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The Prequel to the Prequel’s Prequel

Hmmm, I think I got that title wrong. I wanted to write something catchy, but obviously language puzzles are not really my thing. In the case of Star Wars storytelling backwards in time, this triple 'prequels' looks fine, but again, if I put all the main Jedi characters of various ages in chronological order, i.e., something like this: Gella > Avar > Anakin > Luke > Rey, then it does look like I missed one more word 'prequel' in it. Or... well... if we consider Rey's story to be the only sequel to the first prequel's main story in this thread, which started with "A New Hope", the very first movie of the franchise that initiated it all... then I could be correct after all. Right? Oh, darn it, let it be... So, let's explore the latest prequel in the galaxy far, far away and long time ago, minus 150 years.


Minus 150 years means 150 solar cycles of Coruscant, the capital of the Republic, an entire planet evolved into one giant city before Phase I in the Star Wars canon, described in the books, started with "The High Republic: Light of the Jedi".  Phase II consists of two (adult) books, "The High Republic: Convergence" and "The High Republic: Cataclysm", and it is placed officially around the year 382 BBY (382 Coruscant years before the battle of Yavin within "A New Hope").

After finishing the books, I couldn't shake the same feeling I had after watching "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story". Due to the early history of VFX in creating the movies, the very first trilogy came, from this distance, not visually great and had a hard time conjuring the "wars" part from the title. Don't take me wrong; when I was young and saw "A New Hope" for the first time, I watched it with my mouth wide open almost the entire duration of the film. The second trilogy jumped into the trap of using too many visual effects, which, as a result, looked more like a fairy tale than anything else. The latest trilogy came to fix things a bit, but still, in my mind, only "Rogue One" rendered the war as it should be—as a brutal and believable one with tremendous action and a fabulous ending. In the world of the "Star Wars" books that belong to the same franchise canon, "The High Republic: Cataclysm" provided the same feeling as "Rogue One" once did. The latest book fully justified the entire "Star Wars" premise. There were moments during the reading that I couldn't believe that words alone were capable enough to portray the battle of such epic proportions using only the reader's imagination and nothing more.


Behind the pen of the latest novel was Lydia Kang, and compared to the prequel book and those three from Phase I, "Cataclysm" is perhaps the best of them all. Sure, Lydia's storytelling is perfect with lots of characters well described, but she was in luck—the story that ended the first phase of the High Republic era had it all: the already mentioned fast-paced action described in great detail, interesting and respectable villains, and multiple storylines from protagonists belonging to the "good guys" (or to the Light side of the Force, to be exact), including both the Jedi and people originating from the Republic forces and those from planets Eiram and E'ronoh, whose backstory is the backbone of the entire phase. If we add young(er) Yoda and Yaddle fully included in the story, the author really had an easy task to pack one of the most interesting Star Wars books to date.

Surely, the end is not concluded, and we are left with many loose ends on both sides (villains and heroes), but that was to be expected. As hinted in previous books, the Leveler (a Nameless species), with the ability to overwhelm force-sensitives and nullify their connection to the Force, is something I am sure we will encounter again in the future. The future of Star Wars canon, that is, as it is absent from the movies, and I guess their fate will be resolved in the void after phase 2 and the Battle of Yavin, or the time described with 0 BBY. 


To me, one of the most interesting facts after reading all five Star Wars adult books from the High Republic times and those I also read that don't belong to the canon or directly to the official franchise was the need to picture all the species from the galaxy far, far away. The history of watching movies helped a lot, but I definitely needed to do a little research to find out what all the species look like to allow my imagination to be as accurate as possible while reading.

The images I chose to illustrate the text of this blog story are not entirely accurate, as they belong to different Star Wars concept arts, but the High Republic stories are still very young, and we will have to wait for the future movies for more photographic details. I, for one, would definitely want to see at least one movie dedicated to these events in the upcoming years.
 

The War No One Wants

Before the start of the Great War, the prevailing sentiment in most, if not all, European countries was that victory in any major military conflict was guaranteed only if it was fought with a large, durable, well-trained, and modern army. The dawn of the 20th century established the environment in which countries entered the race to mobilize the largest part of the qualified population, to create faster motorized transport for troops and logistics, to use state-of-the-art communications and the greatest range of artillery, as well as to use various new drugs in medical treatments like morphine and even cocaine to boost the troops and fuel their fighting mood. Compared to 19th-century wars, new warfare was revolutionized and upped to the next level. By June 1914, the stage was set and only a spark was needed to fire off the conflict.

But was it really inevitable? Was the military race alone enough to cause the conflict in which 20 million died and many more were wounded? Or did it need a plot to be played in just a specific order that would lead to the unavoidable horror? Did it need at least one party to actually want the war to happen? To honestly believe that a war on that scale could be won?


When asked if the Great War could have been avoided, Ronald Spector, professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University, said that ’if Sir Edward Grey hadn't been the foreign secretary in Britain, then Britain might not have necessarily entered the conflict. Furthermore, if German Kaiser Wilhelm II hadn't been the flaky person he was, then the Germans may have made different decisions, and in the end, if Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who at the time was the head of the faction that wanted to avoid war, had not been killed, the outcome might have been different’. According to Professor Spector and many others, the real trigger for the First World War was indeed only a combination of these unfortunate coincidences that took place in the summer of 1914—military preparations, the alliances, the people in power—all of those steps that built one after another created the Great War.

In the aftermath, the war did happen, and to many, including me, the question was not who won it four years later but rather what stage it created in the following years. It ended the Austro-Hungarian empire, the German empire lost a lot of territory, and the Turkish empire ceased to exist. On the other end, new statehoods arose along with a new wave of nationalism, as many felt they hadn't achieved enough for their sacrifices and losses. History books at the end of the war never really recognized the winner or the loser. It officially ended in the Compiègne railway car on November 11, 1918, and the final document was signed as an armistice.


But what about today, a century and a change after the war that could have been avoided and the war that allegedly nobody wanted? Is there a new similar danger we could repeat again? The one that, according to Ken Follett, could also be one tragic accident, all things considered. Is there a war that no one wants today? The one that could leave a permanent mark on the surface of humanity. The one that will not be fought in trenches and the one that will truly be worldwide this time.

I think we all know the answer to that question. Yet, just like before, and even though nobody really wants it to happen, it could happen nevertheless. Just like before, it only needs a plot that, if set in motion, step by step, spark by spark, decision by decision, can lead to the point of no return. Are we today, on the first anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, already walking that path? We already have everything the Great War had before it started. Countries have already been in the arms race for a long time—the race for ultimate supremacy and world military dominance. Army budgets are filled up to the roof. More than 10,000 nuclear warheads of various kinds are already in military stockpiles for use by missiles, aircraft, ships, and submarines. We also have questionable leaders like before, even flaky ones like in Professor Spector's description. Let's just hope we will have better luck this time.


