Why Things That Fly Are Cool

I blame my main life obsessions on John Glenn and the Beatles: things that fly and making music. The flying bit started first, in 1962. In February of that year, John Glenn became the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth. I was nine years old and for reasons I don’t fully understand, the whole space thing was immediately very exciting to me. I must have watched the launches on TV and seen the pictures in LIFE Magazine. I started reading everything I could about the astronauts and soon learned that they were first military jet pilots. So I decided that’s what I would be. I’m sure around a million other American kids decided the same thing. The Beatles and making music came a few years later.

I stuck with my Air Force Academy, jet pilot, test pilot, astronaut dream for around three years until it was shattered by myopia. I get that military pilots must have uncorrected 20/20 vision, and even though I was too nearsighted to fly for the Air Force, my interest in space and aviation continued. I decided I would be an aeronautical engineer. I read books and built dozens of model airplanes, and when I was around 12, I joined Civil Air Patrol (CAP). It was something like boy scouts sponsored by the Air Force, but even better – they had airplanes! Cadets could go on demonstration flights in a Piper Cub! They would even let you fly the plane! It was the best thing ever.

CAP faded in high school as I developed other interests (e.g., the Beatles) and my parents got tired of schlepping me to the airport. I still built model airplanes and loved everything about flying, and I still assumed I would study aeronautical engineering and get a private pilot’s license as soon as I could. Of course, “life happened” and I tried a few different majors, quit college for a while to try being a singer-songwriter, and ended up studying physics and optics instead of aerospace engineering. A lot of other stuff happened too of course, like a family and a career.  I eventually did get a private pilot’s license, but not until I was 48 years old. That was great, but for various reasons, I couldn’t fly as much as I had hoped I would.

Which finally brings me to PC flight simulators. I played with a few in the mid-90s, military ones that were fun but not very much like real flying. By 1999 when I started taking real flight lessons, PC flight simulators had improved enough to be useful for some aspects of flight training, e.g., practicing some specific tasks like VOR navigation. But they didn’t look or feel very much like a real airplane, and I only used sims for a few things like preparing for a cross-country flight.

For a couple of years, the flying bug seemed to fade, other than reading my monthly AOPA Pilot Magazine and listening in to the cockpit audio on my United Airlines flights. In 2005, I discovered the free space flight simulator Orbiter, which reawakened my interest in space and in flying, since some of the simulated spacecraft in Orbiter had wings, like the space shuttle. This “space phase” lasted for a few years. It launched this blog and led me to become a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, a volunteer educational outreach program for space and astronomy. I’m still a sucker for a rocket launch or landing, and I would go on a space flight in a heartbeat if I could manage it.

Flight Sim Renaissance

Throughout the 2000s, flight simulators continued to improve, but I didn’t pay any attention until sometime in 2020 when I heard that an amazing new version of Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS) would be released in August. I started reading articles and watching preview videos, thinking that it might be interesting to play with, since like many people, I was stuck at home due to the pandemic. Early in 2020, I had also started to get heavily involved in orchestral composition with sample libraries, so I decided I would wait a while before trying MSFS 2020. I was working with a composition coach and had started entering some competitions.

But by mid-September, the MSFS videos I was seeing were just too exciting. It was clear that MSFS 2020 was something entirely new and different, using modern cloud computing to model the entire world in incredible detail and with beautiful graphic quality. Not to mention airplanes! So I bought it, and within a month, I had upgraded to a new computer and monitor to run it better. My music took a back seat.

Why Is This Still Interesting?

Human dreams of flight started long before the Wright Brothers, and my personal dreams of flight started early in my life. Since I was also interested in travel and in foreign languages, I guess I hit the jackpot with the job I recently retired from, which would send me on international trips 6-8 times a year over many years. I spent a lot of time over the Atlantic and Pacific. And I spent some 120 hours at the controls of small airplanes (including flight instruction time) – a “low time” pilot for sure, but I’m grateful for the experiences and the memories.

With all that, you might think a flight simulator would pale in comparison. It’s definitely not the same as real flight but it still holds my interest for a few reasons:

• It exercises the same “muscle memory” as real flight – the simulation is accurate enough to follow similar flight procedures and see similar results, both good and bad.
• The simulated world and systems are accurate enough to allow for realistic flight planning, including “Live Weather” based on real-world data.
• If I choose to navigate visually (VFR) in a familiar area, my real-world knowledge applies directly, which is quite satisfying. So I can navigate by "IFR" (“I follow roads”).
• I never learned to use advanced GPS flight navigation systems that have become widespread in recent years, but now I have – and the simulated systems are very close to the real ones, which is fun to experience. So I can navigate by IFR (“instrument flight rules”).
• Using multiplayer features and communication software, I can fly and talk with other sim pilots from anywhere in the (real) world. On many group flights, I have toured national parks and various international destinations, adding some of them to my “must visit” list for future real travel. New Zealand is at the top of my list once it opens for international visitors. 
• I can learn what it’s like to fly airplanes I could never experience in real life, from a Stearman biplane to an F-14 Tomcat to a Boeing 787. Is it exactly the same? Of course not, but the better models highlight the critical flight characteristics and flight systems, rewarding you for handling them correctly, and "punishing" you for mistakes (RTFM to minimize this).
• The childhood model airplane builder in me appreciates that I can easily acquire a collection of visually stunning airplane models that I can also fly in the simulator, unlike the plastic models from years past (though I still have a few die cast models of favorite airplanes).
• As I mentioned in an earlier post, virtual travel is also a big attraction for me. It’s especially fun to fly around cities I know well from years of business travel, especially Tokyo, Paris, Seoul, and London. I like to recognize familiar sights and discover new ones I plan to visit.

Finally there is VR, a totally different way to experience simulated flight, where you feel like you are inside a cockpit and where clouds and buildings look 3D and startlingly real and massive mountains truly look massive.

