Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - The SF Universe of Alastair Reynolds "Revenger"

Episode Date: June 25, 2020

Daniel and Jorge talk about solar sails, artificial planets and black holes! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Yeah, you're right. I am a big fan of contact. But what do you think about the opposite? Do you think science fiction? authors could be good scientists? Well, I will happily read their papers if they read my science fiction stories. Sounds like a fair trait, maybe. But do you think they could do real science? Do you think that after being immersed in a fictional world, you could actually sit down and deal with real numbers? I'm not sure, but I think they already contribute in an important way to actual science. Oh, yeah?

Do they discover new particles or new kinds of black holes? Even better. they put crazy ideas into the heads of scientists who read their fiction. Oh, I see. And then you guys take all the credit, right? Yeah, well, maybe we can allow them to name the new particles in that case. Or maybe it could be a joint Nobel Prize, you know, physics and literature. That's right.

And I won a Nobel Prize for the acceptance speech I give for my physics Nobel Prize. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of Ph.D. Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and an aspiring science fiction wannabe. Oh, does that mean that you want to be science fiction? Like, you want your life to be science fiction or you want to write science fiction? Oh, I think all of the above. I'd love to write science fiction and I'd love to live in a science fiction universe. I mean, one of the fun things about writing science fiction is imagining yourself in that universe, teleporting places, shooting ray guns. I mean, that's why people play with

lightsabers, right? Yeah, I am definitely, I count myself an aspiring jetpack owner. I'm still hoping for that. But welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explained the universe, a production of our hard media. In which we like to talk about the rules of the universe. We break them down for you. We explain to you how our universe works, what we're doing to figure out what those rules. are and whether they make sense at all. Yeah, and sometimes we like to talk about also the universe that maybe doesn't exist, or we'd like

to talk about ideas that we don't know are true yet, but that they might be, or that at least it's making people curious, and it's tickling their imagination. And this is an important part of understanding our universe is thinking about what other kinds of universes could there be. How would

the universe look if the laws of physics were a little different? Or, what would the laws of physics have to look like in order to allow Jorge to have a jetpack and Daniel to have a lightsaber. So this is an important part of actual intellectual exploration of our universe is imagining new fictional universes. Yeah, because I guess science isn't just, you know, hitting rocks together or breaking rocks apart and looking at data. You also kind of have to exercise your imagination, right? And consider maybe what are possible crazy solutions that could explain what we're seeing.

That's right. And, you know, I know you've been out of academia for a while, but it's actually a very small fraction of our time. We spend banging rocks together. Sometimes you rub them together. We've moved beyond the rock stage now. Oh, really? Particle physics, yeah. You're still banging rocks, then. They're just getting smaller and smaller.

It's all rocks. It's rocks all the way down. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, there you go. I mean, isn't a proton kind of a rock, really? I guess that makes me a rock and roll physicist. Oh, there you go. That sounds like fiction as well.

Well, I said I wanted to be a writer, so there you go. Anyway, we like to talk about these fiction universes and to understand how they work and to get in the minds of the people who create them. That's right. And so we have the series of episodes in which we, or at least Daniel, interviews famous or well-known or popular science fiction authors and ask them about their world and about the physics of it and how they came up with all of their amazing ideas. That's right, because when I read a science fiction novel, part of the joy for me is figuring

out what are the rules of this universe? What did they create? How does it work? And that's also the joy of physics. We are literally living in the universe where nobody is telling us the answers and we have to play detective and figure out what are the rules. How does this work? And so it's the same joy, but just encapsulated in a novel. And usually in a novel, it's more satisfying because you get some answers. Also, your career doesn't depend on reading the science fiction novel. So it's probably more relaxing. That's right. And there are fewer rocks involved in the novels. That's right, they're called asteroids. Yeah, so today on the program, we'll be tackling the science fiction universe of Alastair Reynolds.

All right, so Alistair Reynolds, he's pretty well known, right, as a science fiction, or is he more sort of in the hard science fiction genre? He definitely writes hard science fiction, and he's sort of best known for his space operas. He writes stories that take place across an entire galaxy and eons and eons of time, and usually you're, buried deep into the future upon layers and layers of crazy history. Yeah. And so to the end, the question that's kind of interesting to you and that you asked him, I imagine, in the interview, is can you write realistic science fiction about life in space?

Like, do these books really portray what it's like to be in space and to move around in space? Because being in space is tricky. It is tricky, indeed. And for this set of books that we're talking about in today's podcast, it's a trilogy starting with a book called Revenger. It takes place in a solar system sort of deep in the future, and he really thinks carefully about how you would navigate that solar system, how you would go from place to place, the fuel needs involved, how you would turn your guns to aim at another ship, how you would even know whether those ships are there. It's really fascinating, and you can hear that he is really thinking carefully about the physics, and that's no coincidence.

Yeah, apparently he is inspired by, you know, stories of pirate ships and nautical stories. And he wanted to bring that into the science fiction universe. That's right. And he himself is a physicist or was a working physicist. He is a PhD in astrophysics and studied binary stars at the European Space Agency and then started writing on the side. So he comes into science fiction with a deep understanding of the science behind it. Hopefully his thesis wasn't fictional. I imagine. I'm sure it wasn't.

I hope he kept a careful wall between his fiction and nonfiction. Yeah, and he's won a bunch of awards in England and for his novels. And some of his stories have been adapted also to television. I actually have seen a couple of them without realizing who it was. That's right. There's a whole series on Netflix called Love, Death, and Robots that adapts a bunch of fun short stories. And several of them are his. Yeah.

And this is one of your favorite writers, right, Daniel? I mean, you're definitely fan-boying here when you're, talk to him. Yes, that's right. He is one of my favorite writers. And one reason is that the physics of it is so good. It's so insightful and interesting and so real and so carefully thought out. And, you know, then on a personal note, it's just, it's nice to see somebody who was a physicist make this amazing transition into being not just a published science fiction writer, but a well-known, well-respected, multi-award winning international bestselling science fiction writer. So, hey, a guy can dream, right? You're like, somebody got out.

