I Dream of Starships

 

Bells in Flight - 50 years ago

For those who enjoyed my post Bridge of a Million Starships (for Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday), you may want some music to accompany you on the trip and make it, well, more of a trip. Fifty years ago this week (25^th May 1973), just coming down from the apogee -the euphoria- of the classical ages of space flight and science fiction, Tubular Bells was released.   

It really deserved its own Space Movie, and got one in a 78min documentary film of that name for NASA to celebrate the 10^th Anniversary of the Moon Landings. But the lasting movie association is, unfortunately, ‘The Exorcist’, never a worthy movie link (atavistic mumbo-jumbo!) but good for exposure. If only Stanley Kubrick had heard a demo tape before he fixed the music for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mike Oldfield might have got the gig, but he was only ~14 at the time, bit early even for that amazing musical risk-taker. The bone flung up into the sky in 2001, turning temporarily into a spaceship, might have made another appearance as a bent bell, and perhaps landed back on Earth as the bone-on-the-beach on the album cover, or perhaps with holes in it like the Hohle Fels flute (world’s oldest musical instrument).

Anyway, and Tubular and its sequels were great as ‘the soundtrack’ to my science-fiction reading years, 11 and onwards. I have a particular association between the beginning to TB Side 2 and the return to a forsaken Earth by humans – but now the home to highly evolved cats, dogs (and rats!) – in Breed to Come, Andre Norton 1972. But the strongest sci-fi connection is with the grandeur, melancholy and desolation found in Arthur C. Clarke. There’s explicit identification here with track and album titles ‘The Sentinel’ and The Songs of Distant Earth (1994), itself with a forward by Clarke himself. Maybe if the AMiTe project ever inspires a space movie, Mike might come out of his recently announced retirement and give it a shot, if the aching loneliness appealed.

Anyone with something to say has a right to try composition, and it does give an insight into what ingredients go into making a composer. You have to absorb a lot of influences and then get stuck into the ‘problem solving’ which (spoiler alert) is the main job of being a composer. Mike is part of my compositional world; his natural feel for folk-type harmonies (sixthy, ninethy) have influenced me and would have pleased Ralph Vaughan Williams (a fellow folk enthusiast) and I’ve learnt something  from his bassist’s sense of off-rhythm. It’s been said that his true instrument is the bass-guitar, never mind that searing lead guitar sound - hey, Elgar was a bassoonist as well as a good violin player, ‘bass and lead’.

My contention in the AMiTe paper is that any aliens that can launch a spaceship that communicates by lasers will have hands, feet, fingers, toes. They may have syrinxes, like birds (that would be cool!) but they will probably have stringed instruments – guitars, violin-thingies – and woodwind/brass, and definitely percussions. They’d surely have a different history (maybe never having had a counterpoint era or a J. S. Bach) and use different combos, and may also include total silliness in the mix like, well… Mike is a bit of a  ‘Musical Alien’ who acquired his musical DNA over a different and unrepeatable personal trajectory. He’s still hard to write about even for good musicians who’ve missed out on part of that mix, eg, the whole ‘band’ experience (he is literally a one-man-band and thinks like that). He invented a whole different ensemble (to the classical orchestra), because those are the instruments he picked up. Etc, etc.

For opinions sharp enough to cut yourself on, read Colin Edwards: “He is utterly unique, ridiculously unique in fact and things of such rarity should be cherished.” “It’s not just the music but also, as mentioned above, HOW it sounds… raises the hairs on the arms”, and, on Incantations: “one of the clearest examples of Oldfield furiously pursing the ecstatic and achieving precisely that.”

He flings his soul out into the Void, and surely dreams of Starships.

Picture credit: Mike Oldfield Worldwide Discography

To See Ourselves as Others See Us

 

The Mighty Mark 1 - a place of pilgrimage

On the day of named-storm Eunice in 2022, I managed to keep my appointment with MikeGarrett, Sir Bernard Lovell chair of Astrophysics at University of Manchester and Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. Jodrell Bank, with its famous Mark 1 Telescope - made out of bits of battleships! - a name to conjure with. Many visits as a boy there; a place of pilgrimage during the Apollo program. Keeping just ahead of the storm on the M6, we were inside the Alan Turing Institute when it finally hit, and it was ‘knock-you-off-your-feet’ strong when we exited 2 hours later. It was great to meet a Radioastronomy and SETI group and to present the AMiTe idea. Lots of discussion, suggestions for references and encouragement to think further about observational consequences.

While Mike’s JBCA group of 190 people have wide ranging (multi light-year!) research interests including active galaxy nuclei and giant arrays (running  e-MERLIN, the UK's radio astronomy network), they are also active in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and Mike is currently vice-chair of the IAAs SETI Permanent Committee.