The Joys of Virtual Travel

Is this thing on? This blog I mean. Since I haven’t written a post since 2018, I thought maybe the whole blog thing was over and nobody told me. We certainly seem to have passed the heyday of blogs if there ever was one. It was sort of cool back in 2005 when I was excited about Orbiter, a new space flight simulator I had discovered, and I decided to share my fascination with real and virtual space flight with anyone who cared to read those early posts. Cool to me anyway. I met a few other space bloggers and Orbiter fans and there was even a small online community of sorts for a while. Woo-hoo! If there are still any blog readers or old space blog colleagues around, welcome! Leave a comment! All my old posts seem to still be out there and we’ll soon see if this one joins them.

Of course, now it’s late 2021 and things have changed. You know what many of them are, but in addition, I retired from my job a few months ago, and between that and COVID, my travel has been sharply curtailed. But things have come full circle in a way. Last year I rediscovered an old interest, non-space flight simulators, and specifically Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (MSFS). I had played with various flight sims from 1994 to 2004, and between 1999 and 2004, I got my real private pilot’s license (2001). I didn’t fly as much as I hoped I would, but I feel lucky that I got to fly at all. For more information on that, please visit my other moribund blog, Flight SchoolRetrojournal.

When I say I didn’t fly much, I meant only as a pilot. As a passenger I flew constantly from 1983 until late 2019, just before COVID started. Hundreds of international business trips and a few cool vacations. I do miss that part of my working life, going places, seeing things, meeting people, doing things. It was great. In retirement, my wife and I plan to do some fun domestic and international travel once things settle down with COVID and a few other issues. Maybe next year.

In the meantime, MSFS allows me to experience some of the joys of flying and “virtual travel” from the comfort of my own office chair, with or without a VR headset. I’ll spare you the details you can learn from any number of websites or YouTube videos, but MSFS takes full advantage of the power of fast PC’s, graphical accelerators, and cloud computing to create a highly detailed simulation of the entire world, complete with “Live Weather” and stunning depictions of terrain, human-built structures, many different airplanes, and even other simulator pilots sharing the skies with you over the internet. It’s an amazing experience with a large high-res monitor, but even better with a modern virtual reality headset. I have the Hewlett-Packard Reverb G2 which works great with MSFS.

Where Have I Been?

I have spent some simulator time in a Cessna 152 flying around Central Massachusetts as I did in real life 15-22 years ago, and it’s fun to see how well Asobo has done recreating airports, towns, and terrain familiar to me (Asobo are the French makers of Microsoft’s current flight simulator). It is detailed enough to navigate “VFR” using familiar landmarks. You can usually even find your house! But with the whole world at my fingertips, and with a stable full of airplanes from ultralights to business jets to a Boeing 747, I’m not usually so close to home. When not flying a Beech Bonanza G36 or a tail-wheel XCub, I tend to favor an old Stearman biplane or the Aermacchi MB-339, an Italian-built jet trainer, both bought from third-party developers. 

Human and Robot Tour Guides

One thing I have enjoyed is a weekly group flight organized by Jules Altis, who happens to be an active private pilot as well as a simulator enthusiast. For months he focused on US National Parks of which there are many worth touring from the air. He would research the history and special features of each park and share those presentations and videos along with the flight plan for all of us to follow in the simulator and on Twitch or Discord. Olympia National Park, Washington, was my personal favorite. More recently he switched to a more informal format with international destinations like the Amalfi Coast of Italy, the Great Rift Valley of Africa, and the Tokaido Road in Japan. He makes use of a great free add-on developed by others called Bushtalk Radio which provides computer-narrated tours within the simulator of over twelve-thousand points of interest around the world. I’ve helped in small ways with Bushtalk Radio, especially with this brief trailer video that introduces it in the same synthetic “English lady” voice used for the actual tours (the music is mine).

Favorite Places

In addition to the “standards” like the Grand Canyon, Mount Fuji, and New York City, there are so many lesser-known mountains, lakes, cities, bridges, and dams, not to mention so many great airports. If you love airplanes you’ve got to love airports! Many of these sights are beautiful right out of the box, but there is also a facility for “add-ons,” both free and paid. In addition to an expanded air fleet (fancy a Spitfire or F-14 Tomcat?), you can find hundreds of airports with added details. Duxford Airfield, England is a current (free) favorite of mine. Scenery enhancements are also popular, many free, but many great commercial ones that are well worth a few dollars, like this improved version of Seoul, Korea which reminds me of my many visits there over the years.

I have created many videos which are usually short flights in some cool area I’ve discovered. I’ve experimented with adding my own music to a few, like this one of a Spitfire (White Cliffs of Dover, of course) or this flight around Tokyo. One of my favorite videos is this one (not mine) of many beauty spots, set to an instrumental version of “What a Wonderful World.”

This is already a long post so I will end here. I’ll probably write another one talking about what it is that makes the Microsoft Flight Simulator experience so engaging for me.

MSFS screenshots above, from the top (* add-on aircraft):

1. Stearman* over north Australia; 2. Dorand AR.1* (WWI) over Minnesota; 3. Stearman* passing through Tower Bridge, London; 4. Diamond DA-40NG over Sphinx Observatory, Jungfrau, Switzerland; 5. Cubcrafters XCub, Milford Sound, New Zealand; 6. Cessna 208 on a group flight in Iceland; 7. XCub on floats, Nahuel Huapi National Park, Argentina; 8. Beechcraft G36 near Lotte World Tower, Seoul, Korea; 9. Nieuport 17* (WWI) over Duxford Airfield, England; 10. Aermacchi MB-339* somewhere over Ireland

Here's a link to a shared Google Photos album with a few other screenshots from Microsoft Flight Simulator.

