Pilot's Log

I went to the library's annual book sale and got a hardback copy of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, which I'll probably spend the summer reading and re-reading.

What piqued my immediate interest are diagrams of the three main hypothetical starship designs of the Sixties and Seventies: Orion, Daedalus, and the Bussard Ramscoop. I'd first learned about Orion from The Future of Flight by Dean Ing and Leik Myrabo, a book I got when I was a Freshman in college--some twenty-five years after the program's cancellation following the imposition of the Nuclear Weapons Test Ban Treaty. The Orion program centered around a rocket whose thrust was generated by atomic bomb blasts. The U.S. Air Force had already succeeded in tests with a scale model powered by conventional explosives and had started spadework on a full-size vehicle when they were ordered to drop it and move on to other things.

The full-sized ship would have been over 100 meters long, probably weighed in the neighborhood of 100 thousand tons, and have a likely crew of 35 people. And, if the program had contined, manned missions to the planets and possibly even beyond the Solar system would have begun by 1970.

Now I'm thinking about building a model of the ship and plotting out a low-budget movie asking the question: "What if an Orion had been built and secretly launched out of the Solar system then? Where could the ship be now?"

Was flipping stations on TV after seeing the weather forecast...clicked to Th!s Network and saw the day's schedule: Starflight 1: The Plane That Couldn't Land, followed by The Panic In The Year Zero.

Starflight was the logical end of the Airport series but made by other hands, it might have been called Airport '83 and nobody other than Arthur Hailey would have cared. The plot: the first hypersonic passenger jet is forced to boost into low-Earth orbit to avoid debris from a failed satellite launch and is stranded in space. Lee Majors is the captain of the flight, Hal Linden is the mission control chief leading the response and rescue effort. The effects were fairly top-notch for the time. Looks like the cut Th!s is using is much shorter than the premiere version, tho'.

The Panic In The Year Zero is about a family struggling to survive in an America that had just suffered nuclear weapons strikes. It came out roughly the same time as the Cuban Missile Crisis and so probably got marks for its topicality. But what I think is strange about it...a while after I had seen it, I got a copy of the Robert Heinlein anthology The Menace From Earth which includes the story "The Year Of The Jackpot". Reading that, I realized that much of it was copied, nearly verbatim, into The Panic In The Year Zero. Which makes me wonder if Heinlein was plagiarized or if he consented and allowed his work to be used. Heinlein's story was first published nine years earlier, so the timing isn't unclear.

These movies will probably be shown again in their usual rotations. If your curious, check your local listings.

Nothing like going back to an old theme to see if it has anything I hadn't discovered the first (or second, or third) time.

In this Previous Commentary I did a look through of the 1981 Book of Predictions to see where we had been in the turn of the 21st Century as opposed to how things looked to happen back then.

Today I found the library's copy to look at predictions for 2010. What I saw in those pages:

* Nationalist "identities" being eroded by the emerging globalized culture. The cyberati/globalati find new ways to define themselves beyond where they live or local social class (or political affiliation).
* Terrorists obtain a nuclear warhead and use it on a major city. The death toll is in the millions and it prompts a global ban on weapons of mass destruction.
* Fusion energy becomes safe and reliable enough for companies to build large-scale fusion powerplants. The order of magnitude of the grid's capacity must be raised by a factor of twenty to thirty to make full use of the advance.
* Artificial Intelligence technology finds its "killer application" and is advanced to the point where AI systems frequently pass Turing Tests.
* The first segment of the first long-term space habitat is launched into orbit. Suborbital spaceflights become available for wealthy space tourists.
* Regional Economic Unions between Third-World nations proliferate as they are seen as a way out of the "continental poverty cycle". Dozens of national currencies get phased out world-wide in favor of regional ones. Where regions come together, some nations adopt two or more as official currencies as a way to reinforce global trading through their territory.
* The Kingdom of Jordan and the Palestinian Authority are merged as the end result of a constitutional crisis in Jordan. The new nation is ceded land from Saudi Arabia and southern Iraq, and this makes a political solution with the State of Israel possible.
* "Superstructures"--massive truss-like building systems--will become the next trend in urban construction.

While there is a lot more in the book, I think more than half of it is "obsolete" because it was either predicted to happen in the years between publication and 2000, or has come to pass/been disproven by events of recent history. And much of the other material is too trivial or silly to bother with.

Just the same, I think I'm having a craving for Convenience Store Pie about now.

FP

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In the words of Thugs on Film: "No. No. No. No. No! Bleeding NO!"

It was just as unstable then as now and don't let anybody tell you otherwise. Nobody likes a nuclear arsenal on a hair trigger...and we had two of them in the Eighties and I'm glad they're gone.

