Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - The SF Universe of Dr. Karen Lords

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

Daniel and Jorge talk about the science of the novel "The Best of All Possible Worlds" by Dr. Karen Lords.https://karenlord.wordpress.com/the-best-of-all-possible-worlds/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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did you know the difference between psychic and physics is only one letter? I feel like I should have sensed that. Well, let's try it. What number am I thinking of? I got to go with 42. Nope, not even close.

Uh, 42,000. Colder. Um, zero point 42. I'm starting to think the difference between psychic and physics is a lot more than one letter. You know, after all these years working together, sometimes I still have no idea what you're thinking. And that's probably for the best. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and not a particle psychic.

So I mean you can read the minds of particles or you can predict what particles will do? I can do neither, actually. And I don't think either of them are possible in our universe. I guess it makes sense to be a psychic of not particles because everything's made out of particles. That's true. And I noticed that a lot of psychics tend to like to use physics, like sort of pseudo terms in their, you know, marketing. I once sat next to somebody on an airplane and told me she was a quantum psychic. Really? I was like, ooh, wow, that's better than all those classical psychics out there, you know? So I mean she was lying and not lying at the same time?

She was both full of it and full of it at the same time. Well, I guess that's better than being a Newtonian psychic. Yeah. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeart radio. In which we take the whole universe and try to insert it into your brain. We're not relying on your psychic powers. Instead, we are taking you on an audio tour of everything that's incredible, that's amazing, that's mind-blowing about the universe.

We think that wonder belongs to everybody, that your curiosity is just as deep and powerful and as important as those of us toiling away in the scientific trenches. And so we want to answer your questions and help you explore all the incredible stuff in our universe. Daniel, are you saying that we're all connected mentally in a way? We are, I hope. all living in the same universe and working on the same science, right? So in that sense, yes, we do have a shared mental challenge.

And including our curiosity about the world, about the universe, about the cosmos. And so in this podcast, we like to talk about all the amazing and incredible things out there for us to discover and to learn about. But we also like to kind of sometimes think about what could be or what might be in the far future. Yeah, because a big part of exploring the universe by satisfying your curiosity is tapping into your creativity, to thinking about what could be out there? What kinds of ideas should we be thinking about? What is the future of the universe and of humanity? Yeah, because, you know, sometimes I think people associate science not with creativity or they think the two of them are separate, but actually

scientists are very creative. I mean, they kind of have to be when facing the unknown. They have to come up with possible ideas of what could be or what might explain what we're seeing out there. And so today's episode is another one of our series of interviews with science fiction authors. That's right. And we like to tap into a broad set of creative minds out there. Everybody has a different idea for what the future might hold or how we might react to it or what life would be like under various circumstances, which, hey, is important because if we're designed in the future, if we are steering the fate of our humanity, we should think about what it would be like to live under various futuristic regimes. Even if they are a little trippy. So to the on the podcast, we'll be tackling.

The science fiction universe of Karen Lord. That's right. Karen Lord has written a wonderful book. It's called The Best of All Possible Worlds. And I recently had a chance to read it and to chat with her about it. So the best of all possible worlds. So it's definitely fiction. I feel like we're definitely not living our best cells right now.

Well, you know, there's dystopian fiction and then there's optimistic fiction. I see. What's the opposite of dystopian? Utopian fiction? The utopian fiction, yeah, absolutely. I heard a wonderful interview actually by Kim Stanley Robinson, a famous science fiction author, and he felt like dystopian fiction was sort of lazy because it just makes you feel better about our world than the world in the show you're watching or the novel you're reading.

And he prefers to write utopian fiction because it inspires us to try to make our world better. Oh, I see. Regular fiction is more like comfort fiction, whereas maybe it should be more like phomo fiction. exactly she'd be like look what they have achieved everybody in this novel has health care and a house and all this great stuff surely we can do that also look how green their grass they've genetically engineered to be that's amazing that's right sometimes you just want to keep up with the science fiction joneses right and there are definitely things we can do to improve our world and sometimes it's the role of science fiction to think about that so karen lord is a science fiction author and she hails from barbadas that's where you can't like the interview. You didn't go there, but that's where she was. That's right. The budget for trips to Barbados was set to zero for some reason. I'm not quite sure what was going on there. This was your chance, Daniel. This was your chance to cook the books and get a vacation. No, so I chat with her over the internets, as I always do. But I got a little bit of the taste of

Barbados because you could hear the sound of it in the background. Wow. This doubles as an MSMR. What's the right? ASMR. That's right. I'm not a fan of acronyms. funny you say that because I heard that some folks listen to our podcast as they go to sleep because our voices soothe them. Not because we lack excitement in our topics here. That's right. So sit straight up and listen to this important podcast interview. Stop falling asleep. Wake up. And Karen Nord has an interesting background. She's also sort of an academic, kind of like you.

