And Now A Fall Preview for Science Fiction Fans

First, a little catch-up.

I'm getting about dead tired of local stores -- most notably CVS -- which seem to have policies which will be denied by corporate headquarters but which are nonetheless ubiquitous and evident. These policies seem to be easily summarized as "by whatever means are necessary, drive out the white man, unless he's rich enough to sue and win". Of course, it's not just CVS. There are other places so bad that even CVS is attractive by comparison.

This is merely a specific symptom of other, larger, things going on, of course. I can't point to CVS as the focus of the infection, although that's a theory I am willing to entertain, and to which I have attempted to apply scientific method. The problem is such, however, that it's difficult to isolate the variables and thus one doesn't have a valid experiment. All one has is literally a pain in the neck.

In some shopping centers, almost any establishment has a rather open and hostile attitude. In some of those shopping centers, this is very easily attributable to American-Hating Foreign Racism. Specifically, this would cover the Aspen Manor Shopping Center, which aside from the Outback Steakhouse seems to seethe with attitude declaring "white folks, get the FUCK OUT".

There is no doubt in my mind that this particular shopping center would be an ideal site for demolition and conversion into upscale high-rises and "walkable development" although in my humble opinion that won't be sufficient unless you pave over the neighboring Harmony Hills subdivision. Well, the "locals" (hint, they are as opposite to "local" as you can get) are paving it over already.

First, it really bothers me that this shopping center provides "security" with a uniformed rent-a-cop who is only there for show. The real enforcement there is a foreign militia who not only have an enforcement arm, but evidently have an intelligence arm as well. Furthermore, there's evidence of cooperation between a variety of foreign militia, one of which is far more low-key and leaves most of the enforcement and business work to another foreign militia, one generally referred to as "gangsta". It's not certain that this latter group has any affiliation with gangs of transnational scope such as 18th Street or MS-13, or if it's just "homeboys defending Da Hood". Oddly enough, they let anyone shop there once, but if it looks like you're going to be a repeat customer, they go pretty far out of the way to provide an "unpleasant shopping experience".

When this was repeatedly reported in the mid-late-1990s to police, their official statement was "there are no gangs in Montgomery County". Well, almost 14 years later, the county government has admitted that there's a problem, but their response -- which should have been an extremely aggressive and utter crushing amounting to raw terrorism of the criminal element -- has instead consisted of throwing money at the problem, most notably in recent years by giving out free food to the younger relatives of the gangster families.

Of course, most of the neighborhood shopping centers aren't this aggressively anti-American or anti-white.

Yet even in the far end of the neighborhood, where the "rich folks" live and shop and have their own recreation center right there across from shopping, you walk into the CVS and it's just like being in Aspen Manor in terms of the blatant racism, only now it's combined with blatant classism. (Or maybe it's personal against me but I'd be paranoid if I seriously entertained that presumption.) And behind the counter? With the exception of one ol' white gal who has probably been behind the counter since it was a People's Drug, the rest of the staff appears to be the result of corporate policy declaring "we only hire tattooed gangsters who are full-blooded native-americans from Spanish-speaking nations, and their sisters too".

And so it seems that the Chavezista Militia has got a foothold here, now, too.

Some people might suggest that I'm flinging around stereotypes, but face it: when someone's got "born to bang" tattooed on one arm and "gangsta 4 life" tattooed on the other arm, the only person who wouldn't instantly think "gangsta" would be a freakin' Space Creature.

Which brings me to the main body of this post.

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It's no secret to the Astute Reader that I just plain love science fiction.

I should point out that while I also loved "Star Wars", I don't call that science fiction, I call it "space fantasy", of the sub-genre called "space opera". Science be damned, as long as the plot moves forward.

I really liked "Battlestar Galactica" too, both the original series and the more recent, and much more ominous and dark, dramatic resurrection by the former Sci-Fi Channel. Yet generally speaking, that was all about Drama, and little about science.

There's this little problem, you see, about faster-than-light travel. It simply isn't possible, as we understand the math.

Well, that's absolutely true, for certain values of "faster" and "light" and "faster than light". To clarify, you have to add a few words.

It is totally impossible to travel faster than light in this universe.

And this, of course, should make one ask, "and how about in other universes", though one might tend to dismiss that idea, either thinking that there are no other universes, or if there are other universes, we have no way to get there. More precise thinkers might suggest "if we had any way to get to other universes, if they are sufficiently different as to allow faster-than-light travel, they also have differences sufficient to preclude the existence of matter, or at least of our type of matter". And this also is likely correct.

Yet there are tantalizing clues that show that there may be other universes, and that we and they can and do intrude on each other.

