no determination to do anything very much, and they certainly don't compete (as for point 4, there aren't machines of any kind because they're not necessary). Quite unlike Star Trek, and hence the resulting dystopian future, the total lack of any real need to do anything has led directly to a total lack of desire to do anything :

I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence, and those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions. 

Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help--may even be hindrances--to a civilized man. And in a state of physical balance and security, power, intellectual as well as physical, would be out of place. 

For countless years I judged there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no danger from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strength of constitution, no need of toil. For such a life, what we should call the weak are as well equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak. Better equipped indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet. No doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I saw was the outcome of the last surgings of the now purposeless energy of mankind before it settled down into perfect harmony with the conditions under which it lived--the flourish of that triumph which began the last great peace. This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.

Perhaps the most important difference between Wells' vision and Trek's utopia is that Trek still requires human intelligence. Although there are plenty of machines in Star Trek, they are seldom truly intelligent. There is always a need for humans to be able to think and understand. In this first scenario of the year 802,701, there isn't even a need for machines. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to think any more - they don't even need machines to think for them. They have regressed, stagnated, become happier, stupider - and dull.

Would this really happen ? In Trek, the excess energy of man is used to good purpose. Now that he doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to do, he gets on with things he enjoys - growing vines, riding horses, running cafés, and negotiating peace treaties with the Klingons (as one does). Not because he needs to, but because he wants to. In Well's dystopian future, doing things unnecessarily is a waste of energy, a hindrance rather than a help.

On second thoughts the back-breaking manual labour is starting to sound more appealing.

Idiocracy ?

There are arguments for both sides. Intelligence is biologically expensive to maintain, and if not needed, the body could devote its resources to becoming stronger, faster, better... except even that's not an advantage in this alter-Eden. There's no advantage to competition even at the biological level here - there's always more than enough to go around for everyone. Fighting off your rivals simply wastes energy, because you haven't diminished their access to resources one jot. Ultimately, it won't mean you have any more children (human sexual desire evidently no longer favouring the biggest or the strongest, especially given the genetic uniformity of the species).

Then, in a flash, I perceived that all had the same form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb. It may seem strange, perhaps, that I had not noticed this before. But everything was so strange. Now, I saw the fact plainly enough. In costume, and in all the differences of texture and bearing that now mark off the sexes from each other, these people of the future were alike. And the children seemed to my eyes to be but the miniatures of their parents. 

Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would expect; for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of an age of physical force; where population is balanced and abundant, much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the State; where violence comes but rarely and off-spring are secure, there is less necessity--indeed there is no necessity--for an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children's needs disappears. We see some beginnings of this even in our own time, and in this future age it was complete. This, I must remind you, was my speculation at the time. Later, I was to appreciate how far it fell short of the reality.

On the other hand, with all our base needs catered for, we might simply raise our game and become more concerned with higher matters. That's the philosophy behind the utopia of Star Trek. Like upgrading a computer - you don't simply run the same old programs but faster : you develop new, more capable programs that weren't even possible on the old machine. The problem, however, is sex.

Already people with conditions that were untreatable a hundred years ago are living long, productive lives and having children of their own, thanks to modern medicine. In Star Trek many more such problems can be alleviated through technology, as our own society does. That is a fundamentally good thing. But, at the same time, it might seem that there's almost no selection pressure any more. Having children is essentially a choice - virtually everyone, no matter how differently-abled, tall, short, skinny fat, intelligent, moronic, or just plain ugly - can have children if they want to. You don't really need any special attributes to raise offspring that will survive to have children of their own.

Err, on the other hand...

In Trek, the solutions to many social problems are technological. At the most basic level that forces a selection pressure to exist once again since if intelligent people started decreasing in number, there would be fewer people to maintain the medical equipment (for example) and so more people would start dying of untreatable diseases. Thus the remaining intelligent people would start outbreeding the stupid people again*, and the system settles into a natural equilibrium : enough clever people to provide for everybody.

* This is rather crude and insulting language. What I really mean by intelligent here is, "people able to understand and operate complex equipment". Of course, it's perfectly possible to be very intelligent and be completely unable to set the timer on a video recorder. Whether intelligence is entirely genetic I know not, but I'm assuming that to be he case here for the sake of simplicity. Genetics are surely a factor, at the very least.

Alternatively, it's also possible that all learning disorders can be medically treated. Stupid people might be born, but maybe they're "cured" (the Federation is quite rightly dead against any eugenics programs to "improve" the species, but that's no reason to avoid treating disorders - assuming stupidity really is a disorder). Then again the education program is highly advanced, with children learning calculus at around age 10. So maybe it's good enough to overcome most natural low intelligence levels - perhaps they've found a way to unlock everyone's proverbial hidden potential. Again people might be born stupid, but educated into thinking rationally. That's certainly the nicest, least offensive option.