Definitely. She has a couple of degrees, including a doctoral degree I read in the sociology of Religion? Yes. She has a really eclectic and fascinating background. I mean, she has an undergraduate degree in physics, which lets her really set her science, you know, in the appropriate context. But then she also has degrees in sociology and religion and history. And so it's really fascinating. And you can definitely feel it in her writing. Her writing is different from the kinds of writing I've read before. So it was really a pleasure for me to sort of branch out and read something different. And it's different in sort of two ways. One is that. that it really focuses on what it's like to be there and the interpersonal connections and how society is built and, you know, how people treat each other in this new context where life is very different from our own. It's more about relationships, kind of. Yeah. And what it would be like to live there.

It's less about like, how do you build this kind of starship and traverse the universe? And more like, well, what's it like to sit next to somebody for 60 years on a spaceship and argue with them about who makes the coffee or whatever, you know? I feel like we may have a good idea of that. that, Daniel. Hint, hint. And also, it's quite different because it's really infused with her knowledge of her culture. This is the second book she wrote. The first book she wrote was actually a retelling of some of her cultural mythology in a science fiction context. And so you'll see as we talk about the details of this book that actually blends mythology in science fiction a little bit.

Interesting. She starts from mythology and then takes it forward using science fiction, which is quite is it kind of like explaining mythology as science fiction or just taking it further it's just sort of taking it further it's like you don't have to explain the beginning of the universe and the whole context of how things were made because you can just sort of assume a mythological origin for things but then going forward everything has to follow the physical rules of the universe so it's a really fascinating blend interesting all right so her book is called the best of all possible world and a big part of it is this idea of psychic powers in telepathy. And so we were sort of wondering what people think of telepathy out there.

Yeah, I was curious if people thought if somehow in the far future humans might evolve this kind of power. And so I asked a bunch of volunteers on the internet to speculate baselessly on this possible future scenario. And if you'd like to participate in baseless speculation, please write to us to Questions at Danielonhorpe.com. I think you just renamed our podcast, Daniel. Baseless Speculation with Daniel and Jorge.

That's the subtitle. All right, so think about it for a second. Before you listen to these answers, if someone asked you, have you thought humans would ever evolve telepathy, what would you answer? Here's what people had to say. I believe that it's possible,

but it would be thousands or millions of years from now. I think at that point, we would qualify as a very different species. I think it's definitely not impossible, but something that will take a lot of time to develop, like, maybe like a thousand or maybe a million years' time, humans would develop a chip or something that we could implant in humans to use for telepathy? I do not believe that humans will ever evolve telepathic powers.

Evolve is kind of a loaded word there. Evolution takes place over many, many generations. So that kind of thing would take an extremely long time for any kind of evolution. could be possible that we could genetically engineer some sort of heightened intelligence, heightened brain abilities. Humans have already evolved telepathic powers. I don't want to brag, but at Burning Man one year, there was a girl about 50 yards away riding her bike away from me wearing a bikini and a cowboy hat, and in my head, I said, please come talk to me. And she turned and looked at me, turned her bike, rode over, parked next to me, got off her bike, and gave me a hug. Boom. I wish I had telepathic powers to know the answer to that

question, but I'm pretty sure science will come to prove that that just cannot happen. I don't think we could evolve telepathic powers unless we embraced human enhancement and achieved it through something like cybernetic augmentations. Keyword here is evolve, and I would say to that no, because I don't see how telepathy would in any way aid in human survival and reproduction. However, I could imagine us using technology to develop this ability. But in terms of natural evolution, no, I don't think so. I kind of hope not because part of what's so fun is figuring out what someone else is thinking, not knowing it. All right. Now, Daniel, did these people record their answers and send it to you, or did they just beam it straight to your brain?

I am in tune with the whole universe, man. So I didn't even need to reach out. It just like just sat down and freestreamed all these. The universe was just speaking to me. No, these were all emailed to me over the internet. All right. Well, pretty cool. A lot of people seem to have a lot of optimism about this.