However, in light of today's story, let's get back to Ken Follett's fiction. I am really a big fan of his work, and his current thriller, "Never", is his vision of how the Great War could repeat today. In a chronological order of events that one by one led to the brink of a nuclear war, he amazingly described a fictional story that looks so real and so familiar. And so possible. He begins the book with a quote from a Chinese proverb, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain", and it amazingly describes the entire book premise. I couldn't agree more with Stephen King when he said that "Ken Follett can't write a bad book", and I could only add that "Never" is definitely more than a book. One of his best. One of those that keeps you thinking long after you finish it.

Refs:
https://gwtoday.gwu.edu/was-world-war-i-avoidable
https://thediplomat.com/2014/08/the-great-myth-world-war-i-was-no-accident/
 

Historical Fiction of the World War Two

The start of the second world war in the Balkans was known as the "April War", which lasted no more than 10 days in the operation called "Führer Directive No. 25". The swift conflict ended on April 14th in an armistice based on the unconditional surrender of Yugoslav military forces. My grandfather was a 22-year-old corporal in the former Yugoslav army when he was transferred to a war camp in Germany in mid-April 1941, along with 30,000 other surrendered soldiers. He spent the next four years in a Nazi military camp, leaving behind his young wife and 2-year-old son.

I am sure it was not easy for him to cope with the entire time of imprisonment and captivity, especially in the beginning, but considering all the horrors of the most cruel encampments of Nazi Germany, the unconditional surrender of the entire Yugoslav Army came with negotiated terms and an agreement of fair treatment of all the prisoners during captivity in various labor camps in the following years. Perhaps the main trauma for all the former soldiers came in the second part of 1945, after the fall of Hitler's Third Reich, when all of them, along with more than 7 million displaced people, ended up for several months in the chaos of the immediate postwar traumatic experience of trying to find their way home. After his return to Serbia under a completely new regime, life treated him pretty well, and the post-war time is perhaps best described with his own words: "Although I was not a member of the communist party, I think I was respected in society; I became a councilor of the municipality of Nis and a member of the council of the electronic industry. Above all, I was proud of my family and 50 years of marriage."


Doing hard labor in the fields and machine workshop helped him to pass through the war relatively undisturbed, and, if we exclude the short April war in the beginning, I am sure the bullet holes in the car he used to maintain were his only reminder of all the horrors of the war. He was pretty quiet about all that happened to him for years, until one of our family gatherings about thirty years ago when he opened his soul and told us most of what happened in those four years, and especially a couple of those last months in 1945 when he headed back home on foot. 

I only found two of his photos that appear to be from his imprisonment, and I was genuinely surprised that there were any at all. The one with the notebook is the most interesting, and knowing him is also not surprising. Who knows, maybe out there somewhere is still waiting to be found that very notebook, which possibly contains one extraordinary journal along with a couple of potentially untold stories he may have taken with him to the grave and not told to anyone.


Anyhow, what reminded me of my grandfather and inspired me to write all this was the latest Mark Sullivan novel, "The Last Green Valley", a historical fiction following a remarkable story of one displaced family and their unfortunate and, at the same time, amazing adventure from the last year of the Second World War. It really was one great novel with an astonishing feeling composing after each page turned. It simply left me speechless after the last one. 

While we are at historical fiction, I warmly recommend two more titles in the genre: Mark Sullivan's "Beneath a Scarlet Sky", with a similar heartbreaking story from the same period in northern Italy, and Ken Follett's "Hornet Flight", with war adventures based on real events in occupied Denmark.

In the Footsteps of Pino Lella:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UJfEaFiMK4
 

Serbian Vampires

It was a foggy day on April 6, back in the year 1725, when angry villagers of the rural hamlet of Kisiljevo, Serbia, opened the grave of their neighbor Petar Blagojević, who died eight days before. His death was followed by a spate of nine other sudden deaths and numerous claims by the victims of being throttled by Petar at night. When they cracked the casket open, features associated with vampires, just like they anticipated, were indeed present: the body was undecomposed, the hair and beard were grown, there was a mixture of new skin and nails along with old ones peeled away, and there was blood flowing out of his mouth.

The villagers were accompanied by an official of the Austrian administration (the Austrian Empire governed the area in the early 18th century) and a local priest. The entire case was documented and reported to the officials and covered by Die Wiener Zeitung, a Viennese newspaper, on July 21st. At the time, vampirism was fully embedded into Serbian folklore with numerous Slavic legends and the old village stories from centuries before, especially during harsh times of Turkish occupation. In the aftermath, with the consent of the authorities, they stabbed Petar's heart with a hawthorn and burned the body.


Petar's case was by no means an isolated phenomenon of vampirism in Serbia. Only one year later, in a different village, about one hundred kilometers to the south, a man called Arnaut Pavle came with an even more colorful story. He was a known rebel against the Ottoman Empire who had escaped to the village from the Turkish-controlled part of Serbia, where he had been plagued by a vampire, by his own claims. Allegedly, he had cured himself by eating soil from the vampire's grave and smearing himself with his blood.

Unfortunately, he died soon after during summer labor—he broke his neck in a fall from a hay wagon. In the following weeks, four people claimed to be plagued by him and died shortly after. Similarly to Petar, after the villagers opened his grave, they saw his body unchanged with the same vampire characteristics. The story said when they drove a stake through his heart, he released a frightful shriek as if he were alive. They cut off his head, burnt the whole body, and performed the same procedure with four victims as well to prevent them from becoming vampires as well.


The most respected Serbian philologist and linguist, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, one of the most important reformers of the modern Serbian language, did thorough inquiries of the old tales, and in his ethnographic research "Belief in things that do not exist", he mentioned vampires as dead people with devilish spirits who enter and revive them after 40 days if their souls are not accepted in the afterlife. The tales indeed contain instructions on how to deal with undecomposed bodies if found in graves, especially those swollen and reddened by what seemed to be human blood. In that illiterate era of the middle ages, when lots of legends and stories in fact survived merely in oral form and transferred from generation to generation only as bedtime stories and were never written down, there is no doubt that colorful fiction is always an inevitable part added to real historical events. More or less, even today, everything in life and death not fully understandable receives fictitious and mysterious additions, especially from religion and vivid human imagination.

Almost three centuries before, back then in the 18th century, little was known about what happens to the body after death. Postmortem purge fluid is one of them. In modern forensics, it is a natural byproduct of decomposition, a reddish blood-like fluid that may or may not exude from the oral and nasal passages after death. Burial in a physical environment (temperature, moisture, and soil properties) with a high deficiency in oxygen often results in slow microbial growth and therefore slow decomposition itself. The body condition is also a factor in the process, as is the nature of the microbial community itself. If we implement all the scientific and medical knowledge of today, it is much easier to separate fiction from what really happened in the Middle Ages. Today we even know a great deal about clinical vampirism, known as Renfield syndrome, which in psychiatric literature is defined as an obsession with drinking blood, and several medical publications are actively concerning themselves with clinical vampirism in scientific literature as well as in forensic psychiatry.