There's hope for me yet. Yeah, I cannot dispute. That was my reaction. I finished his first book that I read, and I thought, wow, what an amazing book. And then I read about the author at the end. And I was like, oh, my gosh, this guy could have been me or I could be this guy. Yeah. So it sounds like the physics in these books are really cool.

And again, the series is called Revenger. The Revenger trilogy, the first book is called Revenger, which is not the sequel to the Avengers. No, it should be. It should be. The Avengers reboot. Yeah. And so let's dive into his world. What is this world like?

Is it in the future, the near future, millions of years into the future? So it takes place in our solar system, but then millions and millions of years in the future. And it's so far into the future that the sense of history is sort of lost. Like you're deep into the future, but you don't really know how the universe that he put you in has been assembled. And it looks very different from our solar system. Like did something happen that caused all the history books to disappear? here? Or what? It's just so far. It's just so far in history. Yeah. And humans have left the solar system and then come back and recolonized it multiple times. What? What do you mean? They left and

then they came back? Yeah, well, this is a sense of mystery in this book is that you don't know the full story. You just hear dribs and drabs and drabs and the characters themselves don't know the full story. Like, do we know how many times humans have colonized Europe? We know there were waves and waves and waves from Africa. We don't know the full story, even though it was sort of us who did it, right? And in that same sense, you imagine millions of years into the future, you might lose the history, lose the written records of why humanity went to the stars and why everybody died out in the solar system and why they came back. And so this is that sort of to the extreme. Right. That sounds pretty interesting. And you were telling me that they disassembled the planets in the solar system. Yeah. So the

solar system is unrecognizable. The only thing you might recognize is the sun, which is still there, but they have taken apart all of the planets and used them to build like a bunch of habitats. And so you have like lace worlds and little Dyson spheres and all sorts of structures you can live on, but they've turned the eight planets into like hundreds or thousands of essentially space stations. Like mini planets. Yeah, sort of like mini planets. But a planet is very inefficient, right?

You don't really need the core of it. And so they mind, I guess, all of the materials from the solar. system and built all these crazy different shapes and structures for people to live on. Oh, you can create more like surfaces to live on if you break the earth into pieces. Exactly. Take the earth and sort of like unwrap it, unroll it. You can get a lot more surface area. And then people can be creative, right?

And you can have like lots of weird layers or you could, you know, just live on the inside of a sphere or you could have a tube or a ring, right? You could have all sorts of crazy stuff. I guess my question right away is how did they deal with? with the gravity then, right? Because if you have a smaller planet, the gravity is less. So how do you walk around? Yeah, so some of these things have many black holes at their centers. Of course.

Obviously, that's the solution. What do you mean? They made a black hole? They captured a black hole? Well, you know, humanity in this story is sort of just living on these found structures. They've discovered them. They think humans made them millions of years ago, but they no longer have the technology to create them.

So they don't really understand them either. So they know there are black holes at the center of them. He never really explains how they were made because, again, that's attributable to the ancient lost art of black hole manufacturing. Okay, so they're using a black hole there. And so it all takes place in our solar system, just in the future. Yes, our solar system, very far into the future. But most of these things feel more like space stations or spaceships than real planets. I mean, you can walk around on them, but none of them are as vast as a planet.

It's almost like, you know, if you took all the conversations, continents on Earth and broke them up into little islands. It's like a giant archipelago. Yeah, exactly. And then you have to figure out how to get from one to the other. And that's another whole fascinating aspect of his universe. Oh, I see. This is where the sailing analogy comes in, like the nautical aspect of it, space nautical

mechanics. Yeah, it's a lot like space pirates. They get around from one of the other using solar sails because it's very inefficient to use like rocket propulsion. You need a huge amount of fuel to get around. and so they take advantage of the energy of the sun and they have these small ships each one is you know like the size of a current human airplane

like a modern jetliner and to get that thing around you'd need like square and kilometer after square kilometer of solar sail so these ships are tiny but then surrounded by these huge sails that capture the energy of the sunlight and use that to get around the solar system

and they're not solar panels right they actually like they bounce off the energy of the sun. That's right. They're much more like sails than panels. They don't absorb the energy and then store it in a battery. They actually reflect those photons and use that to get a little kick. And there's also battles out in space, right, between these sailing chips? Yeah. Yeah, there are a lot of these battles and they have these rail guns that they shoot at each other. And a lot of it is about staying silent, staying hidden, you know, not announcing your location. And so they try to keep as dark as possible so nobody can see where you are and stay as quiet as possible.

They try not to like let their rail guns get too hot because then they glow and other people can spot them. And it really gave me the feeling of reading nautical fiction from like the 1800s. It's all about like turning about and getting your cannons pointed in the right direction and making sure you're upwind and a lot of this very strategic thinking limited by the physics of ships. And in this case, it's limited by the physics of sunjammers, which is what he calls them. But I guess if you're hanging out in space, wouldn't you have like a lot of energy? Couldn't you have a little bit of rocket boost there here and there? You would need to.

I mean, it's much easier to use solar sails to get like further away from the sun. It's much more difficult to get closer to the sun. And so they do have rockets also, which they need to refuel. But they use that sparingly because, you know, while there's always sunlight to capture, just like there's always wind on a sailboat, you know, the engine for their, rockets needs fuel and that's a limited quantity. Cool. And there's a lot of mystery as well.

There's like ancient technology that they keep discovering. Yeah, there's been like eight or ten layers of occupation from humanity. And the previous layers put a lot of their fancy tech into these like locked boxes, which open on regular intervals. Like every thousand years or every hundred years, they will open up. And you can like crawl in there and try to grab some treasure and then crawl out before you it's stuck. And so there's like a lot of these devices around that play a role in the story that nobody understands their science. They're like left over from a previous layer of

civilization. And it's like found treasure. And so a lot of the book, which is just really good storytelling is like sailing around from these treasure islands to treasure islands, capturing things, stealing them from other people. And then, of course, getting revenge. On your revenger. So they find old technology and they can still make it work or just works, you know, like it just turns on and you can use it. Yeah, it just turns on and you can use it. You know, some of it is inert and they don't understand why, but a lot of it they can just use. You know, they have like special armor that makes you invisible and they don't know why. And they have, you know, a technology that lets them see things that are far away.