In The Time Machine medical problems have been solved mostly through eugenics* (everyone is genetically very similar with an extremely low chance of producing significantly different offspring) - whether through natural selection or genetic engineering doesn't really matter. Technology played its part initially, but since the system is set up to be in perfect, stable equilibrium, it is no longer needed. It doesn't matter if the intelligent people all die - the system keeps going. There's no selection pressure to maintain intelligence.

* Wells was outspoken against racism. In his day, eugenics and racism weren't linked - improving the species didn't mean eliminating different races. It meant getting rid of undesirable traits, but Wells didn't think those traits were any more or less common in different races.

The end result is profoundly different to the purely technological scenario of Star Trek. No selection pressure, no evolution, no change, no reason to favour the intelligent over the stupid. It is perhaps the ultimate expression of a universal basic income. Not only has everyone got everything they need, but they've also got everything they want. Admittedly, what they want has become very simple : food, shelter, and sex. Though not necessarily in that order or all at the same time.

Star Trek also explored the planet-of-happy-stupid-beautiful people trope, of course.

And yet all that doesn't mean the intelligent won't exist (especially while the geoengineering projects are still in development), because there's nothing really to prevent them pursuing their own projects and having babies. Indeed, this will be easier than it is today, since they won't have to worry about the mundane concerns of staying alive. True, they won't necessarily be the most successful people on the planet... but there's no selection pressure against them either. So in Star Trek, not everyone is very intelligent, but everyone is successful. Intelligent people don't stop breeding just because stupid people are also breeding.

There's not much reason to think the same wouldn't happen in Wells' dystopia either; more cerebral desires and simple curiosity are not so easily crushed. The Time Traveller's argument that excess energy would become a hindrance is unconvincing, and lacks imagination. The great industrial projects of his own day were becoming more and more advanced, and not entirely dedicated to the base needs of humanity - it's not really a credible suggestion that if all our material needs were catered for, we'd stop being creative. More likely, as we'll discuss, the reverse is true.

So if the intelligent people won't be filtered out, where are they ? Did Wells simply make a mistake ? That, as it happens, is what the Time Traveller is about to discover. Tune in next time for the third and final instalment.

The Time Machine, again (I)

Part One : Science Fiction

I first read The Time Machine when I was ten years old - it was probably one of the first grown-up pieces of science fiction I ever read. It's a classic not just because of its surprisingly good science, but because it looks in detail at the effects our scientific and technological discoveries may have on us. In most media sci-fi, the revolutionary breakthrough is kept secret - usually because the writers want to keep the story grounded in contemporary society, or are just too lazy to fully explore its effects. Not H. G. Wells. The whole point of The Time Machine is to see just how far our we might advance, and how our own discoveries may effect us both as individuals and in society.

With technology getting ever-more sophisticated at a faster pace, The Time Machine has never been more relevant. An ever-growing number of jobs are now directly threatened by technological advances. The Time Machine is essentially a Victorian's attempt to answer the question : if you teach a robot to fish, does everybody eat or everybody starve ?

However, it's pretty obvious that while the robot apocalypse may or may not be inevitable, it certainly isn't imminent.

In this first part, I look at the more straightforward scientific aspects of the book. In the second post I'll examine the far more interesting nature of its social fiction.


Time travel

1895. The British Empire is by far the world's largest superpower. Electric light bulbs have been around for about twenty years. Steam trains have been whisking people across the country for about seventy years. The first cinema is still in the future, as is the internet, though telephones have been around for twenty years. Fax machines, on the other hand, have been present, if not very common, for fifty years. Simple mechanical calculating devices were present, but not very sophisticated - though more complex, programmable devices were conceived of. The average life expectancy in Britain is 50, and the infant mortality rate something like 15%.

The theory of relativity is still a decade away, but much of the mathematics needed is already known. Science fiction authors have been exploring the prospect of time as a dimension for some years. But The Time Machine is by far the best known example.

The 2002 movie wasn't up to much, but it did have a very nice prop.

`Clearly,' the Time Traveller proceeded, `any real body must have extension in FOUR directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and--Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.'

Of course, Wells had no idea that relativity would show that time travel into the future was perfectly possible, while travel into the past was probably not. Strictly speaking it says that travel into the past is possible in certain special circumstances, but never to a point before the machine was created. Wells' machine is much more like a TARDIS, except it only moves in time, not space.

`And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the present moment.'