Like, nobody said it's impossible. And, you know, they think that maybe one day could happen. Yeah, people feel like there's obviously potential out there for all sorts of crazy stuff to happen. That it's not physically impossible in our universe. universe. And then there's a whole other thread of people wondering if it's better done with technology. Right, right. I guess there's two ways that we can evolve tolypathy. One is through evolving our brains biologically and one is kind of augmenting our brain. Yeah. And I was curious what you thought about these various options that we're going to dig into, given your background in

engineering and of course in biomimicry. And so how you saw these various options going forward. All right. So let's get into Karen's book. So the title again is the best of all possible world. And so Daniel, what's the basic premise of it? So the basic premise is that the book takes place in sort of our universe and in our galaxy, but humans or human-like aliens are distributed through the galaxy. It's sort of a setting like Star Trek the next generation. There are all these worlds and they're all populated by human-like creatures. You know, they have two legs and they have a head and they speak various languages, et cetera, but they have mostly 10 fingers, but there are big differences. Some of them are much taller and stronger and faster. Some of them are smaller.

Some of them have telepathic or other psionic powers. Now, do they say that they all came from Earth or people on Earth came from some other source? So she doesn't describe this in detail in the book. She leaves it a bit of a mystery, which I sort of like. I like being dropped into a universe and not just like having it explained to me. I like figuring it out for myself. And for me, it was a mystery I was trying to solve while I was reading the book. Like, is this the far future? where humans have spread through the galaxy and then evolved into these various forms because of their separation?

Or is this some alternative universe where humans evolved in parallel in lots of different places? And so I was trying to figure that out through the book. And I never actually put my finger on it. And you'll hear in the interview, I asked her about that very question. And it's kind of interesting

because you wrote here that Earth is an embargoed. It means that we're like blocked or canceled? Yeah. They canceled Earth. Yeah. So the book takes place from the point of view of one of these huge. human-like aliens.

And in the book, nobody's allowed to go to Earth. And Earth is like embargoed, you know, to interact with Earth because the folks who live there are not very well-behaved. No way. What? Yes, exactly. We're on a timeout, a galactic timeout. Yeah, precisely.

So nobody's allowed to visit us or do trade with us or communicate with us. But like, do Earthlings know that they're embargoed and canceled? You know, or did we do something and no, we did it? It's not dealt with directly in the book. And then I asked her about it in the interview. And it's actually her personal explanation for maybe our current situation, you know, the Fermi paradox. Like if the galaxy is filled with lifelike planets, how come nobody is talking to us, nobody is visited, we've never seen anybody. She thinks it may be because we're on a timeout.

Oh, wow. People are avoiding us. Boy. So she wrote this a little bit as like the, hey, maybe this is what's happening in our universe, that there are aliens out there, but they're choosing not to interact with us. If we don't shape up, we won't get invited to the party. That's right. And so in this world that she's built, you have all these different kinds of human-like aliens. And they have all these different powers.

Some of them can read minds. Some of them can influence what you think. They can do like emotional control. They can make you feel things or coerce you into doing things. It's really quite interesting. And then she builds, you know, a realistic society. She builds workplaces and relationships and all sorts of stuff. takes you through really what it would be like to live in that world.

I guess the biggest question would be how do you trust anyone, you know? Like how do you trust that they're not reading your mind or influencing you or making you say dumb things? It's hard and it really changes the nature of relationships. And she has really interesting examples in there about like abusive marriages where one person controls the other or, you know, romances and what that's like and infidelity. And so it's really an interesting deep dive into what it would be like to live in that society. And that's what I meant earlier, that she's really thought carefully about the experience of a person in that situation. And I'm always really impressed when somebody pulls that off because you have to do two hard things at once.

One is imagine what it's like to be a completely different kind of person with a different kind of brain and also make it accessible to us, right? I mean, if you imagine what it's like to live as a weirdo, blobbo alien, it'd be totally incomprehensible to us. You couldn't write a novel, you know, from the point of view of something that thinks fun. fundamentally different. So you have to sort of like bridge that gap to make it accessible to like, you know, the readers, us actual human beings. It's not an easy thing to do, you know, from a literary construct point of view. You have to kind of translate in a way, a whole different way of thinking.

Yeah. So they play mind games with each other and we're the ones getting a timeout? Who's making these decisions? Yeah, well, you know, the ones with the power are the ones making the decisions. But as you read it, you'll also find that these characters, even though they're not technically human or they're very different from us. Their society is a lot in common with ours, you know, they build bureaucracy,

they have conflicts. The book begins with a really devastating act of war and genocide. And so then there's politics and factionalism and, you know, like workplace romance and all sorts of stuff. So it's very relatable in that way. Unfortunately, I think.

You know, unfortunately. All right, well, let's get into the science of this novel, The Best of All Possible World by Karen Lord. and let's get into your interview with Karen Lord. But first, let's take a quick break. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again?