And they also, one of the coolest bits is how they communicate from ship to ship is that they find these skulls of alien beings from the deep past. Non-humans. So I guess, just to clarify, everyone in the book is human. So they're just super future humans. They're super future humans. There are a few aliens also, just a few characters who are aliens. So in the book, we have met aliens and can communicate with them.

And also, we have the skulls of ancient long extinct aliens. And these skulls have this property that they can, like, communicate between each other. That dead skulls can talk. Yeah, they have some sort of like telepathic ability. and if you, like, wire into it and attach, you know, your head to these skulls with wires and somebody else does it the same way, like on the other side of the solar system, then you can communicate back and forth using this sort of like, you know, hopped up neural telepathy. Wow.

And it's sort of awesome because it's like piggybacking on what these aliens maybe could have done and we don't really know. And like, are there tendrils of those aliens' brains still in their skull? Why does it work at all? And it just barely works. It's very difficult. Yeah, but it's sort of like, you know, using a ham radio. You don't really understand it.

You sort of connect your brain to it. You tweak the knobs. You see who else is out there. And so I think that he's trying to capture not just the sense of like sailing on the open seas, but also like limited communication abilities. All right. Wow. That's a lot of, a lot of interesting ideas here. And so let's dive into the physics of it, whether or not some of these things are possible or impossible or maybe in.

our near future. But first, let's take a quick break. I don't write songs. God write songs. I take dictation. I didn't even know you've been a pastor for over 10 years. I think culture is any space that you live in that develops you. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. pop. This is like watching Michael Jackson talk about Thurley before it happened. Was there a particular moment where you realize just how instrumental music culture was

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podcasts. All right, we're talking about Alistair's Reynolds' science fiction trilogy Revenger and the incredibly interesting ideas in it, including alien skulls that can make you telepathic. Somehow. Like a ham radio. Like if you put a ham radio on your head. That's right. Or if you had like an internet connection in your brain.

I wouldn't recommend that, though. You'd probably get hacked by Russians. I think, I think people. Those phones spend so much time near our heads that it's probably just as well be connected. We're basically there. Yeah. All right. So what's the physics of this series, Daniel? So first

of all, there's planet disassembly. They break apart the planet. And is that possible? Could you like, can I split Jupiter into two? You know, I think it really is possible. I think that it's a problem that's technologically very difficult. It's, you know, engineering difficult, as you would say. But physics

wise, there's no reason why you can't. I mean, think about the solar system is just a bunch of raw materials and use that to build whatever you like. It would just take a huge amount of energy in planning. To like break the, even the Earth, which is a small planet, how would you even break it apart? Yeah, well, you would start by building, you know, a lot of solar panels and use that to capture the sun's energy and then use that energy to mine more raw materials off the planets. Probably you would start with Mercury, because Mercury is very close to the Sun, so there's a lot

of energy there and has low gravity. It's a hot property. It has low gravity. So it's easy to build stuff on the service and launch it into space. And it's metal rich. It's like solid iron core, it has a lot of oxygen on it. And so you start by disassembling mercury and using it to build like essentially a Dyson swarm. Remember we talked on the show once about a Dyson sphere, like a huge superstructure that envelops the entire sun?

This is basically like that except instead of one big superstructure, which is kind of implausible because it would break up. You build a lot of smaller ones. Oh, and so they did this, the ancient humans. Apparently the ancient humans did this. Yeah, they disassembled, but not just Mercury, also all of the planets. There are no original planets left over. It's a completely different solar system. Completely, yeah, exactly, you know, and they redesigned it.

You know, you come, you buy a house, and you redo the kitchen, they redid everything. They stripped this thing down to studs. Oh, I see. So it's not like they took Jupiter and broke it. It's more like they just like mined it. They like, you know, little by little, they took chunks and put it into other parts of the solar system. And the hardest thing I think about the physics is that the solar system is mostly hydrogen. Like, of course, the sun is mostly hydrogen, but even the other planets is mostly Jupiter.

Jupiter is the most mass of anything. And it's mostly hydrogen in some helium. Heavy metals, like the kind of things we find on Earth and Mercury, are much more rare. And so you don't want to build your superstructure or your swarm out of hydrogen. And so I think that's the limiting factor. The amount of surface you can build is not just limited by the mass of the stuff in the solar system, but the amount of heavy metals you need to make it. Oh, I see.

So maybe there aren't enough, or do you think he, did he actually count how much metal there is in the solar system? Yeah, I think he did a bit of careful accounting. And I'm imagining that he used the hydrogen to form those black holes. Like if you can't build something out of it and you need to make a black hole, well, the black hole is just a big pile of stuff that's gotten compressed down. into a small area so take jupiter and turn it into a black hole or a few black holes and you could put those at the center of your little structures and they would provide enough gravity oh and that's why you would do it just to have more gravity yeah if you want gravity on these structures then you

need a lot of mass and if you have a lot of mass you can't use to actually build the structures right all this hydrogen and helium then you might as well use it to make the black holes I guess it would give you like Earth-like gravity in a small asteroid kind of Yes, precisely, because it's much more dense than Earth and so you can get Earth-like gravity and you wouldn't want all of Jupiter

in one black hole because that's way too much gravity, right? The gravity on Jupiter is crushing compared to the gravity on Earth. Oh, but you can make little ones. Yeah, you could, if you have this power, you could divide Jupiter up into a hundred little black holes and use that to provide gravity on a hundred little structures.