`My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present movement. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave. '

It's worth noting that the Time Traveller also mentions the possibility of a fourth spacial dimension, but this isn't explored much. In the novel, this dimension is time : it is no different to the other dimensions, except for our perception of it. Other than this vague reference to consciousness, we're given no clue how the Time Machine works, because that's not the point of the story. Still, Wells' description of time travel is a classic, which deserves to be quoted at some length :

As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing... I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.

 And so my mind came round to the business of stopping,

`The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance in the space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I travelled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered; I was, so to speak, attenuated--was slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances! But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way; meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction--possibly a far-reaching explosion --would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions--into the Unknown.

Wells made a determined effort to think fourth-dimensionally. His mode of time travel isn't possible in conventional contemporary physics, but he tried to think through the consequences of moving through time at a different rate to everything else. In his model, conveniently, objects moving at different rates through time don't interact - at least not much. Just enough, one assumes, to allow gravity to fix the machine to the earth, and electrical forces to prevent it from falling through the floor or the air molecules from penetrating the Time Traveller's internal organs.

Wells at least was aware of the problem, though he had no idea about nuclear fusion or even basic atomic structure. When the Traveller brings the machine to a halt, the sudden resumption of normal molecular interactions throws him from the machine. It can't do much more than that otherwise the rest of the story wouldn't advance.


Deep Time

While the main story takes place a mere eight hundred thousand years in the future, Wells finishes the time travel sequence with a look much further ahead. Thirty million years is now known to be not so very much, but then radiometric dating was still ten years in the future. Still, Wells was entirely aware that vast geological processes would come into effect on such long timescales. With continental drift still seventeen years in the future - and not widely accepted for sixty years - Wells nonetheless has his machine end up somewhere quite different from central London :

The machine was standing on a sloping beach. The sea stretched away to the south-west, to rise into a sharp bright horizon against the wan sky. There were no breakers and no waves, for not a breath of wind was stirring. Only a slight oily swell rose and fell like a gentle breathing, and showed that the eternal sea was still moving and living. 

More than that, Wells considers what might happen on a planetary and even larger scale. Considering that the theory of nuclear fusion wasn't known at the time, he gets the description of what happens to the Sun remarkably correct :

At last, some time before I stopped, the sun, red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat, and now and then suffering a momentary extinction.

 So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth's fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away. At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens.

Wells could not possibly have known that such events would take more like three billion years than thirty million. It's still remarkable that he got as much correct as he did. He also speculates that the Earth has become tidally locked to the Sun and that the orbits of the planets have shifted - hence, although the Sun has swollen into a red giant, the Earth is cold and barren.

I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea, the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the uniform poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one's lungs: all contributed to an appalling effect.

All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives--all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.

A poetic, if chilling, vision of things to come. All the more remarkable for being written 120 years ago. But it's in the social side of things that Wells is even more pertinent - and that takes place in a bright, warm, false Eden a mere eight hundred thousand years in the future.


Geoengineering

Though not everything is stated directly, it's pretty clear than mankind has been engaged at remaking the planet for his own purposes. The whole Earth has become a garden :

I was on what seemed to be a little lawn in a garden, surrounded by rhododendron bushes, and I noticed that their mauve and purple blossoms were dropping in a shower under the beating of the hail-stones.

...   his legs were bare to the knees, and his head was bare. Noticing that, I noticed for the first time how warm the air was... My general impression of the world I saw over their heads was a tangled waste of beautiful bushes and flowers, a long neglected and yet weedless garden. 

But this warm, damp paradise is not the result of natural chance. It is the result of millennia of projects to improve the world for human habitation. Today, we worry about whether climate modification projects might do more harm than good. Wells was audacious enough to see the long-term trend and speculate on the ultimate result of modification of nature :

The work of ameliorating the conditions of life--the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure--had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw ! 

 After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of to-day are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and animals --and how few they are--gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our ideals are vague and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited; because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better organized, and still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies. The whole world will be intelligent, educated, and co-operating; things will move faster and faster towards the subjugation of Nature. In the end, wisely and carefully we shall readjust the balance of animal and vegetable me to suit our human needs.

The air was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi; everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers; brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither. The ideal of preventive medicine was attained. 

No disease, no dangerous animals, no hunger, no cold, no drought, no floods -  no threats. Wells speculates that the Sun has become hotter to explain the change in climate, though if he were alive today he surely would have made this the handiwork of man as well. The point is that man has remade the world according to his own desires. A lot of animals have gone extinct along the way, but from the point of view of the human species, the world is now - apparently - perfect. This is a remarkable vision for a man of an age when people generally didn't live much past fifty.