However, on the other side of the science, fiction had its own evolution in past centuries, and vampires received the great portion in written horror stories and movies as well. The word itself in the literature was derived in the early 18th century from the Serbian 'vampir' (Serbian Cyrillic: 'вампир') but it's usage in Serbian folklore is much older. Almost all the old cultures encountered vampirism in one way or another, especially in the old Slavic paganism. There were also beings known as 'lamia/empusa' in old Greek/Roman mythology, with shape-shifting blood-sucking vampiresses, 'baobhan sith' - a female blood-sucking fairy in old Scottish tales—and many others.

Horror fiction with vampires in the fore/background is not actually my top-notch genre, but from time to time some extraordinary work emerges among all the mediocrities, and 'Constantine's Crossing' by Dejan Stojiljković is just that. The novel is following a main character just before the end of the second world war in occupied Serbia. Almost all the action is in my own town, where I am living ever since my birth, and the main premise summarizes the Nazis in a search for the great secret of Constantine the Great, who was the best-known man ever born in this neighborhood in the late 3rd century AD. The author is also native to the town of Niš, known by the name of Naissus in Constantine's time. What is the best about the book is that Dejan Stojiljković is perfectly embedding the horror plot into real historical events and people, and perhaps the only downside of the novel is that it is too short for that many characters involved, but nevertheless it was by far the best horror novel I read in a while. The accompanying graphic novel is amazing as well, and I warmly recommend both. Below in the ref section, there are more stories related to Naissus, Constantine, and WW2 in this part that could help with understanding the background better.



Medical refs:
Serbia refs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire 
 

In the Footsteps of Pino Lella

It doesn't happen often that after reading a book, you can compare most of the places and some of the portrayed characters with real sites and buildings along with real protagonists from the historical story. Actually, this never happened to me before, and after I'd reached the last cover of 'Beneath a Scarlet Sky', a novel written by Mark Sullivan, published in 2017, I saw the rare opportunity of visiting the city where it all happened and where all the sites still stand today. Not much later, and after my entire family read the novel or at least got familiar with the story, we packed our backpacks and hit the road. In the aftermath, the result is this blog post along with an embedded video story as a documentary of the half-day walking tour of Milan in Italy, where everything happened more than 70 years ago. In the spirit of a fair warning, I advise you to read the book first before watching the video since it might spoil the reading for you or to wait for an upcoming series or movie with Tom Holland in the lead role.


The novel is based on the true story of an Italian teenager, Pino Lella, who lived in Milan during the second world war and, within the last two years until the very end of WW2, helped many Jewish people escape to Switzerland over the Alps and, in the final year, acted as a spy for freedom fighters while being a personal driver for General Hans Leyers, Adolf Hitler’s left hand in northern Italy. Pino survived all the horrors of the war and the Nazi occupation and deeply fell in love with Anna, a girl he met on the streets of Milan on the day of the first bombing of the city. He constantly dreamed about the future they would one day share.

This book tour would not be possible at all without fantastic Valeria Andreoli from BellaMilano, who guided us throughout Milan beautifully for almost five full hours! It was amazing to mix the real streets, all the buildings, the castle and the cathedral, hotels, the train station, and even the monumental cemetery with our vividly built images of all the places we already formed from the book and Mark Sullivan's amazing narrative.



Undoubtedly, spending three days in Milan for us provided lots of more opportunities for visiting the history back to the time all the way to Leonardo da Vinci. Around the year 1482, he moved to Milan to work for the duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, as an engineer, sculptor, painter, and architect. Until 1499, when Milan was invaded by the French, he left behind the 'Last Supper', a famous mural painting of Jesus and the twelve apostles; many paintings, including 'The Virgin of the Rocks', Milan's Narvigly, the system of navigable canals to ferry people and merchandise in and out of the city, 'Leonardo`s horse', an uncompleted equestrian sculpture; and many more.

We were especially interested in Leonardo's engineering projects and his machines, models, and sketches displayed in 'Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia—Leonardo da Vinci' and within a new exhibition dedicated to this amazing man called 'Leonardo3' stationed in 'Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II', another Milan landmark from the 19th century. This second video log of Viktor's shows a glimpse of what we managed to visit and learn.



(Un)expectedly, at the end of our first visit to this great city, we have left with much more footage from what we initially planned to make with Pino Lella's and Leonardo's stories. All these are now packed in this third video embedded above, and if you like to see more of Valeria and stories hidden behind Leonardo's paintings, especially the ones he did in the Sforza Castle, if you want to learn what you need to do if you are in search of a good luck charm during your first visit to the legendary 19th-century shopping mall, or if you are eager to check out one great Italian restaurant along with a couple of more places we managed to visit, this is the video definitely worth clicking on.

As for us, I am more than sure that Milan definitely didn't see us wandering its streets for the last time. The rest of Italy too.

The book references:
https://bellamilanotours.com/footsteps-pino-lella/
https://marksullivanbooks.com/

Beneath a Scarlet Sky:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32487617-beneath-a-scarlet-sky (en)
https://www.newtoncompton.com/libro/lultimo-eroe-sopravvissuto (it)
https://www.knjizare-vulkan.rs/istorijski-roman/44294-pod-grimiznim-nebom (srb)

Museums:
https://www.museoscienza.org/en
http://www.leonardo3.net/en/
 

Unthinkable Solutions of Fermi's Paradox

"At some point, the gluons will no longer be able to hold the quarks together, and the hadrons will decay. Which will mean the end of matter in this universe." - Albert Einstein 1

As it seems, in our universe, nothing is made to last. Eventually, everything gets old and dies or changes or decays into something else, and I am not referring to the life forms only but to all matter in the cosmos. For all we know, this might not be true within our own macroworld alone, but also deep below, the same goes for particles in the quantum realm as well. The fact is that everything in the universe has a tendency to achieve the lowest energy state and to finally rest within a stable system, even if that means going through various changes or decays. In the quantum world, this could be true for the Higgs field as well. According to Hawking, if it becomes metastable, the vacuum decay bubble will emerge and consume everything in order to eventually reach the lowest energy state possible. For Higgs field being everywhere in the universe, this would mean instantaneous collapse of the whole universe and it's own ultimate change into a new and ultimately alien environment with a completely new set of laws of physics in the aftermath that could not be as friendly to the living beings as they are today.


But relax, this is just a theory; it might be wrong; nothing like it happened in previous 13.8 billion years (or did it?) and the quote from the beginning is not really formulated by the famous physicist. Well, fictitious Einstein did say it in Phillip P. Peterson's 'Paradox', a remarkable piece of science fiction driven by this scientific premise, but still, it might be something he would say if he were still alive today.

'Paradox' is a relatively new novel series, so I am not going to spoil the content, but to really understand how vacuum decay relates to the well-known Fermi's paradox or to better understand aliens' actions towards Earth and other star systems throughout the universe, I'd warmly recommend the read. As a science fiction fan for years and decades, I could only say that I didn't stumble to the better science fiction in relation to concepts such as Dyson spheres, quantum mechanics, fusion engines, antimatter propulsion, warp drives, the creation of the Big Bang and inflationary space, virtual reality of enormous proportions, wormholes, travel, and communication... The list is going on, and I can only speculate what is inside the third book that has just been released (unfortunately, due to my illiteracy in German, I'll have to wait for the summer and its scheduled translation in English). Anyway, this was one of the rare book series with a sequel even more interesting than the first book, with perfectly connected endings in both of them.