It seems kind of dangerous, though, because like what if you fall into it or what if your, you know, what if your structure touches the edge of it? Yeah, well, you're worried about the people, you know, living on this thing. I'm worried about the people manufacturing it, you know, like, I hope they're, they're being careful and they're wearing hard hats when they're manufacturing black holes. Oh, yeah, because if you touch a black hole, that's it. That's it, man. There's no coming back. You are not pulling your hand back out of those things. Okay, so then what about the solar sailing? That's pretty plausible and realistic? That's totally plausible. Solar sailing is a real thing. I mean, there's real physics there. It's just a

sheet of very, very light material, and when a photon bounces off of it, it pushes on it. It's like if somebody throws a ball and it bounces off of you, it's giving you a little push. And photons have no mass, but they do have momentum. And so when they bounce off of a mirror, for example, they are giving that mirror a little push. If you put a mirror out in space, the sun's photons will push it through space. Right. Yeah, we have a whole episode about solar sailing if you search our archives. And the problem is that solar sail helps you move away from the sun

but it doesn't help you move towards the sun. That's right. And there was this really fun moment in that podcast when I was being so excited about solar sails and then you were like, well, but what about turning? Can you turn? I'd never thought about that before, oops.

But it turns out you can, right? You can turn with a solar sail if you angle it because it means the photons get reflected off like to the side a little bit which gives you a push sideways. And you can't use a solar sail to go in towards the sun, but you can use it to, like, slow yourself down. Like, say you're in orbit around the sun and you want to go to a closer orbit.

You can sort of angle your sail to bleed off some of your velocity so that the sail is pushing away against the direction you're moving in orbit, and that'll help you fall into a closer orbit. It can't actually pull you in. Only the sun's gravity can pull you in. Photons can just provide an outward or sideways force. So going in is harder. than going out. But it is possible.

I guess it makes me kind of think about how you would navigate a solar system where everything is broken up. Do you think that those ancient humans or aliens, when they broke up the planets, they think about creating stable orbits and things like that? Or is the whole solar system just this chaotic mess?

No, they planted very carefully. It's called the constellation. And these little habitats are all in different orbits that sometimes get close to each other and sometimes further away. And some of these things are on large, orbits because some people like living out in the middle of the darkness and then coming back occasionally every hundred years or something and so you have lots of options and these things

sort of get closer and further apart so it's easier to jump from one to the other and doesn't it take years to go between these islands or colonies well he i think set the whole thing sort of close enough to the sun that these sunjammers are powerful and distances are not so far but it does take weeks right you're not like teleporting from from place to place and that really is a factor in the story that Sometimes it takes weeks or months to get from one habitat to the other. And, you know, it sort of feels like ancient ships, right? You got into a boat. You don't just get to America six hours later, you know, after watching three movies.

It took months or sometimes years to get around the world. So we sort of captured that by transplanting it onto the solar system. Can you get space scurby also? You can. There are versions of that, yes. Oh, really? All right. And then the last bit of science fiction here is this skull communication.

Like some of the skulls can communicate telepathically, even though they're old and dead. Yeah, that's right. And as I was reading it, I was wondering if he was going for faster than light communication here because it does seem fairly rapid. But he's also, he's kept the whole universe of his book barely tightly around the sun. And so the distances are not large. So it might be fast in light or might just be like as fast as light. But, you know, could aliens have some telepathic ability to communicate? Certainly, right? There's nothing, physics can say no to telepathy. Perhaps you can

generate some signals in your brain. Sure, I mean, think about the engineering. Generate some signals in your brain that somebody else can read. Basically a walkie-talkie. Yeah, yes, exactly. Telepathy is just another way to communicate. It's like, I already do that. I generate signals of my brain, which create waves in the air, which go into your ear, which generate signals in your brain. Oh, my goodness. Sound is telepathy from that point. What is this world we're living in Danny. You just approved, you just physics approved, telepathic aliens.

I don't see why it's not possible. You know, the bit that stretches it is like, well, could you use their skulls to do telepathy after they are long dead? I don't know, but hey, it was a fun book. All right. Well, so you actually got to talk to him and we're going to play the interview for everyone here

in a minute here. But what are some of the questions you asked them? I asked him what motivated this and whether he was interested in keeping the physics real. And then, of course, I asked him how to become a science fiction author if you were a physicist. Hypothetically, of course. Yes, because we all know your dream is to be a podcast host, Danny. That's right. One day. One day. All right. Well, here is Daniel's interview with Alistair Reynolds, author of the Revenger Science Fiction Trilogy. So I'm very happy and honored to have

with us today on the podcast, the multi-award winning author and former physicist. Alastair Reynolds. Alistair, thanks very much for coming on the podcast. Good afternoon, Daniel. My very great pleasure. Thank you for having me. And do you consider yourself a former physicist or is somebody a physicist forever? I thought about this a lot, actually. And I used to say I was a former scientist, but no, I think it's sort of in the blood. It's a way of looking at the world that you don't just cast off the day you stop being paid to do science. So I'm, yeah, I'm a scientist for the rest of my life. And tell us a little bit about your background. How did you

come to be a science fiction writer? How did you, what was your education in? It's sort of two, two sort of parallel strands right through my life was an interesting space and science and also an interest in science fiction. And they've just been there for as long as I have. And I started writing stories from the point where I could hold a pen. And I just never stopped really. So right through my early education, the sort of point where I decided I wanted to maybe try and become a physicist, there was also the creative writing. going on. And then, I guess, I think it's when I was about 16, I decided I would try and take the writing more seriously. So I started reading about the ways into publication,

magazines, that kind of thing. Never, never thinking that would be a career option, but I thought it would be something I could do, you know, as seriously as a lot of other science fiction writers who had proper jobs as well, but they're also sort of successful writers in their own right. yeah but so I also kept on studying to become a scientist as well right through that period but there was never a point where I said woke up when they said okay I'm going to be a writer it was always there and what exactly was your area of focus in science I wanted so I did a degree in astronomy and physics at Newcastle and I didn't really have particular sense of what direction I wanted to go in when I started that degree I just wanted to be a scientist in fact what I really wanted to be was an astronaut and I thought this is going to going back to sort of the early to mid-1980s, I thought by the time I've become a professional scientist, there'll be sort of lunar observatories, you know, radio telescopes on the dark side of the moon and all that kind of stuff. So I thought, Bill, it will be, you'll go into space just by being an astronomer, kind of like the Antarctic surveys kind of thing. So I thought

that would be a good way to get in space. But no, I did a degree. And by the end of the degree, I kind of, I was taking an interesting cosmology, I suppose, in particle physics. I was very interesting things like the nature of the neutrino and the solar neutrino problem, which were things that weren't really resolved in the mid-80s. And I started getting interested in, I suppose, the early stories about dark matter and, you know, really sort of how fundamental particle physics mapped onto cosmology, things like that. But that's a really hot and very popular area of astronomy that everyone wants to go into, you know. So I didn't really have the sort of mathematical shops to do that. I don't think. But

