Are micro black holes the next-gen nuke, business opportunity or transport system?

Posted on August 21, 2016 by dave

13.8 billion years ago, at the onset of the Bing-Bang, primordial micro black holes the size of the period at the end of this sentence, may have formed. Assuming that is true, then they are like cosmic bullets boring a hole through the fabric of time, passing through anything and everything in their path. It’s a game of Galactic Roulette.

The original article can be found here: Miniature black holes may be hitting Earth once every 1,000 years

But stop, here. This is where it turns into Science Fiction. So as a writer of Sci-Fi, I look for articles like this and think about how to form a storyline from it and came up with a few possibilities.

Now or Never: The new doomsday weapon that no one has ever used and the protagonists/antagonists are locked in a political battle at a time when they actually need to use one. I will leave the outcome to you.
B train: Luke Killian was on his way to work, traveling downtown on the B Train in NYC when a micro black hole rode the track, taking the car and his fellow passengers with him. Where they were dropped off I will leave it up to you.
Whirl: (Hands off everyone…. this one I’m keeping for my own) A stubborn, slow-moving micro-black hole gets lodged in the ocean, just off of Atlantic City. A permanent whirlpool becomes an attraction and business opportunity for those with foresight that not even the Donald thought of. Blinded by greed, the consequences were not taken into account… the whirlpool is moving slowly toward shore.
Flush: Escaping from a maximum security colony on Xylon, through a micro black hole, the alien was deposited on Earth.

Now get writing everyone…….

Seeded from space or fiction?

Posted on June 4, 2016 by dave

The never-before seen image shows a microscopic metal globe spewing out biological material feared to be an infectious agent.

As a writer of near SciFi, it’s always a great feeling to have written a work and then see a related article sometime after publication. This is what I had in mind when writing, November Seed, except my alien seed a little sexier.

Alien Seeds

The Great Filter

Posted on May 6, 2016 by dave

What a perfect title for a Sci-fi… “The Great Filter”

On a research note, this topic is what drives us to explore. Has any species of the universe ever punched a hole through The Great Filter? Is the Great Filter a stopgap for us… for any species preventing us/them from infecting the cosmos? I recently read a novelette by Rann Murray called, Ascension. In this hard sci-fi, Murray hits upon this exact topic; that maybe the stopgap is in of itself a living entity.

Here is a good TED Talk about The Great Filter.

Are Sci-Fi writers indicators or thermostats of Society?

Posted on March 30, 2016 by dave

Whenever a technology moves too quickly, it frightens people, as we are seeing with drones and the scramble to promote/limit/impede their commercial use. Unfortunately, some Luddites behind the laws might not see the positive future.

About a month ago, I had read a very sad post about the death of a 13-year-old girl involving a pair of Virginia Tech students. There was almost nothing to take away from this read but sorrow, and my thoughts and ache go out to the parents.

But one line in that particular post caught my attention, where it claimed hundreds of Virginia Tech students became involved in the search, some using drones. That is a game changer, where hundreds of drones can converge on an area in a fraction of the time to produce a multi-dimensional search array. Add to that, social media and Amber alerting and you have the beginning of a very comprehensive and sophisticated search and recovery platform.

This got me thinking about what the future might look like. Will there be nanny drones to watch over kids at playgrounds as they leave the house on their way to school, soccer practice, dance recital or sleep overs? Will drones become deterrents if the sky is filled with eyes? Will people have embedded RFID tags so guard drones can track them? If you are interested in the financial aspect of this market, There are several top name companies exploring the use of drones and supporting drone technology.

We have all read articles suggesting the use of AED drones in cities to circumvent traffic jams and provide immediate assistance to the injured or disabled until a medical team can arrive on the scene. The concept below addresses this idea on a much larger scale.

But because we are binary organisms playing out an unbroken plot of what is right and wrong, I can’t help but think there will be an equal number of drones and drone technology used against us. It’s no wonder sci-fi writers continue to cast a dystopian future and why this genre continues to remain so popular. Are sci-fi writers indicators or thermostats of society? That, I have yet to figure out.

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”- George Orwell

I realize my own sci-fi writings are a bit dark, but with a light at the end of the tunnel.

R.I.P. Nicole Madison Lovell. You were loved and I hope one day a future drone search and recovery platform will be named after you. (NicoleNet)

The Future was and can be.

