Feed the Machine: A God Named Higgs
Standard Model So the Higgs Boson was confirmed last year was it? I can’t remember. Anyway, it won Mr. Higgs and that other guy who also theorized it a truckload of krona. Meanwhile, the men and women who actually discovered the damn thing got no love. But fear not, you honorable CERN employees, because you still have the best jobs in the world. The article above theorizes about the Higgs particle/field creating an entire particle landscape with its influence. If you could control the Higgs field, could you turn raw energy into whichever particles — both mundane and exotic — that you’d like? Wormholes would become practically commonplace if one could
Feed the Machine: Blunderdome
This week’s Feed the Machine will be a little different. Before I go on, here is the link to the article in question: Following the missteps of giants — Phys.org It’s a short article, more a review than a science article really, but it got me thinking, and I want it to get you thinking. Why would one of the most respected scientists of the 21st century knowingly make such a blunder? Beyond this, what if, on an alternate earth, there was a scientist who was so respected, so smart, so right about everything, that her discoveries weren’t examined? In fact, they were taken as LAW the moment she set them down to paper? What if the world conformed to her laws, even when they were wrong? What if it didn’t? What if someone called her on it? Imagine a
Feed the Machine: Beautiful Interlude
Sometimes, the Machine is satisfied.
Feed the Machine: Life, Camera, (RN)Action!
Clicketh and Readeth This week’s FtM will be short and sweet. Simply, what would happen if scientists tried to create new life in the lab using RNA reactors and succeeded? What if they put this lifeform in a hothouse and rapidly accelerated its evolution? What would come out of it? What would be the social, cultural, political, and theological ramifications of such an outcome? Come on, I am throwing you one underhand. You better hit it out of the park. Adam
Feed the Machine: Ah, My Eye!
Clicketh This article is incredibly cool. I think biological based SF is poised for an explosion. Most Hard SF is based upon physics or astronomy. Sometimes nanotech, which is an offshoot of chemistry, but the advances being made in biology are exceeding what we are coming up with in SF. This article immediately made me think of the pleasure gun in Niven’s Ringworld. Instead of debilitating with pain, it debilitated by over-excited the pleasure centers of the targets body. But much more devious things can be done with reward-reinforcement training. What about a weapon that released dried algae into the atmosphere, and then a photon bomb that triggered the reward pathways the algae inhabited? Wouldn’t a bomb be limitless in power? What about an optical virus, that created regressive loops in the viewers brain? What would happen if all one had to do to stop addiction is drink a shot of blue-green algae juice and look at a glorified light bulb? What would the world be like sans addiction? Would cigarette companies buy-out the start-ups developing these technologies and destroy them? Would people start using more drugs with the ease of quitting them? Would excuses ala Tiger Woods and David Duchovny be a thing of the past? I’m trying to show that any of these science articles can be used to explore both bad and good futures. SF is getting so dark. Don’t forget that our lives today were the future of someone a hundred years ago.
Feed the Machine: Love Me True
Read me. What is this world coming to? Jesse Schell interviews Bob Bates, game designer and former chair of the IGDA. In it, Bates predicts a few future changes in video games, but the one that is really interesting has to do with player-character interaction. He believes that soon, players will build real emotional conversations with avatars and other NPCs. This goes beyond being scared that your character is going to die, or feeling bad that they had a tragic past. These are real emotion bonds. What sort of societal changes would this bring on? Video game addiction is well on its way to becoming a recognized mental illness. I’m sure most readers out there can think of at least one person they know who spends a majority of their waking hours playing WoW. If avatar interactions become more real, more visceral, and draw the player into the game that much more, what will happen to our cozy little society? Will game boxes come with Surgeon General’s warnings and photos of obese, Cheetoh stained teens with “This could happen to you” written above it? Going further in time, will some sort of legal unions between players and NPCs come into the fold? How bout we look in the opposite direction, towards optimism. Will something like Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” be our future? Can digital “beings” have any sort of legal status? Will the sun be tried for genocide should it knock out our power grids with a flare? I’m hesitant to muse any more because this is such a rich idea and I would much prefer to see what you all come up with. Go forth, and tell your pixelwife that you love her.
