Facts to fiction, fiction to facts

  

We live in interesting times when facts become fiction and fiction become facts. Let me elaborate.

 

Facts becomes fiction when it is very easy to twist truth. Reality gets portraited as just a hypothesis or figment of someone’s imagination. Climate change is one such area where even after tons of evidence that it is happening and we, the humans, are responsible for it, there are folks who believe that the whole thing is fiction. Either mad scientists running around for research money, or extreme liberals looking to overthrow the current economic order are responsible for this fiction. 

 

As I have mentioned before once you start believing that somehow facts are not facts, there is enough “evidence” to justify your belief. Internet directs you to videos by “experts” and “scholarly” papers that agree with you. 

 

Facts become fiction. 

 

At the same time fiction becomes facts. 

 

I am particularly fond of science fiction stories related to space travel and instant communication. Remember “First men in the moon” by H. G. Wells? Or Dick Tracy using his Apple Watch to communicate?

 

One fiction I would love to become facts is cheap space travel and colonies on Moon and Mars. The recent advances in commercial space travel is the right step in that direction.  It is not too fanciful to imagine that such a possibility will allow people, at least some fraction of population, to escape earth if it becomes inhabitable due to climate change in not-too-distant future. 

 

Under that scenario, fiction becoming facts will come to rescue of people who though facts were fiction. 

 

Wouldn’t that be the ultimate irony?

No, you can't

 Ah, retirement. Now is the time to do what I want. I can fly over to different place, some quite remote. I will take in what each place has to offer. When I am not flying around, I will drive to all the National Parks nearby and absorb beauty of what my country has to offer. Back home, I will relax. For lunch I will make myself a sandwich with ham and cheese. For dinner, it will be a fish or a steak now and then. Before dinner, I will have a glass of wine, and somedays, a sip of Bourbon. Finally, after dinner, I will have a dessert. I will have a great time.

 

Ah, retirement.

 

Hold on. Haven’t you heard it is time to retire retirement? If you don’t get engaged in some other activity, your brain will turn into a mush and you will die an early death.

 

Now is the time to do what I want.

 

Privileged, aren’t we? Think of all the poor people who have to work their rear ends off. You should be ashamed of having wealth that allows you to retire. Give up all your ill-gotten goods.

 

I can fly to different places, …

 

Fly? Did you say fly? Do you have any idea of the greenhouse emissions these airplanes are creating? It is people like you who have doomed our planet to severe climate crisis.

 

… some quite remote.

 

Here comes the privilege once again. By going to remote places, you will destroy flora and fauna of every corner of the earth. Haven’t we ruined our planet enough already?

 

I will take in what each place has to offer.

 

I know exactly what you mean. You will take thousands of pictures and post them all over. Then your ego will be boosted when people praise you. It is time to listen to all the gurus and get off this ego bandwagon.

 

When I am not flying, I will drive …

 

And how much emission will you add to what is already an unsustainable load on the environment? I can understand if you are driving to see your doctor, but driving just for fun? Come on.

 

... to all the National Parks nearby, and absorb beauty of what my country has to offer.

 

Overrun all the National Parks, that’s what your action, and that of all people like you, will do. Have you seen pictures of a bison being chased by hundred tourists? 

 

Back home, I will relax.

 

Relax? As I said before, this is the surest way to head for an early end to your life. Haven’t you read what sedentary life can do to people?

 

For lunch, I will make a sandwich of ham and cheese.

 

Good god! Ham? Cheese? First, you will kill all the pigs and eat them. Not only it is bad for pigs, it is terrible for the environment. Then, you will add cheese. Have you thought of what that will do to your cholesterol? Also, what is cheese made up of? Animal milk. How many calves will be left without nourishment so you can indulge yourself with cheese? Finally, bread. Haven’t you heard that the processed carbohydrate is terrible for you? Makes you diabetic. Kills you through heart diseases. 

 

For dinner, it will be fish, …

 

We are already wiping out most of fish in the ocean. Now, you will become an active participant. When there are no fish left, it will be your fault.

 

…or a steak now and then.

 

You must be kidding. You certainly have no regard for your health, do you? If refined carbohydrate does not kill you, steak will. 

 

Before dinner, I will have a glass of wine,

 

You thought wine is good for you, didn’t you? Read the latest in medical journals. Wine is bad for you, period. Ruins your liver, makes you crazy, increases chances of cancer.

 

and somedays, a sip of bourbon. 

 

Wine is not enough for you, is it? You have to drink whiskey? Are you out of your mind? Just multiply every bad thing wine does by a large factor and you get the effects of whiskey.

 

Finally, after dinner, I will have a dessert.

