NewScientist goes for tabloid science. Again.

Then again, maybe the National Academy of Sciences is going tabloid, too. This whole disaster scenario for a coronal mass ejection hitting the earth is just 'way over the top. I'll summarize: the electrical lines could go down and take a while to repair. Apparently, that will cause millions of people to die, and the survivors will turn to cannibalism and living in caves. OK, kidding about the cannibalism part, but they actually do claim "millions" of deaths in the US, only because the power's off.

Have these people never heard of back-up generators? Yes, there'd be a hot market for them, and you'd get a lot of selling out, but this solution already exists. Do no key businesses have backup generators for power? Oh, sure, they admit this, but they think that the fuel will run out in hours and can't be replaced, because the gas stations won't have power to pump it out of the tanks. Uh-huh. And there's no way for them to get it out of the ground? None of them could buy backup generators, for instance?

Sheesh! The tunnel vision of the NAS seems designed to create hype. Yes, we need to be conscious of design flaws in our power lines and work those out, but the "Millions dead!" scenario just isn't going to happen.

WSJ on Michael Crichton

A very nice retrospective on Dr. Michael Crichton here. (And yes, he was a medical doctor!) I've read a lot of his novels and enjoyed every one. He has a talent for giving his characters thought-provoking discussions into the nature of science. Some of his chapters are nothing more than an extended conversation on a single topic, and these have often stuck with me for years afterwards, getting me to think more about it.

The first novel of his that I read was The Andromeda Strain back in junior high, and it was written in the pseudo-documentary style so well (with even the acknowledgements keeping up the pretense) that I kept turning back to the spine to check that I'd actually taken it from the Fiction section of the library!

The WSJ mentions Al Gore's displeasure regarding State of Fear, which critiques the anthropogenic global warming hysteria. It's a little ironic, considering that I've gotten the impression that he'd consulted Gore heavily for Rising Sun some years earlier. (I think Gore might have been mentioned in the acknowledgements, and there's certainly one of those extended dialogue chapters, with a politician who seemed to me to be favorably based on Gore.) The reaction of the Left to Crichton's discussion of global warming is a strange overreaction. I got an earful from a German astrophysicist at a conference in 2005 when some of us were discussing Jurassic Park. This guy was absolutely outraged by Crichton regarding global warming and was using really strong language and just anathematizing the guy. Yikes! Of course, this was also a person (the German fellow) who gave us a heartwarming anecdote about his parents meeting, all thanks to Mao Tse Tung, and so he has a soft spot for the blood-soaked Communist dictator. So he's got a different set of priorities than I do, let's say.

Perusing Pravda tonight

"NASA hides the truth about Mars." ("Source: agencies") It's been observed before, but Pravda's turned into the National Enquirer Russian edition lately. Which is probably unfair to the Enquirer, ever since they stopped running articles about UFOs.

Oh, come on!

Sad to see this from an actual Apollo astronaut who'd walked on the moon. Of course, if I believed him, I'd figure he was an unimpeachable inside source. Since I don't, I figure he's gone a little nutty. Sigh.

A neat, old, science fiction story, and science fiction in the service of ideology

I was listening to the old science fiction series "X-1" on XM radio last night, when they played an episode from 1956(?) entitled, "The Tunnel Under the World." It's taken from a short story by the (still-living) Frederik Pohl about a man who keeps repeating the same day, June 15th, but with slight variations. I won't spoil the entire plot, in case you get the chance to hear or read it, but you can read a summary of the short story in the first link above, which is only slightly different from the radio version. The story is a fascinating one and creepy when you discover the twists and revelations.

Anyway, I was impressed and looked up Pohl when I got home. It turns out that he was high-school friends with Isaac Asimov and that both were early members of a group of science fiction fans called the Futurians. Checking up on what the Futurians were, I found that they were a splinter group from another New York City sci-fi fan club, and they advocated sci-fi fans to push for ideology. Inevitably, this meant communism:

At the time the Futurians were formed, Donald Wollheim was strongly attracted by communism and believed that followers of science fiction "should actively work for the realization of the scientific world-state as the only genuine justification for their activities and existence".[2] It was to this end that Wollheim formed the Futurians, and many of its members were in some degree interested in the political applications of science fiction.

Yeesh! Nothing like the phrase "scientific world-state" to give you the creeps. Especially in the '30s.

Pohl himself was an outright member of the Communist Party, until he was expelled in '39. It was either because, as some say, the Party thought science fiction was escapist and didn't contribute to the building of the dictatorship of the proletariat or whatever, or, as Pohl says, that he rejected the Party line over the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Either way, he apparently remained a true leftist, and his writings display a satire of capitalism and advertising. Actually, I've got to say that the bit that comes through in "Tunnel" is well done and could have been written by a conservative, as well.

There's a whole weird history to this science fiction fan activity, something that I've never gotten into. I enjoy my sci fi movies, but I've rarely read any such books. Funny for an astrophysicist, right? So outside remarks by friends, I'm unaware of what all has gone on in this world. At one level, it seems so trivial (they're fan groups--not necessarily even writers, though many became such), but these guys clearly saw themselves as doing important work, and the Futurians were even claiming it was all in the service of the future "scientific world-state"!

Well, I'd intended to write more about the connections between "scientific socialism" and science fiction, but I'll just have to save it for later. I ought to close this off with the connections "Tunnel" has with other works: Simulacron-3 (1964; made into the movie "The Thirteenth Floor" in 1999) has a similar premise (I'm guessing the writer was familiar with the earlier work), and it in turn influenced "The Matrix" (1999). Interestingly, Stanislaw Lem wrote a short story in 1960 that dealt with some aspects of the same premise. Lem also wrote Solaris, which was made into the George Clooney movie a little while back. I just read the book, which is thought-provoking.