Remember, this was age when steam power was still a pretty neat idea, the electron wasn't even known, compulsory education ended at age ten, and the workhouse was still a thing, Wells' genius was to be able to see through all the technical inadequacies of his own age and see the long-term trend. That's something people would do well to do more often. We sometimes forget just how much progress we've made. For all the social problems of the world - and there are many - the general standard of living in the Western hemisphere has never been higher. Oh, sure, if you think on timescales of a few years, this isn't necessarily true, but in the Western world it is (almost) possible to talk with a straight face about banning the word poverty and talking about inequality instead.

Yes, there are still people at the very bottom of the pile, in all countries, whose living conditions are squalid and miserable. That has been the case since the beginning of time. But the general standard of living for the majority of people near the bottom has risen immeasurably. Forgetting that, and failing to realise just how much worse things were in the pre-industrial era, is a major reason why technology hasn't made us any happier.

Undeniably the environment was in a better state in the pre-industrial era than it is now. But that does not mean things were better for people - quite the opposite. No central heating, no electricity, no disease prevention... food had to be obtained by either hunting or back-breaking manual labour, and childbirth was a dangerous time for both mother and baby. The key, of course, is to strike a balance between the left and right pictures. Wells' vision was something altogether different. The ultimate subjugation of nature he explores is, as we'll see, not such a utopian vision either.

But Wells wasn't content to stop there. What technology can do for us is all very well, and the technical details are interesting, but... that's not really the point. Wells' vision doesn't (exactly) have a world filled with robots catering to our every whim - it has the planet so carefully fine-tuned to our needs that technology is, apparently, unnecessary. But the essence of the thing is the same. The real point is : what happens to us when we achieve our ultimate dreams ? What do we do when we have all our desires fulfilled ? That's what we'll look at in part two.

Why Captain Kirk Was Chasing The Voth

A few days ago I received an email from a fellow Trekkie with a question about quasars. As one does.

"WHAT !?!? AN EMAIL THAT'S NOT FROM A PSEUDOSCIENTIST ????"

"If quasars weren't extragalactic, what might they have (otherwise have been found to have) been ? Lest that sound too much like something from Velikovsky, rest assured I'm asking in terms of SF…or space opera anyway, for strictly Trek-related reasons. Let me explain.

I breathed a sigh of relief at the Velikovsky dismissal, because I've had just about enough of dealing with wackos who think they understand science better than scientists. But I digress.

As you may or may not know, Trek's episode "Galileo 7" cited Kirk's "standing orders" to "investigate all quasars and quasar-like phenomena." This order was cutting-edge in 1967, when quasars' nature and location(s) were unclear. Today it's an anachronism…but my bent for "aired data is factual" Treknological speculation has me longing to be able to say more than, "If taken at face value, these orders imply the very COSMOS of [original series] Star Trek differs fundamentally from our own." "

Well, indeed, I am acutely aware of the episode in question. It's a great episode where we see some fundamental character conflicts that were barely seen in later Trek seasons. But the notion that Captain Kirk could take the Enterprise off on a study of quasars is, as everyone knows these days, just plain silly.

Of course, the rest of the show was a masterclass in subtle understatement.

What are quasars, anyway ?

Quasar, for those of you not in the know, is a short form of "quasi-stellar object" : things that look a bit like stars, but aren't stars at all. They were discovered in the early 1960's using radio telescopes (that they featured in Star Trek as early as 1967 is a credit to the writers). The name comes from the fact that they were bright sources of radio waves but with only a star-like object seen in visible light. At the time, no-one even knew how far away they were, let alone what they were.

Pretty soon though, someone measured the redshift of one of them - that is, how fast it's moving away from us. It was found to be a whopping 48,000 km/s (a hundred million miles per hour, or nearly three hundred billion furlongs per fortnight) - much, much faster than anything in our Galaxy. Later, galaxies were discovered at the same positions as the quasars. So it's now a certainty - yes, really, a certainty - that quasars are very distant, incredibly bright objects.

48,000 km/s is about 15% of the speed of light, which is jolly fast. Accelerating something as big as a star to that speed takes an enormous amount of energy - roughly speaking the entire energy output of our Galaxy for a year. So for quasars to be natural, nearby objects is basically a non-starter. But other galaxies are doing this quite naturally - pretty much all of them, really (much more on this later). The more distant a galaxy is, the faster it's moving away from us, a discovery known as Hubble's Law though the real credit should go to Georges Lemaître*.

* Interestingly, it seems that Hubble didn't believe redshift was really equivalent to speed, but we'll get back to that later.

Anyway, quasars are tremendously far away (many hundreds of millions of light years), so they have to be extremely bright. But they can't just be unusual galaxies - as we've seen, their host galaxies don't look all that weird - because their brightness can vary on a timescale of days. Galaxies don't, indeed, can't, do that.