My Inner Space Child

Not very deep inside me is a still-space-obsessed Inner Child who thinks space flight is the coolest thing ever. As a kid in the sixties, I was super-excited to follow the Mercury and Gemini and Apollo missions as they happened, and I covered the walls of my bedroom with the space posters NASA would send me by the ton whenever I wrote to ask. Space was real then. Apollo 8 orbited the moon in 1968, and in that same White Album year, 2001: A Space Odyssey convinced me that space ships full of people would be tooling around the solar system before I was even 50 years old. I wanted to go!

Of course it didn’t quite pan out that way. The moon landings ended in 1972 and I never got to be a test pilot and an astronaut which was my plan since I was ten. We did have a cool space shuttle for a while, and astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) still circle the globe every 90 minutes. We’ve also sent a bunch of amazing robots to tool around the solar system on our behalf. This isn’t as exciting as the 2001 movie, but I like all of that stuff too.

Even though my obsession is usually turned down to a low simmer, every once in a while something will trigger my Inner Space Child and I will get super-excited again. Sometimes it’s a book, often by Kim Stanley Robinson. Sometimes it’s a movie like The Martian in 2015. But most often it’s something Elon Musk says or does. NASA is still doing lots of important work but it seems that SpaceX gets all the glory. That’s probably because of Elon Musk’s hyperactive Inner Child, and because Elon (yes, I call him Elon) has huge ambition, a huge fortune, and a huge ego, so he can say, “wouldn’t be cool if we could build a rocket that’s bigger than a football field that could fly dozens of people to Mars” and the SpaceX engineers will all say “I’m on it.” And they are. That’s the already-in-work “BFR” which stands for “Big Falcon Rocket” (sure it does). I’ve also seen it called BFS for Big Falcon Ship, and if it really happens as planned, it will certainly be the first true space SHIP, huge and fully re-usable. Elon says that “short test flights” will begin in 2019. That probably means 2020 or 2021, but still. They are seriously building a space ship to colonize Mars (it will do lots of other stuff too).

This week I got excited when I learned about a new SpaceX add-on for the Orbiter 2016 space flight simulator. Orbiter is a free space-flight simulator that runs on a PC. It has accurate physics and beautiful graphics and it is a Space Nerd Inner Child’s dream come true. I spent about a year obsessed with it when I first discovered it in 2005. I even wrote a book about it, Go Play In Space, which teaches you how to do just that.  I still fire up Orbiter on my PC every now and then, usually when I hear about some new features or some cool new add-on developed by someone in the Orbiter community.

The new add-on is a model of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that is set to start carrying astronauts for NASA in 2019 (an “add-on” is a user-developed set of 3D models and computer code that work within Orbiter to simulate a specific spacecraft). This one was the latest work of “BrianJ,” a talented add-on creator who has also made an add-on of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket needed to carry the Crew Dragon or other payloads into virtual orbit. In late 2017 another prolific add-on maker (“francisdrake”) created a model of the SpaceX BFR.

To capture the picture above, I created a scenario in Orbiter 2016 with the Crew Dragon docked to the “top” of the BFR in low Mars orbit (BFR's "wings" are actually solar panel arrays that deploy like Japanese fans). For scale, the SpaceX Crew Dragon with its “trunk” is about 27 feet or 8 meters long, taller than a two-story house. So you can see that the BFR is indeed a Big something Rocket. Search for "BFR size comparison" and you will find many illustrations of its incredible size. Also check out this speculative but suggestive cutaway diagram of the interior of the BFR's second stage (the part that will go to Mars). 

But Orbiter add-ons are more than just pictures or even 3D models. They are working models of the spacecraft, so they can be launched, flown to orbit (or to Mars), maneuvered, entered in the atmosphere, and landed. The Falcon 9 first stage and the BFR are “tail sitters” so they land with rockets blazing. I haven’t tried this yet with the BFR, but I have flown BrianJ’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy a few times (the built-in autopilot makes this rather easy). If you’d like to see it without bothering to install Orbiter, you can watch a video like this one. It's really amazing to see the first stage boosters turn around and fly themselves back to their landing pads. 

Is it weird to be so obsessed, still space-crazy after all these years? Maybe. But I prefer to think that I’m nurturing a sense of wonder that never quite left me. Or something like that. 

This picture shows BrianJ's SpaceX Crew Dragon orbiting the moon in Orbiter 2016.

What If Space Really Sucks?

I read an interesting essay on The Space Review by Dwayne Day, titled “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids,” quoting Bernie Taupin in Elton John's song “Rocketman.” That 2017 essay was inspired by the SF TV series The Expanse, which is now in its third season (I bought the first season and watched a couple of episodes on Amazon Video -- I liked it but never returned to it since it’s not my wife’s thing and I have so many other time sinks). He doesn’t talk too much about The Expanse except to describe it as “gritty” and to say that it depicts a settled solar system a few hundred years in the future, and guess what? There’s politics and war and crime and inequality and oppression of asteroid colonists by Earth and Mars people, and resentment of Earth by Martians who are struggling to make their planet livable, and not just a place defined by its independence of Earth. There are many other problems too, e.g., agriculture collapses on Ganymede because the engineered environment is not as robust as natural environments of Earth. This is something that Kim Stanley Robinson addresses in his colony-starship novel Aurora  which I read and wrote about back in 2015 and found really fascinating (as I do most of KSR's books).


I guess the bottom line is that people are people, and that moving to Mars or a space colony or anywhere is no magic bullet. If there are multiple people anywhere, there will be conflicting needs, priorities, goals, etc. that will need to be managed. Even if you build a seemingly robust, prosperous, and somewhat fair and democratic society like the United States, it won’t be prosperous and fair to all its people, and a scam artist like Donald Trump can come along and try to ruin it for everyone except himself and a few of his wealthy supporters and Russian friends. That’s our now. I don’t think Trump will ultimately succeed in ruining the American Experiment, but he might (or he might drag us into wars that will screw up everything for everyone).