So it’s quite fun to keep tabs on his publications. Here’s one that was publicised only in the last week: What would aliens learn if they observed the Earth? This claims to be the first proper study of the Earth’s Technosignature in 50 years and takes into account all modern human sources of radiation. We currently emit a whopping 4GW of radio noise, just from mobile phone transmission. The team has analysed databases of transmitters and considered the radiation pattern, and the potential for detection at nearby stars. These were limited to nearby systems, including Alpha Centauri, out to a maximum of 8 light-years. The conclusion:

“We worked out that an alien civilisation near these locations would, however, need much better telescopes than we have to detect the Earth’s mobile radio leakage. But that would be quite probable, given most technical civilisations are expected to be much more advanced than we are.”

It would be lovely to think that the closest stars have anciently wise civilisations, just waiting for the ‘youngsters’ (us, a mere 4.5bn years after the Earth cooled) to grow up and invent smartphones. Life may be ubiquitous (C’mon NASAPerseverance) but there again, it’s been a long, hard road here. And despite the best (breeding) efforts of Elon Musk, human numbers may start to decline as early as 2050. If the closest extant technical civilisation may be “outside theMilky Way and therefore forever inaccessible” (Brian Cox musing) then we’re going to need a pretty big ‘scope on the Cheshire Plain to detect that.

But maybe there would be a chance to detect ‘we’re here’ signals from an AMiTe point. I’m still to write up the next version of the paper with suggestions from meeting Mike, but there are some clues in the 'Brian Cox' post. Happy listening!

Picture credit: Unesco

I Salute Admiral FitzRoy – for 30th April

 

FitzRoy's grave at All Saint's, Upper Norwood (nr. Crystal Palace)

I have the deepest respect for ‘Captain FitzRoy’, whose anniversary – of death by his own hand – was on 30^th April (I’m a few days late due to a big family wedding).

An absolute aristocrat (the Fitzroy name comes as being a direct descendant of the ‘Merry Monarch’ at his merriest), he cared deeply, as second Governor of New Zealand,  for the indigenous Maori during a rapacious colonial period - and was sacked as a result. In the navy from 12, he was appointed temporary commander of HMS Beagle at 23 as a result of the madness and suicide of Captain Stokes, and had another suicide, by throat-slitting, in his family. So very wise to take along a gentleman companion on Beagle’s second voyage to keep him sane, on a ship refitted at his own expense (he kept doing that). His friend Beaufort (inventor of the ‘Force 10’ scale) came up with some suggestions. He got his second choice, Charles Darwin, and – fatefully – thrust a copy of Charles Lyell’s ‘Principles of Geology’ into 22yr old Charles' hands, thereby giving Darwin a vision of Deep Time (in a way, a bit like the Deep Time I am proposing for the Amity Project, although I only need 60 Million Years).

You’d think that giving Darwin his big, lucky break (again, own expense) would be enough for fame – and indeed there’s plenty more on this aspect, including his brave, principled rejection of Darwin later (including brandishing a bible at the famed Oxford Debate of 1860), and indeed his later reconciliation with Darwin (though not with evolution). But he had to continue his noblesse-oblige-from-own-pocket by founding the Met. Office and inventing Weather Forecasting (including the very term). Perhaps inspired by Beaufort systematising wind-speeds, and with the new technology of barometers and telegraph, his can-do entrepreneurialism led to the first ever weather forecast of 31/7/1861 in his own hand, which was published in the Times. His forecasts saved the lives of many ordinary sailors.

You can tell this is going to end badly. He’d betrayed God (by being Darwin’s unwitting stooge), lost his colonial job, lost his family fortune (died effectively broke), and then the trolling started. Yes, they had trolls before the internet. We used to call such newspaper letter-writers as ‘Angry of Tunbridge Wells, but the trolls included scientists who apparently thought that no forecast was preferrable to an imprecise one. From the Met. Office site:

“The constant criticism took a severe toll on FitzRoy's health and his frequent absence from the office can be traced through the increasingly sporadic presence of his handwriting in the weather reports. His final entry was written on 20th March 1865, just a few weeks before he took his own life on 30th April 1865”.

It’s rather horrible to think of a man – such a great and principled figure - haunted by those earlier suicides and visions of razor-blades, and being inevitably driven into the depression where he would follow their example.

Here’s a small example of my musical write-up mentioning his first interaction with Darwin. I had long intended to pay my respects at his grave, which I was luckily able to do while visiting family close to St Margaret / All Saints, Norwood (near Crystal Palace) recently. The grave was apparently renovated by the Met. Office in 1981 and the strange (Fuegian?) plant has grown since then. I enjoyed popping into ‘his’ church and testing the acoustics with Fr. Antonio, vicar-in-charge, who supplied interesting chat and directed me to FitzRoy’s (very modest) end-of-terrace two hundred meters down Church Road (with a green plaque).

A bit of recitative within the fugato 'Shooting, Dogs & Rat-catching'

Picture credits:

FitzRoy's grave: David F. Gahan

Musical extract: David F .Gahan