In the next installment from Stories from Space, I plan to talk about the Wow! Signal. On Aug. 15th, 1977, the “Big Ear” Observatory at Ohio State University received what is still considered the most likely candidate for a SETI signal in history. The radio signal lasted 72 seconds and appeared to be coming from somewhere in the constellation Sagittarius. All attempts to explain it in terms of natural phenomena have not panned out, leaving the source a mystery.
Okay, this short is for an episode that aired prior to the introduction of SfS shorts. But it’s still new, so that isn’t false advertising. Henceforth, all episodes in Season 6 will be preceded by a short clip summarizing the contents (with video!)
After engaging with a few podcasts that are way more successful than mine, I gleaned a wee lesson. Successful podcasters put out vignettes, or shorts, of upcoming and recently released episodes. These short clips, never more than a few minutes long, give audiences a teaser and/or a TL:DR summary of what the episode is about in a quick clip. I have been trying to make vignettes for awhile now, but kept procrastinating. But when I started making video episodes, another thing the successful folk tend to do, I saw an opportunity.
I present the first Stories from Space Short I produced that offers a teaser of what’s coming in Episode 2, Season Six of the show: The Anthropic Principle and the Search for Intelligent Life. It’s got a question at the end that I wouldn’t mind people answering in the comments. And you need to watch the full video, don’t cheat, I’ll know.
My podcast, which I started four years ago (almost to the day), has migrated to Patreon so people can enjoy the same content, but without ads. Also, the decision was motivated in large part by my belief in public sponsorship, crowdfunding, and people power! All 111 episodes are now available here: https://www.patreon.com/cw/houseofwilliams
The latest episode, the first of season six, has also just aired. The topic is Panspermia, the theory that the basic building blocks of life are spread throughout the Universe by interstellar objects – asteroids, comets, and rogue planets – and even unbound stars and their planetary systems. This theory is supported by the recent sample-return missions that have found organic molecules and even amino acids on Near-Earth Asteroids.
The topic has become all the rage since astronomers detected an interstellar object for the first time in 2017 – 1I/’Oumuamua. Since then, two more have been detected, 2I/Borisov and 3I/ATLAS, which has provided a wealth of data on what conditions are like in other parts of our galaxy.
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This latest episode of Stories from Space featured a special guest: Dr. Alex Polanski, a postdoctoral researcher at Lowell Observatory. During our discussion, we talked about how the Lowell Observatory played a vital role in training the Apollo astronauts. This consisted of detailed images of the lunar landscape, which the astronauts used to help select landing sites for their missions.
The astronauts also trained on the volcanic terrain of northern Arizona and the Barringer Meteor Crater, which provided an environment analogous to the Moon. Here, astronauts donned spacesuits and gathered samples from the local terrain, similar to what analog astronauts do today in environments similar to the landscape of Mars (Arizona, Utah, Nunavut, and Hawai’i)
Today, as we enter the Artemis Era, Lowell continues this tradition by providing education and outreach to students who will become the next generation of space explorers. For those who become astronauts, lunar exploration will be commonplace, as missions to the Moon are launched regularly (1 per year, according to plan).
Check out the full episode below, and the video accompanying it:
The title says it all. In any case, here are the episodes that dropped in the past two months, starting with Episode 111. In this episode, I addressed Elon Musk’s recent decision to redirect SpaceX’s efforts toward the Moon for the time being, with the goal of creating a self-sustaining city there in the next decade. As he put it, there were several reasons for this, ranging from easier transits, more launch windows, and more rapid iteration.
This was a surprising decision, given that Musk founded SpaceX more than two decades ago for the express purpose of establishing the first city on Mars. And as early as last year, he called the Moon “a distraction. Naturally, the timing of the announcement has also led to speculation about what changed his mind. So what’s the deal? Check out the episode to learn more.
Second, there’s Ep. 112 that looks at Asteroid Mining. This fledgling idea has declined in popularity since the 2010s, when companies and investment firms were stepping up to get in on the ground floor. But with humanity’s growing presence in space, increased access, and the growing commercial space part, it is commonly believed that it’s just a matter of time before space resources become a viable industry. What impact will this industry have for life on Earth?
On the one hand, there are the environmental benefits of relocating all our mining and manufacturing off-world, which are major drivers of environmental destruction and Climate Change. On the other hand, there are concerns that it will dramatically increase the gap between the rich and the poor. In fact, several scientists and the financial firm Goldman Sachs have speculated that the world’s first “trillionaires” will get rich from asteroid mining.
But there’s another very plausible outcome: Gaining access to abundant precious metals and mineral wealth will inevitably drive down the value of both. This, in turn, will eliminate the very basis of wealth itself: scarcity. To quote George Orwell, “If at once it became general, wealth would confer no distinction.”
And here are the accompanying videos for both episodes, which is a regular thing I’m doing now. Enjoy!
Yes, it’s about that time. You know the one I mean. When a work-in-progress is just shy of completion, you want to get a sense of what it looks like. If you’re a writer like me, that’s when cover art comes in! And if you’re really like me, you don’t even wait until the book is nearing completion. You want to see it while it’s still in early development!
Somehow, it’s the next best thing to holding your novel in your hands for the first time. After all the labor you put into its creation, it’s like looking upon the latest addition to your family. With that said, here are the top contenders for the Transverse. The two immediately below are the current front-runners, but I’ve included some of the honorable mentions too.
Check them out, and let me know what you think in the comments!
The cover shown above depicts the interior of the Transverse, a generation ship that contains all Earth’s ecosystems within a single self-contained biosphere. The bright light above is known as the Sunband, a light source of assembled photons that simulates day and night and provides each ecosystem with the energy it needs to sustain the ship’s life cycle.
