Archive for the ‘Sci-Fi’ Category

Real Science Fiction

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

The cover of an old <em>Amazing Stories</em> magazine.

The cover of an old Amazing Stories magazine.

Science fiction afficionadoes, imagine harnassing stars and moving them from place to place. Or contemplate living on a planet where everyone pays one another in good deeds. Think what it would be like to meet aliens for the first time, or to live for eons upon eons. How wonderful it would be to terraform a world! Or suppose you could set your foot into the fabric of space and “feel” your way into another dimension. Think of the implications of a time machine which permits you to examine the past and answer historical questions. What if the great figures of yesteryear could be brought together in one place and you could meet them? What if you could live forever?

For many years I was an avid reader of science fiction. From Balmer’s When Worlds Collide to Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld I read fascinating speculations and longed to enter the authors’ worlds. As I grew in my Christian faith, however, science fiction began to turn me off because of its increasing trend toward hubris, occult, pornography and atheism. It was no longer the delight it had been.

However, all was not lost. Fulfillment of all the desires evoked in me by science fiction is promised in God’s word.

Jesus was able to pass through walls. Clearly he moved through other dimensions. We are to have a body like his with the same ability.

To us angels are aliens. We will meet them.

And we will meet every person ever saved by the blood of Christ. Imagine what histories of God’s dealings with men we will learn! Mathematics shows us that we can spend an infinite amount of time with every person in heaven even if we see each person only once every billion or trillion or quintillion years, because an infinite series (such as prime numbers), no matter how far separated or how sporadic, remains an infinite series.

It appears we will terraform worlds. Paul teaches us that all creation groans until the Sons of God are revealed. Evidently at that time we are going to fix some broken things.

In heaven it seems we will pay our way in love and praise.

And there will be ages upon ages of new experiences (the Hebrew for “forever” is “ages of ages.”) Paul speaks of “ages to come.” Apparently God has planned many different learning levels, each encompassing an age, until at last everything is put in God and God is all and in all. Then the inventor of everything, the creator of the longings which find dim expression in science fiction, will be our eternal delight.

What promises these are! No wonder Jesus compared the kingdom to a pearl of great price which we ought to sell everything to obtain. “Make every effort to enter the kingdom of heaven,” he said. No wonder those barred from the kingdom will go with weeping and wailing.

Lord, let us put nothing in this ephemeral world above gaining that kingdom.

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Hubris

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Ray Bradbury. Photo by Alan Light.

Ray Bradbury. Photo by Alan Light.

It didn’t take me long to find an example.

Over the years I had noticed a great deal of hubris among sci-fi authors. I needed an example for this blog, and found it in the first book I cracked open.

In his introduction to Science Fact/Fiction, (Scott, Foresman, and Co., 1974) Ray Bradbury, a brilliant Sci-Fi author, crowed that we in the United States were a nation of blasphemers, “measuring not only how things were, but how they ought to be…if death and disease got in our way, we raised medicine up to its greatest disciplines in the history of the entire world and chopped death down and cured disease and invented pain killers.”

Sorry, Ray. Last time I looked, death was still chopping us down, not the other way around. Many of the men who struck the first strong blows against pain and disease were European, not American. Several, such as Joseph Lister, were humble Christians. I document 36 others at length in my book Doctors Who Followed Christ, with thumbnail sketches of dozens more.

Not a scientist, doctor, or science fiction writer alive has anything to boast about. Not one chose his or her own genes. Not one had a word to say about what era they would be born in. Not one even had a say whether to be born or not. Furthermore, all owe a debt to the inventors, and manufacturers, explorers, scientists and teachers who came before them. Marcus Aurelius, honoring his mentors in the first paragraphs of his Meditations, showed a greater wisdom than any boaster with millennia of discovery and technology behind him or her. A similar thought caused St. Paul, dealing with the boasters of Corinth to ask, “What do you have that you did not receive?”

By all means tackle the problems of mankind with gusto and verve. But let it be done with a humble recognition that we are all contingent beings, whose bodies break down and whose minds will ultimately fail. Let us show some respect for those who mentored us, to the God who created us.

The truth is, unless we are among those blessed few whom Christ will catch heavenward at his second coming, death will chop us down, too, however great our achievements.

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The Last Question

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

A Univac computer at the Census Bureau.

A Univac computer at the Census Bureau.

The most wicked show I ever saw was not in a theatre or on TV. It was at a planetarium. Highly touted in the press, the presentation was Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Last Question.”

The question, asked of a colossal computer named Multivac, was whether or not entropy could be reversed (and life continue). Multivac answered, “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.”

Over trillions of years mankind fills not only our home galaxy but all the galaxies of the universe. Future generations ask the question again and again of Multivac’s successors which have more and more intelligence. Before the last man fuses with Multivac which has now become Cosmic-AC, he asks the question again and AC replies, “THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.”

The story ends this way:

The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.

And AC said, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!”