If the Astute Reader feels like asking an actual physicist about this sort of thing, feel free, and I shall feel that I have done a Good Thing by making someone both actually think, and actually consult an actual expert. Even if it turns out that I'm totally wrong, at least I jarred someone out of complacency and made them wonder.

Schrödinger's kittens were first observed, so far as I know, about the same time that the Super Cold Labs of NIST in Boulder managed to freeze up a boson condensate. The same labs, as I recall, were playing around with super-cool plasmas and super-cool lasers and were trying to affect the spin states of a single lithium atom, and managed to nudge it into both possible electron spin states at the exact same time. For this, they got two instances one atom in two (admittedly nearby) locations. Shortly thereafter, one of the instances disappeared.

Some might argue that this was some sort of observation error, but it was reproducable. Some continue to argue that this is nothing but a repeatable observation error.

Some argue that this is a repeatable example of how you get from one universe to another. Some would respond to that statement, yeah, one lithium atom at a time, and speaking of lithium, I think you should take some.

The centerline of the debate, as best I have followed it, is that the experiment actually produced the long-sought "one true real 50/50 chance", pushing a lithium atom into a state from which it could go exactly one of two ways, and had an exactly even chance of doing both. And then it did... both.

Quantum physics has long had the interpretation that for every decision made at the quantum level, the universe splits, as it were, though this is imprecise. Actually, there probably is no single universe, nor collection of single universes. It's far more likely, and experiment may tend to show this, that there may be a sort of fog of universes, all drifting a bit apart and then drifting back together again.

Discussing the limits of speed of light, one finds that one is always discussing a so-called "paradox of information". The fastest means of transmitting information that we have, is light itself.

Some have suggested (and these are the people that others suggest medication might help) that the various particles and sub-particles and strings and suchlike all are in constant communication with each others, a sort of quantum entanglement on a transuniversally vast scale. Without that communication, particles (etc.) might not be able to "talk" to each other well enough to be in the right place at the right time, as orderly particles (etc.) are expected to do.

Under such a theory, if a physical object (which is really just a highly-organized and cohesive supergroup of packets of information) were to be instantly transported past the range that light could have transmitted information, the place it had left would suddenly be missing a voice, as it were, that hadn't told the surroundings that it was going someplace; and the new place (again, as it were) would be harangued by an unexpected voice speaking out of turn. This, it is generally believed, might be expected to result in Very Bad Things happening.

But what if you had a way to tell the folks at the other end, as it were, that you were coming, and a way (again, as it were) to tell folks that you had left? Without, as it were, actually being in either place... perhaps in another universe.

And, to put some icing on the cake for the folks who insist that the informational-paradox both precludes FTL ("faster than light") and if not precluded would violate global causality causing time and space themselves to implode, let me point out that there's no reason to believe that causality could be breached by instantaneously traveling from one place in one universe, to a place in another universe which if in the same universe would be separated by a distance for which the travel time would violate causality. The universes are divergent and thus do not share causality. Yet they could be so close to identical as to make them effectively indistinguishable.

And this would be why people get "lost in hyperspace" in the movies and TV shows and even some otherwise decent SF novels. You can go almost anywhere at all in almost no time, but how can you be sure that you made it back to the same place you left? If the universes are all so similar as to be effectively indistinguishable, does it actually matter? Wouldn't it be better to go off on a mission and come home to a spouse that's most likely not actually the same person, but only indistinguishably different, rather than to be frozen in hibernation while your NAFAL ("nearly as fast as light") ship crawls between the stars, while everyone behind you ages and dies, never to be seen again?

The Astute Reader may be wondering what exactly the gibbering fuck do I think I am going on about. And rightly so!

But I'll put it this way, so that you can understand: I will be a far better, and far better-informed, critic of the upcoming television season's science-ficiton offerings than just about anyone else around here.

And I am very much looking forward to the fall-midseason's premieres of the remake of the classic series, "V".

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Just keep something in mind, folks. Even if there's no possibility of FTL travel, it's been about 75 years since we first started nuclear testing, including detonating some high-altitude fusion devices that no doubt radiated a nice strong signature electromagnetic pulse out to the rest of the universe.

We also know for sure now, planets around stars are apparently far more the rule than the exception. Sure, all of the ones we've been able to discern have tended to be a bit freakishly large, but that's because of the methods we have to use to see anything at all. It may be that we've spotted only very strange systems until now, and those have been few and far between mostly because very strange systems are few and far between, and the vast majority are more "normal"... like ours.

So, where will our fictional Visitors come from? In the original series, they came from the unlikely (yet nearby) star system of Sirius.

Personally, I like to suggest that they might be from the second moon of the fourth planet orbiting the star that human astronomers call "Procyon B".

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