 

There we go again. Sugar!! It will wreck a havoc on your body. You seem to have a deep-seated desire to shorten your life.

 

I will have a great time.

 

No, you can’t

 

 

 

 

Because it is there

 George Mallory was a famous mountaineer who tried to climb Mt Everest and died in the process. When he was asked why he wanted to climb that formidable mountain, he famously replied, “Because it is there.” That sums up the reason for why people risk their lives in attempting to climb a piece of rock.

The same sentiment applies to why ordinary people want to go to space. Now they may have a chance. Suddenly a new industry is springing up to take us up in space. Yes, there is considerable amount of money involved, there is even some risk. There is, of course, some bragging rights that would come by going to space, but for most people it is the fulfillment of their life long dream to see for themselves what it would feel like orbiting the Earth, what would they see and experience. 

 

Besides the question of why would anyone want to go to space, there are several other objections raised by people who are opposed to space tourism. I had mentioned and argued against with two in a previous Blog Post (“A Far-out Scenario”, September 1, 202). One was how can we support anything that unsavory characters such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are promoting. The other, why can’t they spend this money on climate change. 

 

A new objection I have heard is that space tourism will cause a “disastrous” effect on the environment because of the pollution caused by rockets. My issue with this argument is two-fold: There are a lot of other activities that cause pollution and can be curtailed without snuffing out a nascent industry. I look around and see gasoline leaf blowers causing pollution and noise racket. I bet making them illegal will save far more on pollution than making space tourism illegal. My second argument against this objection is that technology will undoubtedly improve to reduce any harmful environmental effect of space tourism. Considering the fact that it will be quite a few years before space tourism really takes off (pun intended), we have some time.

 

At the moment there are two choices for future space tourists: Take a rocket up to the elevation that defines the beginning of space (50 miles up), experience weightlessness, admire scenery and come down. I was watching one such venture as it unfolded and was dismayed at how short the entire flight was. In ten minutes, these “astronauts” were up and down. Would that constitute space travel? Not in my opinion. Also, they charge an arm and a leg, and there is a long line of people waiting to go up.

 

Another choice is being offered by a couple of new ventures that have recently been announced. There is one called “World View” and the other, “Space Perspective.” Both will take you to 100,000’ by a balloon and charge $50,000. Space Perspective claims that 500 seats are booked and the first opening is in 2025. The benefit of their offering is that you stay afloat for many hours, not minutes. The downside, there is no weightlessness and the altitude is much less, only about 20 miles, much less than 50 miles offered by the rocket ships. You will be in stratosphere, not “space”, as currently defined.

 

The next step in space tourism will be orbiting earth. I am sure a space capsule, a more sophisticated version of the ones used by Yuri Gagarin or John Glen, will be created to get the wealthy tourists achieve that objective. However, in longer run, just one or few orbits in a cramped capsule will not cut it. The tourists will demand a longer time in space in a spacious vehicle. Like the International Space Station.

 

 Currently a few civilians have bought their way to the Space Station, but there is no possibility of a mass of space tourists invading it. So, a new orbiting Space Platform will be required. One likely scenario is that such a platform will rotate (like the one in 2001: A Space Odyssey”) so that artificial gravity is created. Ride the hub of this tourist platform to experience zero g, but come back to the rim to sip a cocktail while seeing the world go by. To reduce price, this orbiting Space Platform will probably be shared with organizations that provide other services in space besides tourism. Much like the cargo space in current airplanes. 

 

After that will come tourist trips to the moon, and eventually, to Mars. I have no clue when or in what form that will take. The only thing I feel confident is that eventually it will happen. 

 

May be my granddaughter, or her grandchildren, will get to really experience space. This is all too late for me. The best I can hope for is the balloon type of a ride. I have flown Concorde and remember the experience of being at 50,000’. Going twice as high will be something. However, I am not sure that I will do it.

 

What I am sure is that people like me and others will go to space…just because “it is there.”

LA is fine, the sun shines most of the time

                                 L.A.'s fine, the sun shines most the time and the feeling is "lay back"

                       Palm trees grow and rents are low. But you know I keep thinkin' about making my way back 

Well, I'm New York City born and raised but nowadays,
I'm lost between two shores L.A.'s fine, but it ain't home
New York's home,
But it ain't mine no more.

 

----Neil Diamond

 

When we moved from Boston to Los Angeles two years ago (not counting a little more than a year we spent as nomads), this Neil Diamond song captured the feeling we had. We were lost between two shores. LA wasn’t home, and Boston wasn’t ours any more. 