I sort of segued into stellar astronomy. So my PhD was on the mathematics of the properties of interacting binary stars, particularly a class of binary star where you have a star that's rather heavy in relationship to the sun, so 10 to 20 solar masses. And then the other partner in the binary would be a neutron star. These are sort of high mass extra binaries, and there's lots of different types of them. many of them are a short orbital period, so you can study the orbital cycle over a few days, which makes them good targets for, say, short campaigns on big telescope.

So you would aim to go to Australia or Hawaii or somewhere like that and bag four nights or observations on a number of these different high-mass Xero binaries. And the big sort of topic that was of interest was the limiting mass of the neutron star, because there's all sorts of theories that sort of said what the, what the mass. the neutron star ought to be. But some of the observations that have been done in the 60s and 70s were a little bit sketchy, you know, so there was some question about whether the neutron stars were lighter than they should have been. Very cool stuff.

It was cool, yeah. It was really interesting, yeah. Well, let me ask you some questions to get to know how you think about the universe. Do you think the universe is really, really big or actually literally infinite? I think my sort of... take on it is probably just bog standard modern cosmology with, you know, a big bang, inflationary epoch, whatever you want to call it. And then we sort of at, you know, 13 and a half billion years later, we're here with an observable universe, which is bigger than the age

of the universe multiplied by years, which some people have trouble wrapping their heads around, but not infinite. So, yeah, I think we live in a sort of bounded, universe. But I'm not zealous about it. To me, the actually infinite universe makes the most sense because it's hard to imagine having a bound. A bound in space or bound in matter seem harder to explain than actual infinity, even though infinity is difficult for humans to wrap their minds around. It may actually be natural. You know, the universe is no stranger to bizarreness. But let me ask you another question. Do you think that human interstellar flight will ever be a reality?

Is that something people will ever actually do? Do you think we'll be stuck in our solar system forever? I mean, there's so many different levels to that question. It's like, is there a technical capability that we could achieve if we so wanted? That, to me, is probably a fairly firm yes. You already know a little bit about, say, we could build a fusion spacecraft based on fairly well-established principles that could get us up to about 10% of speed of light. So you might have trouble slowing down, but at least we could take a, you know, go to Ballard Star in sort of 40 years or something like that.

Using technology that's not absolutely beyond, beyond the sort of pale. When we sort of talk about sort of the stuff in my book sort of like relativistic interstellar travel at 1G where you sort of get up to the speed of light and then you decelerate again and you have sort of significant time dilation factors, that's a much bigger ask. And I think that's like, if that's even technically feasible, it's probably thousands of years in the future. But one of the sort of things that does sort of trouble me slightly, I'm not sure, I mean, my feeling is that once we have the technical capability to maybe do interstellar, crude interstellar exploration, we might not have the will to do it anymore because in parallel with that development scientifically in terms of scientific engineering capabilities, presumably

our knowledge of the universe is going to expand as well. And we may have what we consider to be a completely comprehensive, self-consistent picture of our position in the galaxy and the galaxy within the larger universe. And we may just reach a point where we're not interested in going any further than our solar system because we've essentially established to our own satisfaction that we know what's out there. And I think already we know a lot more about the broad conditions of many solar systems.

We know about thousands of exoplanets in different solar systems. So we have a sharpening sense of what's out there, not just in our immediate interstellar neighborhood, but out to thousands of light years with this sort of transit observation. And as that picture firms up and develops over the next century, we may think, realize that actually Earth-like planets are incredibly rare, and all that's out there is just more stuff like the solar system, you know, more sort of versions of Mercury and Jupiter. Would we be sufficiently motivated to explore if we already sensed that we had all the answers already? So I don't know.

Maybe it depends on what we see then. Well, if we saw something really interesting, if we sort of resolved the structure on a planet. I mean, I don't necessarily mean an artificial structure, but if we resolved, say, a continent with green bits or something like that in a blue sea, then that would be a significant motivator for some form of exploration. But I think it's far from settled that there will be this grand, you know, the default science fiction future is that we go into the solar system. system, sort of best around there for a few hundred years, and then we develop interstellar capability, sometimes even faster than light capability, and we burst out into the universe, and that's like our sort of cosmic destiny. I'm happy to play with that in science fictional terms as a writer. There's a lot of literally fun to be had from that premise, but I'm probably

a little bit more doubtful about it now than I was when I started my career. And so that leads me to my next question about the Fermi paradox in your books, there's almost always aliens and there's been contact. But in some cases, the galaxy is like mostly wiped out by some prehistoric galactic battle. So what does your take on our current situation? Like, why haven't the aliens visited, in your opinion, here in our actual physical galaxy? Again, I always say, what day of the week is it? And I'll give you a different answer. I mean, for a long time. So I read this very book that a lot of science fiction writers read in the 80s, which was the anthropic cosmological principle by Barrow and Tipler.