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Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about science fiction author, Karen Lord and her book, The Best of All Possible World. And so it's a world where everyone has psychic powers in a way, Daniel.

And so what's the science of it? How do you explain this psychic ability that's pervasive among all these alien species? Yeah, so one question is just like physically or biologically, is it possible to evolve this kind of ability? I mean, evolution essentially explores random mutations and chooses the ones that are best fit for the environment, but it can't do things that are impossible. You can't spontaneously evolve the ability to travel faster than the speed of light, right? Because it breaks the laws of physics. Or like evolve anti-gravity. Or maybe.

Or maybe. It's called legs, Daniel. But you know, you can't break the laws of physics even with evolution. But, you know, fundamentally, I don't think there's anything physics-wise that would be preventing us from communicating more directly brain to brain. Interesting. We have a lot of ways to translate the thoughts in our brain into information and transmit them so we recreate the thoughts in somebody else's brain. We're doing one right now. I'm boiling down my thoughts into these sound waves and sending them into your brain.

Through your device, through the internet, you know, through the air in cell phone signals and then into my ears and into my brain. Precisely. And so that's a little indirect. And I guess telepathy would just be like somewhat more direct. You know, imagine your brain broadcast something invisible. Instead of using it through sound waves, we use electromagnetic radiation or something. It's not inconceivable to imagine evolving a new part of the brain that can transmit EM waves. because after all, you know, the brain is a bunch of wires, right? That use electromagnetic signals to interact. It's basically a little circuit. Wait, so you're talking not through tech, but through actual biology.

Do you think there's a way to have a biological, like, you know, radio transmitter and receiver? Yeah, I think there's no physics objection to having a biological radio antenna in your head. Oh, wow. I guess, yeah, maybe. I guess, you know, your body could learn to, I don't know, what, like make an antenna inside of your head, like accumulate metals in a certain way. And you don't even necessarily need metals, right? To generate a signal, a radio signal, you just need a current, a current that's oscillating

and then to be receptive to it. And so there are lots of ways to do that and lots of things that are conductive. You know, water, for example, is very conductive. And so you could certainly engineer. If you were going to sit down and design it, there's no physics or engineering principle I'm aware of that would prevent it from happening. The whole separate question of whether it would evolve, whether it would evolve, whether It's the benefit to it and the energy use, you know, makes it worth it,

whether you could find yourself in an environment that would need that and evolution would provide the selective pressure to encourage that. But from a physics point of view, I don't see why you couldn't have telepathy. Wow, yeah. I guess there are studies of birds, right? Birds who can sort of sense the magnetic field of the earth and they do it by manipulating some, you know, some metal inside of the brain, reading the right current, I think, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And this is different from other things, you know, like telekinesis, the ability to move objects with your mind. Like, I don't see a physical basis for that at all. Oh, I see. But, you know, sending messages back and forth, emailing brain to brain. Yeah, totally. We could, in theory, evolve that using our brain. I see. So telepathy, yes. Telekinesis, no. But that's the phone. That's a more fun more. Because you want to tap on somebody's shoulder from the other side of the room and trick them. I always feel like if you're telekinetic, the best thing you can do with it is move yourself. You can fly, right? Right, of course. Can you? I wonder. Telekinesis is basically flying, yeah. Or you could just sit on your couch and clean your room at the same time.

You could, yes. Technically. Would you, though? It brings a whole new challenge to being lazy, right? You have no excuse. Do you think it feels like an effort to lie in bed and clean your room without moving your body? Well, I always wonder, you know, because these things take energy, right? Like even if you're a telepathic, you would need to, you would be burning a lot of energy to send these signals out.

Yeah, wouldn't you? Probably. And I don't know what it would be like from the evolutionary point of view, whether evolving this thing would be efficient or not. But, you know, you could imagine some scenario where it's really crucial to survival because you can't communicate using sound for whatever they find themselves on a really noisy planet or something. And you have to evolve some alternative way to communicate or in response to some, you know, predator or something. I mean, you could imagine various scenarios, but it would take a lot of time, right? Like, evolution takes generations and generations and generations. So this is not like by 2,200, this is like far in the future of humanity.

Or if humanity existed on different planets, they would have to have split a long time ago in order to have this sort of evolution. All right. But then it's also possible to get telepathy through technology. Yeah. I think, you know, engineering would probably beat biology in the race there. Like, if you wanted to design and implement something. to make it possible to send a message without talking to just think it.

