Latest / Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe / The SF Universe of Alastair Reynolds "Revenger"

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The SF Universe of Alastair Reynolds "Revenger" · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, do you think scientists make good science fiction authors? Oh? Sometimes?
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: I mean Carl Sagan was a scientist and he wrote
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: some really excellent science fiction. Yeah, you're right. I am
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: a big fan of contact. But what do you think
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: about the opposite? Do you think science fiction authors could
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: make good scientists? Well, I will happily read their papers
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: if they read my science fiction stories. That sounds like
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: a fair trade maybe, But do you think they could
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: do real science? Do you think that after being immersed
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: in the fictional world, you could actually sit down and
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: deal with real numbers. I'm not sure, but I think
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: they already contribute in an important way to actual science.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Do they discover new particles or new kinds of black holes?
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: Even better, they put crazy ideas into the heads of
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: scientists who read their fiction. I see, And then you
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: guys take all the credit, right, Yeah, well, maybe we
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: can allow them to name the new particles in that case,
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: or maybe it could be a joint Nobel prize, you know,
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: physics and literature. That's right, And I would a Nobel
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: Prize for the acceptance speech I give for my Physics
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Nobel Prize. Hi am or handmade cartoonists and the creator
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: of PhD Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: and an aspiring science fiction want to be Does that
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: mean that you want to be science fiction, like you
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: want your life to be science fiction? Or you want
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: to write science fiction? Oh? I think all of the above.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: I'd love to write science fiction, and I'd love to
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: live in the science fiction universe. I mean one of
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: the fun things about writing science fiction is imagining yourself
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: in that universe, teleporting places, shooting ray guns. I mean,
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: that's why people play with lightsabers. Right, I'm definitely I
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: count myself an aspiring jet pack owner. I'm still hoping
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: for that. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: Explain the Universe, a production of our Heart Media in
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: which we like to talk about the rules of the universe.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: We break them down for you. We explain to you
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: how our universe works, what we're doing to figure out
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: what those rules are and whether they make sense at all.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: And sometimes we like to talk about also the universe
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: that maybe doesn't exist, or we'd like to talk about
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: ideas that we don't know are true yet but that
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: they might be, or that at least it's making people
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: curious and it's tickling their imagination. And this is an
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: important part of understanding our universe is thinking about what
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: other kinds of universes could there be. How would the
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: universe look if the laws of physics were a little different,
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: or what would the laws of physics have to look
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: like in order to allow Horey to have a jet
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: pack and Daniel to have a lightsaber. So this is
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: an important part of actual intellectual exploration of our universe
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: is imagining new fictional universes. Yeah, because you know, I
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: guess science isn't just you know, hitting rocks together or
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: breaking rocks apart and looking at data. You also kind
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: of have to exercise your imagination, right and and consider
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: maybe what are possible crazy solutions that could explain what
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: we're seeing. That's right, And you know, I know you've
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: been out of academy for a while, but it's actually
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: a very small fraction of our time we spend banging
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: rocks together. Sometimes you rub them together to move beyond
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: the rock stage. Now, yeah, they're just you're still banging
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: rock standards, they're just getting smaller and smaller. It's all rocks.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: It's rocks all the way down is that we're there
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: you go. What's I mean? Isn't a proton kind of
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: a rock? Really? I guess that makes me a rock
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: and roll physicist. Oh, there you go. That sounds like
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: fiction as well. Well, I said, I wanted to be
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: a writer, So there you go. Anyway, we like to
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: talk about these fiction universes and to understand how they
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: work and to get in the minds of the people
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: who create them. It's right, and so we have the
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: series of episodes in which we or at least Daniel,
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: interviews famous or well known or popular science fiction authors
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: and asked them about their world and about the physics
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: of it and how they came up with all of
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: their amazing ideas. That's right, because when I read a
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: science fiction novel, part of the joy for me is
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: figuring out what are the rules of this universe? What
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: did they create? How does it work? And that's also
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: the joy of physics. We are literally living in the
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: universe where nobody is telling us the answers, and we
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: have to play detective and figure out what are the rules?
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: How does this work? And so it's the same joy,
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: but just encapsulated in a novel, and usually in a novel,
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: it's more satisfying because you get some answers. Also, your
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: career doesn't depend on reading the science fiction novels, so
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: it's probably more relaxing, that's right. And there are fewer
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: rocks involved in the novels. That's why they're called asteroids. Yeah.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: So to be on the program, we'll be tackling the
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: science fiction universe of Alistair Reynolds. Right. So Alistair Reynolds,
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: he's pretty well known, right as a science fiction or
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: is he more he's more sort of in the hard
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: science fiction genre. He definitely writes hard science fiction, and
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: he's sort of best known for his space operas. He
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: writes stories that take place across an entire galaxy and
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: eons and eons of time, and usually you're buried deep
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: into the future upon layers and layers of crazy history. Yeah.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: And so to the end, the question that's kind of
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: interesting you and then you asked him, I imagine in
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: the interview is can you write realistic science fiction about
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: life in space? Like? Do do these books really portray
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: what it's like to be in space and to move
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: around in space? Because being in space is tricky, It
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: is tricky indeed. And for this set of books that
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: we're talking about in today's podcast, it's a trilogy starting
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: with a book called Revenger. It takes place in a
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: solar system sort of deep in the future, and he
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: really thinks carefully about how you would navigate that solar system,
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: how you would go from place to place, the fuel
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: needs involved, how you would turn your guns to aim
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: at another ship, how you would even know whether those
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: ships are there. It's really fascinating and you can hear
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: that he is really thinking carefully about the physics, and
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: that's no coincidence. Yeah, Apparently he is inspired by, you know,
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: stories of pirate ships and nautical stories, and he wanted
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: to bring that into the science fiction universe. That's right.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: And he himself is a physicist, or was a working physicist.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: He is a PhD in astrophysics, and he studied binary
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: stars at the European Space Agency and then started writing
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: on the side. So he comes into science fiction with
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: a deep understanding of the science behind it. Hopefully his
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: Jesus wasn't fictional. Imagine shred wasn't. I hope he kept
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: a careful wall between his fiction and nonfiction. Yeah, and
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: he's won a bunch of awards in England and for
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: his novels, and some of his stories have been adapted
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: also to television. I actually I have seen a couple
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: of them, Realiz, think who it was? That's right. There's
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: a whole series on Netflix called Loveday and Robots that
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: adapts a bunch of fun short stories, and several of
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: them are his. Yeah, and this is one of your
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: favorite writers, right, Daniel. I mean you're you're definitely fanboying
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: here when you talk to him. Yes, that's right. He
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: is one of my favorite writers. And one reason is
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: that the physics of it is so good. It's so
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: insightful and interesting and so real and so carefully thought out.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: And you know, then on a personal note, it's just
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: it's nice to see somebody who was a physicist make
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: this amazing transition into being not just a published science
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: fiction writer, but I well known, well respected, multi award winning,
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: international best selling science fiction writer. So hey, a guy
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: can dream, right, You're like somebody got out. Yeah, I
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: cannot dispute that with my reaction. I finished his first
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: book that I read, and I thought, Wow, was an
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: amazing book. And then I read the about the author
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: at the end, and I was like, oh my gosh,
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: this guy could have been me or I could be
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: this guy. Yeah, so it sounds like the physics in
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: these books are really cool. And again, the series is
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: called Revenger, the Ander Trilogy. The first book is called Revenger,
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: which is not the sequel to The Avengers. It should
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: be it should be the Avengers reboot. And so let's
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: dive into his world. What is this world like? It's
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: is it in the future, the near future? Millions of
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: years into the future, so it takes place in our
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: Solar system, but then millions and millions of years in
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: the future, and it's so far in the future that
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: the sense of history is sort of lost, Like you're
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: deep into the future, but you don't really know how
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: the universe that he puts you in has been assembled,
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: and it looks very different from our Solar System, Like
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: did something happen that caused all the history books to
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: disappear or what. It's just sort of like, it is
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: so so far. It's just so far in history. Yeah,
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: and humans have left the Solar System and then come
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: back and recolonized it multiple time. What do you mean
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: they left and then they came back. Yeah. Well, this
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: is a sense of mystery in this book is that
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: you don't know the full story. You just hear dribs
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: and drabs, and the characters themselves don't know the full story,
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: Like do we know how many times humans have colonized Europe?
