Bridge of a Million Starships – for Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday

 

Needs another thousand years development but recent advances in fusion seem promising

I posted on 1^st December on just about the only definable (and safe!) point in space that all our intelligent neighbours - of ~1.4Trillion star systems - could be expected to agree on: the mid-point between the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies, the ‘AMiTe point’ (see the post for where to find this in the sky).

The inhuman, monstrous-awful distances and timescales to get there recalls Blaise Pascal:

“Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere…  I feel engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me.”

The great science-fiction authors weren’t daunted by such difficulties. One of them, Olaf Stapledon, even gave us the adjective ‘Stapledonic’ for concepts on the very largest scale (the word is now practically ungoogleable, returning one broken link and one unsafe site). But the greatest of all, and a good engineer to boot, was Arthur C. Clarke, inventor of the geo-synchronous orbit for communication satellites, whose 105^th birthday it would be today. Boy, did he do immensity.

The journey of an intelligent species – all the way “from Apes to Angels” – is the background to 2001: A Space Odyssey, perhaps the grandest of all journeys. I’m not sure we’ll ever get to the Angel stage, but we’ve come such a long way and have further to go. A vast time dimension is the backdrop to The City and the Stars which takes place “two and a half billion years from the present - ten rotations of the Galaxy”. Humanity has, sort of, reached an end-point but could there be a chance for ‘rebirth’? (a cyclic view similar to mine). There’s a good jaunt to the Centre of the Galaxy, needing a faster-than-light space-drive, which adds distance (and emptiness…) to the picture but in the end it’s the renewal of the human race which will be the imperative. But the real immensities of distance and time – for spaceships obeying the unbreakable, unshakeable velocity limit of c – are best conveyed in Rendezvous with Rama (ignoring sequels). The mystery, “that chilling touch of the alien, the not-quite-knowable*,” of the apparently uninhabited ‘worldship’ of Rama passing through the Solar System remains unbroken at the end - but one conclusion that protagonists and readers can make with certainty is that Rama is one of a chain of similar ships, at least three! Another will follow in seventy years’ time.

I like this vision of chains of ships. If you are going the immense distance to the AMiTe point (see post of 1^st Dec and the AMiTe page on this blog), then being part of a chain means you can get the signal back. A million starships, spaced at 4 light-years apart, would give you a very good chance of interacting with a similar chain coming the other way ‘antiparallel’, or parallel - originating from somewhere else in the Milky Way. See the paper for the maths and rationale of 4.19 light year and 59 year launch separation. Is a million a big number? Not when you consider the >200 million SUVs in the world, and especially if you have several 10’s of millions of years – short by Clarke’s timescale in The City and the Stars. Clarke lived a long time (1917-2008) but didn’t expect to see things like a Space Elevator with his own eyes; he wouldn’t mind taking the long view.

But I think he would like to look up to that fuzzy blob of M31, the right-hand edge (edge closest to Sagittarius) and wonder just how many lines-of-a-million-starships, each originating from a different solar system, are threading their way to, and through, that ‘empty’ region of space. Could be quite a buzz there.

Picture credit IMDb under ‘non-commercial’ license.

*John Leonard, New York Times

Other Composers do DNA Music (2)!

Back to music! Following the performance of my quartet Eyenigma Variations (extract here) where one of the principal themes is a melody derived from the DNA of the most basic Eye (receptor) protein, I’d like to do a post about other composers doing DNA & other codes in music. Please comment if you'd like to highlight others!

In the beginning was the Book: Gödel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter, 1979), “A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll”; you can tell that there are devious codes in there right from the start! Although really about the mind emerging from self-referencing in brain circuits, there are beautiful digressions about self-referencing in maths and music. Enter B-A-C-H, both the composer and his musical self-reference in The Art of Fugue. The BACH code pervades Eyenigma, as well.

H? What’s H in music? At the time in Germany, H was just ordinary B – so what was B then? why B ♭ of course! Just shows you can make any rule, as long as you stick with it. But Bach has started a trend to code names in music. Dmitri SCHostakovich stretched a point by coding the bolded letters as D-E♭ -C-B (there’s that H = B thing again, and a weird letter sound eSS becoming E♭). So I bunged that one in as well, Eyenigma bars 192/3. (One day, I’ll do myself as DFG(AHA)^N (the ‘to the N’ would be a trill).

Douglas Hofstadter couldn’t resist the idea that ‘DNA makes DNA’, referencing itself with the letters GATC (Guanine, Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine) - and makes all living things as part of that loop (the phenotype provides the energy and materials).  Give-or-take a ‘T’, that looks musical, similar to the BACH code. DaveDeamer, Prof. at University of California Santa Cruz, inventor of the latest DNA wonder technology and now doing amazing work on Darwin’s ‘warm pond’ origin of life theory, thought the same in 1992: see his Wonderfest lecture here. He uses GAC but assigns the note E to thymine. This gives four notes either in major sixth (CEGA) or minor seventh (ACEG) chords, both loved by jazz improvisers ‘cos everything sounds good with these notes. It’s a great choice if you want direct translation of DNA strings and don’t mind the ‘goes on forever’ aspect. I’ll post more about Dave’s later DNA musical activities in the future.

