What are those buggers up to?

One proposed form
of Dyson swarm.

We learned efficient use of stellar energy because they blacked out this planet.  In fact, that's how we discovered them.  In a period of three days, Eros gradually disappeared from telescopes.  We sent a tug to  find out why.
--Ender's Game

Life sometimes imitates fiction.

In Orson Scott Card's popular 1985 science fiction novel, Ender's Game, Earth is threatened by a race of intelligent aliens, insect-like in appearance, who are seeking new worlds to colonize.  As the quote above suggests, the presence of the "buggers" was first evidenced by the sudden fading from view of the asteroid Eros.  We discovered that Eros had been surrounded by material that absorbed all of the sun's normally-reflected radiant energy, allowing the buggers to use that energy to power their activities on and inside the asteroid.  Eros appeared as black as starless Space as the Earth spaceships approached it.

Eros's fate came to mind as I read a brief article from Popular Mechanics about the strange behavior of "Tabby's Star," more formally known as  KIC 8462852, a star within our own Milky Way galaxy.  The star shows variations in brightness that are inexplicable under any known scientific theories.  The star was discovered in the 1890s, but has been intensely studied for the past four years by use of the Kepler space telescope.

According to a more in-depth article in Wikipedia, the star showed a dip in brightness of 15 percent in 2011 and of 22 percent in 2013.  Its overall average luminosity has dimmed by 20 percent since its discovery in 1890.

In the absence of other compelling explanations, some scientists have suggested that the dimming may result from an artificial structure or collection of satellites (a "Dyson shell" or "Dyson bubble" or "Dyson swarm") that an alien civilization may be constructing around the star, constructing it with the intent of intercepting a large amount of the star's radiant energy and using it for their own ends.  Such a project may be theoretically feasible, but far beyond our present engineering skills.

If our observations of Tabby's Star do reflect, therefore, a Dyson whatever, we would be observing the activities of a civilization far more advanced scientifically and technically than our own. 

Would such an advanced civilization be peaceful, or would it be human-like and aggressive.  Who knows?  The star is 1,480 light years from Earth.  That gives us more than 1,480 years to prepare for the encounter, in the unlikely event that our neighbors are able to travel near the speed of light, and that our puny civilization should attract their interest.

The buggers in Ender's Game, of course, had both the ability and the interest. 

It was only after Earth had totally destroyed the buggers' civilization in the greatest genocide of all time that we discovered that the buggers had mistakenly believed we were insensate animals, incapable of intelligent thought and consciousness.  They were actually far less savage killers, subjectively, than we were when we cleared the prairies of bison. 

Have fun, future generations.  No one ever said that life in the next millennia was going to be simpler than in the past.    

Ender's Game

Yes, I do enjoy writing book reviews.  But I don't review War and Peace, or Gone with the Wind, or Les Misérables.  I don't review them, because everyone who would enjoy those classics has either read them already or already plans to read them at some point in the future.

Similarly, I won't review Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card.  Anyone interested in science fiction or fantasy knows about the book, at least, and probably read it long ago.  A much publicized movie based on the book is scheduled for release in the United States for November 1. 

The book was written in 1985, and it's my own fault that I just got around to reading it this week.  Mr. Card's writing is serviceable and adequate, but not particularly "literary" -- a fact that he acknowledges in a somewhat embarrassingly lengthy apology in the latest edition's preface.  But the story is absorbing, the characterization of the hero is moving, and the "message" is well worth noting. 

So I won't review the book -- its plot or character development -- but I do want to mention the "message" (or one of the messages) I find in that book.

The story, in quick summary, is that mankind, 150 years from now, has been engaged in battle twice by attacks from an alien species of bug-like humanoids that we call the "buggers."  Earth's forces have been sent -- by relativistic means -- across space to the buggers' own realm in the hope of defeating their forces before they regroup for a third attack.  Young Ender, a genius, has been bred and recruited, and is being trained, to direct these forces as supreme commander.

Most of the book is devoted to Ender's rapid development from a six-year-old child to an eleven-year-old conquering hero.  Ender's forces not only defeat the buggers, but totally annihilate their species, opening up their own planets for Terrestial expansion.

But Ender learns, after the celebrations conclude, that the buggers were far more civilized than we had given them credit for.  More civilized than ourselves.  Because of their own physiological functioning, they had believed that Earth was uninhabited by intelligent life, and that humans were simply robots left from an earlier and now departed civilization.  They realized their mistake after the second battle.  They therefore had no intention of ever launching a third attack.  Their "queen," realizing that defeat and annihilation were inevitable, and that Ender had the empathy to appreciate what she would tell him, found a way to leave Ender a message; her message told him that the buggers had never intended harm to an intelligent species.  Nevertheless, they accepted their fate, and she recognized that humans were now the heirs of what the bugger civilization had accomplished.  She wished them well.

Ender, now 12-years-old, and the toast of humanity, realizes that he has unnecessarily caused the death of billions of civilized beings, and an annihilation of their entire civilization.  He is devastated, despite the assurance of adults that man is evolutionarily a killer, that killing is the key to survival, and that survival is the ultimate goal of any species. 