Whatever quasars are, they have to be small - no more than the distance light travels in a day or so (about 26 billion kilometres, several times the distance to Pluto). Since nothing can travel faster than light, if they were any larger than that there's no way the change in brightness would vary consistently across the object : some parts would be bright while others were dim, and vice-versa. It would all cancel out so it would look like there was never any variation at all.

Long story short, our current best guess for what quasars are is something like this :

The idea is that quasars look different from different viewing angles. So if we happen to be looking straight down the jet, they look very bright; if we're edge on and looking at the torus, they're dimmer. Image author unknown.

A huge black hole (by the standards of black holes, which is still tiny compared to galaxies) gobbling up material which swirls around it in an accretion disc. Before it falls in to the hole itself, from which nothing can escape, it gets hot and radiates energy. It turns out that accretion is one of the most efficient ways to release energy, second only, perhaps, to a matter-antimatter explosion. This is not so much because of the mass of the black hole, but more because that mass is very concentrated.

Imagine you dug a hole right down to the center of the Earth, and, feeling reckless, you jumped in. Obviously, you'd get faster and faster. But while your speed would always increase right until you met a miserable fate at the bottom of the hole*, your acceleration would steadily decrease. The further down you went, the less mass there'd be pulling you down. For a solid sphere, it turns out that you only feel the pull of gravity from the mass beneath you - all the mass above you cancels out.

* I said you dug a hole to the center. I never said it went right out to the other side.

This Wikipedia illustration is too sensible. It even puts
the little dude inside an elevator so the tunnel can be
a vaccum.

Not so with a black hole. To squish the Earth into a black hole we'd have to make it about the same size as a pea. Let's suppose we were clever and stupid enough to do this. Well, we'd suddenly find ourselves floating in space with a black hole now around 6,000 km below our feet. We'd start falling... but this time our acceleration wouldn't decrease. It would get higher the closer we were to the hole. All of the mass of the Earth would still be beneath us right until the bitter end - which means we end up with a much higher final speed (as in near light speed, though things get horrendously complicated with such strong gravity), releasing more energy.

Funny thing though - our initial acceleration wouldn't have been any greater than if we'd dug a hole. Turn the Sun into a black hole and it wouldn't start sucking everything in, in fact it wouldn't pull on us any more strongly than it does now. Even at where the surface of the Sun is now, the gravity wouldn't be any stronger - but get closer, and things get much, much worse. It's the concentration of mass that makes things go haywire, not the amount of mass.


What about Kirk ?

That's enough about science (said no-one, ever*). How can we reconcile what we know about quasars today with Kirk's standing orders ? Well... we can't. The Enterprise was limited to exploring our own Galaxy, it couldn't go flying off to study distant quasars. Unless... what if we got that whole redshift thing wrong ?

* No-one worth knowing, at any rate.

Bad news, we didn't. We know quasars are extragalactic because we've seen their host galaxies, remember ? But maybe we can make this work with what we knew about quasars in 1967.

The "quasar" as it originally appeared in the show. In the remastered version it looks like this.

The strictest definition of redshift is that the frequency (wavelength) of light is altered. It doesn't actually mean things are very far away or even moving very fast. There are actually three ways we know of creating redshift : 1) Expand space between us and the object; 2) Move it very fast; 3) Put it in a strong gravitational field.

Expanding space is basically the real-world answer (that's why galaxies can have high redshifts), sheer speed is something we'll come back to in a moment, as is strong gravity. Suffice for now that the latter two have problems.

Some astronomers were so startled by how frickin' bright they would have to be if they were as far away as redshifts would conventionally suggest, that they proposed a fourth mechanism : intrinsic redshift. The idea was that the light was emitted at at different frequency to begin with, but as to how this was supposed to happen was anyone's guess. It wasn't an outrageous idea, it just didn't work.

So that leaves us with gravity and speed. If we have incredibly strong gravity, we can create the same redshift we'd normally mistake for extreme speed. From this formula, all we need is the size of the object, its distance and redshift, and we can work out its mass.

We've got the redshift from the observations, so that's easy. We can place an upper limit on the distance given the size of the Federation (about 8,000 light years across) and the highest resolution observations available in 1967 (about 1" or 0.0003 degrees) - any larger than that and quasars would have looked like diffuse objects rather than stars, even with telescopes of the 1960's. Allowing the Murasaki quasar to be around 5,000 light years from Earth, this gives us an upper size limit of around 0.024 light years or 1500 AU.

Aaar ! Thaat quasaaar be one aaarcsecond across, arrr !