To me, space is not a religion or a utopia or even a next frontier that is needed to inspire humanity to be better. I think it is a source of materials, energy, and yes, space for future populations to exploit, in ways that at least have the potential (in the very long run) to relieve pressure on Earth-bound ecosystems and societies. And for now at least, exploiting those resources will not displace or destroy anyone else as the Europeans did when they invaded the “New World.” I think the profit motive will play a key part in having a reason and the means to get more people in space, even if it’s not the only reason, with Elon Musk and SpaceX serving as Exhibit A for this approach. Having a long-run backup plan for humanity doesn’t seem crazy to me – as long as it isn’t coupled with the idea that we can just abandon this planet. Earth is really perfect for us, because we co-evolved with it. So as KSR and many others suggest, we have to make this planet work. That doesn’t preclude also using asteroids, the Moon, and other planets for their living space and resources. But we shouldn't expect them to be perfect societies or utopias. They will be imperfect, human creations, just like everything else humans have created (with the exception of Mozart's music). 

But I also think that AI is going to have a very big part to play in space and in every aspect of life going forward, which may be bad news for old fashioned flesh-and-blood humans like us. If engineered “mind children” are the ones that reach the planets first... well, I don’t know what I think about it. For sure they won’t need life support, just energy sources. And maybe they won’t need meat machines like their parents to slow them down. I hope they still like us and remember to send us a postcard now and then.

Hey O Way O

Do you remember the children's book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day? Just substitute "year" and that pretty much sums up 2017. I don't want to talk about it.

My readership (both of you) may have noticed that I haven't written a blog post since April 2017. Yeah, I have pretty much stopped blogging in favor of writing in my journal. I use an app called Day One, and if you have any interest in keeping a journal on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, I can heartily recommend it. I started in July 2014 and now, 1,266 days and 3,055 journal entries later, I'm still writing two or three entries a day. I guess I still like to write.

And I still like to make music, even when things are crappy. I've written maybe a dozen songs in 2017 and recorded a few with my friend and producer Roger Lavallee. Roger and I have been working on music together since 2002 and he is totally amazing as a guitarist, drum programmer, arranger, producer, and engineer. I decided to share our latest "nearly complete" song on SoundCloud today. It's part of a long-rumored 2015, oops, 2016, oops, 2017, oops, 2018 album project.

This song is a quirky sort of pep talk to a friend. Or something. It's called "Hey O Way O" because, why not? I say that a lot in the song. The lyrics are on the SoundCloud page if you're interested. This happens to be the first song we completed in Studio One 3 after using Cakewalk Sonar for many years (Roger is a ProTools guy but he adapts amazingly well to new recording software). The goal is to make music, whatever the tools, but Studio One (S1) has a clean and modern interface that really makes it easy to learn and use. I jumped ship when I heard that parent company Gibson is stopping development of Cakewalk products. A half-price Black Friday sale also helped ($200 for the Professional version). It's nice that most of the plugins I have for Sonar work with S1 too.

Let's all hope that 2018 will be a better year for all of us. Cheers!

Conscious AI as a Feature, Not a Bug

I really like the SF show Humans and its depiction of an alternate present-day UK where in addition to iPhones and super-fast internet service, humanoid “synths” have come into widespread use as servants, workers, caretakers, and companions. The basic premise is that while these robots are sufficiently human-like to engage in conversation and even sex (complete with body warmth and fluids, apparently), they are “just machines,” and people are not supposed to consider them as “persons,” though many certainly develop relationships with them, as humans do even with dogs and cats. And as with pets (and people), some humans will abuse their synths.

The big plot driver in this show (spoiler alert!) is that some of the synths have secretly been “upgraded” to possess consciousness and emotions, and when some far-fetched circumstances lead to this upgrade being pushed over the network to all synths, we have the makings of an uprising. That’s where they leave us hanging at the end of season 2, with thousands of synths “waking up” and abandoning their dreary posts as gardeners or whatever. There's a lot to swallow to really enjoy this show, but the writing and characters are good, and they manage to earn my suspension of disbelief most of the time. I'm looking forward to season 3 (I hope it's renewed). 

What always bothered me about the show is that despite their stilted speech and claims to not understand many “human things,” normal synths function at such a high level that it’s hard to imagine that they are not self-aware above and beyond whatever technical self-diagnostic systems they may have (so they can know when to recharge their batteries and recognize when another synth is not broadcasting as they apparently are supposed to do). Their ability to converse smoothly, navigate messy home and family environments, to even read human emotional states and anticipate needs, and to explain why they do things (when asked)… these suggest they are much more than “mere machines.” But would this mean they are “conscious?” What does that even mean?

This Nautilus article by a Japanese neuroscientist and AI researcher delves into this: “We Need Conscious Robots: How introspection and imagination make robots better” by Ryota Kanai.  He emphasizes that something like consciousness or at least self-awareness will be needed to allow AI systems to explain their “reasoning,” decisions, and actions to people, so people can feel more confident in and safer with these entities. But he suggests a more immediate need for such awareness – to allow for simple and common delays in their interactions with people and objects caused by distractions or other factors. Sometimes I forget why I walked down to the basement or that I put my coffee cup in the microwave, but most of the time, I “know what I’m doing” at least over a brief time period. This seemingly simple knowledge is connected to consciousness. As Kanai writes:

In fact, even our sensation of the present moment is a construct of the conscious mind. We see evidence for this in various experiments and case studies. Patients with agnosia who have damage to object-recognition parts of the visual cortex can’t name an object they see, but can grab it. If given an envelope, they know to orient their hand to insert it through a mail slot. But patients cannot perform the reaching task if experimenters introduce a time delay between showing the object and cuing the test subject to reach for it. Evidently, consciousness is related not to sophisticated information processing per se; as long as a stimulus immediately triggers an action, we don’t need consciousness. It comes into play when we need to maintain sensory information over a few seconds.