 

Now two years later, we still occasionally miss Boston and New England. The lovely fall colors, the serene beauty of fresh snow, and the blossoming of flowers at the end of winter…how can we forget them? Also, the White Mountains, our outdoor playground, and Plum Island, where we went birdwatching. Above all, how can we not miss our family and friends who were a part of our lives for so many decades?

 

However, to our surprise, not only have we made home in Los Angeles, we actually like it here. Like it a lot. 

 

Of course, having both our children and their families nearby, and my sister living not far away (as LA distances go), are big reasons for our happiness in this megapolis. Afterall, we moved here because of them in the first place.

 

Another big factor is how different LA has turned out to be from what we expected. Yes, it is huge and driving on the freeways can be frightening. There is practically no downtown to speak off and what there is can be considered to be quite plain, at least at the first glance. It has none of the beauty of the Boston downtown. 

 

On the other hand, we discovered that LA is not a monolithic entity but a collection of a large number of neighborhoods, connected by those freeways. Some of these neighborhoods are really pleasant, like Pasadena, where we have now settled. 

 

Living in this quiet part of Pasadena we get a sense of what a “walking” neighborhood feels like. We get our daily walks through treelined streets (talk about LA being very dry) with hardly any cars around. There is Arroyo, a little stream we can walk down to. Walk a little further, and we end up at Rose Bowl, famous for its New Year’s parade.

 

Pasadena is in the foothills of San Gabriel Mountains, where we can see almost every day the 5,700’ high Mt. Wilson, and on a clear day, Mt. San Gorgonio, which is 11,200’ high. I never imagined living so close to mountains, especially in LA. There are also a number smaller hills nearby, all providing excellent hiking opportunities. On a typical morning, we would drive for ten minutes to a trail head and do a 3-mile hike that takes us 400’ high. As there are few trees to obstructing views, we can see the entire San Gabriel Valley as well as downtown LA. 

 

This town also has an active cultural scene. The Pasadena Symphony orchestra performs in Ambassador Auditorium, only one mile away, within walking distance. Also, the downtown begins around there, and so we can dine in all types of restaurants and walk back home. There are several lovely gardens, the largest and most famous being The Huntington Gardens. It is enormous and makes you forget that you are in a major city. There are museums and an auditorium inside this garden, as well as well-designed Chinese and Japanese sections. There are thousands of trees and plants of every type imaginable.

 

Caltech is not far from our home either. In pre-Covid days, we used to attend lectures on scientific topics, such as space travels, which is what this university is famous for. Now we attend them on zoom. Soon, the in-person lectures should start again. JPL, the world-famous NASA facility managed by Caltech is just a little further away. That’s where most unmanned space probes get designed and built.

 

Then there is the Mediterranean weather of Southern California. Although I enjoyed snow as well as cross country skiing in New England, and cold weather does not bother me, I must say that being able to sit outdoors every day on our patio for a cup of coffee or a drink has its advantages. 

 

Finally, being where we are, we are within a day or two drive away from some splendid areas of the country and a huge number of National Parks. We have done a couple of two-week road trips already and visited/hiked in multiple places located in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Utah. Hopefully, this is just the beginning. 

 

Boston will always have a special place in our hearts. However, fortunately, we have ended up in a pretty good place to spend the winters of our lives. 

 

 

Beethoven's tenth symphony

 On October ninth (2021), Beethoven’s tenth symphony was released. This work was never completed by the maestro but now Artificial Intelligence has advanced to such a stage that finishing it was possible. I presume that all the nuances that makes a Beethoven’s symphony unquestionably his were understood by the machine and extrapolated to develop a piece of music that sounds just as if the old composer had created it. 

 

This opens up intriguing possibilities. Should we expect that other composers would receive a similar treatment? Certainly. Expect to hear Tchaikovsky’s seventh symphony or a finished version of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Perhaps the creators will be honest and say that AI helped develop them. However, one can envision that many “missing” pieces will be “found” in the cellars of old people who lived in the same town as those composers, and then auctioned off as authentic.

 

Talking about missing pieces…what about fine arts? How about a “missing” oil painting by Van Gogh suddenly turning up? A “Starless Night” which is a companion work of the famous “Starry Night?” I am sure a properly trained AI program can very easily figure out the colors, techniques, and the chemicals used to create those colors to create a painting that looks totally “authentic”.

 

This type of scam will only work if people value authenticity and are be willing to pay for it. An authentic work by Van Gogh has far more value than a print made out of it (like the one I would have hanging on my wall). That begs the question, why is it so?

 

If the pleasure is obtained by looking at the art and appreciating what it is conveying, what difference does it make whether it is authentic or not? The only reason I can think of is the bragging rights that accompany the acquisition of an authentic piece of work. “I can afford an authentic van Gogh and you can’t.” 

