Lemon slice with seeds
A writer’s mind is always triggered by oddities both witnessed and overheard. The more sensory input you have from something the stronger your trigger will be. A strong trigger will sit there picking away at the back of your mind until you finally have to write it down. This post is the result of such a trigger.
Many months ago I went to visit my father and he had the television on while he went to the bathroom. No, he didn’t turn it on to go to the bathroom. There are only a handful of stations he likes and he just leaves it on one of them. Well, he also misplaces the remote which contributes to leaving the television on and tuned to one channel. I suspect that was the case when I visited that Sunday morning. Why? Because there was some religious show on and I have only seen him sit through one of those Sunday morning Holy Roller shows when the television was on and the remote wasn’t within arm’s reach of his recliner. He will wait to look for it until he needs to go to the bathroom . . . assuming there isn’t someone else in the room he can order to find the remote.
Of course, this meant I had to listen to this show while I waited for him to finish up in the bathroom. This must have been a show on one of those obscure “golden era” television stations he likes. This sermon started out bad and kept getting worse. Public speaking was not his forte`. Finally he walked out to the center of the stage where there were a few pieces of fruit with a slasher type butcher knife sitting on a standing height table. He continued muttering and nattering while he sliced open the lemon and dug a seed out with the knife. He had the camera come in close to view the seed and finally he got around to what triggered the writer’s mind.
Man cannot make a seed.
At that point he got onto a decent roll, at least for the minute or so my mind allowed my ears to provide input. The writer’s portion was chewing up all of the resources. You see, we used to have great futurist writers. They would boldly make predictions about life and technology based, sometimes loosely, on existing science. These futurist writings would inspire others to actually make such things. “Star Trek” gave us cell phones, the MRI and ion propulsion among many others. You can watch the documentary if you don’t believe me. The inventors of these technologies all say on camera they created the thing because they were inspired by “Star Trek.” We geeks are loyal to our founding fiction.
What has the seed got to do with this you ask? Futurists have basically lost their way. We don’t get inspirational writing which pushes the bounds of technology. If so, it is pushed only a couple of years. We don’t have the kind of futurist writing which really explores both society and technology with technology being based on actual science.
Right now it seems everyone is unwilling to go beyond the edge of “Star Trek.” Admittedly we don’t yet have the full diagnostics table/bed they had, but we aren’t far off. We already have AI which can detect heart disease and lung cancer more accurately than humans. We also have AI which can more accurately diagnose skin cancer just by looking at that spot you wondered about, but we haven’t yet fully replaced the doctor with a hologram.
Science fiction and futurist writers have long talked about either Earth being seeded by far away aliens as in “Mission to Mars.” It has also went the other way as in “Stargate SG-1” where an alien race scattered humans among the stars both for slaves and replacement bodies. The “Star Trek” world has long talked about food replicators as the only viable method of feeding long duration crewed flights. Some much loved shows, like “Firefly” kind of glossed over the whole terraforming topic, yet they periodically mention things like “terraforming event” and “terraforming not taking hold.”
Here’s the rub for both the science and the science fiction writers. Until we can replicate seeds from raw minerals and a power source, we cannot successfully branch out across the solar systems. We don’t have warp factor 5 nor are we anywhere close to developing it. This means it is a stasis ride in either direction. (No, we don’t actually have stasis yet, but they are close enough to it for a crewed Mars mission.) True, for the first trip we can take seeds from Earth, but, we cannot keep returning to Earth for more seed stock.
A trip to Mars is something of a long duration flight. If you wondered why there was much ado about an astronaut spending a year in the space station it is because we needed to know what would happen to a human body kept weightless for that long.
Oh, you forgot. Most of those great science fiction shows simply tell you the ship has artificial gravity and you buy it. If you didn’t buy it, the show would become massively expensive to shoot because it would all have to be done in-flight doing zero-G dives. We rather suck at artificial gravity now. Rotating hulls is the best we got.
So, you reading this post and wanting to write great science fiction, you need to read up on the science, poke it with a stick, and turn your writing mind loose on the problem.
Just how do you create a seed? Not just something which looks like a seed, but an actual seed. When you plant it in the proper soil in the proper client on this or any other planet, if cared for, it will bring forth an apple tree which will from that day forth produce apples with seeds.
You, dear reader, need to write the thing which inspires the geeks to do this thing before the great solar event wipes out all of the seed stock.
In short, you need to create the Johnny Appleseed of interstellar travel.