That means we now have size, distance, and redshift, so we can work out mass - which turns out to be 9 billion times the mass of the Sun, or 15% of the stellar mass of the Milky Way. The density wouldn't be that great by everyday standards (about 300x less than water, about the same as ordinary clouds), but it would still be staggeringly huge compared to most of the matter between the stars. The free-fall time (for it to collapse to a point ignoring everything except gravity) would be about two weeks. This could be prevented if the gas was hot enough, but the temperature needed to prevent collapse would be around six hundred billion Kelvin. Or Celsius. Or Fahrenheit. At that temperature it really doesn't make any difference.

An object that size with that temperature would have the energy output of five tredecdillion Suns. That's a number far larger than all the stars in the Universe. The energy received on Earth in one square metre would be the same as the total output of 200 Suns. This monster wouldn't be a planet killer, it would be a galaxy killer.

We'd die.

Admittedly, I'm pushing the equations well beyond their breaking points, but the point is that a giant nearby quasar with strong gravity is a bloody stupid idea.

But remember, the size limit was imposed only because of telescope resolution. Maybe we could still get equivalent gravitational redshifts from smaller objects ? Alas, not really. It turns out that to get a redshift of 0.15 (the lowest known), the light would have to be emitted from a radius only about four times the Schwarzchild radius, the size below which an object of a given mass becomes a black hole. As we've seen above, it's nigh-on impossible to get a large, stable object like a star that's so massive for its size.

But couldn't we just do this by having material emitting light when it's close to the surface of a different object, like a neutron star or a black hole ? In my email response, I made a mistake and said that to do this would require emitting material to be below the Schwarzchild radius, which is impossible. But that's not the case at all. Theoretically, you can get any redshift you like if the material is close enough to the event horizon.

Stellar mass black holes have event horizons ~10 km across, far smaller than the maximum 1500 AU size allowed by observations, so that's good. Emission that looks like it's at a redshift of 0.15 would have to come from around 350 km from the singularity. The problem is there's no obvious reason why the emission should peak at this distance - you'd have to somehow keep the material stable far above the hole itself, otherwise you'd see a much higher redshift as the material fell further in to the gravitational well. Also, apparently it just isn't possible to have material creating redshifts greater than 0.62, which are observed for many quasars.



What about a rocket ?

Good thinking, Batman ! The one remaining option to generating such high redshifts is sheer speed. But, how do we get material up to such a tremendously high speed ? Easy :

In the Trek universe, "aliens" are not only a perfectly valid explanation, but they're probably the most likely explanation. There's one alternative : white holes, a.k.a wormholes. Material falling into a black hole might be spat out of its opposite somewhere else in the Universe (but almost certainly isn't). Fortunately this one is easy to dismiss : in Trek cosmology, wormholes are very rare and very unstable (with one notable exception), nor do they ever eject huge quantities of matter. So these aren't a very likely explanation at all*.

* Naturally occurring jets from black holes can also reach tremendous speeds. The problem is that each black hole has two jets, pointing in opposite directions. So if quasars were actually black holes in our own galaxy, we'd see this second jet.

So natural explanations are out. Which leaves the question : what is it the aliens are accelerating up to such high velocities, and why ? Obviously, nothing larger than 1500 AU in diameter, but things which are bright enough to look like stars. So, stars then ? Well, as I mentioned, this would take a tremendous amount of energy, equivalent to the mass of a small asteroid in anti-matter. That's an awful lot in the Trek universe, but not out of the question. Also, of course, Trek science allows for faster than light travel - in reality this requires infinite energy. So maybe with Trek physics there could be a way to use far smaller quantities of anti-matter to achieve the same result.

There are a couple of other interesting observations about quasars that are also relevant in working out what the aliens are up to. One is that there are no quasars with blueshifts - they're all moving away from us, unlike some galaxies. That means that - accepting that quasars are not extragalactic, for the purposes of Kirk being able to visit them - they have to be a purely local phenomena. If other galaxies were spewing out there own quasars by some natural process, we'd see some of them heading toward us*. Which makes "aliens" a very plausible explanation indeed.

* In the real world, we don't see this because quasars are almost exclusively found in very distant galaxies, where the expansion of the Universe is much greater than their peculiar velocities.

The other interesting nugget is that quasars are found more or less evenly across the whole sky. Stars, of course, are not distributed like this - because we live in a spiral galaxy we see a band of them across the sky. Those outside the band are nearby.

With Earth at the center of the circle.

In reality, that means that quasars - if they are basically weird stars - have to be very close, within 2,000 light years or so. But since we've constrained quasars to be a local phenomenon distinct from stars, with redshift indicating speed, that's no longer the case. They can't be too far away though, or their density will be so low that Kirk is never going to be able to visit any. Say a cloud of about the same diameter as the Milky Way.