 

If we can somehow move away from the ego that comes from owning an authentic art, then we can sit back and enjoy these new products without worrying about the fact that they are not authentic. We can live in van Gogh’s world and admire “his” new paintings every few days, and I can continue to enjoy new works by my favorite composer, Beethoven, as the dead man continues to compose symphonies and piano concertos forever.  

 

The end of conversation

  

In 2009, I wrote a Post on different types of conversations. The four types I identified were:

 

• A ping pong match, in which the other person tries to one-up every statement you make. For example, you say, “We had a good vacation in Arizona.” To which the person you are conversing with replies, “We had a good vacation in Paris.” No interest what so ever in hearing your story.
• A Spanish Inquisition, in which every statement you make is torn apart in pieces by the other person who just cannot see the larger picture and seems to be on a quest to prove he/she is smarter/more street wise than you.
• A Communist debate, so named in honor of how Soviet Union used to respond to almost every proposal from the West in United Nations. “Nyet,” they would say. In this type of conversation, everything you say will be opposed by the other person, does not matter what you say. 

 

I pointed out that a more pleasurable conversation would be the fourth type, a Productive Conversation, which involves listening to what the other person is saying, thinking about what was said, and then responding. The point here is to not to think of the other party as an opponent and the reason for conversation as an opportunity to score a victory

 

Little did I know that we would be heading a situation in which there will be no conversation among people. 

 

You know the scenario. Two people sit down for dinner in a restaurant, and both are engrossed in viewing and tapping their own smartphone. An occasional word will be exchanged, otherwise it is total immersion in the outside world.

 

This is a very frustrating situation if you are trying to have a conversation with an addict of smartphone. You are staring at him; he is staring at the smartphone. 

 

“So, how was your day?”

“Good” …. Tap, tap, tap, full concentration on the device, total absence from the present moment.

“What did you do today?” No response. Tap, tap, tap.

“I said, what did you do today?”

“Huh…nothing.” Back to tap, tap, tap.

You give up.

 

Occasionally, the conversation starts normally, but the phone pings and it is taken out in a moment. Then, you lost the conversation partner. Sometimes it does not even need to ping. Every few minutes the addict has to take out the phone to check if he has missed something. How bad would it look if the text of a distant friend is not responded immediately? 

 

Now I am no saint. I too check my smartphone periodically, but I make it a point that it does not come in way of a conversation, which can be a joyous, fruitful activity that further cements the bond between two people. Perhaps some people don’t see the need or don’t feel that they are good at talking with the others. Smartphone provides an easy out in those situations. 

 

As the grip of these devices tightens, there will be no talking. 

It will be the end of conversation.

A far-out scenario

 I recently wrote a Blog Post commenting on the beginning of passenger space flights, thanks to the efforts by Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk. That would usher in a new era for making dreams of many people like me come true. 

 

When I posted it on FaceBook, I was criticized by two sets of people. One group of responders could not stand these billionaires, especially Jeff Bezos, and so could not see anything good coming out of their efforts. “They are terrible people, sucking blood out of their workers and amassing fortunes that are unconscionable. All they are doing is boosting their already inflated egos,” they said. Right, I responded. I am not a big fan of who they are either. However, that does not diminish what they have done for space travel. Let us not throw the baby with the bathwater.  

 

I was also told that they could have spent their money on fighting climate change (and multitude of human problems that can be addressed by pouring more money). 

 

That last point made me think about the future of our planet. How fruitful will it be to throw money at fighting climate change? Hasn’t the train already left the station? Aren’t we heading to a disastrous scenario? Looking at what is going on this year I cannot help but believe that we are now beyond the tipping point and things will accelerate rapidly in an undesirable direction. Perhaps the earth will become uninhabitable in a few decades.

 

It may be time to start thinking about survival, not just prevention. Perhaps it is more meaningful to pour money into assuring that we the human beings can survive the coming catastrophe that we have brought upon ourselves.

 

Under that scenario, what the billionaires have done is even more meaningful than ever. One option for human survival, albeit far-out, is to transfer some portion of the population into space when earth becomes largely uninhabitable. 

 

This far-out scenario is similar to what was envisioned by a science fiction author Neal Stephenson in his wonderful book called “SevenEves.” In that book, moon is destroyed and its parts are going to hit earth after two years. With the clock ticking, a significant portion of the population manages to get into the near-earth orbit and start a long journey toward an uncertain future. It has a happy ending with population coming back and establishing presence in a ring rotating around earth at the geosynchronous orbit. 

 

That may be one scenario that may come to pass as climate change manages to destroy earth over the coming decades. Then, people will say that those crazy billionaires in year 2021 played a small but significant role in making human survival a possibility.