The idea of vacuum decay behind Peterson novels for the solution of Fermi's paradox is indeed new in scientific background, but surely there is more logic we can think of and apply to the absence of aliens, and the idea, more than half a century old, is getting renewed attention in recent years. What I am referring to is the simulation theory and/or holographic principle. It is triggered by the very research of black holes and the information paradox, which states that physical information can be lost and swallowed by black holes despite quantum mechanics postulate that nothing, including information, can ever be lost, only transferred from one form to another. One of the solutions for the paradox I discussed a while ago with the question in the post title 'Are We Holograms?' answered Fermi's paradox perfectly.

However, to get back to science fiction, on several occasions in the past, I mentioned "The Thirteenth Floor", the movie that portrays so far the best story about a simulation of everything in existence. I don't know why, but I never read the backstory about this great film, and especially for this post, I went to check where the script came from in the first place and discovered that it was loosely based on the book called "Simulacron-3", written by Daniel F. Galouye way back in 1964. Needless to say, I downloaded the copy and liked it very, very much. Considering the year and the fact that it was written at the dawn of digital computers, the details and sophistication of the story were amazing. In relation to Fermi's paradox, if we are indeed living in a simulated world created by aliens themselves and we are all nothing more than just a bunch of artificial intelligence characters in the game, then the absence of other intelligent forms becomes clear. Or we will meet them when they become programmed and inserted in the simulation. Anytime now.


Next in line of the fictitious solution for Fermi's paradox on the first glance is not something that much unthinkable. But if we reason about communications over long distances in space, calling the ET and/or receiving a message from aliens from deep space is not as easy as we might think. By using our current technology, that is. The most obvious is the SETI project, which was founded half a century ago based on only monitoring electromagnetic radiation in search of ET broadcasts. After that, many years of looking for the signal from the above failed to find anything so far.

The most interesting and one of the first works of science fiction in this realm was Carl Sagan's 'Contact', in which aliens managed to receive the Earth's earliest TV broadcast 25 light years away, decoded it, and sent it back into SETI's antennas. Unfortunately, even though this looks much more plausible than vacuum decay or giant simulation, it really is not. Engineering and the science behind it are cruel. To broadcast anything at all in the electromagnetic spectrum, the signal must be focused and powerful enough to reach the destination without dissipation of the signal, to avoid the data being embedded in too much noise on the way, or to experience path loss while spreading out over long distances. Our EM broadcasts from Earth are meant for Earth only (or for the Moon on occasion or two in the past), and they are not powerful enough to reach even the closest stars without serious signal loss. To get weak transmissions like that, aliens around Vega might need solar system-wide antennas to detect UHF broadcasts from us. The same goes for SETI on Earth; it is unlikely we will ever get anything that is not narrow, focused, and aimed directly toward us. Nevertheless, ''Contact' will always stay on my physical and digital shelves for being one of the best science fiction films in the history of the genre.


At least for this post, the last and final obstacle with life forms swarming the vast space throughout the universe(s) is ... life itself and its potential limitations. Organic life based on carbon or something else exotic to us could be fragile and short in general. One small asteroid strikes the planet in the Goldilocks zone, and poof... everything dies and resets. Billions of years of evolution go into oblivion in a cosmic second. Even if major extinction events miraculously avoid the intelligent species, they might be destined to destroy themselves at the end of the path. Even more unthinkable scenarios we are still not aware of yet can pop into the equation. One of the obstacles could be that life could exist only in networked scenarios, or, to be precise, it could only work and evolve, more or less, in the form of a giant hive mind in relation to the mother planet. If that's true, there could be a limit in distance for a small number of individuals to leave their world, where they would ultimately lose connection to the hive and die. We never sent anyone or anything to live beyond moon orbit, so if this is true, the border of life could be anywhere beyond that.

I am not sure that Arthur C. Clarke had this in mind when he wrote 'Rendezvous with Rama' back then in 1973. Probably not. However, it was not far from common sense that in this unthinkable scenario, in order to sail toward the stars, the only way that could be done is to build enormous spaceships and giant cities that could carry everybody on the one-way journey. There are countless hazards for that kind of travel, and something along the way might happen to the people who originally populated Rama in the beginning. If we add to the story ultimate laws of physics and issues with limited speed of travel, vast distances between stars, and sparse sources when it comes to little things like food and fuel, 'the hive mind' problem could be another perfect solution to the paradox to consider.


But let's stop here with imagining all potential reasons why we still haven't met ET. If I would like only to spice it up with more unthinkable reasons, it would not be that hard. Just think about the "Zoo Hypothesis", in which we are created and observed by aliens in their science fair experiment, or the theory that we are the first intelligent civilization to emerge so far, or that there is 'The Great Filter' that limits intelligent life species from reaching the potential to dive into stars.

In the end, we could all be wrong. Evolution of species throughout the universe might not be headed toward stars at all. Perhaps we have to reset our minds and look elsewhere, no matter how strange it sounds.

1 Quote by Albert Einstein character from Phillip P. Peterson's Paradox novel series

 Novels:
http://raumvektor.de/paradox/
https://www.amazon.com/Contact-Carl-Sagan-ebook/
https://www.amazon.com/Rendezvous-Rama-Arthur-C-Clarke

Image refs:
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/heres-how-universe-could-destroy-itself-horror-vacuum-decay
http://lcart3.narod.ru/image/fantasy/jim_burns/jim_burns_cylindrical_sea.jpg
http://starkovtattoo.spb.ru/titanfall-wallpapers

Refs:
http://www.bidstrup.com/seti.htm
https://briankoberlein.com/2015/02/19/e-t-phone-home/
https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000984.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_F._Galouye
https://medium.com/o-s/6-mind-bending-solutions-to-the-fermi-paradox
 

Fiction and Reality of Mount Olympus

I was very young when I visited Olympus for the first time. It happened during our early vacation in the region back then, in the eighties of the previous century. I vividly remember there was a dangerous dirt road with not much room for two vehicles to pass by, ending near one of the mounting homes with an embedded small tavern, which can really print on its portfolio that was built on the top of gods' heavenly entrances. For some fairly strange reasons, Coca-Cola and souvlaki on the tavern's terrace felt really tasty, just as the pure and clean water from the water stream just next to it. Unfortunately, and despite all of my efforts, I couldn't see or find anything divine, out-of-worldly items, or even a glowing, shiny rock. There were no gods whatsoever. Or naked muses. Or beasts with snakes instead of hair. Or horses with wings. Or mighty heroes. Nothing. Well, I was only 10 years old. What did I know... Maybe that pair of hawks we saw flying around the highest rock across the tavern and screeching in high tones were actually Apollo and Artemis arguing about something.