And the sort of takeaway message of that is that the reason the sort of explanation for the Fermi paradox is that there's no one out there because the mechanics of interstellar colonization using relatively slow propulsion systems, but say replicating robots and things like that, mean that you could, in effect, colonize the entire galaxy in a very short span of time, much less than a million years. And that's just a tiny fraction of the existing age of the galaxy. So the argument is that that only would have had to have happened once for the sort of evidence of it to be obvious. There's been many, many opportunities for it to happen and it doesn't seem to have happened. Therefore, there's no aliens out there, apart from maybe single cell,

slime, things like that. I took that as gospel for a long time. I thought it was a very sort of persuasive argument. But I'm not so smitten with it now because I think one also has to think, if there were, imagine that we had been visited by super-intelligent alien beings at some point in our history, I think it would be an absolutely trivial problem for them to conceal all evidence of their activity. I think they could even be here now. We wouldn't see them. That's why, in a way, it's why I don't take UFOs seriously, because I think any extraterrestrial civilization that wanted to visit our skies could do so without being detected. That would just, that would just be a trivial little technological problem for them just to avoid detection.

So, yeah, I kind of haven't really answered that, have I? I think the Fermi paradoxes, one possible answer is that we're alone. That's sort of quite interesting one. I don't find it depressing, but it's interesting. But the other one is that really when we speculate about the motives and activities of highly advanced extraterrestrial beings, we're, you know, we don't really have a lot of experience to base our suppositions on. It's a lot of speculation from one day to point.

It is an enormous amount of speculation, yeah. I mean, I'm quite like the idea that, I mean, someone did the mathematics on us about, you know, what are the odds of finding, say, a single alien artifact in the solar system? You had, like, an alien civilization somewhere else out in the galaxy. At some point, some of their space junk will sort of wander away from their system. You know, there might be sort of like a spanner on the moon or something like that.

So I think it will be, I mean, well worth keeping our eyes open as we sort of move out through the solar. I had hopes for Omuamua being a bit of space junk passing through the system, but unfortunately it doesn't look that way. Oh, no, no, it's just a dirty comment or something like that, yeah. This is super fun, and I have more questions for our guest, science fiction author, Alistair Reynolds. But first, let's take a quick break. Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

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Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. All right, we're back, and I'm talking to Alastair Reynolds, science fiction author of the trilogy Revenger. So then let's turn to this novel. That's the topic of our episode today, which is actually your trio of novels, this Revenger series. And in this book, we're sort of in a world where the old planets have been deconstructed into a vast series of artificial worlds and the ships that move between them operate on solar sails. It's a fascinating topic, and it felt to me very much like a novel that could almost be set in a bunch of pirate ships navigating between islands in the 1800s or something.

What gave you the idea to use this concept? So what made you want to write this book? Where did this idea come from? Did you start from the science concept of solar sails, or did you start from the story and look for the right setting? I had actually had two ideas that was sitting on my computer for a long, long time. And we're talking to 10, 15 years because I quite often, I have a lot of ideas on the back burner, which is, I think a lot of writers are like that because writing is a bit like a conveyor belt. You know, you write one novel, and you've got to kind of have some ideas germinating from the next one.

So I write a lot of stuff that's very sort of notes and sort of ideas to myself in computer that don't necessarily go anywhere for years and years. And the first sort of part of that was that I tried to write a set of stories about explorers breaking into alien structures where they had a certain random time limit where they had to get in, get the treasure and get out, sort of Indiana Jones stuff. But they didn't really know how long that they would have. So it was very sort of high risk, sort of like safe cracking, but with an element of alien big dumb objects and things like that in it. And I thought there's definitely something in that. There's some mileage in that idea, but I couldn't really get it to catch fire. And I tried telling it within some of my other literary universes. It just didn't happen for one reason or another, but I still had the idea on my hard drive.

And then again, about 15 years ago, I really liked the idea. I mean, there was a science fiction writer you're probably aware of who had a big burst of productivity in the 60s, a guy called Larry Niven. And he wrote a bunch of stories about, well, it kind of goes back to the, that thing we were talking about of the manifest destiny going into the solar system and then we move out into interstellar space. But his stories were quite good fun because by the time we had an interstellar society, we'd met lots of different alien civilization. And some of them were trading their technology with it. So what I quite liked about the Larry Niven stories, the non-space stories, was that you'd have a sort of spacecraft. But bits of it would be made by

one set of aliens and the puppeteers would make the hulls because they were very good at making indestructible material you know and then there'd be some other system supplied by someone else and it was a real sort of cosmopolitan quite a fun and colorful sort of civilization i always like i like the spirit of that and i thought i really want to put my own spin on it so i started coming up with notes for a set of stories that were set in a dyson swarm so uh not a sphere around a star but a literal globe of lots of little micro worlds. I thought, what if, rather than deal with the people who built it, what if some human explorers sort of stumbled on long after it was constructed and in fact, after it had sort of formed into ruin? And then they could have a sort of little

micro-civilization where they're playing amongst these enigmatic leftovers from sort of previous glory civilizations, glory days. But you can see, so that was an idea that didn't go anywhere either. But then a long, long time later, I sort of spotted that those two ideas could be sort of jammed together and made something else. And then the sort of third of the two ingredients, you know, I just mentioned, was just a longstanding love for nautical fiction. So that's where all the sort of the pirate high treasure on the 70s and all that stuff comes from. I just love that stuff. I've steeped it. And I'd always wanted to write a sort of science fiction past niche of of sort of at the age of fighting sail, something that sort of went back to Robert

Stevenson, also a lot of the sort of 20th century writers who did stories about sailing ships so it all just came together and then what I quite like was that because the whole action is only confined to a volume about the size of the Earth's orbit, that was quite important. So it's 16 light seconds wide this human civilization, even though there's thousands and thousands of planets within that sort of sphere. I thought, well, within that bound, you could just about get around using solar sails. And, you know, I thought, well, the Earth's orbit takes us around the sun once a year. So that'll be the rule of fun.

It takes about a year to get from one side to the other of this body of wolves. And I fudged it because solar sails are very good to get, you know, getting away from the sun is obviously trivially easy with the solar sail. You just use the light pressure. Tacking inwards is more difficult. But I read a paper about using angular momentum effects, the sort of tacking. way deeper into a gravity well. So if that's all I need, the rest of it's

just pure handway. Ion drives in there, just so I could have a get out of course. If anyone would say this is totally impossible using solar sensors. They've also got ion capability. They just prefer not to use it because the solar saline comes for free.

