It's not every day that a warship shows up at your (figurative) doorstep. Last weekend saw HMCS Ville de Québec, a Halifax-class frigate of the Canadian Navy, stop at the foot of Yonge Street in Toronto as part of a Great Lakes tour to buff naval volunteerism. If you only see vessels like this in pictures, it's easy to be unprepared for how massive they are. Today's frigate would be a cruiser a couple of generations back, with the effective firepower of a battleship for as long as it's got Harpoons in the tubes.I wrote a novel set aboard one of these ships once. Maybe eventually it'll see the light of day.
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The greatest dangers, I think, are those that sneak in through the back door when you're not looking, and move so slowly that you can't really see them at all until they strike. Climate change, for example, may turn out to be one of these; the scientific community has been talking about the danger for decades, but it's only been in the last few years that the general public has begun to pick up that awareness.One potential threat that's still a long way out, but which deserves consideration nonetheless, is the long-term danger of orbital warfare. I touched on this subject back in May, when I criticized the laissez-faire attitude George Friedman displayed toward it in his "The Next 100 Years." I was reminded of the necessity of addressing that threat early by an article in yesterday's Toronto Star, which discussed the possible future viability of space-based solar power.If you're unfamiliar, space-based solar power is a system in which orbiting solar generating stations gather and wirelessly transmit electricity to Earth-based receivers. The concept has been around for a while - its first great heyday was the early 1970s, when the oil embargo made the prospect of non-fossil power attractive, and gamers of my generation may remember the Microwave Power Plant from 1993's SimCity 2000, which worked in this way but had the failure mode that errant bursts of wireless power might vaporize parts of your city.1 Fortunately, in reality this is about as likely as a nuclear power plant exploding like a nuclear bomb.One very attractive aspect of space-based solar power is that, once the satellites have been built and launched, they produce zero-carbon electricity. Multiple solar power satellites in orbit would do wonders for a planet struggling to increase or retain its standard of living even as attempts to do that further destabilize the ecosystem. The Star reported that Japan is working on its own "moon shot" initiative of launching a 1,000-megawatt solar power satellite within the next thirty years.The problem, though, is what happens when they're up there. Satellites are uniquely vulnerable platforms. In a world with no active orbital cleanup, debris will accumulate and the threat of a Kessler Syndrome will remain ever-present. Furthermore, they're vulnerable to attack as well. One kinetic missile could turn a solar power satellite into a million constellations of shrapnel. This is exactly what happened in the historical background of Transhuman Space - the Transpacific Socialist Alliance was highly dependent on solar power satellites for its electrical generation, and in its short war with China effectively all of those installations were destroyed.The incipient importance of orbit makes the idea of a war fought there ludicrous. Orbital fighting would not have the "cleanliness" of modern warfare - it would resemble more H.G. Wells' nuclear weapons, no more powerful than conventional explosives but which continued exploding for days. If governments become wise to this before it's too late, the best thing in my mind would be for attacks against orbital infrastructure to be treated the same as attacks using weapons of mass destruction.Because, really, that's exactly what enough debris will do in orbit. It just won't happen all at once. We have our opportunity for a fresh start in space, to improve the whole world with the resources we can find there, but we can't do it recklessly or we won't have it at all.1 On the other hand, it has the second-lowest cost per megawatt of any power plant in the game, behind only Fusion.
Prior to amalgamation in 1998, the municipalities of Metropolitan Toronto all had their logos. Toronto's was the same as it is now, a stylized rendering of City Hall, Scarborough used the Scarborough Bluffs, and Etobicoke had - some kind of flower, I think. Its flag was characterized by an alder leaf, though I'm not sure if that's what this is supposed to be.I found this artificial flower, and many others like it, in Etobicoke's Mimico Village, at Royal York Road and Evans Avenue. This one is painted with the mascots of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics - not what I expected to find, but interesting anyway. In this city, an art installation is its own reward.