Posted on February 17, 2016 by dave

This was a two wheel Gyro car. A 1954 Ford Gyron, dreamed up by futurist Sydney Mead, who later went on to work with major studios on such films as: as Star Trek: The Motion Picture, followed by Blade Runner, Tron, 2010, Short Circuit, Aliens, Timecop, Johnny Mnemonic and Mission: Impossible III. (wiki)

I have said this often, but the 1950’s was a time of forward thinking, people looking out through the windshield instead of the rear view mirror.

So get out there and write, writer’s of Sci-Fi! Let’s lay off the dystopian past and get back to designing for the future…. But please don’t cancel the Walking Dead series…… LOL

Where Do Sci-Fi Writers Get Their Ideas? Part I

Posted on January 26, 2016 by dave

I was chill’n at one of my favorite places tucked away in Port Salerno, FL called the Grove Dock Bar & Cafe. In fact, this exact longitude and latitude was the inspiration for the sequel to my upcoming sci-fi (Silversides) and where Chapter one starts in the year 2026. This place is a BYOF (bring your own Food)… You provide the food, they provide the drinks. Kind of tells ya how local and tucked away it is.

A place where the view and ambiance normalizes the playing field for people of all social and economic circles– where at the end of the day we’re just people of the same planet all enjoying the same thing… a great conversation surrounded by simplest of things.

I had brought an artist friend here for the first time last year and he fell in love with it, although, he sat down right in front of the mermaid holding up the roof and when he looked up he laughed, then said, “Kind of intimidating.” He was 80 at the time but still managed to jump over the door into my ’62 Austin Healey Sprite when I picked him up. He scared the shit out of me, “Guy! Whoa… what are you doing? I can’t even do that.”

“I always wanted to do that,” he smiled. “Promise we can come back.” When this el Niño takes a break and it warms up in southern FL, I will fulfill that promise to Guy.

So what inspires me for a story line? I suppose the simplest of things. For Silversides, it was this bar. I came home one day and pounded out a complete chapter of what I thought it would be like here in 2026 with not a clue of what would follow. Five hundred pages later and 20 light years away, the first draft is done and editing is moving along nicely. For November Seed, it was a common reed called Phragmites that launches all their seeds during the first cold snap in November. A private holiday for me. Writing From Europa With Love, the inspiration was from a stunning image I saw on the internet of Jupiter’s moon Europa and a contest dare to write about it. Inspiration comes from anywhere and everywhere, you just need to look deep enough for it and not skim the surface. When I hear writers say, ‘don’t know what to write about’, that drives me crazy. I have five novels started with five more ideas waiting after that.

Here is a perfect example of something anyone can write about. Watch this fantastic mini-documentary and learn what inspired the creator. Then transport yourself to some remote outpost on a dust-blown rock of a moon where intra-stellar wars were fought and the moon was declared too dangerous for humans to colonize because of undocumented arsenals left behind. And your protagonist finds herself here, clearing a plot for she and her fusion powered robotic dog to spend the only remaining time she has left. In a place no one will come looking for her, and if they do, only she knows where all the nasty stuff lies.

Hard Science Fiction Writers – why is it more popular today?

Posted on December 15, 2015 by dave

I read a post on NPR about hard science fiction, which hinted why it migh be on the rise: No Warp Drives, No Transporters: Science Fiction Authors Get Real

The ecoBbiologist in me wanted to identify the root cause (which the article did not delve into), so I thought about it … for a day… then following the thread of a post from one of my G+ circles, I came across an image I had used in my own work, Silversides and then it hit me… why hard science fiction might be on the rise…

I think writers today, especially hard sci-fi writers, have such an advantage over the trail-blazers before us for the simple reason we have the internet at our fingertips for research; it does not make us better writers, just better equipped writers for hard science fiction. Instead of relying solely on our imagination,which I believe is why so much science fiction had been written about far off places, bordering on fantasy, all we new writers need to do is enter a search string and in a matter of minutes we become byte matter experts (not to be confused with a Subject Matter Experts or SME).