As soon as you turn on the ion drive, you're burning fuel money. And so how important is it to you that there's always sort of a physics explanation for everything that happens in your novel? Is it critical to you that you have a physically self-consistent universe, even if you get to tweak the laws of it a little bit? It's not colossally important, and it varies quite striking, I would say, from one universe to another. I mean, the two sets of books that I'm probably best known for, the books I wrote earlier in my career,

in which I've returned to set in the Revelation space, which on one level is quite grounded in hard physics, because it has this implacable rule that you can't travel faster than light and I try to work out all the relativistic effects correctly and I try to do the sort of dynamics of planetary systems and atmospheres as realistic as I could get it with my own limitations

and at the same time tell a story that was hopefully interested more than one person but even within that there's sort of crazy science creeps in the sort of tachion signaling from the future inertialist drives that kind of thing even a bit of time travel So the revenge of stuff is even more like that, because you have this, on the foreground, the humans use a technology that's broadly familiar to our own, you know, so they have rockets for short distance navigation. And I was thinking of real Buck Rogers rockets here.

So they're like sort of bullet-shaped cylinders with little fins on the back and rocket motors, with port holes and rivets as well. That was important to have lots of rivets. but that's like within our technological sort of horizons. And the ships, not outlandish in the sense that they use solar sails, but I didn't time myself down to, I mean, if you sort of do the math, so I said, right, my ships are about the size

of a 737, that's what I decided. So I wanted them to be big enough that you could sort of have a bit of drama within the compartments, you know, maybe room enough for a crew of 10 or 12 or something like that. But I didn't want it to be sort of enormous space dreadnought, dreadnought, sort of kilometers long. You know, 737 is good. It's about the size of a galleon or something like that.

But the amount of area of solar sail you need to accelerate, even a 737 to any kind of acceleration. The accelerations of the ships in the books are quite low by twice of the science fictional standard. It's sort of like, I don't know, a third of a tenth of a G or something like that. But you would need an enormous collecting area to do that. So I just didn't want to go down that road of scrupulously fact-checking myself. Because fundamentally, these books are about spirit of adventure, a sense of drama, an atmosphere, the sort of mix of noir sort of fiction and nautical fiction and a bit of Gothic horror coming in there. And I didn't really want them to be paradigmatic hard SF books.

So the science is kind of crazy as well. When there's stuff the humans operate, you know, utilize, there's alien technologies and former human technologies left over, even though I never use the word human in any of the three books. But they have access to weird things that they don't really understand how they work. And I, as a writer, put as little explanation as I can get as I can get away with on the page. Tell me a little bit about the bones that they use to do faster than light communication. This is something you imagine might one day be possible with some crazy alien tech in our civilization? or you think fast-and-like communication is totally out of bounds for humanity? Well, I think I kind of fudged, I kept it, I never resolved to my own satisfaction

whether the skulls work faster than life. The humans don't really know because they're operating within this sort of relatively small volume of space. It's not apparent to them whether they're instantaneous or not, I think. Perhaps they are kind of a good superlingual. But actually, the genesis of the skull's idea was that originally, To go back to this idea of humans utilizing bits of alien technology, originally the whole ships were going to be skulls.

So it was just like you're going to have like a 300 foot long discarded skull from some alien you find floating in space, presumably some long, vanished star-faring alien. And I like the idea was the humans sort of get these skulls and they sort of scoop out all the gun that's left over and then put rocket motors on them or whatever. And then they just fly these skulls around. And I was really going with this. And then I went to see Guardians of the Galaxy.

And quite, at some point in this film, we go to this sort of, I think it's like asteroid mines or something like that. And their base is a skull. It's just floating in a nebula. And I just can't do it now because it's been done. You know, they've had a big space skull has been done. So then I downscoped. And I thought, well, if the ships can't be skulls,

then we'll have something inside them that uses the idea of the same skull. And I was just thinking about old-fashioned crystal radio sets, you know, and a little bit of that and a little bit of sort of Ouija boards just to keep it spooky. But really, it was just to get a sort of slightly recarb, gothic vibe into the stories. And it gave the crews another specialization idea that he needed people with this particular talent to be able to get a signal after skull. Well, I didn't really know how, whether that would just be a little background detail when I started the books.

Well, to me, it seemed really evocative of a lot of, the other things I like about your other novels, the fact that the protagonists in the book are always surrounded by leftover bits from ancient civilizations. There's constantly, there's vast quantities of previously understood, but now lost knowledge. And I like that because it resonates with the way I feel about our universe, that we're surrounded constantly with information about the universe that we don't understand. You know, we're bathed in clues, but totally clueless. This is something you're explicitly going for in your books?

Or is this just the way you feel about the universe? Probably just the way I feel about the universe. But it's also, I mean, it's like, there's a sort of, the cynical answer is actually, it actually, I've always said, it's far more interesting to describe a spacecraft that's covered in rust than one that's kind of all shiny and chrome, because there's lots more adjectives you can use when things are sort of crumbling, falling apart.

So I've always like, I've always been drawn to that sense of decrepitude and lots of old things sort of bolted together that kind of more or less work, but don't work reliably. it's just far more interesting. But I think the more serious answer would be that a lot of the science fiction I read and a lot of the science fiction that I was influenced by had that sense of antiquity, of layers of antiquity

and the future built on top of the past. I mean, in literary science fiction, I think the writer that I got the most sense of that from would be Gene Wolfe. Because the books of the New Sun, which I read when I was at university, kind of feel like fantasy. And you sense that you're a long way

into the future of this dying earth, but gradually little bits of science fiction sort of intrude into the narrative. Then you realize that, you know, this very, very distant time is built on, almost literally on these geological strata of different ages. I really love that. And I love the fact that there were bits of technology, weaponry, whatever, left over from more sophisticated times

that the characters could use, but not necessarily understand. So you have a... On the surface, it's kind of sword and sorcery, very game of throne sort of stuff with citadels and guise and cloaks with swords. But at the same time, very rich people have rayguns because they've found ray guns and some people have flying cars because they're just left over bits of leftover technology. And I love that. I love that sense of, you know, just enormous archaeological accretion of different layers. So that came into it.