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The recent 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's lunar landing brought the usual suspects out of the woodwork, kooks and crackpots who have just the selection of YouTube videos and poorly-written blog posts they need to convince you that it was all just a hoax. Fortunately they're harmless, if a bit nutty, and can be ignored. I wish the same was true of the other usual suspects. These are the people who, whenever there's bigger-than-usual news about space exploration, bitch and whine about how all that money should be spent here on Earth solving our problems and how pointless it is to send humans into space when probes can do just as much science just as well.Notwithstanding that, say, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars have been such successes in spite of their limitations and not because of them, and that two astronauts could have taken in a matter of days the observations it's taken those probes years to collect. Neither, for that matter, is NASA's budget ever stuffed into rockets in the form of small unmarked bills and launched into the sun.Personally, I like the science that the space probes have been doing. The photographs from Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 revolutionized our understanding of the solar system, and I look forward to the discoveries that Dawn and New Horizons will make in the coming years. Nevertheless, I can't have faith in a program that goes no further than that. To my mind, probe missions have always been, and should always be, precursors to eventual human presence on those other worlds.This is why it infuriates me so much when I hear people suggesting that we shut down manned space exploration, that we do all our looking around from home. Bullshit. I have no problem with indulging scientific curiosity through these probes and expanding Earth's ability to interact with space at the same time, because those things will be important later.If things were up to me, I would sooner shut down NASA and JPL and all the rest than see them relegated to shepherding a bunch of robots. I can get behind the value of blue-sky research toward space when it's being done in conjunction with something just as worthwhile, like laying the groundwork for humans to eventually escape from this world. But if it's no more humans and only robot probes, and NASA is drawing $16 billion a year for robots to peep at Mars and Mercury - if that ever came to pass, I think would side with the people who say that All That Money should be spent on Earth.We need to know where our priorities lie. I would rather have no space program at all than one that had no intention of including humans in it.
This is Starspray Loop, just east of Starspray Boulevard along Lawrence Avenue East in Scarborough. What makes this loop interesting, to me, is that it is the furthest eastern outpost of the Toronto Transit Commission; no buses run beyond it. While the city's northern and western borders are somewhat porous, there's very little overlap between the public transit operators of Toronto and Durham Region, on the other side of the Rouge River. It's served by 54A and 54E Lawrence East buses, and when I passed by it did have that feeling of being on the edge of the world.
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There's an old anecdote that in the United States a hundred years is a long time, and in the United Kingdom a hundred miles is a long way. It seems to me that North American society has forgotten the truth of it. A lot of bad habits can become so ingrained to seem unimpeachable in far less than a hundred years, and the road and highway networks of Canada and the United States make distances seem artificially compressed.I realized this in my bones yesterday, during the tail end of my crazy bicycle adventure. I'd taken the GO train to Oshawa GO Station, and intended to cycle back to my home near Exhibition GO Station - a distance of 53.7 kilometers by the rails. Nothing, right? I'd done forty-two kilometers before, and the only killer chunk of that was a long, steep hill on Wilson Avenue in Downsview.It wasn't until I crossed from Pickering to Scarborough, found myself forced to switch from comfortable lakeside bicycle trails to Lawrence Avenue East - which, though an official bike route, doesn't have anything to actually make it so - that I found I was still only halfway home. Scarborough, if you're unaware, is big. Much of it was rural up until the postwar housing boom, and Scarborough is where you will find the sort of suburban developments that could just as easily be in Scottsdale.Even before then, my ride through Pickering wasn't stress-free either, once the trail so thoughtfully dumped me onto Liverpool Street and then Bayly Street, which parallels Highway 401 and struck me as its younger sibling - wide lanes, wide grassy shoulders, few opportunities to enter or exit, and aside from a single sidewalk on the south side of the lanes, no consideration given to road users not driving cars.The extent to which this philosophy of rambling suburbs connected by wide, howling highways and mini-expressways dominates North American development makes it even more disturbing to realize that it's only in the last sixty years that it became the law of the land. What's worse, in my opinion, is that it's actually harder to destroy than to create in this context. We would have a far more difficult time adapting our existing infrastructure to new modes of living than our predecessors had building that