A huge cloud of star-like things rushing away from Earth is a plain ridiculous explanation in the real world, but totally satisfactory if you're allowed to say, "because aliens". Making this cloud about the size of the Milky Way also means that only a very few quasars will be within range of a Federation starship, so Kirk's orders then make a lot of sense. Not too close - or the Feds would already have investigated hundreds of the buggers - and not too far away, otherwise there'd be none to visit at all.


Enter the Voth

I mean, come on. A bunch of mysterious objects rushing away from Earth ? It could hardly be more sci-fi. A mega-engineering project to hurl stars out of our Galaxy is one possibility, a more obvious explanation is that quasars are in some way alien spaceships themselves.

Initially, I rejected the idea of star-hurling for several reasons. The energy requirements are huge, and their isotropic distribution implies something like an explosive event. But would the alien spaceship interpretation be any better ?

Given the brightness of the brightest quasar, and assuming it to be at a distance of 5,000 light years, it would be about 400 times as luminous (that is, its energy output) as the Sun. That's equivalent to combining 4 million tonnes of matter with 4 million tonnes of anti-matter every second. Which, for comparison, is roughly a cube of basalt (the densest rock) 100 metres on a side. With something as dense as the material inside a neutron star, things are a bit better - maybe 1 cubic metre per second or even much less, though storing such material is hazardous.

Hazardous here meaning, "mistakes will briefly make your starship shine as brightly as the Sun".

One wonders why aliens capable of such stupendous feats of engineering haven't, in the Trek universe, just invented warp drive like everybody else.

But let's assume they didn't. My initial thought would be that alien ships moving away from Earth that have been travelling for millennia sounds very much like the Voth. In Voyager, we learn that a bunch of dinosaurs managed to escape Earth before the asteroid hit (presumably before they even knew it was coming, otherwise deflecting an asteroid would certainly have been easier than launching a fleet of starships), eventually settling in the Delta Quadrant.

You know it makes sense.

The Voth are pretty advanced by Federation standards - they have transwarp drive and transporters which can beam aboard whole starships. But they're not nearly as advanced as one might imagine for a species that's been space-faring for 65 million years, and their politics is positively medieval. That suggests a generally very slow pace of development. They also command vast resources, with at least one spaceship that's tens of kilometres long.

They sound ideal. A species that's left Earth and has been travelling across the Galaxy, probably initially in very primitive craft. Presumably they would have travelled in many separate spacecraft travelling in different directions, to increase the chances that at least one of them would survive. So the Voth Voyager encounters need not be the only ones. Given Voth politics, it doesn't seem much of a stretch to suggest that maybe some of those others never even invented warp drive, and that's what 1960's scientists were observing as quasars.


Exit the Voth

But there are problems. The average speed to cross the galaxy in 65 million years is about 400 km/s. That's way faster than anything we have access to today, but it would still take over 3,000 years to reach the nearest star. Which is so long as to make the whole venture pointless, and given the Voth's stupendous feats of engineering, they ought to do rather better than that. We know they can manipulate energies equivalent to that of stars, which for a 10 km spaceship (assuming it to have a mass as though it were made of solid steel) should allow them to reach such a speed in a couple of seconds.

There's just no way the Voth - even the primitive ones - can be travelling so slowly. Especially given the redshift of what are supposed to be their ships, which are more than 100 times as great as their supposed initial speed.Worse, if quasars are spaceships, what exactly are we observing ? Their engine exhaust ? If so, we're seeing the engine exhaust rushing away from Earth...which means the ships themselves are heading right for us.

At this point I faffed an explanation, "maybe it's the bow-shock of their ships moving through the interstellar medium". Such features do exist around real-life high velocity stars (which are moving much more slowly than real quasars, < 100 km/s), but this is a stupid explanation. Only a tiny fraction of the material directly ahead of the ship would be forced up to the speed of the ship itself; the vast majority will be pushed aside into a tail.

Unnamed stars seen with Hubble.

The only realistic explanation of quasars for the Trek universe is that they are small, bright objects moving very rapidly away from us. That brings us back to the star-hurlers again.

What about Murasaki ?

OK, so by invoking some treknological solution, an ancient race of super-advanced beings started hurling stars out of the Galaxy several tens of millennia ago. One thing that worried me is that since no quasars are blueshifted, all of those stars would have to have been close to our own Solar System, suggesting a sort of explosion. That means not only having the mass of an asteroid in anti-matter, but also inertial dampers powerful enough to stop a star from being ripped to shreds.

However, as the inquirer pointed out, this isn't necessarily the case. The explosion could have been far away from Earth, if it occurred long enough ago that the stars flung towards us have now moved past us. Or, perhaps the stars were selected from completely random locations in the Galaxy but always flung away from the Galaxy, rather than specifically away from Earth. Redshift tells us about motion along our line of sight, but it doesn't mean the stars aren't also moving - from our perspective - across the sky.