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: We know there were waves and waves and waves from Africa.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: We don't know the full story, even though it was
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: sort of us who did it right. And in that
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: same sense, you imagine millions of years into the future,
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: you might lose the history, lose the written records of
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: why humanity went to the stars and why everybody died
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: out in the Solar System and why they came back.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: And so this is that sort of to the extreme.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: That sounds pretty interesting. And you're telling me that they
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: disassembled the planets in the Solar System. Yeah, so the
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: Solar sistem is unrecognizable. The only thing you might recognize
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: is the Sun, which is still there. But they have
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: taken apart all of the planets and use them to
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: build like a bunch of habitats, and so you have
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: like lace worlds and little dicen spheres and all sorts
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: of structures you can live on. But they've turned the
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: eight planets into like hundreds or thousands of essentially space
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: station like many planets. Yeah, sort of like many planets,
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: but you don't but a planet is very inof Asian, right,
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: you don't really need the core of it. And so
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: they mind, I guess all of the materials from the
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: Solar System and build all these crazy different shapes and
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: structures for people to live. Oh, you can create more
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: like surfaces to live on if you break the Earth
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: into pieces exactly, take the Earth and sort of like
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: unwrapid unroll it. You can get a lot more service area,
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: and then people can be creative, right, and you can
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: have like lots of weird layers, or you could you know,
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: just live on the inside of a spear, or you
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: could have a tube or a ring. Right, you could
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: have all sorts of crazy stuff. I guess my question
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: right away is how did they deal with the gravity then? Right,
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: because if you have a smaller planet, the gravity is less,
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: So how do you walk around? Yeah, so some of
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: these things have many black holes at their centers. Of course, obviously,
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: what do you mean they made a black hole? They
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: captured a black hole? Well, you know, humanity in this
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: story sort of just living on these found structures. They've
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: discovered them. They think humans made the millions of years ago,
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: but they no longer have the technology to create them,
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: so they don't really understand them either. So they know
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: there are black holes at the center of them. He
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: never really explains how they were made, because again that's
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: attributable to the ancient lost art of black hole manufacturers. Okay,
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: so they're using a black hole there, and so it
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: all takes place in our solar system just in the future. Yes,
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: our Solar system, very far into the future. But most
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: of these things feel more like space stations or space
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: ships than real planets. I mean, you can walk around
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: on them, but none of them are as vast as
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: a planet. It's almost like, you know, if you took
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: all the continents on Earth and broke them up into
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: little islands, it's like a giant archipelago. Yeah, exactly, and
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: then you have to figure out how to get from
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: one to the other. And that's another whole fascinating aspect
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: of his universe. This is where the like the sailing
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: analogy comes in, like the nautical aspect of its space,
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: nautical mechanics. Yeah, it's a lot like space pirates. They
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: get around from one of the other using solar sales
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: because it's very inefficient to use like rocket propulsion. You
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: need a huge amount of fuel to get around, and
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: so they take advantage of the energy of the sun.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: And they have these small ships. Each one is you know,
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: like the size of a current human airplane, like a
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: modern jetliner, and to get that thing around you'd need
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: like square and kilometer after square kilometer of solar sail.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: So these ships are tiny, but then surrounded by these
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: huge sales that capture the energy of the sunlight and
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: use that to get around the solar system. Oh and
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: they're not solar panels, right, They actually like they bounce
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: off the energy of the sun. That's right. They're much
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: more like sales than panels. They don't absorb the energy
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: and then store it in a battery. They actually like
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: reflect those photons and use that to get a little kick.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: And there's also a battles out in space right between
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: these sailing chips. Yeah, yeah, there are a lot of
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: these battles, and they have these railguns that they shoot
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: at each other, and a lot of it is about
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: staying silent, staying hidden. You know, not announcing your location,
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: and so they try to keep as dark as possible
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: so nobody can see where you are, and stay as
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: quiet as possible. They try not to like let their
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: railguns get too hot, because then they glow and other
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: people can spot them. And it really gave me the
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: feeling of reading nautical fiction from like the eighteen hundreds.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: It's all about like turning about and getting your cannons
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: pointed in the right direction and making sure you're up wind,
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: and a lot of this very strategic thinking limited by
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: the physics of ships. In this case, it's limited by
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: the physics of sun jammers, which is what he calls them.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: But I guess you're hanging out in space, don't you
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: have when you have like a lot of energy, you
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: couldn't need to have some a little bit of rocket
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: boost there here and there you would need to. I mean,
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: it's much easier to use solar sales to get like
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: further away from the Sun. It's much more difficult to
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: get closer to the Sun. And so they do have
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: rockets also which they need to refuel, but they use
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: that sparingly because you know, while there's always sunlight to
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: capture just like there's always wind on a sailboat, you know,
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: the the engine for their rockets needs fuel and that's
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: a limited quantities cool. And there's a lot of mystery
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: as well. There's like ancient technology that they keep discovering. Yeah,
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: there's been like eight or ten layers of occupation from humanity,
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: and the previous layers put a lot of their fancy
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: tech into these like locked boxes which opened regular intervals,
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: like every thousand years or every hundred years. They will
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: open up and you can like crawl in there and
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: try to grab some treasure and then crawl out before
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: you get stuck. And so there's like a lot of
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: these devices around the player role in the story that
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: nobody understands their science. They're like left over from a
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: previous layer of civilization and it's like found treasure. And
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: so a lot of the book, which is just really
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: good storytelling, is like sailing around from these treasure islands
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: a treasure islands, capturing things, stealing them from other people,
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: and then of course getting revenge on your revenger. So
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: they find old technology and they can still make it
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: work or it just works, you know, like it just
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: turns on and you can use it. Yeah, it just
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: turns on. You can use it, and you know, some
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: of it is inert and they don't understand why, but
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: a lot of it they can just use. You know,
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: they have like special armor that makes you invisible and
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: they don't know why. And they have you know, technology
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: that lets them see things that are far away. And
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: they also one of the coolest bits is how they
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: communicate from ship to ship is that they find these
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: skulls of alien beings from the deep past, non humans
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: so humans. Just to clarify, everyone in the book is human,
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: so they're just super future humans. They're super future humans.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: There are a few aliens also, just a few characters
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: who are aliens. So in the book we have met
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: aliens and can communicate with them. And also we have
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: the skulls of ancient long extinct aions and these skulls
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: have this property that they can like communicate between each other.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: The dead skulls can talk. They can they have some