It's also in lots of Doctor Who as well. Lots of classic Doctor Who had that sense of really deep time. deep pass. So I just absorbed it. Well, I find it fascinating, but also a bit painful because it gives you the sense that somebody knew these answers, somebody mastered these topics, and then the knowledge was just lost. And to me, that's a, it's endlessly frustrating. But let me ask you, since you are in a unique position, being in both the academic community and the science fiction community, I have the sense that science fiction authors actively and realistically contribute to sort of progress in academic, scientific research and engineering by coming up with sort of the

craziest ideas on the edge of possibilities. Having been in both communities, how do you feel about the way those two interrelate intellectually? I didn't sense that exchange on a personal level in my experience as a scientist. I had very little to do with science fiction because I was working in a particular fiddly little subset of astronomy and instrument science when I I was working for the European Space Agency, sort of photon camping, things like that, which also played into astronomy. But, I mean, I kind of kept my science fiction credentials to myself for a long time, so I didn't really, I wasn't sure how people would take it.

And I've found, as a general rule, some scientists are really receptive to science fiction, and they love it, they've been stimulated by it, and they see the potential in it. But others are really disdainful of it. And, you know, I didn't want to run foul of the latter, so I just, I'm not going to make a big deal of this. But since I stopped my former scientific career, I've taken an interest in this, I mean, I've sort of looked at, for instance, the way that our scientific and literary understanding of the planet Mars has evolved over sort of the last century and a half. That's some interest to me. I've done lectures on that because it's a real two-way process

where science fiction and science have sort of moved hand in hand are our science fictional understanding of the universe and with Mars as a case study has evolved and sometimes lagged behind the science because sometimes as writers were very attached to a particular image of something and when the science upends that image we often don't want to let go of it but eventually we come round to it eventually I think the you know with with Mars you know there was it was a sense that we had to say goodbye to the the romantic idea of Mars of Edgar Ice Burroughs and even Ray Bradbury as somewhere where there might be civilizations and ruins and wonders. And we had to confront the idea that Mars was really just a barely less hospicable

version of our own moon. You know, it's an arid, nearly airless rock floating in space. But now we have, we kind of come to terms with that. And now we can see the grandeur and the beauty in the real Mars. That eventually led to a whole second wave of science fiction books that drew their inspiration from Viking and then subsequent Martian expeditions. And that process has carried on. There's also sort of two-way,

the traffic in the other direction where you get little bits of science that draw their inspiration from science fiction. It's not as easy to trace those connections, but they're certainly there. I mean, on one level you have scientists who say, I became a scientist because I read science fiction,

but probably to some degree true of me. I don't know, but did you read science fiction as you were? Absolutely it did. I think that for me the science fiction authors were the ones thinking about the deepest questions. You know, day-to-day science work, we're not answering big questions about the universe or making big discoveries.

And so to sort of connect with the romance of the mystery of the universe, science fiction really taps into that much more directly for me than the actual research work that I do on a day-to-day basis. To me, that's why they provide a nice balance. I mean, the one sort of case study that I can sometimes present to people as a clear case of science fiction shaping scientific thinking is when Carl Sagan was writing contact, he wanted to come up with some plausible means of using...

First of all, he had the idea of travel through black holes, and then he went to speak to Kip Thorne, and out of that came the idea that a traversable wormhole was a much more interesting idea. And then Kip Thorne, sort of, I think for almost for his own sort of self-gratification, came up with the sort of mathematics of traversable wormholes, the idea that you need exotic energy to stabilise the throat. But that's still a whole viable discipline in, I don't know what, whether you call that particle physics or, you know,

space-time physics, gravitational physics. But lots and lots of papers are still coming out with reference to traversable wormholes and the physics of wormholes. So that whole subdiscipline probably wouldn't have existed without at least the germ of a piece of science fiction. There are many, many other examples, but that's a really clear-cut one. Well, let me ask you as the last question about your future work. I hear that you're working on a new novel in your Revelation Space Universe, which I'm very excited about. And I wanted to ask you, what makes you decide to sort of revisit a universe that you've created previously or to create a vast new intellectual playground? I don't know.

They just feel like itches that you've got to scratch. And you can't fight it. You just have to go with the muse, to put to protect. the term on it, but every now and again an idea sort of, I mean, Stephen King says, you know, what's the, what's the expression using like the muse shats into your head and you've got it. It's a really horrible expression, but it's true. You just can't predict it. And I've always just been grateful that a, if you have a desire to write something that's good, it's far better than waking up and having no ideas. So I've always been quite grateful

for the fact that the ideas keep coming and I never complain about it. It's far better to have too many, too many books in the queue, if you like, and too few. But yeah, I don't know, I don't analyze it too much, really. I just go with the flow and hopefully people are happy to go along with it, read them. Publishers are happy to publish them, hopefully. Well, I've thirdly enjoyed them, and I've also very much enjoyed talking today. Thank you very much for taking your time to answer our questions and to share your thoughts about writing and science and crazy aliens.

Oh, it's my very great pleasure. Thank you. Really great questions as well. We could talk all day, I think. All right. Pretty interesting. Pretty cool guy. And also, I just, credit me.

He has like a perfect name for nautical adventures and pirate story. Yes. Alistair Reynolds. And his Welsh accent, I guess, makes him sound a little bit like a whole-time pirate. No, he was really wonderful to talk to. So thank you, Alistair, for taking your time to talk to me and for letting us hear about the physics of your universe and what goes on inside your brain. Yeah, we hope you enjoyed that. and hopefully it got you to think a little bit about what could be possible out there

even in the far future, millions of years from now. That's right. So go out and check out his book. It's the Revenger Trilogy from Alistair Reynolds. He also has written many other wonderful books, including Chasm City and Revelation Space and Pushing Ice, which I also recommend. Yeah. So thanks for joining us.

See you next time. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Why are TSA rules so confusing? You got a hood of you. I'll take it off. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin.

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