 He also talks about the need for some level of “desire” or curiosity in robots or other AI systems to avoid humans needing to spell out every detail of the simplest request. One aspect of this is “counterfactual information generation” (i.e., thinking about or modeling past or future situations, not only the here-and-now). Kanai writes, “We call it ‘counterfactual’ because it involves memory of the past or predictions for unexecuted future actions, as opposed to what is happening in the external world. And we call it ‘generation’ because it is not merely the processing of information, but an active process of hypothesis creation and testing.” He gives an example of one of their test AI agents learning to drive around a simulated landscape and deciding that climbing a hill would be a useful problem to solve in order to drive the most efficient route (without being taught or specifically asked to do this, as would normally be needed).

In the context of my home, this makes me think about how our aging dog Gracie would always like to go upstairs to sleep in our bedroom during the day, but we keep the gate closed at the bottom to limit her stair-climbing due to her arthritis. She will sometimes push open a loosely-closed door but has never tried to pull open the loosely-closed baby gate (if she learned this, we would just have to keep the gate latched). If we had a Humans-type “synth” and I wanted it to go upstairs and get me my wallet, it would have to know that if the gate or bedroom door were closed, or if something on the stairs were blocking access, it should open the gate or door or move the object. That could be some simple logic programming I suppose (if door closed, open it, unless it's locked, or something), but the more human-friendly approach would be to remember and “want to” complete the goal, independently solving any minor sub-problems along the way.

Kanai writes in conclusion: 

If we consider introspection and imagination as two of the ingredients of consciousness, perhaps even the main ones, it is inevitable that we eventually conjure up a conscious AI, because those functions are so clearly useful to any machine. We want our machines to explain how and why they do what they do. Building those machines will exercise our own imagination. It will be the ultimate test of the counterfactual power of consciousness.

This makes sense to me. If we are to interact comfortably with future robots or other AI systems, it will be helpful if they can maintain a "mental model" of our household, workplace, or other relevant environments, not so they can feel good or bad about themselves, or fall in love or whatever, but because these are things we unconsciously expect in social interactions. Simpler systems or apps, even voice-driven ones like Siri and Amazon's Alexa, can get by with being strictly transactional, to tell me the weather or play me some Talking Heads music as soon as I ask. But conversation and predictability will be a lot smoother if these systems have at least some level of self- and other-awareness and some ability to learn how things work around here. We can decide later whether this is the same as what we call "consciousness," but it is certainly like it in some ways. As AI systems improve, they will behave more and more like conscious entities, whether they are or not.

Then of course we can have that long-anticipated war between the humans and the machines. May the best entity win. But would you mind getting me my slippers first? 

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Nautilus is a great web-based science magazine that features essays by various writers, often touching on the societal aspects of science and technology. There's a theme for each month's issue to which the essays are at least loosely tied. This month it's consciousness.

Fermi Paradox Explained?

I’ve often thought that the whole “where are they?” question about SETI (i.e., the Fermi Paradox) is bogus, both because the universe is just so BIG, and because we still understand so little about it, even though we have learned in recent years that planets and even “Earth-like” planets seem to be quite common throughout the Galaxy. As smart as some of us may be, it seems likely that we are still as clueless about major chunks of physics as scientists in the 1800’s were about quantum mechanics and the scale of the universe. If there are wormholes or quantum foam or gravitational technologies we won't develop for another 200 years, there could be aliens popping in and out all the time, and we wouldn't even know what to look for. It would be like an airliner passing 37,000 feet above some remote tribe of people who have never encountered other humans or modern technology, as unlikely as that may be today.

Such advanced beings might find radio wave communication to be as quaint as rubbing sticks together as an energy technology. I’ve also read articles suggesting that we ourselves are probably approaching the end of our “radio age” due to fiber optics and other technologies. Though we still send out a lot of radio waves, they tend to be more directional (like radar, microwaves, etc.) or short range (cell phone towers, Wifi, Bluetooth, etc.). Maybe technical civilizations only use radio waves for a few years and any continued or specialized use eventually becomes very efficient with very little leakage to space.

Somehow I wandered over to Centauri Dreams, a blog that periodically blows my mind with advanced space exploration ideas. I found an article “CitizenSETI” about a couple of guys (Roger Guay and Scott Guerin) who decided to work out this Fermi thing. A key part is the lifetime of an IC (intelligent civilization), which really means the DETECTABLE lifetime. If that is very short (e.g., humans have been broadcasting for about 110 years and listening for only about 60 years), and if such civilizations are widely separated in time and space, you will have a big “synchronicity” problem – finding times and places where someone is broadcasting AND someone in range is listening.

Roger Guay created a simulation with LiveCode, a modernized version of my old, beloved HyperCard for the Mac (screen shot above). In his Advanced Civilization Detection (ACD) program, he can set various assumptions about the spacing, lifetime, and other factors and run this simulation at high speed. Under most reasonable assumptions it creates a sort of “firefly” effect with detectable IC’s flashing in and out of existence and only rarely being seen by other IC’s. If these assumptions and simulations are reasonable, IC’s could be plentiful and it might still take hundreds of years of observation to catch one of these “fireflies” before it flickers out.

I've been interested in this subject since I read Intelligent Life inthe Universe by Carl Sagan and Iosif Shlovsky back in 1974. This was a pretty early work on exobiology (or perhaps astrobiology), a field that still lacks data but provides an interesting framework for thinking about everything we know about ourselves. My guess is that unicellular life has probably evolved in many places but that the leaps to multicellular, intelligent, and technological stages are much rarer, though certainly possible (current sample size is N=1 if you give humanity the benefit of the doubt as an IC).