On the other end, it might be that I visited Olympus during the gods' withdrawal. Way too early...


But, before I continue with the actual glimpse into modern Olympus fiction and short reviews of one hilarious book and one extraordinary comic, I think I need to write a word or two about the photo I embedded above, which might be interesting to read. This is in fact the Mount Olympus (just like the highest peak shown from the air in the post header). The most famous mountain in the entire world. The mighty one. It is not the highest of them all—just slightly lower than 3K meters and not even the highest in the entire Balkans—but it was the one chosen by gods to build their own abode during the ancient times. Sitting just next to the Aegean Sea, it is the first sight you see when you travel from Thessaloniki to Athens in modern-day Greece. I took this image in 2010 from the beach in the sea resort of Leptokarya, described by Wikipedia as "the former seat of East Olympos municipality, which is part of the municipality of Dio-Olympos". During my countless visits to northern Greece in the past several decades, and all of them during summer holidays, believe it or not, all of my Olympus photographs ended with a similar heavy stream of clouds above mountain peaks. It is like Olympus is always hidden in clouds by some weird meteorological reasons. Well, that was not entirely true, as I have seen Olympus naked on an occasion or two, but still, it was not often. It's like Olympus is attracting the clouds and capturing them to stay and hide its peaks.

This summer, almost forty years after my first excursion to the famous mountain, we took the perfect opportunity to board a tourist bus and venture their Olympian route, following new paved roads carrying people to the multiple resorts within the mountain base and visiting Olympus' main attractions. At least to the point where the road limits heavy buses from proceeding. The tour included the town of Litochoro, the famous Bath of Zeus, Agios Dionysios Monastery, and Old Panteleimon, a picturesque mountainous village on the slopes of the mountain. Surely seeing the sites with your own eyes has no alternative, and the next best thing is to check a couple of those travel guides and stories you can stumble on online, but as far as this post is concerned, I will leave it to my son Viktor to tell you all about it in his channel's video log we both filmed this August. If you find it pleasing, you know the YouTuber's drill - please like and subscribe... ;-)



The mountain definitely contains a beautiful charm of its own, but we all know that Olympus is best known for its part in Greek mythology, and with all its ancient fiction, it has inspired writers all over the world ever since. With some of them, the thin line between fiction and nonfiction is not really visible at once, but in the case of Michael G. Munz's amazing novel called 'Zeus Is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure' one would say it is all about fiction and laugh-out-loud (LOL) moments. The gods in this comedy returned from their withdrawal after more than two thousand years with all of their entourage and got back to the active and mutual life with mortals. And they returned with a twist.

What is most interesting about the old Greek gods, compared to all of the modern religions of today, is that their godhood was not that estranged from their creation like it is now the case with all of those Jerusalem monotheistic beliefs. Greek gods loved to mingle with mortals. And by mingle, you know what I mean, which is especially true with Zeus (probably Dionysis too). In fact, within the opening chapters of the novel, Apollo defined it best when he said that "Gods are just like mortals, only... better." And that means with everything that we can use to describe ordinary people, including conspiracies, hatred, intelligence, stupidity, love, sex, affairs,... It's like the Greek gods possess everything good and bad we mortals experience on a daily basis; only theirs is enhanced and powered off the charts. And of course, they could change appearances into hawks... and do other magical stuff. So, by establishing that, we can safely say that all the gods in "Zeus Is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure" are more than just divine creatures. They are active characters in the story, and along with amazing Michael's narrative, which is playing with the reader on numerous occasions, it is something that gives this book, at least for me, the originality I have never experienced before. The humor is everywhere, especially in the narrative, which on many points requires a fair amount of the reader's geekery and knowledge of ancient mythology. I'll stop here with no further spoiler and only my warm recommendation.


As for the other media dealing with Olympian myths, there are numerous movies, among them "Clash of the Titans" and "Wrath of the Titans", with Perseus played by Sam Worthington and Liam Neeson as Zeus. They were not that bad movies at all, despite all my reservations, and best of all, the script of the second movie offers the answer to the ultimate question of how and why gods from Olympus ended their presence on Earth. Of course, Henry Cavill as Theseus in "Immortals" was also one of the visually great movies, with heavy usage of old Greek myths and Olympian gods in main roles.

On the other hand, the world of graphic novels never disappoints, and Rick Riordan's novels with Percy Jackson adventures recently, after debuts with two motion pictures, transferred into extraordinarily enjoyable comics. The world of demigods in so far two graphic books looks very nice and, I have to admit, much more appealing than in movies. Perhaps because reading comics was my first love from early childhood and/or maybe because these two books were my first comics reading with the Kindle way of presenting graphic novels, but nevertheless, if you are into Olympian myths and love great fiction that emerged from old tales, my recommendation for Riordan's "Heroes of Olympus" series with "The Lost Hero" and "The Son of Neptune" goes without saying.



zViktor22 YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH2BtavSrxaRyvOJS5JZaHQ

Zeus Is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure
http://michaelgmunz.com/books/zeus/

The Lost Hero: The Graphic Novel
http://rickriordan.com/book/the-lost-hero-the-graphic-novel/
 

Space Humor

It happened long ago, in the dark ages of CRT monitors, when I first received a short forum message with :-) at the end. I stared at the message for a long minute(s) before giving up on decoding its meaning. It came from a well-respected friend of mine, so I responded with a short reply:

"What!?"

"You have to turn your screen 90 degrees clockwise." The answer came promptly.

My CRT was large and heavy, and it looked way too dangerous to tilt it that way, so after a little brainstorming of the problem, I concluded there's a better way of achieving the same goal.

I tilted my head 90 degrees anticlockwise.

"Aaaaaah!!!" I said promptly, and after realizing the picture, the big smile on my face slowly morphed into loud laughter. So I typed back:

"Wow!"

I didn't have to wait long for the next message:

"LOL!"

"What!?" I quickly copy/pasted my earlier message but realized I was too uninformed about new internet fashion, so I canceled the message and opened a new Netscape window instead, called www.altavista.com, and 'googled' new internet words. Ever since then, LOL has been at the top of my list of favorite acronyms. Along with all those cute ASCII faces. ;-)


In my case, and probably with many people as well, laughter is one of those most powerful cures for everything. The almighty vaccine for all diseases. Especially boredom and poor moodiness. LOL moments somehow come naturally with live social occasions and in movies, but in books they have one extra dimension. I really can't explain why that is. Perhaps funny moments in the written world often come unexpectedly and are more genuine. Take, for instance, Andy Weir's "The Martian." The hilarious parts in the book were genuinely funnier than in the film. At least with me... Well, nevermind that. So, to get to the chase, last month I read three extraordinarily funny books in the realm of science fiction and space exploration. So here they are in this short review, sorted by the count of LOL moments I had during reading. In descending order, of course.