And there was light –

Humans have a tendency to make gods of created things and of what their hands have made. This tendency is aptly illustrated in Asimov’s story and in reader’s/viewer’s reactions to it. Despite gross scientific inaccuracies,* the story receives raves across the web. Readers revel in its blasphemy. One declared “I have found a new religion.” Some acknowledge that seeing this show led them to embrace atheism.

In “The Thinking Machine,” an Asimov essay which corresponds to this story, he declared that the only difference between a computer and the human brain is complexity. Evidently he also believes that the only difference between God the Creator and a computer is an even higher level of complexity. In his “wisdom,” he reached the pantheistic religious position that the totality of the universe itself is god.

I consider “The Last Question” the most wicked show I’ve seen because it directly, willfully defies the first and second commandments, “You shall have no other gods before me,” and “you shall not make for yourself an idol.” Fancy throwing away faith on untenable hypotheses such as hyperspace and the non-existence of spirit.

*For example, Asimov declares all galaxies are the same and inhabitable; they are not; and at the rate they are stretching apart many will not even be visible from ours on a time scale far shorter than his story encompasses.

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False Miracles

Sunday, March 1st, 2009
Cover of the first paperback edition of <em>The Flying Sorcerers.</em>

Cover of the first paperback edition of The Flying Sorcerers.

The Bible tells us that at the end of this age a deceiver will come working false miracles and drawing virtually the whole world after him. Some theologians take false miracles to mean actual miracles worked by Satan as opposed to miracles worked by God. I suspect that, at least some of the time,  false means fake.

Throughout history, there have been plenty of charlatans willing to fake supernatural powers to gull spiritual followers. From Egyptian priests operating hidden levers and siphons to monks coaxing tears from statues of Mary to Uri Geller bending spoons there have always been fakirs willing to trade on the credulity of human kind. 

Two of the miracles ascribed to the deceiver are the ability to cause an image to speak and the power to call fire from heaven. Neither seems altogether out of the range of modern technology. The right person willing to use illusion and some of the more arcane findings of quantum physics and numerology could have a hey-day. Imagine how many people would follow a fakir with the skill of illusionist David Copperfield. 

Science fiction writers have toyed with the idea of impressing a backward people with “supernatural” technology.  Mark Twain pioneered the theme in his hilarious A Connecticut Yankee. Another amusing story with this theme is David Gerrold and Larry Niven’s The Flying Sorcerers. It is not a safe idea to seriously fantasize; the destiny of the deceiver (and his followers) will be to suffer eternally in the Lake of Fire.

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The Foundation and Science

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

 

Nova remnant in the Z Camelopardalis double star system. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Nova remnant in the Z Camelopardalis double star system. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.

One of the top-ten all time great Sci-Fi books on almost any list is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. As a story it is superb. As science, well…

Asimov has swarms of humanity living in star-crowded regions of space where, to put it mildly, earth-like planets, and therefore life, would be highly unlikely. While reading (and re-reading) the Foundation series, the thought of excess radiation in galactic centers used to gnaw at the back of my mind, making it hard for me to suspend disbelief as completely as I could wish.

Today, many other obstacles to an Asimovian cosmos suggest themselves: the dustiness of the central galactic areas, the likelihood of perturbation of planetary orbits in so crowded a region (almost guaranteed to abort the formation of an earth-like planet), and above all the greedy black holes at galactic centers.

All told, it is highly improbable life would flourish in the busy centers of galaxies.

Since carbon is the sole element suitable to base life on (silicon, the only other candidate, doesn’t inspire much enthusiasm), we can safely say higher life forms will probably need an environment hospitable to carbon-based life—in other words, an earth-like planet.

A few years ago, for a school project (which, unfortunately I have misplaced), I made some conservative calculations of the chance of there being another earth-like planet in our galaxy. I began by eliminating from consideration all stars in multiple star systems (or in densely populated regions which would likely disrupt the stable planetary orbit needed for the survival of higher forms of life). This left me with less than half the starting population of stars, since binaries and other multiples make up the majority of stars we see. I then applied other factors.

At that time, about 100 extra-solar planets had been discovered. Because of eccentric orbits, star types, and masses, not one could conceivably support life as we know it. I took this to be characteristic of the galaxy as a whole, and estimated conservatively that perhaps one star in 50 might have a rocky planet with the carbon and trace elements necessary for life. We have now found almost 350 extra-solar planets and still not found a truly earth-like one.

privileged planetThis still left a huge pool of stars which could conceivably possess earth-like planets. But when I began to demand other essentials of life—water, for instance—the number dwindled. In the end, I decided I’d be surprised if there were another planet like good ol’ earth in our galaxy. The DVD Privileged Planet takes just a few necessities of life and leaves us looking at odds of one in 100 trillion. Since there are under 250 billion stars in our galaxy, those odds are pretty steep. They are also too conservative. Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe has assembled a list of over one hundred essentials for higher life, which, if factored out, would make the chances of another earth-like planet infinitismal. The earth is such a special place that its development by a superior power seems almost proven.

So while the Foundation Trilogy makes a great yarn, one which I will almost certainly re-read yet again, Sci-Fi writers today need to readjust their premisses.

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