A nation that came close to wiping out its own indigenous Indian population, enslaved Africans, attacked Spanish possessions without reasonable provocation, dropped its second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, replaced democratic governments with dictatorships in Chile and other Latin American countries, and accepted devastating "collateral damage" in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan, should have no difficulty in understanding the weight of Enver's self-accusing guilt, and in asking similar questions about its own policies.

The lesson is not that we should never kill.  It's that we must develop the empathy to understand our supposed adversaries before we ever resort, as a final alternative, to killing.

So far, humanity has never totally obliterated an entire intelligent species (unless, perhaps, we count whatever homo sapiens did to the Neanderthals, which I don't).  But we still have 150 years to hone our abilities.

And a child shall lead them ...

This is sci-fi with a brain, and a heart.
--Soren Andersen (Seattle Times)

A couple of months ago, I read for the first time Orson Scott Card's 1985 classic, Ender's Game.  I posted a short essay -- not a book review -- remarking on my initial reaction to the story.  Last Saturday I saw the movie, which is now showing in theaters.  I'm ignoring dismissive reviews I've read, offered by perhaps half of the film critics. 

I found it to be a stirring and moving film.  It forced me to read the book again for the second time in three months, an exercise that was well worth the time.  It also forced me to bore Facebook friends with my praises.  

The book was too well known and too frequently reviewed for me to add my own unoriginal thoughts to the clamor in the form of a formal review.  So also with the film.

Let me just suggest that readers see the movie with an open mind, preferably after reading the book.  The film illustrates dramatically on the screen the events and themes presented by the book, but the significance of those events and the importance of those themes really need the fuller exposition that the book provides.  For example, much of the "action" in the book is devoted to the "games" that Ender and his fellow students play as preparation for what is anticipated to be an apocalyptic war with an alien race.  The book shows how the games -- and the manipulations by those staging the games -- lead to Ender's growth.  The movie can only compress the games into one or two episodes -- albeit, episodes that make vivid the mental pictures arising from the book's descriptions.

The movie has to to omit, in a two hour film, one of the book's major subplots -- the machinations of Ender's older brother and sister -- as intelligent as Ender, but for differing reasons unsuitable for Ender's military role -- who use the internet (a use for computers largely unknown by the general public when the book was published) to obtain vast worldwide political influence, anonymously, while still a couple of preadolescents.

An important theme of the book is how the military authorities deliberately deprived Ender of a childhood and with calculation forced him to live in loneliness and in psychological isolation from his classmates in order to focus his attention solely on the war games he was playing.  The book shows the reasoning behind this deliberate cruelty, and the effect it had on Ender's mental state.  The movie doesn't have the time to fully explain these policies, or to show the anguished private discussions among the officers who decide upon them.  The movie, on the other hand, shows vividly their effect on the young genius who was already both sensitive and shy by nature -- but who also is coldly rational to the point of inflicting death on a bullying classmate as a calculated example to other potential bullies in the school.

In the book, Ender is six years old when recruited by the military, and eleven years old when he becomes supreme commander of Earth's interstellar military forces.  It would be difficult to find an actor or actors in those age ranges capable of fulfilling the demands of the role.  In the movie, Ender is recruited at age twelve, and his training is compressed into a much shorter period of time.  Ender is played by a young-appearing fifteen year old actor, Asa Butterfield, who proves fully capable of displaying the enthusiasm, the physical agility, the sense of loneliness, the sensitivity, and the conflicted emotions that the part demands.

As for me, I'm hooked.  I've downloaded the next book in the series, Speaker for the Dead, which I'm advised is a totally different sort of story.  No matter.  I'm willing to bet some more time on this author. 

The Goblin

I was the kind of kid who read every book about "outer space" in the children's section of the library.  Now, since the American space program landed men on the moon and has sent unmanned vehicles far beyond the orbit of Pluto, I'm not so sure that dreaming of the planets is still a boyhood  obsession.  Somewhere along the line, dinosaurs seem to have filled the void.

But for me, it was planets.  By the time I was nine or ten, I knew the major characteristics of every planet, and its number of known moons (far fewer than are known now).  I loved the names of the planets, each the name of a Roman god.  Including Pluto, before Pluto was demoted to a "dwarf planet."

Ah, but if I had learned of a planet -- yes, even a dwarf planet -- named "The Goblin," I would have been delirious with joy.  A planet named not after an ancient classical god, but named after a Germanic (Middle High German kobold) demon, and so named because it was discovered around Halloween.

He's a bashful little goblin.  The closest he comes to Earth is 2 1/2 times farther out than the orbit of Pluto.  He then proceeds way, way out there -- sixty times as far as Pluto is from the Sun.  According to an article in The Guardian, The Goblin takes 40,000 years to make a single elongated orbit around our Sun.  Forty thousand years ago, our Homo sapiens ancestors began arriving in Europe from Africa, and discovered they needed to figure out how to handle the Neanderthal problem.  

Hypothetical inhabitants of The Goblin would thus see a lot of history march past before they were even one year old.  But the history would be limited in geographical scope, since The Goblin has a radius of only about 300 km (186 miles). 