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: sort of like telepathic ability. And if you like wire
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: into it and attach you know, your head to these
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: skulls with wires and somebody else does it in the
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: same way, like on the other side of the Solar System,
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: then you can communicate back and forth using this sort
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: of like you know, hopped up neural telepathy. Wow, And
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: it's sort of awesome because it's like piggybacking on what
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: these aliens maybe could have done and we don't really know,
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: and like, are there tendrils of those aliens brains still
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: in their skull? Why does it work at all? And
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: it just barely works. It's very difficult. Yeah, but it's
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: sort of like you know, using a hand radio. You
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: don't really understand it. You sort of connect your brain
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: to it, you tweak the knobs, you see who else
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: is out there? And so I think that he's trying
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: to capture not just the sense of like sailing on
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: the open seas, but also like limited communication abilities. Alright, wow,
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: that's a lot of a lot of interesting ideas here,
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: and so let's dive into the physics of it, whether
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: or not some of these things are possible or impossible
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: or maybe in our near future. But first let's take
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: a quick break. All right, we're talking about else. There's
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: Reynolds science fiction trilogy Revenger, and the incredibly interesting ideas
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: in it, including alien skulls that can make you telepathic somehow,
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: somehow like a Ham radio, Like if you put a
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: Ham radio on your head, that's right, or if you
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: had like an Internet connection in your brain. I wouldn't
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: recommend that, though you probably get hacked by Russians. I
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: think I think people's phone spend so much time near
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: our heads that it's probably might just as well be connected.
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: We're basically there. Yeah, all right, So what's the physics
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: of this series? Daniel? So, first of all, there's planet disassembly.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: They break apart the planet, and is that possible? Could you, like,
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: can I split Jupiter into two? You know, I think
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: it really is possible. I think that it's a problem
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: that's technologically very difficult. It's you know, engineeringly difficult, as
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: you would say, But physics wise, there's no reason why
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: you can't. I mean, think about the solar system is
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: just a bunch of raw materials and use that to
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: build whatever you like. It would just take a huge
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: amount of energy and planet to like break the even
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: the Earth, which is a small planet. How would you
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: even break it apart? Yeah? Well you would start by
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: building you know a lot of solar panels and use
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: that to capture the Sun's energy and then use that
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: energy to mind more raw materials off the planets. Probably
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: you would start with mercury because mercury is very close
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: to the Sun, so there's a lot of energy there
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: and has low gravity. Hot property has low gravity, so
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: it's easy to build stuff on the service and launch
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: it into space. And it's metal rich, it's like solid
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: iron core, has a lot of oxygen on it. And
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: so you start by disassembling mercury and using it to
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: build like essentially a dice and swarm. Remember we talked
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: on the show once about a dice and sphere, like
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: a huge superstructure that envelops the entire Sun. This is
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: basically like that, except instead of one big superstructure, which
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: is kind of implausible because it would break up, you
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: build a lot of smaller and so they did this
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: the ancient humans. Apparently the ancient humans did this. Yeah,
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: they disassembled but not just mercury, also all of the planets.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: There are no original planets left over. What it's a
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: completely different solar system completely, yeah, exactly, you know, and
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: they redesigned it. You know, you come, you buy a
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: house and you redo the kitchen. They redid everything. They
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: stripped this thing down to studs. Oh I see. So
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: it's not like they took Jupiter and broken. It's more
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: like they they just like minded, they like broke, you know,
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: little by little, they took chunks and put it into
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: other parts of the Solar System. And the hardest thing
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: I think about the physics is that the Solar System
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: is mostly hydrogen. Like, of course the Sun is mostly hydrogen,
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: but even the other planets is mostly Jupiter. Jupiter is
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: the most massive anything, and it's mostly hydrogen in some
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: helium heavy metals like the kind of things we find
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: on Earth and mercury are much more rare, and so
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: you don't want to build your superstructure or your swarm
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: out of hydrogen. And so I think that's the limiting factor.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: The amount of surface you can build is not just
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: limited by the mass of the stuff in the Solar System,
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: but the amount of heavy metals you need to make it.
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: Oh I see, So maybe there there aren't another four.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: Do you think he did he actually count how many
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: how much metal there is in the Solar System? Yeah,
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: I think he did a bit of careful accounting, And
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: I'm imagining that he used the hydrogen to form those
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: black holes like if you can't build something out of it,
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: and you need to make a black hole, Well, a
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: black hole is just a big pile of stuff that's
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: gotten compressed down into a small area. So take Jupiter
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: and turn it into a black hole or a few
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: black holes, and you could put those at the center
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: of your little structures and they would provide enough gravity. Oh,
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: that's why you would do it, just to have more gravity. Yeah,
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: if you want gravity on these structures, then you need
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: a lot of mass. And if you have a lot
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: of mass you can't use to actually build the structures, right,
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: all this hydrogen and helium, then you might as well
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: use it to make the black holes, I guess would
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: give you like earthlike gravity in a small asteroid kind
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: of yes, precisely, because it's much more dense than Earth,
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: and so you can get Earth like gravity. And you
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: wouldn't want all the Jupiter in one black hole because
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: that's way too much gravity, right, the gravity and Jupiter
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: is crushing compared to the gravity on Earth. But you
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: can make little ones, yeah, and you could. If you
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: have this power, you can divide Jupiter up into a
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: hundred little black holes and use that to provide gravity
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: on a hundred little structure. It seems kind of dangerous still,
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: because like what if you fall into it, or what
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: if you're you know, you know, what if your structure
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: touches the edge of it. Yeah, well, you're worried about
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: the people, you know, living on this thing. I'm worried
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: about the people manufacturing it, you know, like I hope
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: they're being careful and they're wearing hard hats when they're
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: manufacturing black holes. Oh yeah, because if you touch a
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: black hole, that's it. That's it, man, there's no coming back.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: You're not pulling your hand back out of those things. Okay,
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: So then what about the solar sailing? That's pretty plausible
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: and realistic. That's totally plausible. Solar sailing is a real thing.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's real physics there. It's just a big
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: sheet of very very light material, and when a photon
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: bounces off of it, it pushes on it. It's like
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: if somebody throws a ball and it bounces off of you,
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: it's giving you a little push. And photons have no mass,
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: but they do have momentum, and so when they bounce
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: off of a mirror, for example, they are giving that
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: mirror a little push. If you put a mirror out
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: in space, the Sun's photons will push it through space. Yeah,
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: we have a whole episode about solar sailing if you
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: search our archives. And the problem is that solar sale
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: helps you move away from the Sun, but it doesn't
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: help you move towards the Sun. That's right. And there
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: was this really fun moment in that podcast when I
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: was being so excited about solar sales and then you
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: were like, well, but what about turning? Can you turn?