So star-hurling it is then. Where does that leave the Murasaki quasar ? Err... floating around in space. That's about all, really. If we're saying that quasars are just ordinary but fast-moving stars, they wouldn't necessarily seem all that weird up close. I have absolutely no idea what the bow shock from a relativistic star would look like though. That Murasaki doesn't seem to have one could just a viewing angle effect - since we don't see a bright central source, perhaps the Enterprise was directly behind the quasar.

We're given precious little information about Murasaki. It's described as a "quasar-like formation", with "negative ionic concentration 1.64 times ten to the ninth power metres". I don't know what this means. "Ionic concentration" is an odd term, more suited to chemistry. Astronomers would probably talk of "ionization fraction" or just "ion fraction", for convenience - what fraction of the gas is ionized. Why it matters to specify that these are negatively charged ions, I don't know. As for the incredibly clumsy, "times ten to the ninth power", they could have just said "billion" or "giga". I guess they wanted to sound more sciency. And "metres" as a unit of concentration is like saying, "I'd like seven Pascals of sausages, please."

Quite. The second piece of information is that the radiation wavelength is 370 angstroms. That puts it in the UV band (almost X-rays), which will indeed ionise interstellar gas. So that one is totally accurate.

Finally, we learn that "Harmonics - upward along the entire spectrum". This could mean anything. A harmonic might refer to a multiple of some frequency of radiation, with interference being successively weaker at higher harmonics. Maybe.

The entire sector has been ionised : "four entire solar systems" - presumably referring to all of the interstellar gas. Well I suppose as it's travelling through space, it could be shock-heating the surrounding gas, ionizing it. Maybe.

In summary, Murasaki itself tells us nothing that prohibits it from being a relativistic star, though nothing that indicates it definitely is one either.


What if quasars really were high velocity stars ?

Or rather, what if quasars weren't giant, distant black holes ? Much more difficult to answer. Our Universe would require different physical laws, but just how different is impossible to say. No-one had predicted the existence of quasars prior to their discovery - so you might think that implies they're not all that important. The problem with that is that we barely had any understanding our galaxy evolution at all in the 1960's - after all, it was at that time only about 30-40 years since galaxies were proved to be distant objects.

There are two ways we could go about preventing quasars : change the laws of physics...

Oh, right, yes. Of course. Silly of me. Guess that option isn't available then. Anyway, I have no idea how much we'd need to alter gravity and/or themodynamics, let alone what would happen if we did. Probably nothing good.

The second option is to be semi-magical and say that pretty much everything in the Universe proceeded from the Big Bang just as it did in reality, until the point where quasars first formed. At that point, for some reason, they didn't. Exactly how important quasars are in galaxy evolution isn't clear. Oddly enough, the mass of the black hole correlates with the mass of a galaxy's bulge and even the angle of its spiral arms. There's probably some underlying common connection between the two, so preventing quasars might necessitate dramatic differences in galaxy structure.

Would this prevent the Universe from being habitable ? My guess is probably not. Many simulations have reproduced the basic features of the Universe without invoking quasars at all. That doesn't mean there might not be massive differences in detail though : totally different star formation histories of galaxies, different structures, maybe the wrong numbers of dwarf galaxies... all kinds of things. But I can't see any obvious reason why lack of quasars would lead directly to a lack of a Federation.


Why are the aliens doing this ?

What, you mean hurling random stars out of our galaxy at tremendous speed ?  The questioner suggested that it might relate, somehow, to the creation of the Galactic Barrier that (in Trek) surrounds the Milky Way. Possible, but it would have to be an indirect connection since quasars are distributed isotropically. Though I suppose this barrier might surround the entire galaxy like a shell, in which case its depictions in the show shouldn't be taken literally - for one thing, it couldn't be so visible at optical wavelengths, otherwise we wouldn't be able to see other galaxies.

A.k.a. the Very Pink Barrier, the Barrier of Slight Inconvenience,
or the Barrier of Thinking Two-Dimensionally.

Of course, there's always Q, if we're allowing other Trek series. Q is the sort of entity who would choose to randomly hurl stars into extragalactic space for the sole purpose of confusing bloggers. Which seems an entirely sensible possibility if you ask me.

Conclusion

Kirk's standing orders are a bloody nightmare to reconcile with real-world physics, bordering on impossible. It's barely possible to make them fit what was known in the 1960's, but, if we must, relativistic stars seem a strong possibility. No other natural explanation (that we know of) seems to fit - and the power requirements for alien spaceships don't seem plausible, especially given their absurdly slow speeds by Trek standards.

As for how the aliens have gone about hurling stars out of the galaxy, I have no really no idea. Their reasons for doing so, I think, are best left as an exercise for the reader.