The Goblin now joins two other dwarf planets that also circle the Sun far beyond Pluto's orbit.  It was discovered by astronomers using a telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, who have been looking, so far unsuccessfully, for a giant planet, bigger than Earth, that seems to affect the orbit of all three dwarf planets.  They refer to this mysterious, and still invisible, planet as Planet Nine (sorry again, Pluto).

My own suspicion is that Planet Nine is actually a giant space station, designed to absorb rather than reflect all light and other radiation, making use of this radiation as an energy source for Planet Nine's inhabitants.  Yes, exactly, like the hollowed out asteroid occupied by the "buggers" in Ender's Game.  

My theory of an alien outpost explains the source of  the much reported UFOs, the nighttime abductions of humans by alien beings, and quite probably the Greek, Roman, Nordic, and Hindu gods who played such a major role in the early years of many civilizations.  Also, as a practical joke by said aliens, it may explain the appearance and presidency of Donald Trump.

Whatever.  When talking to an astronomer seated next to you on a plane, you can now talk seriously to him about these late developments.  He'll know what you mean when you ask about The Goblin.  But if you want to really impress him, use The Goblin's formal name -- 2015 TG387.

Got it?  Good.  Keep an eye open for aliens after you douse the lights tonight.

Easter for Neanderthals

Neanderthal burial ceremony
(portrayal)

Reading science fiction will do it to you -- lure you into thinking outside whatever comfortable box you habitually curl up in.  I'm nearing the conclusion of Children of the Mind, the fourth volume in a series by Orson Scott Card, the series that began with Ender's Game.  Mr. Card's interests are extremely broad, and his series delves into -- among many other topics -- microbiology and comparative religion.

But my sci fi reading merely predisposed me to worry about the topic I want to discuss.  The actual trigger was today's MSNBC article discussing gene sequencing performed on the oldest DNA so far discovered -- DNA from well-preserved bones believed to be 400,000 years old.  Analysis of the DNA showed that the bones, discovered in northern Spain in an area well-frequented at one time by Neanderthal populations, were actually more closely related to a pre-human population whose fossil remains were recently uncovered in Siberia.  The MSNBC article discusses the possible implications for the ancestral relationship between "modern" humans, Neanderthals, and other species or subspecies that roamed about Europe and Asia during the past 600,000 years or so.

The discussion was interesting, but what it triggered in my own mind were the theological implications.  Neanderthals themselves were not stupid, and presumably the populations with DNA more closely related to our own were also, like the Neanderthals, tool-makers, artists, users of oral language, and (probably) practitioners of primitive religious rites. Modern man (e.g., Cro Magnon) may or may not have interbred with Neanderthals -- no conclusive evidence is yet available.  What -- to put it bluntly -- is the Christian position on the Neanderthal question?  Did they have souls?  Were they subject to divine judgment?  Will Cro Magnons and Neanderthals, and the early hominids related to them, consort together with us in Heaven?

Putting my trust in Yahoo, whose mighty search engine never fails me, I did a quick search.  I was fairly sure that none of the major churches had developed any definitive doctrine on the subject, but I wanted to test the winds of serious theological discussion.  I was sorely disappointed.  I found a lot of message boards that discussed the issue as a joke, or declared with dogmatic certainty that Neanderthals, if they had even ever existed, existed before Adam and Eve were created, and so were just another form of chimpanzee.

And there are Catholic forums, where you might expect to find some theological analysis, but these forums merely raised the question, allowing equally unqualified laymen to speculate with answers.  The typical response:  Wow, that's a good question!

Likewise, this post proposes no solution to the question, because no one appears to have given it serious consideration.  Or, perhaps wisely, serious theological discussion may have been deferred until we have more scientific data to work with.  For a Christian, the fate of Neanderthal souls is irrelevant to his own life and salvation, I suppose.  But, like the fate of those millions of fully human individuals who lived before Christ's birth, it does perhaps affect how he views the nature of God and his religion. (Or, perhaps, conversely.)

For a Calvinist, I doubt that the question poses much of a problem.  Humanity is such a mess that it's wonderful that God predestined a few of us (Calvinists) for Heaven, just to show that he's a good guy at heart, leaving the rest of us to the horrors that we so richly deserve.  On the other hand, for those Christians who believe that Christ's sacrifice redeemed all of mankind, including those born too early to accept explicitly his redemption, the answer is easier: If, in fact, Neanderthals had souls capable of choosing between right and wrong, the possibility of redemption was provided to them retroactively, and will depend on the nature of their lives and their willingness to worship God in whatever form he appeared to their level of civilization.

Those represent two extremes, perhaps, on the "Neanderthal in Heaven" continuum.  Obviously, theological speculation on such a subject would be grossly speculative.  Nevertheless, it would be interesting to read serious discussion of the issue by theologians who are considered well-qualified by the branch or denomination of Christianity to which they belong.

If no theologians want to discuss the subject, I'm confident that Orson Scott Card would be willing to write science fiction taking it on.  He would suggest solutions that are intelligent, moving, satisfying -- but perhaps not wholly orthodox.