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: I've never thought about that before. Oops, But it turns
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: out you can, right, You can turn with a solar
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: sale if you angle it, because it means the photons
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: get reflected off, like to the side a little bit,
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: which gives you a push sideways. And you can't use
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: a solar sale to go in towards the Sun, but
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: you can use it to like slow yourself down. Like
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: say you're in orbit around the Sun and you want
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: to go to a closer orbit. You can sort of
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: angle your sale to bleed off some of your velocity
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: so that the sail is pushing away against the direction
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: you're moving in orbit, and that will help you fall
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: into a closer orbit. It can't actually pull you in.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: Only the Sun's gravity can pull you in. Photons can
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: just provide an outward or sideways force, But so going
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: in is harder than going out, but it is possible.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: I guess it makes me kind of think about how,
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: you know, how you would navigate a solar system where
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: everything is broken up. Do you think that that those
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: ancient humans or aliens when they broke up the planets
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: that they think about like creating stable orbits and and
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: things like that, or is the whole Solar system just
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: this chaotic mass you know, they planted very carefully. It's
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: called the constellation. And these little habitats are all in
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: different orbits that sometimes gets close to each other and
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: sometimes further away. And some of these things are on
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: larger orbits because some people like living out in the
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: middle of the darkness and coming back occasionally every hundred
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: years or something, and so you have lots of options,
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: and these things sort of get closer and further apart,
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: so it's easier to jump from one to the other.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: And doesn't it take years to go between these islands
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: or colonies. Well, he I think set the whole thing
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: sort of close enough to the Sun that these sun
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: jammers are powerful and distances are not so far, but
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: it does take weeks. Right, You're not like teleporting from
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: from place to place. And that really is a factor
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: in the story that sometimes it takes weeks or months
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: to get from one habitat to the other. And you know,
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: it sort of feels like ancient chips, Right, you got
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: into a boat. You don't just get to America six
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: hours later. You know, after watching three movies, it took
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: months or sometimes years to get around the world. So
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: we sort of captured that by transplanting it onto the
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: Solar system. Can you get space scurvy? You can? There
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: are versions of that. Really, huh? All right? And then
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: the last bit of science fiction here is this skull communication,
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: Like some of the skulls can communicate telepathically even though
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: they're the debt. Yeah, that's right. And as I was reading,
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: and I was wondering if he was going for faster
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: than light communication here, because it does seem fairly rapid.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: But he's also he's kept the whole universe of his
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: book barely tightly around the Sun, and so the distances
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: are not large, so it might be fast in light
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: or might just be like as fast as light. Um,
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: but you know, could aliens have some telepathic ability to communicate? Certainly? Right,
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: there's nothing physics can say no to to telepathy. Perhaps
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: you can really generate some signals in your brain. Sure,
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: I mean think about the engineering generates some signals in
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: your brain that somebody else can read. I mean basically
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: a walkie talking. Yeah, yes, exactly. Telepathy is just another
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: wave to communicate. It's like I already do that. I
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: generate signals in my brain which create waves in the
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: air which go into your ear, which generates signals in
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: your brain. Sound is telepathy. And this world we're living in,
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: then you just approved, just physics approved telepathic aliens. I
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: don't see why it's not possible. You know, the bit
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: that stretches it is like, well, could you use their
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: skulls to do telepathy after they are long dead? I
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: don't know, but hey, it was a fun book, all right. Well,
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: so you actually got to talk to him, and we're
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: going to play the interview for everyone here in a
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: in a minute here, Um, but what are some of
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: the questions you you asked him? I asked him what
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: motivated this and whether he was interested in keeping the
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: physics real. And then of course I asked him how
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: to become a science fiction author if you were a
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: physicist hypothetical hypothetically of course, yes, because we all know
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: your dream is to be a podcast host. That's right,
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: one day, one day? All right, Well, here is Daniel's
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: interview with Alistair Reynolds, author of the Revenger science fiction trilogy.
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: So I'm very happy in honor to have with us
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: today on the podcast the multi award winning author and
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: former physicist Alistair Reynolds. Alistair, thanks very much for coming
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: on the podcast. Good afternoon, Daniel, A very great pleasure.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: Thank you for having me. And do you consider yourself
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: a former physicist or is somebody a physicist forever? I
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: thought about this a lot, actually, and I used to
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: say it was a former scientist, but no, I think
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: it's sort of in the blood. It's just a way
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: of a way of looking at the world that you
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: don't just cast off the day you stopped being paid
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: to do science. So I'm yeah, I'm a scientist for
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: the rest of my life. And tell us a little
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: bit about your background. How did you come to your
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: science fiction writer, how did you what was your education
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: in its sort of to to sort of parallel strands.
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: Right through my life was an interesting space and science
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: and also an interest in science fiction, and they've just
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: been there for as long as I have. And uh,
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: I started writing stories from the point where I could
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: hold a pen and I just never stopped, really so
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: right through my early education and the sort of point
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: where I decided I wanted to maybe try and become
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: a physicist, there was also also the creative writing going on,
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: and then I guess I think it's when I was
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: about sixteen, I decide, you try and take the writing
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: more seriously. So I started reading about the ways into
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: publication magazines, that kind of thing, never never thinking that
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: would be a career option, but I thought it would
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: be something I could do, you know, as seriously as
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: a lot of other science fiction writers who had proper
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: jobs as well, but they're also sort of successful writers
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: in their own right. Yeah. But so I also kept
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: on studying to become a scientist as well right through
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: that period. But there was never a point where I
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: woke up when they said, Okay, I'm gonna be a writer.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: It was always there. And what exactly was your area
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: focus in science? I wanted. So I did a degree
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: in astronomy and physics at Newcastle, and I didn't really
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: have particular sense of what direction I wanted to go
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: in when I started that degree. I just wanted to
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: be a scientist. In fact, what I really wanted to
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: be as an astronaut um And I thought, this is
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: going going back to sort of the early to mid
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: ninety eighties. I thought, by the time I've become a
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: professional scientist, there will be sort of lunar observatories, you know,
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: radio telescopes on the dark side of the Moon and
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff. So I thought, Bill, it
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: will be you'll go into space just by being an
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: astronomy kind of like the Antarctic surveys kind of thing.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: So I thought that would be a good way to
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: get in space. But no, I did a degree, and
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: by the end of the degree, I kind of I
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: was taking an interesting cosmology as suppose in particle physics.