The cover below shows the exterior of the Transverse in orbit around Ararat, the largest planet in the Tōnatiuh system. As you can see, there’s a megastructure emerging from the planet, which is kind of intrinsic to the plot (no spoilers!)
Here are the honorable mentions. They are included not because they received many votes, but because my wife and I like them. The first is a representation of the Tōnatiuh system, while the second is a more compact version of the cover immediately above.
After about 8 years in development limbo, my WIP is on the verge of being done. There’s more to do after the last chapter is written, editing and the like, but I can smell the finish line. This is one of the hardest parts of writing, pulling off the big finish! In any case, I wanted to share some more details of the story and the artwork I generated to set some of the scenes. So here are some choice pics and the story they help frame…
The Transverse is a generation ship bound for Delta Pavonis, a Sun-like star located about 20 light-years from the Sun. The ship is equipped with an anti-matter propulsion system, which allows the ship to achieve a maximum speed of 10% the speed of light. This means the total journey will take about 250 years, including acceleration and deceleration burns. It is protected from cosmic rays and small debris objects by a magnetic field projected from the front end.
The ship has two counter rotating sections to simulate artificial gravity. The fore section is the Habitat Section, where the crew that is currently on rotation live and work. During acceleration and deceleration, the crew migrates to the rear wall of the Habitation Section, where the burst of velocity will simulate a full-g.
During the transit, the crew of the Transverse rotates, with one-third of the crew in a wakeful state. These people maintain the ship, tending to the farmlands, and steer the ship. The Engineers who oversee technical operations and serve as the de facto leaders of the mission also rotate, with three on while the remaining six are in cryosleep. The name of the individual shown here is taken from the story, and Xanadu Tepe is his birthplace – a settlement on Saturn’s largest moon Titan.
The inside of the Habitation Section simulates every climate on Earth, with landmasses that simulate entire continents separated by oceans and waterways. The entire volume is heated and lit by the “Sunband,” a flowing beam of photons designed to provide enough heat and light to maintain the climate in different regions. From one end of the Section towards the “equator,” the climates are arranged as Tundra, Boreal Forest, Grassland, Tropical, Desert. From the equator to the other end of the Section, the same climates are arranged in reverse.
The ship is powered by a Singularity Drive: a tiny black hole kept stable within a magnetic confinement chamber. This hole is created by gamma-ray laser arrays, positioned around the interior of the chamber, which fire simultaneously onto a single point. This causes mass to accumulate onto this tiny point until the Chandrasekhar limit is reached – the point where its achieves infinite density and undergoes gravitational collapse to form a black hole.
Matter is then fed into the chamber over time, which falls into an accretion disk that is sped up to near the speed of light. When the matter is eventually fed onto the face of the black hole (aka. accreted), its broken down to the subatomic level. Both of these processes release a tremendous amount of radiation that is harnessed to generate a steady and abundant supply of electricity.
The Delta Pavonis system, which the crew of the Transverse have named Tōnatiuh (the Aztec Sun god). The third planet from the star, their habitable planet that is their destination, they’ve named Çatalhöyük, after the Neolithic settlement located in southern Turkey that existed from the ca. 7500 to 5600 BCE.
The other planets, in order from the star, include the molten world Zebaki, the “steam world” iKhwezil, the cold and desiccated Molokh, the gas giants Ararat, Kǒngquè, Sakwa, and the ice planet Lowell – or by the acronym ZICMAKSL. Sure, it sounds clunky, but it’s no more difficult than MVEMJSUNP, right? These names are all derived from different cultures:
No indication yet on when the book will be released, but I’m just a few chapters shy. All that remains is to check in my beta readers and educators. Those good folks know who they are, and they should expect to get chapters soon! All images were generated with ImagineArt.
I feel fortunate that I am able to make good news posts these days. In the past few years, I have generally left bad news alone and otherwise posted nothing. I think we can all agree that that is NO WAY to run a website! Not when reader engagement is all about having things to say. So with that in mind, I have some very positive news. After nearly eight years of tinkering, my story Transverse is finally nearing completion!
I’ve been jazzed about this since I finished Part II of this three-act play a few short months ago. And as of the writing of this post, I am over 49,000 words in and just a few chapters shy of completion. While I am tempted to issue some well-deserved thanks yous and “I couldn’t have possibly done this without the support of” statements, it’s customary to leave that until the end. But trust me, those who helped out along the way know who they are and WILL be getting their mentions.
Transverse began several years ago, as I was plotting the story for my first true hard SF novel, The Cronian Incident. From the beginning, I wanted to write a story that would be part of a series, and I knew that it would begin in the Solar System. But I always hoped to expand it into the interstellar realm at some point. It was just the next logical step, really. I also wanted to get into some truly deep Fermi Paradox stuff eventually (i.e., Aliens!).
Transverse is also important as far as the whole series is concerned because it serves as the standalone-bridge novel that connects my first trilogy – The Formist Series – to subsequent trilogies. The next one will either be called the Seedling Series or the Dysonist Series, haven’t decided yet. But I promise to keep you posted. In the meantime, here’s some AI art that helps capture the spirit of my soon-to-be-finished novel!
After a bit of a hiatus, John Michael Godier and the fine folks at Event Horizon invited me back on their show to talk about all things space! The topic of this episode was NASA’s Artemis Program, the upcoming Artemis II mission, and other plans to return to the Moon; this time, with the intent to stay!
We also talked about my science fiction writing and what we’ve been up to since we chatted last. Check it out, it was a very fun time!
Stories by Williams 