I think it's not that far in the future to be able to do that. We have the basic elements of that, I think, already in hand. Right. No, I mean, we have it right now. I don't know if you've seen those studies or those experiments. For people who are like paraplegic, they put a brain sensor in their cortex and they sense, you know, spatial signals and they were able to sort of move a robot arm around. It's like that's happening right now.

Yeah, there's sort of two steps you need there. One is, like, to control an external device, to use your brain signals to send information, right, to some prosthetic, for example. And you're right, we can do that. You can train your brain to send the right signals to control a prosthetic, which is amazing. And the other side of it is to interpret messages in your brain, like to receive messages. And people have been doing this already with, like, cochlear implants. They attach a fake ear to somebody's head and just, like, zap it. into the brain, the nerve, and the brain learns to interpret those messages as sound.

Yeah, they do that with a retinal eye implants too. And so, you know, there's a lot of steps between here and, you know, brain email your friend, but... It's there, but the technology is there. The technology is there. And a lot of, you know, complicated signal processing, like, how do you take what's in somebody's brain and interpret in a way to send it out and all this kind of stuff? But there's some really fascinating studies they've done there.

They did one with movie trailers where they showed. showed people a bunch of movie trailers and imaged their brains while they were doing it. What? Yeah. And then they tried to train and network to guess which movie trailer they were watching just from the brain image. And they could totally tell. They could totally tell. Really?

Probably just dependent on the voice of the narrator. In a world. They all start with in a world. The voice changes a little bit. Yeah. But so I think that technologically, you know, I don't know how many years away we are. You should say because you're the engineer. But I don't see an obstacle to making this happen if we want it to, you know, if you're willing to drill into your brain and add some sort of prosthetic device to your brain, then, yeah, you could probably tap into the internet with your mind.

Yeah, I don't know if you know this, but I actually worked in a lab after my PhD. I was a research scientist at a neural prosthetics lab. I wasn't aware of that. Did you work on the human computer interface? I used to people, I worked in the little base port in the matrix where you insert the connector. That was my thing. I see. So you're actively working for our AI overlords. I was.

That's why I quit. Until they fired you. Because I left the matrix. You pull the plug. I pulled the plug, yeah. But, you know, the hard part in all this is actually your body rejects anything foreign. So you can put implants in your brain. But after a while, your body's going to be like, this is not supposed to be here.

And it actually, like, covers it in cells and scar tissue that makes it unusable. And so they have to, like, pull that out again, insert. it again or figure out one way for either your body to accept it or for it to kind of adapt to your body. Do those folks have to take immunosuppressants forever? Oh, yeah, probably. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I also thought it was interesting. Like, how long have people been thinking about telepathy? Like, is it a new idea or an ancient one? And I was surprised to learn that it's sort of a recent concept. No. The idea of like sending messages invisibly brain to brain only sort of appeared like about 150 years ago.

Really? What was the first mention of it? It was sort of in the late 1800s when people realized that like x-rays and radio waves and invisible particles were actually real, that you really could send invisible information, that we were basically living in an invisible universe, constantly surrounded by things happening around us we weren't aware of, that they thought, well, oh, maybe it's possible then to send information brain to brain. And if you look at like the history of science fiction, this kind of concept didn't appear in

science fiction until about the late 1800s, early 1900s. But there have been sort of like mystics, right, and mythology also that must have, you know, talked about this idea of reading your mind or making you controlling you. Yeah. And those people always have like special magic powers. But the idea is that it entered, you know, sort of science fiction across the threshold into like, maybe this is something which could actually happen in the future for normal, regular people. Once we realized that we were surrounded by these invisible fields and particles that maybe

we could learn to manipulate. All right. Well, let's get back to Karen's book. And so what I guess what's the basic story of the book before we get into her interview? The basic story of the book is that one of these planets with human-like aliens is devastated by an attack that wipes out almost the entire species. And so refugees from that planet then come to another world and they have to learn to sort of live on that planet and interact with those folks. And it's a lot of like clash of cultures and acclimatization. It brings different kinds of aliens into contact and conflict and have to learn to live together and find a new home. So it really highlights in a nice way the differences between them as they figure out how to learn together and get to know each other and have some romance.

All right. Some refugee romance. Some pan alien romance. Oh boy. All right. Well, let's get into your interview with Karen Lord, author of The Best of All Possible World. And here it is. Well, It's my absolute pleasure to welcome today to our program, Dr. Karen Lord, the author of today's featured book, The Best of All Possible World, and also the book, Redemption in Indico. Dr. Lord, thank you very much for joining us, and welcome to our program. Thank you so much for inviting me. First, we'd just like to get to know you a little bit. Tell us, how did you get into science fiction writing? You have a sort of impressive academic background.