Dave proposed expanding the idea to choosing notes for amino acids which would give twenty notes instead of four. This idea has been expanded by Markus Buehler at MIT – here’s his Soundcloud page. Sounds pretty good (what do you think?) but again uses the direct translation method so not much for a human composer to do!

In my setting of rhodopsin, I’d used the translation of T = B (see oldest/first post in this blog). That gave a ‘leading note’, one of the two semitone intervals in the diatonic scale (eg E to F, B to C) which allows a melody to arrive somewhere. I also used the principle of ‘third letter redundancy’ which allows a composer some harmonic control but ends of with the same end results – see Evolution of Redundancy in the Genetic Code. This gave the first theme (melody) in Eyenigma ; you hear it on the ‘cello in the extract.

Another composer who has written a genetic string quartet is Deirdre Gribbin – ‘Hearing your Genes Evolve’. This is a great example of starting from a DNA translation base but using absolutely contemporary compositional skills to get a fully satisfying result from simple ideas (I used a more classical Variations structure to tell the story I wanted of the ‘Eye Debate’ of 1860). I’d love to know what ‘rule’s Deirdre uses – hopefully she’ll tell me!

Gregory Brown has also used DNA derived ideas in his Missa Charles Darwin. I wrote about this in my 'Evolution Day' (24th November) post.

Picture credit: DNA-MUSIC Abhijit Bhaduri, Flickr CC

Observing the AMiTe Point: busiest point in the (Local) Universe?

 

"The Most Exclusive Address in the Local Group", right hand edge of M31 core

At the date of posting, 1^st December 2022, the Northern Sky is a fine sight (no street-lights in our village). The waxing Moon has proceeded along the ecliptic from Saturn, is now passing Jupiter and, via the two bright stars of Aries, is on its way to join Mars for Opposition on 7^th December (‘Opposition’, for planets further away from the Sun than us is, just like the full of the Moon, getting in line with us and the Sun). When the Moon’s light is out of the way, then it’s a good time to look up and locate the point in space with the highest likelihood, selon-moi, of the presence of Alien civilisations in the known universe.

This blog, with its starry header, indulges my twin fascinations for the origin of life, human‘n’all (via the celebration of music related to Charles Darwin and DNA including my own composition, performed at both Oxford/Cambridge Universities), with a possible far future for humans, which is at least an entertaining one.

On ‘8-Billion Day’ (15^th November 2022), I posted an article suggesting a very unorthodox view of future population first published in my ‘AMiTe Paper') – or see the separate page in this blog. This came out of my lockdown musing of ‘how to meet the Aliens’ and neatly gets the humans out of the picture for a few million years. (Don’t worry: “We Shall Return!”)

The AMiTe paper is all about how, practically, with currently envisaged technology, an engineer from any technical (sorry! no super-dolphins!) civilisation, with our level of vanity - might try to crack the problem. A difficulty, of course, is for everyone in the galaxy to agree to meet at the same place when you can’t talk to them first (the ‘Schelling Point’ problem). The answer, funnily enough, and ‘proving Brian Cox wrong’ (in a way), is almost certainly for robotic ships to meet outside the galaxy (Martin Rees should approve, leaving it to the robots).

Just above Aries (see map) is the long line of bright stars connecting the Square of Pegasus with Perseus and his bright ‘Sword Handle’ double-cluster, the three middle stars being ‘Andromeda’. You may well have observed the farthest-you-can-see-with-the-naked-eye Andromeda galaxy, at 2.54 Million light years distance and 2.54 Million years ago. You go up from the central star Mirach (‘Girdle’), do a little shimmy to the right and the cloudy smudge is it. Or rather, it’s the bright central part of a monster galaxy of a trillion stars. The lovely spiral stuff covers a much bigger extent – about 6 full-moons in breadth – but is just beyond the grasp of eyes which also have to cope with the daylight Sun. It's our Milky Way’s biggg sister (we’re the middle-weight of three). Just in line with the right hand edge of the smudge (to our line of sight) is the most exclusive address in the Local Group – the mid-point of the two galaxies, the AMiTe point, Andromeda/Milky-Way Treffpunkt (‘meeting point’, see the paper for why). The beautiful thing is that every intelligent race in the trillion stars of Andromeda and the four hundred billion of our own spiral knows where it is…

I will write again on 16^th December, Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday, (which I hope he’d have appreciated) of a grand but tenuous ‘intergalactic bridge’…