infrastructure in the first place.The phrase "tyranny of distance" originates from the sprawling decentralization of Australian civilization, with metropolitan centers in the southeast, northeast, and west cut off from each other by thousands of kilometers of hostile terrain. Canada, by contrast, is centralized in its own peripheries, with the vast majority of the population brushing up against the American border because that's where the best lands that we have can be found - until, of course, they're plowed under for more developments that prize wide lanes and sparse settlement.We think that the world is smaller than it is because of how easy we can get from place to place, either physically or by online proxy. That's nothing but an illusion. Driving for pleasure from Oshawa to Toronto might mean a relaxing bop around back roads, not to mention even more kilograms of carbon dioxide chilling in the atmosphere, but what have you accomplished? Nothing, except reinforcement of the perspective you already had - that if traffic's good, Toronto's half an hour or forty-five minutes away.In the end, I didn't even make it that far. After five hours on the saddle I'd gone way beyond the limits of my endurance, and I diverted to Guildwood GO Station and took the train the rest of the way home.If we want to learn the lessons that will be necessary to solve our pressing problems, if we want to exit the twenty-first century in a better state than when we entered into it, we can't keep falling back on old perspectives. There are some things that can only be meaningfully experienced with no filters. Taking a hundred miles, or even ten, on a bicycle demonstrates just how long those distances can be when they're paid for not with gasoline, but with dripping sweat and aching muscles.They say that cars bring freedom. Personally, I prefer the freedom of the grocery store being close enough for me to walk.
Recently I decided I didn't have enough crazy adventures in my life, so this morning I woke early and brought my bicycle on a GO train to Oshawa. From there, I set out to bike back home to Toronto, following as close as I could the route of the Waterfront Trail. It went pretty well until Pickering, when it broke down with discontinuities, and in Toronto, where it disappeared entirely for a massive stretch of Scarborough. I only got as far as Guildwood GO Station before I felt like I could go no farther.Today's photo comes from the waterfront of Ajax, third of the five municipalities I passed through, looking west. Toronto's skyline is lost in the distant smoggy horizon - that is, if it's ever visible from that perspective - but between a gap in the trees, the outline of Pickering Nuclear Generating Station is just visible.
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From my point of view, positive environmental news comes along more rarely than Montreal Metro trains on the Blue Line, so I have to take it where I can find it. I had an opportunity to feel uplifted for a time yesterday, though, as the Globe and Mail reported that Ontario Power Generation will be closing four of its eight active coal-burning generators in 2010, nearly halving the province's coal infrastructure. Officially, Ontario is still on-target to close all of its coal generators by 2014 - a far cry from the original target date of 2007, but still something worth shooting for - and these closures bring that much closer to reality.The Globe and Mail article is slim, and among other things doesn't tell me anything about what the environmental benefit of closing these generators will be in terms of how many millions of tons of carbon dioxide _aren't_ pumped into the atmosphere every year as a consequence. Nor does it say anything beyond the province's plans on how to replace generators' capacity, except that the closures will "make more room for green, renewable forms of energy" in the future.What I do know is that it's incumbent upon us to resist the siren song of coal, to look past its artificially low price per ton so that we can see the true cost of burning it, and to go beyond the antediluvian madness of fueling our civilization with accumulating poisons, getting a little bit worse day by day and year by year.Personally, I'd have preferred this news to come in concert with the expansion of Ontario's existing nuclear generation infrastructure. One of the great feel-good news articles I've been looking forward to for a while now is one that reports on the final demolition of Nanticoke Generating Station - listed as Canada's single worst polluter in 1999, though it's a good bet the tar sands have overtaken it by now, and those numbers wouldn't have included carbon dioxide - and its replacement with a nuclear generating station. Ontario will need a strong generating infrastructure in the near future, with electric cars creeping closer and closer from dreams to reality, and we can't afford to pay for that transition by burning even more mountains of coal.Even so, it's bittersweet news. Once the four generators are taken off-line, it will take roughly three days for the resultant lowered emissions to be completely neutralized by China and India. That's the greatest problem with trying to live an environmental lifestyle: those two will swamp anything and everything you do. It's the environmental costs of the breakneck industrialization of China and India that leaves me without real hope for the future. In the end, it may be that closures like this are modern sacrifices to the gods, roasting meat on the altar.But, dammit, we have to try!