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: I was very interesting in things like the nature of
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: the neutrino and the solar neutrino problem, which were things
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: that weren't really resolved in the mid eighties, and I
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: started getting interested in I suppose the early stories about
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: dark matter and you know, really sound health fundamental particle
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: physics mapped onto cosmology and things like that. But that's
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: a really hot and very popular area of astronomy. Everyone
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: wants to go into, you know, So I didn't really
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: have the sort of mathematical chops to do that. I don't,
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: but I sort of segued into stellar astronomy. So my
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: PhD was on the mathematic of the properties of interacting
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: binary starts, particularly a class of binary star where you
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: have a style that's rather heavy in a relationship to
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: the Sun, sort of ten ten to twenty solar matters,
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: and then the other partner in the binary would be
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: a neutron star. These are these are sort of high
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: mass extra bineries, and there's lots of different types of them,
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: but many of them have a rather short orbital periods,
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: so you can study the orbital cycle over a few days,
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: which makes them good targets for say short campaigns on
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: big telescope. So so you would aim to go to
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: Australia or Hawaii or something like that and bag for
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: nights of observations on a number of these different high
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: miss extra binaries. And the big sort of topic that
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: was of interest was the limiting mass of the neutron star,
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: because there's all sorts of theories that sort of said,
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: what the what the mass of the neutron start to
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: be For some of the observations that have been done
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: in the sort of sixties and seventies, we're a little
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: bit sketchy, you know. So there was some question about
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: whether the neutron stars were were lighter than than they
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: should have been. Cool stuff, It was cool. Yeah, it's
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: really interesting. Yeah, Well, let me ask you some questions
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: to get to know how you think about the universe,
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: and do you think the universe is really really big
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: or actually literally infinite? I think my my sort of
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: take on it is probably just bog standard modern cosmology
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: with um, you know, a big band inflationary park or
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: whatever you want to call it. And then we sort
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: of a you know, thirteen and a half billion years later,
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: we're here with an observa an observable universe which is
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: bigger than the age of the universe multiplied by by
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: by years, which some people have trouble wrapping their hairs around,
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: but not infinite. Um. So yeah, I think we live
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: in a sort of bounded universe. But I'm not Zella
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: is about it. To me, the actually infinite universe makes
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: the most sense because it's hard to imagine having a
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: bound abound in space or a bound in matter theme
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: harder to explain the actual infinity. Even though infinity is
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: difficult for humans to wrap their minds around, it may
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: actually be natural. You know, the the universe is no
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: stranger to bizarroness. So but let me ask you another question.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: Do you think that human interstellar flight will ever be
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: a reality? Is that's something people will will ever actually do?
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: Do you think will be stuck in our Solar system forever?
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's like so many different levels to that question.
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: It's like, is there a technical capability that we could
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: achieve if we so wanted? That? To me is probably
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: a fairly firm yes, in that we already know a
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: little bit about Say, you know, we could build a
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: fusion spacecraft based on fairly well established principles that could
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: get us up to about ten speed of light. So
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: he might have trouble slowing down, but at least we
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: could take a go about our star into a forty
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: years or something like that using technology that's not absolutely
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: beyond beyond the sort of pale when we sort of
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: talk about sort of the stuff in my look sort
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: of like relativistic instead of travel one g. Where you
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: sort of get up to the speed of light and
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: then you decelerate again and you have sort of significant
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: time relation factors. That's a much bigger ask, and I
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: think that's like, if that's even technically feasible, it's probably
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: thousands of years in the future. But one of one
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: of the sort of things that does sort of trouble
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: me slightly. I'm not sure. I mean, my feeling is
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: that once we have the technical technical capability to maybe
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: do interstellar crude interstellar exploration, we might not have the
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: will to do it anymore. Because in parallel with that
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: development scientifically, in terms of scientific and engineering capabilities, presumably
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: our knowledge of the universe is going to expand as well,
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: and we may have what we consider to be a
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: completely comprehensive, self consistent picture of our position in in
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: in the galaxy and the galaxy within within within the
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: larger universe, and we may we may just reach a
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: point where we just not we're not interested in going
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: any further than our solar system because we've we've sexually
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: established to our own satisfaction that we know what's out there.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: And I think when when you know already we know
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: a lot more about the broad conditions of many solar systems.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: We know about thousands of extra planets in different solar systems,
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: So we have a sharpening sense of what's out there,
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: not just in our immediate interstellar neighborhood, but out to
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: thousands of light years with the sort of transit observation.
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: And as that picture firms up and develops over the
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: next century, it may we may think, think, realize that
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: actually Earth like planets are incredibly rare, and all that's
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: out there is just more stuff like the Solar system,
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: you know, more more sort of versions of Mercury and Jupiter.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: And would we be sufficiently motivated to explore if we
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: already sensed that we had we had all the answers already,
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: So I don't know, Maybe depends on what we see.
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: Then if we saw something really interesting, if we sort
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: of resolve the structure on the planet, I mean, they
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: don't necessarily necessarily mean an artificial structure, but if we
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: resolved say a continent with green bits or something like
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: that in a blue seed and then that would be
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: a significant motivator for some form of exploration. But I
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: think it's far from settled that there will be this
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: grand You know, the default science fiction future is that
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: we go into the Solar System, best around there for
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: a few hundred years, and then we developed interstellar capability,
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: sometimes even faster than like capability, and we burst out
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: into the universe. And that's like a sort of cosmic destiny. Um.
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: I'm happy to play with that in science fictional terms.
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: As a writer. It's there's a lot of literally fun
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: to be had from that prectice. But I'm probably a
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: little bit more doubtful about it now than I was
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: when I start in my career. And so that leads
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: me to my next question about the Fermi paradox. In
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: your books, there's almost always aliens and there's been contact,
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: but in some cases the galaxy is like mostly wiped
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: out by some prehistoric galactic battle. So what does you
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: take on our current situation, like why haven't the alien
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: visited in your opinion, here in our in our actual
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: physical galaxy. Again, I always say what day of the
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: week is it? And I'll give you a different answer.
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: I mean, for a long time because I read this
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: very book that a lot of science fiction writers read
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: in the eighties, which was The Anthropic Cosmological by Barrow
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: and Tippler, and the sort of takeaway message of that
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: is that the reason, the sort of explanation for the
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: Famie paradox is that there's no one out there because
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: the mechanics of interstellar colonization using relatively slow propulsion systems
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: but say replicating robots and things like that, I mean
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: that you could in effect colonized the entire galaxy in
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: a very short span of time, much less than a
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: million years, and that's just a tiny fraction of the
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: existing age of the galaxy. So the argument is that
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: only would have had to have happened once for the
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: sort of evidence of it to be obvious. There's been many,
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: many opportunities for it to happen, and it doesn't seem
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: to have happened. Therefore, there's no aliens out there apart
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: from maybe single cell slide things. That I took that
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: as goss for for a long time. I think it
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: was a very sort of persuasive argument, but I'm a
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: lot I'm not so smitten with it now because I
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: think one also has to think if if there were
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: imagined that we had been visited by super intelligent alien
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: beings at some point in our history, I think it
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: would be an absolutely trivial problem for them to conceal
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: all evidence of their activity. I think they could even
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: be here now we wouldn't see. That's why, in a way,
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: it's why I take I don't take UFOs seriously because
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: I think any any extraterrestrial civilization that wanted to visit
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: our skies could do so without being detected. They would
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: just that would just be a trivial, little technological problem
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: for them just to avoid detection. So yeah, I kind
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: of haven't really answered that. I think the family paradox is.