The first one was "Where the Hell is Tesla?" by Rob Dircks. I stumbled on this one by accident, and boy, I am glad I did. Nikola Tesla is one of my favorite men in the history of people, science, and engineering, and here in Serbia, especially during my childhood, Tesla was idealized and always portrayed in a too serious manner. Anyhow, when I saw the title with Tesla playing the major role in the comedy story, I couldn't resist, and I didn't regret a single penny. It was by far the funniest book I read in a while. It had it all: decent science fiction based on cutting-edge scientific theories of the multiverse, the romance and friendship within different storylines, cute aliens, sci-fi battles of enormous proportions, great style of writing, Nikola Tesla in the most entertaining meaning of the word, and of course... Chip. I am not going to spoil the reading for you, but I will tell you this. On one occasion, I almost dropped my Kindle on the hard floor because of one of the strongest LOL moments. Enough said.


The second is "Jazz of Artemis." In the context of today's post, this is how I would name the book if I were Andy Weir. Of course, his new book is not a comedy per se. But it is not "The Martian" as well. However, in the realm of the funny moments, it is a decent sequel. Way better and much funnier. Jazz is... let me find the right word... an extraordinary girl on multiple levels. I enjoyed her adventures fully, and I do hope for the real sequel this time. I mean, with Jazz around, what can go wrong on the Moon? I really hope there will be a movie after this one as well, but not solely because of the entertainment part and all the LOL moments, especially with that Svoboda guy and his ability to manufacture various devices that do or do not belong to ESA blueprints and worksheets.

But seriously, what Andy Weir did with creating a fully functional city on the moon with both working technology and society organization is amazing and also extraordinary. It definitely deserves the motion pictures, and I am sure filming the movie that takes the entire story and action on the moon is another challenge. I am sure Ridley Scott is buzzing his mind with this as we speak.


Finally, and to use the cliché, last but not least comes the good old British humor. Something I grew up with was all the great TV shows like "Monty Python" and "Only Fools and Horses" or short comedy sketches and skits by Dave Allen, Benny Hill, Rowan Atkinson, and others. But in the flashlight of the parody novels, the throne is still with Douglas Adams and his "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". This was the first book I experienced LOL moments with, way before the LOL acronym was ever invented. "The Worst Man on Mars" by Mark Roman and Corben Duke was probably the most similar novel I read in a long while.

This is also a parody, but not really as much as its famous predecessor. This book follows plausible science fiction and doesn't go into wild imagination, like the restaurant at the end of the universe or "42". I really did like many technological backgrounds inside, like artificial intelligence or a space elevator, for example. But the humor with this one comes first, and the robots in their sitcom on Mars are something I do recommend warmly.

:-)

Refs:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25053578-where-the-hell-is-tesla
http://www.andyweirauthor.com/books/artemis-hc
https://www.amazon.com/Worst-Man-Mars-Mark-Roman/dp/1536930970
http://www.milanzivic.com/2013/06/dave-allen.html
https://www.space.com/38725-artemis-andy-weir-author-interview.html
 

Gravis Gravity by Gravitons

Don't take this title too seriously. It's wrong on multiple levels. Grammatically and scientifically. Nonetheless, it fits perfectly for this post. As for grammar amiss, I used the Latin root word 'Gravis' which means heavy, and it is actually the perfect adjective for gravity as we perceive it here on Earth. As for the scientific issue, the rest of the title might be all wrong. If we glimpse into the features of the three main natural forces of the universe, it is obvious that they work in more or less the same fashion—they use carriers or elementary particles to mediate the force through the force field. Photon is one of them, and it carries electromagnetism, while strong and weak forces in the nucleus, respectively, are mediated by gluons and w/z bosons and they are all confirmed in experiments. Gravitons are supposed to be the same thing as gravitation force, but they are never found and confirmed either directly or consequently. Ever since Einstein, we have had second thoughts about whether or not gravity is acting as a 'normal' force at all or if it is something entirely different.


Think about this: you are located in the spacecraft far in the space outside of the big, heavy planets and stars and truly experience microgravity. You start the engine, and your fancy spaceboat starts accelerating with about 10 m/s, and each second increases the speed with 10 m/s more. Actually, the right number is 9.806 m/s per second, which is the measurable 1 g force of the planet Earth. In our thought experiment, a spacecraft that works in a fashion that always uses constant acceleration and half the journey from, i.e., Earth to Mars, pushes with 1 g and the other half turns around and uses backthrust with the same 1 g, could not only provide a normal human environment inside the craft, but it would be very fast and reach the red planet in just three days*. If you can't imagine how this would be working in real space travel, I will only state the name of one fictional spaceship from the sci-fi literature. Its name is Rocinante**, and it is one great piece of interplanetary Corvette from the amazing franchise "The Expanse".

Well, science fiction aside, the point here is that gravity and acceleration seem to be one thing. The obvious conclusion in this chain of thoughts is that Earth and Rocinante are both capable of creating gravity of one steady g. At least it looks the same from the observer's point of view. However, we know for sure that Earth is round and rotates, and no matter where you are standing, it will pull you toward its center without accelerating anything. Its just enormously big and does something to the very fabric of spacetime itself, which is actually pulling you by invoking some mechanism we don't understand yet. Perhaps by using gravitons—our friendly force carriers from the title? Actually, both particle and string theories predict gravitons as real things. In the former case, it is a massless boson with spin-2, while in one of the string theories, it is sort of a closed string with a low-energy vibrational state. I will not go into further scientific details in both theories, but it is evident that a massless particle or low-energy string is very hard to observe as it either never or extremely rarely interacts with other particles on sub-atomic levels. Let's compare it with neutrinos for a moment—an elementary particle with no charge and the tiniest mass we can detect. Their underground large super-awesome detectors, like the Super-Kamiokande Neutrino Detector in Japan, detect only a handful of neutrino interactions with regular matter over a big amount of time. For example, when light from Big Kaboom from supernova SN1987A reached the Earth, Kamiokande detected the sum of only 19 neutrinos from this super explosion. And to use Carl Sagan terminology, there were billions and billions of neutrinos only from that event. Detection of a single graviton, even if we consider some theories that suggest gravitons with non-zero mass, would be extremely hard.