You have a PhD and a master's in philosophy and a master's in science. Well, I think that anytime you grow up as a reader, you kind of end up going this direction anyway. So I was reading science fiction from very, very far back. And as for writing it, I think you do that thing in school where you try to write things, and you just realize how extremely bad you are. So you wait to grow up a bit. And then it was quite by accident that I, you know, sometimes I would go back to writing and then I would get busy and have other work to do,

and then I'll go back to it. And then one month, I was actually doing, I was taking a pause from a master's, and I said, I need to keep my hand in writing long documents, so this month I'm going to try National Novel Writing Month. And I'm going to tackle that folktale that I always loved as a kid and see if I can expand it. And that's how the draft of redemption in Indigo came to be.

and I didn't have any particular plans for it except to just try to see what I could do. Yes, it just sort of snowballed from there. Oh, well, that's wonderful. What is your academic background? What fields do you have your degrees in? Oh, dear. So this is going to make me look like a dilettante.

And my only excuse is that this is all over a very long period of years. My first degree is Bachelor of Science. It's actually a specialist in history of science and technology. a major in physics and a minor in astronomy. Then after that, my first master's is science and technology policy. And then I did an M-film, which was actually in sociology of religion. That bit was a bit more history plus sociology. And then my PhD also sociology of religion.

Wow, fascinating. That is quite an amazing collection of topics. For our listeners, we usually like to ask a science fiction author to sort of orient themselves in the science fiction. in the space of science fiction writers. So let me ask you a few questions that we ask all of the authors. You, I assume, of course, are familiar with the transporter technology in Star Trek. Yes.

And so is it your view that those transporters actually transport your atoms somewhere else? Or kill you, disassemble you, kill you, and then clone you and recreate you somewhere else? Well, to answer that question properly, you'd have to talk about the nature of being, wouldn't you? Yes, exactly. So I do have some writings. in fact, something I'm working on right now with a colleague, where I am talking about what does it mean to be discorporate, but still conscious? Where does your consciousness reside when you're not in a physical body?

Some of that can be looked at mystically and some of it can be looked at scientifically, especially if you plan to go forward a few centuries. So in that case, would you, if somebody invented this technology, would you be willing to step into a transporter? So that's an excellent question, because right now I wouldn't be willing to step into a plane. I think that part of it depends on who built it because it still has to be reliable. And we've had plenty of episodes about what goes wrong when it doesn't work properly. So you understand that there's always still a risk once it's sort of built by human hands.

But then again, sometimes it's a question of balancing your risk with your opportunity. How else are you going to get to see the universe? How else are you going to go there into the galaxy? So let's just say I would be very, very tempted. And depending on how much I could trust the manufacturers, I might make it to go for it. All right. So you'd look at the brand name before you stepped in. Exactly.

I want to dig into that a little bit more, but first we have to take a quick break. I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call, said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission.

I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head.

Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola, it's HoneyGerman. And my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment. With raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite. We were Latin artists and celebrities.

You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters,

sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vivas you've come to experience. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching?

I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. Yeah. But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Has Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.

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solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, and we're back. I'm interviewing Dr. Karen Lur, the author of the book, The Best of All Possible World. Well, you have some knowledge of the history of science, which is fascinating. So I'd like to ask you then, what technology exists in science fiction only

that you would like to see become reality in our future? That's a tough one because, you know, we've had our jet packs phase, and then we realized we didn't really want those that much. And then we had our kind of, oh, goodness, what do you call it again? Well, that thing which became the iPad, which basically came off of Star Trek, that kind of came into being. I almost feel as if I want to be surprised.

I don't want the things that we think we can invent just from our point of view. I want something to come completely unimagined and unimaginable and surprise me. That's the sort of thing I really want to see. I'm not answering your questions really bad, aren't I? I'm not doing a yes or no. I'm just sort of always choosing the weird option. No, the weird option is always the most interesting one. So then last in this series of questions, what's your personal answer to the Fermi paradox? If the galaxy is so big and there are a lot of earth-like planets, why haven't we been visited yet by aliens? Oh, well, I wrote that into my books

because we're so badly behaved. We don't deserve to be visited. We're too dangerous to be visited. We're the equivalent to that ant's nest in the garden that, you know, you waver between avoiding it and wondering if you should call the exterminator. Well, that's sort of terrifying and disappointing to think that there are aliens out there with great knowledge that they're just keeping from us because of our poor behavior. Wow. I'm disappointed in us. Well, then let's turn into your novel, which I read and thoroughly enjoyed.