Based on this simulation work, we are not likely to expand that sample size anytime soon. Here is Roger Guay’s final paragraph on Centauri Dreams:

Conclusions? The ACD simulation dramatically demonstrates that there is indeed a synchronicity problem that automatically arises when ICs attempt to detect one another. And for reasonable (based on Earth’s specifications) Drake equation parameter selections, detection potentials are shown to be typically hundreds of years apart. In other words, we can expect to search for a few hundred years before finding another IC in our section of the galaxy. When you consider Occam’s razor, is not this synchronicity problem the most logical resolution to the Fermi Paradox?

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Of course this is hardly the last word on the subject of the Fermi Paradox. In fact, while reading the blog posts that triggered this one, I discovered a recently updated book that goes into much greater depth, If the Universe IsTeeming with Aliens … WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life (2015) by Stephen Webb. I've read the Kindle sample and I may have to buy it despite my insane backlog of books already waiting to be read. Author Stephen Webb also has an interesting blog. 

Orbiter: 2016 vs. 2010

As I wrote recently in this blog and in an article in The Space Review, Orbiter 2016 was released in September. This is the first major release of this freeware space flight simulator since Orbiter 2010, and as I mentioned, not all of the many third-party addons for the 2010 version are working in Orbiter 2016. If you are familiar with Orbiter, you know that it's quite easy to have multiple installations of the software on the same PC, so there is no need to replace the 2010 version with the 2016 version -- as long as you have the disk space, you can keep multiple copies of both versions installed in separate folders and just run the one that has the features and addons of interest at the moment. In the picture pairs below, the top screenshot is from Orbiter 2010, the bottom one is from Orbiter 2016. 

You should also know that although there are some user interface changes in the 2016 version, they are really quite minor, so even if you are new to Orbiter, you can install and use both the 2010 and 2016 versions quite easily. Some developers have already updated their addons for 2016, and others no doubt will when they have the time and inclination. But Orbiter 2010 is still readily available, so if you are interested in the Apollo program, the advanced Shuttle Fleet, the fictional spacecraft of 2001: A Space Odyssey (sample screenshot at the top of this post) or Colliers Magazine, and many other addons, there's no need to wait for 2016 versions to come along. Note that the final version of Orbiter 2010 is often called 2010-P1 (patch-1) or 100830 (August 30, 2010).

Here are some observations and tips for working with both Orbiter 2010 and the new Orbiter 2016:

1. The biggest user interface difference is that the "no-cockpit" full screen pilot view has a control bar that appears when you hover the mouse near top edge in the 2016 version. In the 2010 version, the F4 key will pop up a small menu bar with same controls (in the 2016 version, F4 will toggle the top edge menu between "on" and "auto-hide"). See "no-cockpit" comparison screenshots above. 

2. The biggest visible difference in the 2016 is in its support for highly detailed surface terrain data complete with elevations, so mountains and craters are true 3D objects. This makes for some incredible eye-candy especially when you are flying low over the terrain, but in most situations in Orbiter, you are orbiting (oddly enough) 200 km or more from the surface, and the flat 2010 terrain textures look just fine. 

3. In addition to the general high-res 3D surface data for all of Earth, the Moon, Mars, and some other bodies, Kennedy Space Center (cockpit view above) and the Edwards AFB/Mojave region (see shuttle final approach screenshot below) have been given super-detailed makeovers in Orbiter 2016. Again, this doesn't matter much if you are in orbit or cruising to the Moon or Mars, but it does add a lot to the realism before you launch or when you are landing at Edwards AFB. 

4. There is a thread on the Orbiter Forum that reports addons that are known to work in Orbiter 2016. There are quite a few and there are probably many others that have not been tested but may work. Orbiter Sound 4.0 works with Orbiter 2016 though there are a few minor glitches such as incorrect audio feedback for some actions (e.g., the G key for "landing gear" in the Deltaglider will deploy the gear but audio will say "radiator deployed"). 

5. Some popular addons that currently seem to work only in Orbiter 2010 include AMSO (Apollo program in great detail), Shuttle Fleet V4.8 (which is freaking amazing), and the excellent "World of 2001" and "World of Colliers" addons by "Sputnik." Note that even for 2010, some addons may only work with Orbiter's "native" graphics (not the D3D9 Orbiter_NG client which offers better graphics quality and frame rate). I'm not sure how to know this for sure, but if you find that your spacecraft are invisible in the D3D9 client, you should try the native graphics version. 

6. One addon I especially like is the videnie module for orbital path drawing by "artlav." It renders orbital paths for spacecraft, planets, and other bodies in exterior views (green, red, and purple lines around Earth in screenshot above from Orbiter 2010). This is super cool and very helpful in understanding orbital paths, but it only works in native graphics mode (not orbiter_ng) with Orbiter 2010.

7. If you have plenty of hard drive space available, a good general tip is to create two separate "clean" installation folders, one for Orbiter 2010-P1 and one for Orbiter 2016, including whatever terrain data you prefer, and perhaps with Orbiter Sound 4.0 installed. Make a copy of the clean installations and install any desired addons there. Note that Orbiter 2016 installations with full terrain data can be very large (I have one installation that is 58 GB). 

8. Orbiter Sound supports mp3 playback with control over when the music plays (e.g., exterior views only). But since modern versions of Windows support multi-source sound multiplexing, I tend to just stream music from Amazon or iTunes while running Orbiter. An album of Strauss waltzes is a particular favorite, especially with the World of 2001 addon.

Note: The screen shots here are from Orbiter 2010 and Orbiter 2016, without modification. You can find them and various others in full screen resolution in this Flickr album. 

Orbiter 2016 Is Here

Orbiter 2016 is the latest version of a space flight simulator I have been playing with on and off since 2005. And while I'm now old enough to be a grandfather, I find that Orbiter still brings out the "space kid" in me. The sixties were a great time to be a space- and aviation-obsessed kid, and I was a NASA fan from Mercury to Gemini to the Apollo moon flights and beyond. Aside from TV coverage, my only space resources back then were books from the library, plastic model kits, LIFE Magazine, and a huge trove of "NASA Facts" and other free publications I would write to Washington to request. Fortunately NASA had a pretty big public relations budget in the sixties and they were happy to send bulging envelopes of space info to a kid in upstate New York.