Sagittarius Horoscope for week of July 3, 2008

Beginning in 1951, the U.S. government regularly set off nuclear bombs in the desert 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Most of the 1,021 explosions occurred underground, though for 11 years some were also done in the open air. Tourists used to flock to Las Vegas to watch the mushroom clouds, which were visible from that distance. As far as we know, the detonations ceased in 1992. Also as far as we know, the unusual lifestyles of Las Vegas's inhabitants are not the result of mutations in their DNA caused by radioactive contamination. Let's use this scenario as a departure point for your own personal inventory, Sagittarius. What dangerous or tempestuous events from your life are now safely confined to the past? Are there any lingering consequences from them? If so, what might you do to heal?

Too often in my life I was treated like somebody else's fireworks detonator...them pushing my buttons for their hope of an entertaining blast of anger or emo or madness. Looking back I still hate that to a very great degree. What's worse, the conscious effort I made to insulate myself from that kind of human behavior has only helped on a limited number of levels. I can handle myself, but I don't know whether it's because of growth or burnout...and whether I am still weak enough for someone else's abuse to lead to a chain reaction. Maybe I can go the rest of my life without a clear answer to this issue...but for the sake of my future, there is a part of me that wants to look in the silos and count the warheads that are still there. And if so, have enough of them permanently dismantled to ease my mind.

FP

You want to talk about weird coincidences? On the Kenzerco game company boards, I was in the middle of concocting a Knights of the Dinner Table story wherein the characters are playing a game scenerio...the premise being how WW3 starts with the attempted capture of Osama Bin Laden and the assassination (by NPCs) of the Pakistani Prime Minister. I'd started this weeks ago.

I just related that nightmare scenerio to my parents...mentioning my opinion that if the Iranian government--or elements thereof--claimed (or was proved) to have been responsible for the death of Benezir Bhutto, the U.S. and Russia would be morally obliged to declare war on each other due to mutual defense treaties. So Bhutto would become our generation's Archduke Ferdinand.

The fuse is burning toward the powderkeg.

* * *

Meanwhile another war has been ongoing. Proof that no matter how fanatic I'd be about any subject, there is always somebody far more fervent and energetic about it.

FP

PS: Producers Are Money-Grubbing Scum.

My main man Andre Codrescu describes the emerging center of the world as we know it.

If there are any global terrorist organizations with asperations involving weapons of mass destruction out there reading me--if you lob your warhead into the northwest corner of Arkansas, and do enough damage, the American people will welcome you as liberators.

FP

Does anybody know whether the DPRK's detonation of a weapon of mass destruction legally constitutes a material breach of the cease-fire that allegedly stopped the Korean War?

Not that I suspect anybody in the Blogosphere would.

FP

Hey.

Was looking through my old letters files lately. Found a critique that Antarctic Press editor Herb Mallette gave to some scripts and ideas I submitted back in the middle 1990s. Of course, the overall complaint about my work was the ideas were all too derivative of existing works. And of course, I had pacing problems...too much dialogue in one story, too much action in another, and so on.

Of the stories I submitted, I was told that one titled Peace Dividend: Woodland Camo had the most promise. Let me tell you about that one...

Peace Dividend was planned to be a set of stories, all concurrent to one another, with the same general theme: Advances in Military Technology, and attempts to use these advances to better society in general. At least, that was it on the surface. It was also to be the story of the last twelve months before a nuclear war destroys our civilization. Woodland Camo would have been a more personal story wrapped up in this larger saga.

The central character of Woodland Camo would be a teenage Asian-American girl named Sally. Because of her criminal record (habitual shoplifting), she was being "posted" to a youthful offenders' boot camp run by the U.S. Army. "Woodland Camo" was the name for the boot camp program; it was created by the Army as a way to boost activity at underutilized Army bases, and so doing protect them from the Pentagon Base Closure Commission.

What made this particular Woodland Camo operation special was the fact that the base was also testing new combat robots...and the youths would be working with these machines. I was going for a Patlabor-esque tone for this story...the machines would have been very similar in design and capabilities. "Heartbreak Ridge With Robots" was how I described the concept to my buddies.

It's actually a little bizarre seeing how I would have told the story of the future in 1995. By now, the Second Great Depression would have hit America--banks all over failing because of corporate fraud and the collapse of the credit system. Just as 2007 starts, Russia starts annexing its former Soviet neighbors again, the Saudi Kingdom is overthrown and replaced with a Baathist regime aligned with Iran and Syria, and Mainland China invades Taiwan. Cyberterrorism runs rampant and some states declare martial law to restore order. Midway through 2007, open war would be declared...the Woodland Camo kids would be summarily drafted and sent to the front lines. Three months later, nuclear Autumn. End of story.

I gave up on this story at the time I moved to Tennessee because I had more important problems...and I finally got onto the Internet.

There's a part of me that still wants to be proven wrong...that somehow we as a people can work out or problems and step back from the brink. But I have this awful suspicion that we're on a path from which there is no return.

FP