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, some dude burned a bus down. The TTC's bus #1517, an Orion VII hybrid model, wasn't exactly reduced to ashes but the $700,000 vehicle is a write-off, and now there's a little less slack in the system. I pored through some 9,500 photographs last night looking to see if I'd captured #1517 at some point in its prior service, but... no luck!I did, however, find the next best thing: the TTC's bus #1518, loading passengers at Dufferin station in May 2008.
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"Blessed Are the Meekbots," by Daniel F. Galouye
Appeared in Imagination, December 1953...For they shall inherit the earth, Paul thought as he conjured up a picture of a world of sloven human idiots sitting idly by as a creeping dementia washed over them. The mental picture also showed Meekbots, reacting under engrained compulsion, reporting back to the laboratories to await futilely reassignment to other masters.This story won me over with its title alone. If you've never heard of this 5,000-word short, let alone read it, you're in common company. According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, the December 1953 issue of Imagination - a magazine specializing in "stories of science and fantasy" which ran from 1951 to 1958 - is the sole and solitary place "Blessed Are the Meekbots" was ever published.The story itself is set in an indeterminate future time and follows Paul Davis, a gubernatorial candidate who comes to feel that the use of Meekbots, biological robots1 which "are, for all practical purposes, human," is a particularly sinister form of slavery. The function of a Meekbot is simple, but significant: when a Meekbot is attuned to an owner, a telepathic link enables the transfer of all the owner's pain, concerns, and worries to the Meekbot, which suffers in its owner's stead. Someone attuned to a Meekbot can feel the consequence of pain, but no discomfort from it.Paul believes that the Meekbots are, contrary to the manufacturer's claims, not simply serving as passive receptacles for the pain they absorb from their owners, but actually suffering the pain. His quest for a legal solution to Meekbot slavery takes him face-to-face with a world transformed by the absence of pain, and stands on the doorstep of a few interesting inquiries before veering into the sort of Twilight Zone twist ending that was, I believe, fairly common in 1950s sf. In fact, this is the sort of story that probably would have worked well as a Twilight Zone episode.Having read it, I think "Blessed Are the Meekbots" is worth more than its very limited publication history suggests. It represents good science fiction in that, except for the very last scene, it raises important questions about how technology might affect human nature and how people adapt to it. The climax of the story, Paul's confrontation with his wife Audrey over her purchase of a Meekbot, I found very effective at communicating how much potential the technology had to corrupt society - people suddenly free of pain, concerns, and worries coming to believe that lacking those qualities made them superior to those who did not.Admittedly, it's a relatively minor portion of the story, somewhat buried beneath the larger theme that basic selfishness would keep everyone who obtained a Meekbot from discarding the "paradise" they reaped by having another person to suffer from them. In that, "Blessed Are the Meekbots" is more of an anti-slavery tale with a technological twist.One of the marks of good sf, in my opinion, is the ability for a piece to raise further questions in its readers. "Blessed Are the Meekbots" certainly did that for me. Pain is a universal condition of humanity, and though it's a negative in most respects, banishing it from the world might not necessarily create good.ANDREW'S RATING: 3.5/5Previous Short SF Reviews:1 I prefer the term "bioroid," but your mileage may vary.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.