It's called The Best of All Possible Worlds. And the novel takes place sort of in the deep future where humans have a wide variety of mental and physical abilities, including like psionic powers like telepathy and emotional manipulation. What gave you the idea to use this concept in your novel? Did you start from the science and the concept and then develop the story, or was there a story you wanted to tell and you created sort of this concept and framing in order to tell that story? I think it was a little bit of both. I didn't want my aliens to be fully alien. I wanted it to be a concept where the aliens are still human. They're so recognizably human. But then you needed to have a degree of

difference that would allow for the usual fare of the other. That is always an interesting thing to play with in Storing. So I remember someone telling me that people had kind of abandoned the psionics aspect of science fiction for a while, that I was sort of bringing back this old school thing. And I hadn't thought of it that way. I was just interested in something that would allow me to play with the power dynamics between people, the question of, you know, what if this person really did have some kind of superior or different mental ability that made you feel at risk, made you feel as if they could harm you? And how would that play out in terms of being in a society with them? It's really a story about fall of empire in some ways. So the

people from the empire have to look as if they are somehow ahead. And being just technologically ahead wasn't cutting it for me. And so I noticed that in the story you tell in this future you describe, the problems these folks face are sort of familiar. There's culture clash, there's conflict, there's identity questions, there's workplace romance. Is that because you think that those problems will be with us forever, that they're part of what make us human? Or is that just because you wanted to tell a story to people who live today and you wanted to make it sort of accessible? Well, I kind of hate to tell you this, but it's not as far in the future as you think. Because remember, it doesn't take place on Earth.

Right. Because Earth is embargoed because we're kind of, you know, so immature. to be left to ourselves for a bit. So although I haven't come out and said exactly when it takes place, there are some hints in terms of where the cultural references stop to make you kind of realize that, wait a minute, it might not be as far in the future as I think. So it's close enough for people to have the same flaws and foibles and usual pitfalls.

And so there was one sort of factual detail I was a little bit confused about in the stories. Are these humans or are these aliens? because they're sometimes described as human cultures, but they definitely seem like they have abilities that humans don't currently have, which is what made you think maybe it's happened in the far future. They are definitely human. At the time, I was interested in some genetic research

that was coming out talking about, I'm going to mispronounce all these names, by the way. I'm an author. I always read my words. I never speak them, and then I embarrass myself. So just let you know that up front. It's a sign of being well read. Yeah, we'll go with that.

But yes, there was research on the genetic traces that the Neanderthals and the Denisovans had left behind. And part of me was thinking, what if there was a template that there were supposed to be at least three or four closely related human species that could, in fact, you know, to use the crass term interbreeding and mixed genetic material and what have you? And what if there was another planet that was like mostly Neanderthal or mostly Denisovan? What would that look like? So in the back of my head, although I haven't put it in the story, that's what these different so-called alien planets are. These different strains of humanity that are somehow kind of hardwired into that and the whole egg of creation. I see. And so in this backstory you've imagined, how do humans get on those other planets?

Is it some sort of panspermia where humans have come to Earth and other planets from some. somewhere else? We have a common thread of evolution. I didn't have a connection between the planets, except for between Earth as thing as beta. That's when I use the old hand wavy portals thing. As for humanity springing up on those other worlds, I kind of couched him myth. It is sort of an egg myth. It is sort of, you know, God throws on this egg to these four core planets and voila. But there's nothing to suggest that it's reality. It's probably just a story that, you know, parents tell their kids or something from some old religion and nobody really takes it seriously. I like to leave those things a little vague, but then again you get

this idea that it's not a case of, except for, you know, three of the planets, it's not a case that there's this long tradition of interconnection. And that allows you to have some quite separate cultures, which is fascinating to play with in its own way. Yeah, absolutely. That was that was really fun to read about. I see now that you're saying it's a, that's sort of a structure of a story where we're talking about divergent evolution and how these cultures become different and then they come together and they have those clashes, which is definitely a familiar kind of story. But thinking about the future of humanity, do you think, you know, in 100 years or a thousand years that these are things that might happen to humanity, that we might evolve psionic abilities or telepathic powers or anything else that features in your novel? You know, I am both interested in accurately predicting the future and quite terrified of accurately predicted future because just last year I wrote a story which got published in January called

The Plague Doctors about a pandemic. So, yeah, so I'm really careful about that. But the other thing I was riffing off of is that nothing that had described in those books hasn't already been claimed by humans on earth right now. Different degrees of it, of course. But I, aspects of empathy, aspects of, you know, twins reading each other's minds across the distance, what have you. That's why it's one of our most beloved tropes, because it doesn't come out of nowhere. It comes out of people in real life saying, but I have disability or I have a little touch of this ability. So I thought, well, you know, maybe we do. Maybe it's in process of being developed. Let's just imagine it got a little further. Now what? What does society look like?