I never really lost my fascination with space and aviation, as I have often discussed in this blog (though not so much recently). Thanks to personal computers and the internet, there are now more space and aviation resources than ever. I spent a lot of time in the nineties playing with various flight simulators, and I got my real pilot's license in 2001, though I ended up not flying nearly as much as I had hoped, and I am not an active pilot now. Orbiter was a great find in 2005, because it allowed me to combine my interest and experience with flight simulators with my long dormant goal of being an astronaut, albeit only a virtual one. And Orbiter was free (it still is).

Orbiter even inspired me to write a book called Go Play In Space (free Orbiter tutorial ebook), and to volunteer as a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador to do some space and astronomy-related educational outreach programs, often using Orbiter in my presentations as a dynamic extension of PowerPoint slides and words. The years 2005 to 2010 were probably my "golden age" for space related study, play, conferences, and educational outreach, but shortly after the release of Orbiter 2010, my company was acquired, and my professional workload greatly increased. Side interests like Orbiter largely fell by the wayside.

Things are still busy at work, but I do again find time to pursue hobbies like music and space, and with the recent release of Orbiter 2016, I'm getting fired up again. The biggest visible change in the 2016 version is built-in support for detailed 3D terrain on planetary surfaces, with gigabytes of data available for the Earth, Moon, Mars, and some smaller bodies. This doesn't matter much visually from a 300 km orbit, but when you are down low, it makes a huge difference, especially for the Moon and Mars. Earth terrain is nice too -- though not as detailed as in Microsoft Flight Simulator, it covers the entire globe (clouds are modeled too). Orbiter is primarily a space flight simulator, and although atmospheric flight is modeled reasonably well, if you are mainly interested in flying airplanes and understanding realistic flight operations, a dedicated flight sim like MSFS or X-Plane is probably a better bet.

Orbiter 2016 includes some other updates, and thanks to user interface improvements and a wide range of community-produced video and other tutorial materials, it is easier to learn and use than earlier versions, though the learning curve is still pretty steep.

I will be writing more about Orbiter 2016 in the coming weeks. In the meantime, here are some possibly helpful links, including a collection of Orbiter 2016 screen shots I have placed on my Flickr site.

My review of Orbiter 2016, Kerbal Space Program, and Space Simulator (iOS app) on The Space Review

Orbiter 2016 Screen Shots on Flickr

Main Orbiter website with free download links

Orbit Hangar: Most Orbiter add-ons are hosted here for free download

Home page for the Orbiter Forum

Download my free ebook Go Play In Space here (PDF, 2006 version, Wiki version here)

David Courtney has a large number of Orbiter tutorial videos here

TexFilms has many Orbiter videos including tutorials here

Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest is a 1,079 page novel by the late David Foster Wallace (DFW). I haven't read it, but as I was updating some iPad apps and playing briefly with a synthesizer app called Magellan, the phrase popped into my head. The 1996 book is somewhat in the news because of a new movie "The End of the Tour," based on an interview with DFW by a Rolling Stone reporter played by Jesse Eisenberg. It sounds pretty dull but I guess it all depends. According to an article on how to fake having read Infinite Jest (because come on, who reads a 1000 page book?):

The Title: “Infinite jest” has three meanings in the context of the novel. It’s a Hamlet quote, the name of a fictional movie that’s impossible to stop watching, and a reference to our own culture of constant entertainment. [emphasis added]

I guess that's why "infinite jest" popped into my head. I was realizing that Magellan is possibly the most amazing musical instrument ever, and if I had had this one thing before the era of i-devices and the Internet, I might have spent weeks or months exploring and creating music with it. The sounds are beautiful and the flexibility is mind boggling.

But I've had this app for probably 2 years, and except for brief periods like this when I launch and play with it a while due to an app update, I hardly notice it. I have 143 apps on this iPad including at least 20 synthesizers (probably more since GarageBand has several synths built in). Every one of those synths is similarly worthy of hours or weeks of exploration and music creation. Yet I hardly notice them and have not written or recorded even a song fragment in months.

I can't blame my lack of creative output on "too many choices" but this does play a part. My journal does too. I'm not dying but sometimes it feels like I'm amusing myself to death with apps, Facebook, Flickr, Amazon Instant Video, Apple Music, and all the other trivial stuff vying for my attention.

In my personal hierarchy of worthy pursuits (outside of family and work), creating something is #1, especially if it's a completed song or recording (journal or blog writing gets partial credit). Learning something, usually by reading a book, is probably #2, and I still do spend a lot of my free time on that. But I wish I could figure out how to get past the fractal fragmentation of the culture of infinite jest. Usually a self-defined "special project" like making a new album does the trick, but I've defined several of these projects in the last year, and they too have succumbed to fragmentation. Maybe I need to lock myself in a room with nothing but a guitar. Would I have my iPhone too? It's a slippery slope.

Aurora: Generations Through the Void

Aurora is Kim Stanley Robinson's (KSR) new book, a science-fiction novel set about 400 years in the future. I really enjoyed it. The "Accelerando" (singularity) has occurred, and Earth has sent out a number of generation ships traveling at sub-lightspeed (0.1c) toward nearby stars with planetary systems. The story takes place on the Aurora, which is about 160 years into its journey and is nearing Tau Ceti. They are in their deceleration phase, using a continuous series of small hydrogen bomb explosions to slow them down so they can enter orbit around an Earth-like moon orbiting a "small Neptune" planet in the star's habitable zone. The ship has two large, rotating rings which each contain a set of twelve, 4 km long "biomes" that simulate specific environments on the earth, complete with weather, plants, animals, and human towns. There are around 2,100 6th-generation humans on board, and they apparently have their share of technical and social problems.