Ever since Einstein's general theory of relativity, scientists are struggling to find the best description for gravity. If we are looking at it as a fourth natural fundamental force, compared to the other three, it is the weakest by far; for example, gravity is about 36 orders of magnitude weaker than electromagnetic force, and it probably has a trivial influence on subatomic particles. However, it is cumulative, always attractive, and therefore plays the major role in the macroscopic realm, making it possible for planets to orbit their stars, and it is behind recently experimentally confirmed gravitational waves by the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) experiment. Einstein himself noticed first the difference in behavior of four fundamental forces and spoke of gravity as not a 'normal' force per se but more as a fictitious (or apparent) force that is observed only as a consequence of the curvature of spacetime caused by the presence of large masses or energy throughout the universe. A very nice example of one apparent force is the Coriolis force, or Coriolis effect. It is observed as a force, but in reality it is just an apparent deflection of an object that is moving in the spherical system, such as Earth, that rotates. Deflection is caused by the fact that the rotating speed of the Earth is faster for a moving object located near the Equator than for one near the pole. In simple words, the system you are moving in is also in its own motion that must be included when you want to calculate the actual path of yours; otherwise, you will never reach your intended target. And in the universe, everything is in motion. Gravity could be just that—an apparent force that is caused by the interaction of large moving masses with the fabric of the universe itself that might be in its own motion as well. Or perhaps gravity could be the outcome of the interactions of mass with the potential energy of that fabric itself. In science fiction and also in the quantum science realm, this is known as zero-point energy, quantum vacuum zero-point energy, or simply vacuum energy. If I understand this correctly, by applying Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (we can only know the position or velocity of a moving particle, but never both), every quantum system to sustain this principle must have minimum non-zero energy. In the case of a vacuum, this is the minimum energy of all fields in the universe, including the necessary Higgs field needed to provide the existence of every mass everywhere in the cosmos in the first place.

In the conclusion of the scientific part of this post, I am hoping that whether the future will confirm gravitons and 'pronounce' gravity as a real fundamental force or we finally find how big masses influence the tiny quantum world of the universe's fundamental ingredients, in the end we will have our answers, which might bring more challenges and questions for future generations. Maybe even ways of mastering it with applying some ingeniously clever engineering of future gravity-related devices and tools. It would definitely be one major breakthrough and one of seven futuristic wonders I already tried to describe in post Global Changemakers. Of course, how exactly the world would be changed with full understanding of gravity and gravity-based appliances; perhaps the best vision is in the science fiction of the amazing futuristic thriller "Influx" written by Daniel Suarez.


I am always eagerly acquiring novels with gravity premises in the background if the plot teaser is interesting enough, so I bought 'Influx' a while ago and stored it in my Kindle's queue for future reading. I was a little busy with my work and reading a couple of other novels, but now I have this regret of why I didn't read it sooner. It was really amazing! Just exactly comprehensive and entertaining I was hoping for when I saw the book cover in the first place. The science behind the gravity mirror or deflector invention in the book is perfect, and just in the realm of Scifi plausibility I am always looking for. It was explained perfectly well in both the science behind the invention and also in the workflow of all engineering vehicles, armor, satellites, and other appliances that were built on it. If you add to the main 'gravity' twist all 'regular' scifi inventions such as AIs, robots, cold fusion, quantum computers, futuristic weapons, immortality, and other non-scifi thriller stuff, please believe me that my additional regret after reading this book was that it had only 500+ pages. I wouldn't mind if Daniel added more stories to it and created a sequel. I read somewhere that FOX is interested in the movie, and hopefully this will see the daylight in the end. It perfectly fits for a motion picture, not just because of the science and story but also because of the potential artistic and visual aspect of gravitational falls in all directions that was extraordinary.

Image refs:
https://www.artstation.com/artist/deningart
http://www.thethoughtarchitects.com/2014/04/14/detecting-neutrinos-neil-degrasse-tyson/
http://www.thedaemon.com/

In-text refs:
* http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/08/30/flying-to-mars-in-three-days/
** http://expanse.wikia.com/wiki/Rocinante

Refs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/01/08/national/science-health/japans-super-k
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/coriolis_effect.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2mec3vgeaI
 

Chasing Ghosts of the Universe

You probably heard that matter is pretty much an empty space. It's true. Everything is made of tiny particles with nuclei in their centers and clouds of electrons orbiting around. If we take hydrogen (H), for example, the smallest atom with just one proton in the nucleus orbiting by just one electron, and if we scale the proton to be the basketball size, the orbit of the electron in diameter would be something about 15 km. Both the nucleus and electrons are electromagnetically charged, keeping everything in stable equilibrium, and also inside the nucleus, two more fundamental forces—strong and weak nuclear interactions—are keeping all the matter and energy in line. However, the smallest atom in the universe is not the smallest, standalone system we know of. According to the standard model, all atoms and complex molecules found in nature or artificially produced are made of fundamental particles. Something we cannot cut into smaller pieces. Electron is one of them. But there are more. So far, as far as we know, if we count all of those basic particles inside protons or neutrons and those that represents force carriers in addition to the "god" particle that makes all the mass possible, there are exactly 17 of them. But one of them deserves its own story to tell. It's nickname is "the ghost particle," and it is literally capable of passing through any mountain like it is made of cheese.


You probably guessed, this will be a short story about neutrinos, the most elusive particles in the universe we can play with. They are products of radioactive beta decay in heavy nuclei where proton or neutron decays into other sub-atomic particles, i.e., if proton decays in a process known as 'beta plus decay', it transforms into a neutron, a positron, and a neutrino. In the moment of its creation, even if it happens in the center of the sun, it escapes the entire star immediately. There are many different beta decay types, and I mentioned just one; others help as classified neutrinos. Just like with other fundamental particles that come in three flavors—with charged leptons (electron, muon, tau), the up-type quarks (up, charm, top), and the down-type quarks (down, strange, bottom), neutrinos can also be different in mass and property. The one created in the previous example with the creation of positrons is called an electron neutrino, but if anti-tau or anti-muons are created in the process, neutrinos that emerge on the other side of the decay will be tau or muon-neutrinos, respectively. Neutrino, no matter which type it is, belongs to leptons as well. This means it is not affected by strong nuclear force at all, and it only interacts with weak nuclear force, and because it is a particle with mass, it also follows gravity as well. To simply illustrate its ghostly manner, I will just note that its tiny mass is about 4 millionths of the electron mass (and electron mass is 1837 times less heavy than the entire mass of hydrogen). Furthermore, it is not electromagnetically charged and therefore not affected by this fundamental force as well. In other words, if you like to watch horror movies or believe in ghosts, the obvious conclusion is that they are made of neutrinos. That would perfectly explain how ghosts travel through walls and doors just like Patrick Swayze did in the movie "Ghost" a couple of decades ago.

Well, kidding aside, and thankfully for these neutrino's features, they are really one ghostly particle that is extremely hard to either control or detect. However, this phantom behavior of theirs immediately triggers some extraordinary ideas. If we could embed messages into neutrinos and control the path of their beam, we might literally send them through anything. If some neutrino-based portable device is possible to be built and you are located, for example, in Buenos Aries, Argentina, and you want to send a message to Beijing, China, you would have to point your neutrino device slightly toward the center of the Earth*, and neutrinos would reach the receiver with speed of light all the way through the planet. But before we glimpse into the obvious possibility of whether or not it is possible to use neutrinos in some sort of communication, let's check some more facts about them.