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: One possible answer is that we're alone, and that's that's
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: sort of it's quite interesting one. I don't find it depressing,
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: think it's interesting. But but the other one is that
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: really want to speculate about the motives and activities of
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: highly advanced extrastrial beings. We're you know, we're really we
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: don't really have a lot of experience to base our
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: suppositions on. It's a lot of speculation from one data point.
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: It is an enormous amount of speculation. Yeah, well, I
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: quite like the idea that. I mean, someone did the mathematics.
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: So it's about, you know, what are the orders of finding,
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: say a single alien artifact in the Solar System. We
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: had like an alien civilization somewhere else out in the galaxy,
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: because at some point some of their space also wander
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: away from their system, and you know, there might be
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: sort of like a spanner on the moon or something
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: like that. So I think it will be I mean,
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: well worth keeping our eyes open as we as we
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: sort of moved out through. I had hopes for MUA
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: being a bit of space junk passing through the system,
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: but unfortunately doesn't look that way. I know, no, no,
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: it's just a dirty comment or something like that. This
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: is super fun, and I have more questions for our
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: guest science fiction author Alistair Reynolds. But first let's take
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: a quick break. All right, we're back and I'm talking
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: to Alistair Reynolds, science fiction author of the trilogy Revenger.
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: So then let's turn to this novel that's the topic
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: of our episode today, which is actually your trio of novels,
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: this Revenger series, and in this book, we're sort of
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: in a world where the old planets have been deconstructed
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: into a vast series of artificial worlds, and the ships
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: that moved between them operate on solar sales. It's it's
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: a fascinating topic, and it felt to me very much
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: like a novel that could almost be set in a
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: bunch of pirate ships navigating between islands in the eight
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: hundreds or something. What gave you the idea to use
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: this concept? Um? So what made you want to write
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: this book? Where did this idea come from? Did you
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: start from the science concept of solar sales? So did
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: you start from the story and look for the right setting?
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: Actually had to ideas that was sitting on my computer
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: for a long long time, and we're talking to the ten, ten,
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: fifteen years, because I quite often I have a lot
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: of ideas on the back burner, which is I think
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: a lot of writers are like that, because writing is
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: a bit like a conveyor. You know, you write one
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: novel and you've you've got to kind of have some
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: ideas germinating for the next one. So I write a
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: lot of stuff that's very sort of notes, notes and
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: sort of ideas to myself computer that don't necessarily go
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: anywhere for years and years. And the first sort of
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: part of that was that I tried to write to
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: set the stories about explorers breaking into alien structures where
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: they had a certain random time limit where they had
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: to get in, get the treasure, and get out, sort
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: of Indiana Jones stuff, but they didn't really know how
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: long that they would have, so it was very sort
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: of high risk, sort of like safe cracking, but with
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: an element of alien big dumb objects and things like that.
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: And I thought there's definitely something in that, there's some
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: mileageing idea, but I couldn't really get its catch fire,
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: and I tried telling it within some of my other
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: literally unit It's maybe it just didn't happen for one
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: reason or another, but I had still have the idea
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: on my hard drive. And then again about fifteen years ago,
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: I really liked the idea. I mean, there was a
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: science fiction writer you probably aware of who had a
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: big burst of productivity in the sixties bychall Larry Niven,
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: and he wrote a bunch of stories about what it
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: kind of goes back to that thing we were talking
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: about of the manifest destiny of going into the Solar System.
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: And then we move out into interstellar space. But his
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: stories were quite good fun because by the time we
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: had an interstellar society, we've met lots of different alien
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: civilization and some of them were trading their technology with
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: So what I quite liked about the Larry Diving stories
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: and space stories was that you'd have a sort of spacecraft,
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: but bits of it would be made by one set
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: of aliens, and you know, the puppeteers would make the
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: hulls because they were very good at making indestructive and material,
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: you know, and then there'd be some of the systems
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: supplied by someone else. And it was a real sort
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: of cosmopol and quite fun and colorful sort of civilization.
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: I always like, I like the spirit of that, and
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: I thought, I really want to put my own spin
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: on it. So I started coming up with notes for
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: a set of stories that were setting a dicens sa,
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: so not not a sphere around the start, but a
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: literal globe of lots of little microworlds. And I thought,
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: what if, rather than deal with the people who built it,
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: what if some human explorers sort of stumbled up long
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: after it was constructed, and in fact after that sort
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: of fallen into ruin, and then they could have a
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: sort of little micro civilization where they're playing amongst these
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: enigmatic leftovers from sort of previous glory civilizations glory lens.
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: But you can see so that that was an idea.
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: It didn't go anywhere either. But then a long long
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: time later, I I sort of spotted that those two
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: ideas could be sort of jammed together and made something else.
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: And then the sort of third of the two ingredients,
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: you know, just mention it was just a longstanding love
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: for nautical fiction, and that's that's where all the sort
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: of the Pirate High Treasure on the Seventh Seas and
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: all that stuff comes from, which just I just love
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: that stuff. I've steeped in it, and I always wanted
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: to write a sort of science fiction prestige of sort
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: of the age of fighting sale something that sort of
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: went back to Robert Stevenson also a lot of the
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: sort of twentieth century writers who who did stories about
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: sailing ships. So just it all just came together. And
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: then what I quite like was that because you're the
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: whole action is only confined to a volume about the
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: size of the Earth's orbit, that's quite important. So it's
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: sixteen light seconds wide. It's human civilization. Even though there's
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: thousands of thousands of planets within that sort of sphere.
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: I thought, well, within that bound you could just about
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: get around and some solar sects. And you know, if
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: I thought, well, the use orbit takes us round some
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: once a year, so that would be the fun. It
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: takes about a year to get from one side to
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: the other of its body of worlds. And I sledged
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: it because solar sales are very good to get you know,
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: they're getting a way from the Sun is obviously trivially
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: easy with the soil of sale, you just use the
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: light pressure. Attacking inwards is more difficult, but I read
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: a paper about using Anglo momentum effects to sort of
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: tack your way deeper into a gravity. Well, so that's
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: all I need. The rest of it is just just
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: pure handwing ion drives in there, just like I could
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: sort of a get out. If anyone were to say
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: this is totally impossible using solar sects. They've also got
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: ie on capability. They're just prefer not to use it
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: because the solar cells. Solar sailing comes for free as
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: soon as you turn on the ion drive you're burning
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: fuel money, and so how important is it to you
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: that there's always sort of a physics explanation for everything
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: that happens in your novel. It's critical to you that
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: you have a physically self consistent universe, even if you
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: get to tweak the laws of it a little bit,
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: but it's not colossally important, and it varies quite striking.