The story is largely narrated by Ship, a quantum computer-powered AI that operates all the systems on the Aurora. The lead engineer is a woman named Devi, and her adolescent daughter Freya is the main protagonist in the early part of the book. They are sixth and seventh generation descendents of the humans who boarded the ship 160 years earlier. At this time, Freya is going off on her coming-of-age "Wanderjahr" which provides a nice device for visiting and describing various parts of this huge ship. As usual in KSR space societies (and life), there are conflicts and rebels and troublemakers -- it is certainly no Utopia. But it makes for a lot of good storytelling.

Aurora is incrediby detailed, but thought provoking and engaging as KSR's books tend to be for me. It connects in some ways to his 2312 world, where there were human settlements on Mercury, Mars, the moons of Saturn, and in hollowed-out asteroids, but in many ways it's an anti-space, pro-environment book, which is consistent with some of the things I read in a recent interview with KSR. Human beings are animals which have co-evolved with all the other life forms within Earth's environment. It's quite a trick to build a spaceship or a space settlement where humans can live for a while, and an even cooler trick to build one that can function as a closed environment for 170+ years. But in the end, this environment and the environment of some "earthlike" planet are just poor imitations of where humans are meant to be, the Earth.

I say "meant to be" not in some philosophical destiny sense, but purely in an evolutionary and environmental sense, as KSR depicts in this book. Aurora is huge for a spaceship, and equipped with multiple "biomes" modeled on various Earth environments. Everything the designers could think of is there to form a closed life-support system, but they couldn't think of everything -- for example, they did not fully account for variable rates of evolution between large mammals and bacteria. They experience some of problems of island evolution with small populations. The cleverness and persistence of people like Devi and of the ship's AI allow them to overcome many of the problems for many years, all the way to Tau Ceti, where they encounter other problems.

MINOR SPOILER: Not all of the inhabitants of Aurora decide to settle in the Tau Ceti system. The trip back to Earth for a subset of the settlers (the "backers") turns into a struggle and a nightmare for these descendants of the original crew. Those people wanted to go, to be the pioneers, or at least the ancestors of the true pioneers. But they didn't fully realize what they would be inflicting on their children and great-great-grandchildren on the long voyage. Perhaps that is true whenever humans migrate from one place to a new place, but at least all such moves to date have taken place here on Earth where the environment is largely compatible with our bodies.

Although I'm more optimistic than KSR that we can eventually solve many of these problems, I still think that evolution and other things could make such small-population multi-generation ships very inhospitable, at least for some of the people. Unless there turn out to be things like wormholes or other shortcuts through deep space time, I think it's unlikely that humans will ever be taking interstellar voyages, at least not in our original biological bodies. If there are to be centuries-long voyages, I suspect they will be made by post-human beings in non-biological or perhaps hybrid bodies.

Future Physics

This is an interesting essay by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Frank Wilczek, “How Physics Will Change—and Change the World—in 100 Years.” A pretty big topic! Can you say anything definitive? Not really, but it reinforces something I have thought about sometimes, that we are nowhere near the finish line in understanding the universe. One hundred years ago, quantum physics and relativity had just arrived. At least now we know better how far things can be from what they seem. But we may still be closer to Jon Snow (“You know nothing!”) than to God. A few points from the essay…

Newtonian physics is a system outside time that describes how things change from some set of initial conditions. This is practical and helpful for lots of problem solving and engineering, but not fundamentally satisfying from a God's-eye view:

For the answer, “Things are what they are because they were what they were,” begs the question, “Why were things that way and not any other?”

Einstein 's space-time integration helps:

In the light of relativity theory, the God’s eye view seems, much more natural. There, we learn to consider space-time as an organic whole, whose different aspects are related by symmetries that are awkward to express when experience is carved into time-slices. Hermann Weyl expressed this memorably:

The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling along the lifeline of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.

He also foresees further integration of physics and information and life and mind:

In 100 years, biological memory, cognitive processing, motivation, and emotion will be understood at the molecular level. And if physics evolves to describe matter in terms of information, as we discussed earlier, a circle of ideas will have closed. Mind will have become more matter-like, and matter will have become more mind-like.

He also has a lot to say about technology, though in broad terms, such as vast expansion of computational chemistry (something I briefly worked on at a very primitive level in high school with my NSF Summer Science Program professor in Ohio, simple molecular orbital calculations). Better computers, quantum computers, robotic control of matter to build anything, AI, and even better human senses:

Human perception leaves a lot on the table. Consider, for example, color vision.

Whereas the electromagnetic signals arriving at our eyes contain a continuous range of frequencies, and also polarization, what we perceive as “color” is a crude hash encoding, where the power spectrum is lumped into three bins and polarization is ignored. Compared to our perception of sound, where we do a proper frequency analysis and can appreciate distinct tones within chords, it is impoverished. Also, we are insensitive to frequencies outside the visible range, including ultraviolet and infrared. Many other animals do finer sampling. There is valuable information about our natural environment—not to mention possibilities for data visualization and art—to be gained by expanding color perception.

Modern microelectronics offers attractive possibilities for accessing this information. By appropriate transformations, we can encode it in our existing channels in a sort of induced synesthesia. We will vastly expand the human sensorium, opening the doors of perception.

Now the LHC at CERN is coming back online with even higher energy than the levels that finally outed the Higgs Boson. Some mysteries may be solved and others created. Will advanced physics research lead to advanced technologies that make use of space-time and quanta as we see in SF books and movies like Interstellar? I don't know, but nearly every past breakthrough in physics has led to some new technology. I hope I can stick around long enough to see some of this crazy next chapter of the Adventures of the Human Neocortex.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/physics/in-100-years/