Basically, neutrinos, strictly speaking, belong to the radiation realm. They are indeed carriers of radioactive energy. The same as alpha and beta particles, gamma rays, muon radiations, and tons of other types of particles floating around the universe as a result of different types of particle decays or some other processes in the universe. Actually, we are living in a soup of radioactive energy on a daily basis from various sources, as pretty much everything in the universe is decaying or decomposing toward the ultimate fate of the universe, which will in the end be just one giant soup of basic ingredients, if the ever-lasting expansion of the universe is the correct theory, that is. Therefore, the choice between usage of paper and plastic bags has nothing green in the potential answer. Either way, both bags will eventually decompose. Just give them enough time. Humans are also radioactive; we also emit radioactive particles thanks to the radioactive food we are consuming. Technically speaking, all food is radioactive because all organic food contains carbon-14, or radiocarbon, as it is nicknamed. Many other radioactive elements can be found in other products, and the most notable one is potassium-40. This one is actually a radioactive isotope that undergoes all three types of beta decay. In one of them it emits neutrinos as well. So, if you like eating bananas, rest assured that you are one of the neutrino producers, as well as bananas are very rich in potassium. Believe it or not, large container shipments full of bananas at ports or airports regularly trigger radiation alarms. Well, if you have not eaten the entire container full of bananas, you are safe. Radiation from a couple of bananas is harmless, way below the edge, and potassium is actually very good for you, and if you emit a neutrino here and there, nobody will notice. Believe me. Well, on second thought, don't believe me. Even though neutrinos are very hard to detect, there is still, after all, a way to do it.

Neutrinos are tiny particles, but few of them, on rare occasions, still collide with the atom nucleus of the material they are passing through. And by few, I mean the literal meaning of the word. The Sun is producing an extremely large number of neutrinos—60 billion per square centimeter are passing through Earth and... us each second. That is maybe around 100 trillions of neutrinos passing average humans. To detect that few, several extremely large detectors are created, and one of them is shown in the above image: Super-Kamiokande under Mount Ikeno in Japan. It utilizes Cherenkov radiation, optically equivalent to a sonic boom, to detect collisions. If neutrino collides with the electron or nuclei of water, neutrino only changes direction, but the particle that was struck recoils in sudden motion and faster than the speed of light in water (which is slower than the maximum speed of light in a vacuum). This creates a flash of light, which is amplified with photo detectors (those round bulbs all over the water pool). This flash provides information on the direction and type of the neutrino. SK is located in the old zinc mine 1 km below the surface in order to exclude all other radiation to reach the water and ensure that only neutrinos are detected. To illustrate the small number of neutrinos detected with this approach, state the fact that the total number of collisions detected from supernova SN1987A in Kamiokande was only 19 out of trillions of neutrinos emitted by the supernova. A small amount of neutrinos are regularly detected from the Sun, and their number is way smaller than predicted by the number of estimated nuclear reactions in the star, which provides proof that neutrinos are able to change their flavor during their travel, and as it seems, especially during their travel through solid matter. Different numbers of solar neutrinos are detected during the night as they pass a long way through the solid matter of the entire planet Earth, while on daylight they need to penetrate only those 1000 meters to reach the mine chamber.


Poor detection of neutrinos due to their weekly interaction with matter is only the start of bad news regarding the potential communication device we are trying to build. More difficulties follow. For example, artificial production of desirable types of neutrinos is either with nuclear reactions or in particle accelerators, which are either too large or too dangerous to build. Encoded information in beamed neutrinos can also be lost with their oscillation between flavors during travel. Creating desirable beams and paths is still not perfect, and last but not least, there is too much noise on the way as billions and billions of other neutrinos are also there, either created in stars, supernovas, or those created in the very beginning during the big bang. Even so, scientists with powerful proton accelerators developed a procedure to develop stable beams of neutrinos or anti-neutrinos**, which are then directed toward near and/or distant detectors. Two experiments emerged with potential scientific value: in the first, a neutrino beam at Fermilab was sent with a short, encoded message through 240 meters of rock toward the MINERvA neutrino detector, and the word "neutrino", which was binary encoded within the beam sequence, was successfully decoded. The second and most challenging one was performed in Japan. Within the "T2K experiment", both neutrino and anti-neutrino beams are created in the J-PARC laboratory and sent toward 295 km distant Super-Kamiokande. Both are successfully detected and, in return, opened the first working neutrino beamline on large distances.

So in both theory and practice, neutrino communication might be possible, and current experiments confirm it with working proof of concepts made in large neutrino observatories and accelerators. Actually, it resembles the state of computers as they were some half a century ago, when they were large and limited in mathematical computation and built with bulky vacuum tubes. With the invention of semi-conductors and transistors, everything changed, and the result is pretty much in front of you, either on your desk, lap, or palm. Perhaps a similar breakthrough is waiting to be invented so we could equip our smartphones of the future with neutrino messaging when we would be finally able to send texts to Mars from our living room without enormous satellite dishes. Who knows, maybe the search for extraterrestrials would gain a completely new angle, and perhaps many of those neutrinos that are passing through our bodies right now could be complex messages from E.T., and neutrino communication in the future might be our ticket into the Milky Way alien internet. Universe's WiFi. So to speak.


Speaking about E.T. and science fiction in general, this neutrino story reminded me about two more things I love to share in conclusion for this post. The first one is John Cramer, experimental and theoretical physicist and professor at the Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle. Some seven or eight years ago, Cramer intended to perform an experiment with two quantum entangled laser beams pointed in different directions. He was trying to prove that by fiddling with one beam that was sent into a circuitous detour miles away through optical cable, it would be detectable on the second beam that was ended in a detector much earlier in a different location. Detection of this form of laser beam fiddling would be an indication that quantum entanglement is a phenomenon not only between spatially distant particles but also distant in time. When asked what he expects in the outcome, John Cramer, being a science fiction author as well, said: "If this experiment we're doing works, then I will follow up and push it as hard as possible. And if it doesn't work, I will write a science-fiction novel where it does work. It's a win-win situation."

The second thing, and in the recent tradition of MPJ and its "books" thread, what partially hinted at this post is the great novel "Signal", written by Patrick Lee, with the entire plot triggered by the neutrino-based portable device capable of catching radio waves from the future by harvesting neutrinos that move against the direction of time. The device is able to hook into radio stations 10 hours ahead. Just try to imagine all the implications and applications of this kind of fictitious device. If you can't, I am encouraging you to grab Patrick's novel and read it. I literally swallowed it and, during reading, eagerly waited for another chapter. I really can't emphasize what is better, the thriller plot, scifi, or the intense writing. I will say no more.

Image refs:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-neutrino-detectors-look-so-cool
http://irfu.cea.fr/Sphn/Phocea/Vie_des_labos/Ast/
http://www.patrickleefiction.com/
http://www.nuclear-power.net/nuclear-power/fundamental-particles/antineutrino/
http://particleadventure.org/neutrinos.html

In text refs:
* http://www.antipodesmap.com/
** http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/november-2012/how-to-make-a-neutrino-beam

Refs:
http://physics.info/standard/practice.shtml
http://chemistry.about.com/od/foodcookingchemistry/tp/Radioactive-Foods.htm
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/life-is-rad
http://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/03/2.html
https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/neutrinos/neutrino-types/
http://timeblimp.com/?page_id=1033
http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2007/07/17/4350992-backward-research-goes-forward
http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/cramer.html