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: And I would say from one universe to another. I
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: mean the the two sets of books that I'm probably
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: best best known for, the books I wrote earlier in
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: my career here which I've returned to set in the
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: Revelations space, which on one level is quite grounded in
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: hard physics because it has this implacable rule you can't
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: travel faster than light. And I tried to work out
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: all the relativistic effects correctly, and I try to do
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: the sort of dynamics of planetary systems and atmospheres as
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: realistic as I could get it with my own limitations,
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: and at the same time tell a story that was
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: hopefully interesting more than one person. But even within that
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: there's sort of crazy science, creative sort of tacking on
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: signaling from the future, inertialist drives that kind of thing,
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: even a bit of time travel. So there range of
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: stuff is even more like that because you have this
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: on the foreground. The humans use the technology that's broadly
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: familiar to our own, you know, so they have rockets
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: for short distance navigation, and I was thinking real buck
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: rogers rockets here. So they like sort of bullet shaped
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: cylinders with little fins on the back, and rock keute
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: motives really with with portholes and riverts as well. That
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: was important to have lots of riverts. But that's like
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: within within our technological sort of horizons. And the ships
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: not outlandish in the sense that they use solar sales.
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: But I didn't I didn't tie myself down to I mean,
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: if you sort of do the math, so I said, right,
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: my ships are about the size of a seventary seven.
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: That's that's what I decided, because I wanted them to
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: be big enough that you could sort of have a
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: bit of drama within the compartments, you know, maybe room
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: enough for a crew of ten or twelves or something
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: like that. But I didn't want to be sort of
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: enormous space dread or dreadnought sort of kilometers long, you know,
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: seven three sevens good, it's about the size of a
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: of a galleon or something like that. But the amount
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: of area of solar sales you need to accelerate even
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: the Secretary seven to any any kind of acceleration, and
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: the accelerations in the Book of the Ships and the
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: books are quite low by as quite of the SciTE
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: fictional statard. It's sort of like, I don't know, a
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: third of a tenth of a g or something like that,
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: but you wouldn't an enormous collecting area to do that.
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: So I just didn't want to go down that road
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: of scrupulously fact checking myself because because fundamentally these books
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: are about the spirit of adventure, a sense of drama
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: and atmosphere that the sort of mix of what no
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: a sort of fiction and nautical fiction, of a bit
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: of gothic horror coming in there, and I didn't really
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: want them to be paradigmatic hardest fet books. That's why
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: there's so the science is kind of crazy as well.
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: When when there's stuff the humans opera utilized, there's alien technologies,
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: former human technologies left over, even though we never used
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: the word human in any of the three books, but
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: they have access to weird things that they don't really
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: understand how they work, and I, as a writer, put
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: as little explanations I can get as I can get
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: away with from the page. Tell me a little bit
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: about the bones that they use to do faster than
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: like communication. Is this something you imagine might one day
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: be possible with some crazy alien tech and our civilization?
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: Or you think faster like communication is totally out of
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: bounds for humanity. But I think I kind of fudged.
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: I kept it. I never resolved to my own satisfaction
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: whether the skulls work faster than like. The humans don't
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: really know because they're because they're operating within this sort
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: of relatively small volume of space. It's not apparent to
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: them whether they're, whether they're instantaneous or not. I perhaps
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: perhaps they are kind of But actually the genesis of
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: the skulls idea was that, originally, to go back to
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: this idea of humans utilizing bits of alien technology, originally
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: the whole ships are going to be skulls. So it
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: was just like you're going to have like a three
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: h foot long discarded skull from some alia you find
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: floating in space, presum presumably some long vanished staffaring alien,
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: and I like the idea was the humans sort of
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: get these skulls and they sort of scoop out all
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: the jump that's left over and then put rocket boats
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: on them or whatever, and then they just fly these
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: skulls around. And I was really going with this, and
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: then I went to Z Guardians of the Galaxy and
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: why some at some point in this film they go
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: to this sort of I think it's like asteroid moneys
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: or something like that, and the bases a skull. It's
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: just floating in a nebula, and I just can't do
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: it now because it's been done, you know, they've had
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: a big space skull has been done. So then I
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: downscoped and I thought, well, if if the ships can't
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: be skulls, then they will have something inside that uses
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: the idea of the table Scott and I was just
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: thinking about old fashioned crystal radio sets, you know, and
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: a little bit of that, a little bit of sort
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: of weiji boards just to keep it spooky, but really
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: it was just to get a sort of slightly recarb
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: gothic vibe in to the stories, and it gave the
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: cruise another specialization idea that people with this particular talent
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: to be able to get a signal a skull, but
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: I didn't really know how whether that would just be
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: a little background detail or started the books. Well, to me,
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: it seems really evocative of a lot of the other
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: things I like about your other novels, the fact that
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: the protagonist in the book are we surrounded by leftover
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: bits from ancient civilizations? Like there's constantly there's vast quantities
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: of previously understood but now lost knowledge. And I like
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: that because it resonates with the way I feel about
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: our universe, that we're surrounded constantly with information about the
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: universe and we don't understand, you know, we're bathed and
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: clues but totally clueless. This is something you're explicitly going
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: for in your books or is this just the way
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: you feel about the universe? Probably just the way way
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: I feel about the universe. But it's also I mean,
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: it's like there's some the cynical answer is actually it
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: Actually I've always said it's far more interesting to describe
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: the spacecraft that's covered in rust than than well it's
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: kind of all shiny and chrome, because there's lots more
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: adjectives you can use when things are sort of crumbling,
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: falling up. So I've always liked I've always been drawn
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: to that sense of decrepitude and lots of old things
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: have bolted together more or less work but don't work reliably.
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: Just it's just far more interesting. But I think the
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: more serious answer would be that a lot of that's fiction.
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: I read a lot, a lot a lot of the
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: science fictions, but I was influenced by had that sense
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: of antiquity, of layers of antiquity, and the future built
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: on top of of the past. I mean, in literary
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: science fiction. I think the writer that I got the
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: most sense of that from would be Jean Wolf, because
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: the books of the New Sun, which I read when
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: I was at university, kind of feel like fantasy, and
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: it's you sense that you're a long way into the
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: future of this dying earth. But gradually little bits of
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: science fiction sort of intruded into the narrative and you
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: realized that, you know, this is very very distant time
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: is built on well almost literally on these geological strata
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: of different ages, and I really love that, and I
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: love the fact that there were bits of technology, weaponry,
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: whatever left over from more sophisticated times that the characters
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: could could use but not necessarily understand. But so you
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: have on the surface, it's kind of sort and sorcery,
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: very game of Throne sort of stuff with citadels and
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: guys in cloaks with swords. But at the same time,
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: very rich people have ray guns because they found rey guns,
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: and some people are flying cards because they just left
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: over bits of leftover technology. And I love that. I
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: love that sense of just archaeological accretion of different layers,
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: so that came into the It's also in lots of
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: Doctor Who as well, lots of classic doctor Who had
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: that sense of really really deep time, deep deep paths.