Carapace-mask Here is an example. In Silversides, my protagonist, Nori, is sitting on the edge of her berth, interacting with a hologram projected in front of her. To achieve this, she has a combination of an implanted optical plate and a carapace mesh mask with access to the ships A.I,. called CEIL (Correlation Engine and Intelligence Lab) to receive telemetry of various cubeSats orbiting the planet Dykazza. The carapace mesh mask provides Nori senses such as smell, temperature, hearing, etc. So what is a carapace mask and what do I know about such a thing? Click on the video below. Having something to see in practice makes the concepts we are writing about so plausible. Especially if the writing is available in eFormat where the reader can stop on a word or concept and can ask the question: Is that idea, real? Then with a tap of their finger, they can link to the source. So coupled with a new breed of writers and readers, real or hard science fiction is just a logical step…

Excerpt from Silversides – Chapter One

Posted on December 15, 2015 by dave

Chapter One – Arrival (Draft)

Silversides / David Nadas

Chapter One: Gliese 581 Solar System – 2132

Far below the rolling swell of the Monterey Bay where the endless trawl of current hooks along the ocean floor, a giant kelp began to lose its grip on the weakened shale; each surge tearing away the finger-like tendrils, each tear drawing in the Garibaldi that swam nearby. With a final tug the kelp ripped free, igniting a rush of orange through the kaleidoscope of sunlight; the Garibaldi snatching at limpets raining down through the cloud of trailing silt, their jaws no match for the limpet shells snapped in half.

Nori Matsui had been diving nearby hearing these sharp clicks radiating around her, a trigger that it was time to rise. She exhaled through her artificial gills she followed the stream of bubbles rising and crawling along the cave ceiling, ushering her out into the open water and toward the neon light from above. Nearing the surface her gills began to sputter, her breathing labored as if drawing air through a straw. Low oxygen and high carbon dioxide levels in her bloodstream appeared on her oculars, a dangerous mix where blacking would come without notice.

Kicking and clawing her upwards, she broke through to the surface and pulled the regulator from her mouth, gagging on its chase of tendrils that slipped greasily from her throat.

After thirty years aboard the starship, Hoshi Akari, Nori Matsui was the first of her crew to be awakened by a custom dream applet. She sat patiently until her breathing settled taking caution not to scratch her pupils with her carbon-tipped fingernails as she peeled away the paraffin covering her eyes. Unclothed and suspended above a bath of orange cryoGel she squinted against the starbursts of neon blue that lined her bay; beyond that was blackness.

The Correlation Engine and Intelligence Lab aboard the Hoshi Akari, known as CEIL, raised the ship’s lighting to a golden hue, simulating the lighting on Dykazza, where its red dwarf sun cast a permanent twilight over the surface.

Why we explore space

Posted on November 20, 2015 by dave

Watching a launch is a thing of beauty. It is an assault on our eyes, for there is no other color like it. It is an assault on our ears hearing the successive snare of explosions like someone is beating on our chest in time to our own heartbeat. And when that fireball rises up, carrying this monument of humanity with it, we cannot help but feel connected to every living organism on this planet. It’s what we do. It’s what we must do, and yes, it defies the logic of ignoring the mysteries of our own planet, in search of the mysteries beyond our reach, but watching one of these… up close, we realize we have no other choice but to do so.

Some Sci-Fi movie reviews

Posted on August 26, 2015 by dave

First, there are no spoilers here, so read on. I finally got around to watching some sci-fi flicks that were on my watch list.

The Frame: This could have been made into a series. I soaked up the characters, played by Tiffany Maulem & David Carranza and felt their every emotion. What a great twisted version of the Truman show. The music track to this film is by the hauntingly beautiful sounds of Jamin Winans.

Under the Skin: This is a Stanley Kubric Clockwork Orange with Aliens; a beautiful alien (Scarlett Johansson). Brilliant in minimal dialogue carried on the vertebrae of visual artistry. I Loved it.

Traveling Salesman: A thinking person’s sci-fi played by excellent actors: Danny Barkclay, Tyler Seiple, Eric Bloom, David John Cole & Marc Raymond. Discusses the P = NP equation. Slow moving, but conceptually riveting from the standpoint of contemplating the opening of Pandora’s Box. Might be hard to get through for most, but if you are writing a sci-fi about computer espionage, there are some essential theories here for you to get it right.

The Bothersome Man: An interesting, if not poignant view of heaven as a possible franchise—I never thought of it being that way, but why not.? We live and breathe in the franchises of our culture, so why can’t heaven be the same way? I’m not sure what to think about this one. If I were writing this, I would have taken a different path; however, something may have been lost in translation for me (Norwegian).