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

The Super Ape: date change!

 

...Is Us. Reggae, Dub & performance poetry below

Last post, I’d just been asked to give a talk for International Darwin Day at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, Quadram Institute on 13^th Feb (date change from 10th due to INDUSTRIAL ACTION). This free event has now been posted (LINK SHOWS INCORRECT DATE, but booking site will be fine) as one of seventeen events from Brazil, Mexico (US x 8), through Germany and Novosibirsk, Russia (more on this excellent group later). I’ll be giving a talk inspired by the cult classic Gödel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter, 1979) - about codes in music and how DNA can be represented, drawing on other composers’ efforts and using a useful trick from my biochemical past! A fair amount of genetics with a bit of music-theory added. I’ll be posting a new music video on Soundcloud to mark the occasion.

The event, organised by Profs. Tracey Chapman & Mark Pallen, will feature talks on “The ghost in the garden: in search of Darwin’s lost garden” (Dr Jude Piesse) and “The Call of the Wild: the genomic history of wolves and dogs” (Dr Anders Bergstrom). Mark is an international expert on high-throughput sequencing to problems in microbiology and ancient DNA research, and old hand at giving popular lectures on Darwin & Evolution. Here’s a saucy one from the Institute’s 2020 Darwin Day events, giving all the scuttlebutt (lovely American term) you’ll ever need on C.D. He’s also the author of the Rough Guide to Evolution (2008) which contains a section on music related to Darwin. A lot has happened since 2008 (stimulated by the 150^th anniversary of ‘Origin’ in 2009) so probably will need an update; but in the meantime it’s a main theme of this blog so keep on reading!

One delight of finding all this science-arts-culture fostered by Tracey & Mark at Quadram was discovering performance poet (& science-writer, &&&…) Peter Bickerton, the Juggling Doctor. Peter gave a great reading of his piece Super Ape at Quadram in 2019, a video of it here. Wow, in a grand sweep (see my blog entry Arthur C. Clarke for comparison), he arcs our story from big-bang to extinction. Millenial-millenarianism?  Why not? Of course it’s painted in topical concerns, images and thought-patterns of our age (whadja want? Biblical style?), but that’s what gives it colour and fun; oh, and the really cool Jamaican Reggae / Dub from The Upsetters (1976). In a blog whose twin themes are evolution and music this was a great find. I’ll post at a later date about more Evolution-Dub!

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

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’…