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: So I just as well, I find it fascinating but
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: also a bit painful because it gives you the sense
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: that somebody knew these answers, somebody mastered these topics, and
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: then the knowledge was just lost. And to me, that's
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: as endlessly first doing um. But let me let me
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: ask you a sense. You are in a unique position
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: being in both the academic community and the science fiction community.
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: I had a sense that science fiction authors actively and
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: realistically contribute to sort of progress in academic scientific research
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: and engineering by coming up with sort of the craziest
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: ideas on the edge of possibilities. Having been in both communities,
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: how do you feel about the way those two inter
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: relate intellectually? I didn't sense that exchange. On a personal level.
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: In my experience as a scientist had very little to
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: do with science fiction because I was working in a particulars,
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: particularly a subsets of astronomy and instrument science when I
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: was working through in Space Agency, sort of photon camping
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: and things like that, which also played into astronomy. But
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: I mean, I kind of kept my science fiction credentials
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: to myself for a long time, so I didn't really
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: I wasn't sure how people would take it. And I've
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: found a general rule. Some scientists are really receptive to
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: science fiction, and they love it. They they've been stimulated
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: by it, and they see the potential in it. But
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: others are really disdainful of it. And I don't, you know,
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: I didn't want to run foul of the latter, so
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: I just I'm not going to make a big deal
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: of this. But since I stopped my former scientific career,
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: I have taken an interest in this. I mean, I've
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: sort of looked at, for instance, the way that our
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: scientific and literally understanding of the planet Mars has evolved
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: over sort of the last century and a half. That's
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: of interest to me. I've done lectures on that because
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: it's a real two way process where science fiction and
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: science have sort of moved hand in hand. Our science
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: fictional understanding of the universe, and with with Mars as
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: a case study, as has evolved and sometimes like behind
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: the science because sometimes as writers were very attached to
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: a particular image of something, and when the science appends
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: that image, we often don't want to let go of it,
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: but eventually we come around to it eventually, I think
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: the know with with with Mars, you know, there was
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: there was a sense that we had to say goodbye
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: to the romantic idea of Mars, of Edgar Ice Burrows
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: and even Ray Bradbury as somewhere where where there might
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: be civilizations and ruins and wonders, and we had to
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: confront the idea that Mars was really just a a
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: barely less prospicable version of our own move you know,
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: it's a an arried, nearly airless rock floating in space.
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: But now we have we kind of come to terms
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: of that, and now we now we can see the
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: grandeur in the beauty in the real marks. That eventually
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: led to a whole second wave of science fiction books
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: that drew their inspiration from Viking and then subsequent Martian expeditions,
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: and that process is carried on. There's also sort of
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: two way, the traffic in the other direction, where you
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: get little bits of science that draw their inspiration from
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: from science fiction. It's not as easy to trace those connections,
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: but they're certainly there. I mean, he's on my level.
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: You have scientists who say I became a scientist because
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: I read science fiction. It's probably to some degree true
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: true of me. I don't know. Did you read science
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: fiction as were absolutely did? I think that that's for me.
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: The science fiction authors were the ones thinking about the
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: deepest questions. You know, day to day science work, we're
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: not answering big questions about the universe or making big discoveries,
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: and so to sort of connect with the romance of
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: the mystery of the universe, science fiction really tapped into
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: that much more directly from me than the actual research
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: work that I do on a day to day basis.
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: To me, that's why they provide a nice balance. I mean,
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: The one sort of case study that I can sometimes
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: present to people as a clear case of science fiction
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: shaping scientific thinking is when Carl Sagan was writing Contact,
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: he wanted to come up with some plausible means of
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: using First of all, he had an idea of travel
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: through black holes, and then he went to speak to
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: Kip Thorn, and out of that came the idea that
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: a traversible wormhole was a much more interesting idea. And
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: then Kip Thorn, sort of, I think for almost for
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: his own sort of self gratification, came up with the
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: sort of mathematics of of traversible wormholes, with the idea
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: that you needed exotic energy to stabilize the throat. But
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: that's still a whole viable discipline in I don't know
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: what whether you call that particle physics or you know,
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: spacetime physic gravitational physics, but lots of lots of papers
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: are still are still coming out with reference to traversible
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: wormholes and the physics of so that whole subdiscipline probably
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: wouldn't have existed without at least the germ of a
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: piece of science fiction. There many many other examples, but
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: that's a really clear couple one well let me ask
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: you as the last question about your future work. I
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: hear that you're working on a new novel in your
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: Revelation Space universe, which I'm very excited about, and I
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: wanted to want to ask you what makes you decide
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: to sort of revisit a universe that you've created previously,
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: or to create a vast new intellectual playground. I don't know.
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: I think they just feel like itches that you've got
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: to scratch and you can't fight it. You just have
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: to go with the the muse. Not to put too
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: pretentious a term on it, but every now and again
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: an idea sort of. I mean, Stephen King says another
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: what's the what's the expression using like the muse shots
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: into your head and you've got it. It's a really
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: horrible expression, but it's true. You just can't predict it.
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: And I've always just been ateful that a if you
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: have a desire to write something that's good, it's far
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: better than waking up and having no ideas. So I've
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: always been quite grateful for the fact that the ideas
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: keep coming and never complained about it. It's far better's
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: and have too many, too many books in the queue.
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: If you like them too few, But yeah, I don't know.
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: I don't analyze it too too much. Really, I just
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: go with the flow and hopefully people are happy to
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: go along with it, read them, publishers are happy to
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: publish them hopefully. Well. I've thoroughly enjoyed them, and I've
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: also very much enjoyed talking today. Thank you very much
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: for taking your time to answer our questions and to
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: share your thoughts about writing and science and crazy aliens.
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: It's probably very great pleasure. Thank you, really great questions
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: as well. We could talk all day. I think, all right,
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: pretty interesting, pretty cool guy. And also I just incredibly
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: he has a he has like a perfect name for
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: it for nautical adventures and pirate pirate story. Yes, Alistair
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: Rent and his Welsh accident. I guess mix them sound
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: a little bit like a wi now. He was really
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: wonderful to talk to. So thanks, thank you, Alistair for
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: taking your time to talk to me and for letting
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: us hear about the physics of your universe and what
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: goes on inside your brain. Yeah, we hope you enjoyed that,
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: and hopefully I got you to think a little bit
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: about what could be possible out there in even in
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: the far future, millions of years from now. That's right,
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: So go out and check out his book. It's the
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: Revenger Trilogy from Alistair Reynolds. He also has written many
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: other wonderful books, including Chasm City and Revelation, Space and
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: Pushing Ice, which I also recommend. Yeah, so thanks for
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: joining us, see you next time. Thanks for listening, and
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from my
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. No