Yeah, fascinating. And I like how you connected it also. to sort of the transportation technology. You made all these references to these mindships. And I was desperate to know more about those. Can you tell us a little bit about your faster than light mindships, what they are, how they work? I can indeed, but, you know, the scary thing is at first when you invited me and you said, oh, it's what the science invest in all possible worlds.

I thought, how am I going to talk about the science invest without talking about the science in the galaxy game, which is the sequel? Because that's when I really started to talk about the transportation technology. And the mineships, without spoiling too much about the sequel, what comes out about how the mineships work and how certain other forms of transportation work is that you have to have a collective consciousness. So going back to your question to me,

the Star Trek transport technology, where does your consciousness go when your corporal form is disassembled? So the idea there is that, okay, If we have a form of technology or form of ability, let's say, in this kind of basically a space wheel, but it's more like a stingray, so we'll call the space whale. But if we have that ability and we're moving across dimensions because, of course, to make this work, we have to have our faster than light transportation. How do you hold your consciousness together?

And that was why I say, okay, maybe we have to have a larger than human consciousness. to survive that kind of travel. It has to be a collective consciousness. I was, in fact, inspired by something in real life. There is something called a Portuguese Manor War, which is like a jellyfish, but not a jellyfish. It's actually a collective organism. It's not one creature.

It's like a colony creature. It also gives you the most horribly painful and vile sting, you can imagine. But, you know, I got over that, and I took a science and I put it into the book, and I said, you know, what if, you know, you know, there were these advantages to becoming a colony creature so that not only do you have a future where humanity has these kind of psionic powers developing, but you also have a creature

that has a form of intelligence that can combine with human intelligence to form a collective consciousness. And this has some benefits in some way. This has some advantages of, you know, going through the galaxy with an ease that just ordinary, mechanical solutions would not achieve. So that was what I was playing with. And that then begins to explain why, for example, the humans of that planet develop in a certainly because it's partly their interaction with the animals

that become the mindships that cause them to become so strong to empathically. It's a fascinating twist that the mindships themselves are sentient to their essentially animals. When you construct the universe of your novels and you're building this and putting your story into it, how important is it to you that the science in there be plausible? Not necessarily that it follows the same laws of physics that we have, but that there are some laws of physics of that universe that it obeys. I'll tell you what I find important. There has to be a cost. There has to be a

cost because if you have free and easy travel, for example, then you almost cannot build a similar to Earth society and play with it as a story. You've removed some of the constraints that make us who we are. So in some respects, even when you're making up a technology, you're using something that mirrors a present day constraint or restriction that we have in terms of the technology that we're using. As for the details, as for the, you know, exactly how does this work? I often say to people, you know, ask someone how a TV works. They don't know. It doesn't affect their lives, you know. They're just happy that they get their entertainment. So you need to be careful how much you immerse yourself in the details of even the stuff you make up as well

as the stuff that is real and ask yourself, okay, to what extent is this going to advance the story or be relevant to the plot? However, I want to put in a good word for social science because I might read a story which explains to me in great detail how a TV works and that's nice. But if the relationship between two of the characters is simply implausible, or if the society has this weird gap of

who's doing this labor, or where's this money coming from, that's what trips me up. Because even though we don't necessarily know the, have the vocabulary to understand exactly how our world is structured and why it works the way it does,

when the gaps are there, we can sense it and it doesn't feel quite real. It doesn't feel quite right. So for the proper suspension of disbelief, at least on my side, and I think it's gotten worse, the more I've gone into sociological study, I need to have a plausible society. I need to have a plausible psychology of the individual as well. And that has to be all affecting how the plot unfolds. If the science of the individual and the collective isn't right, I definitely can't write it.

That's fascinating. I agree with you that the story has to take place. place in the context of some obstacles, some constraints that make the story move forward, that those have to be consistent for the story to make sense, even if you haven't worked out the scientific details. But I think that touches in a really fascinating way on something you said earlier. You're telling me that you're wanting to construct a story that makes sense to us here today, that resonates with us, that makes sense to us, that speaks to who we are as people and

our struggles. But also science fiction is about extrapolating into the future and wondering what would it like to be human in the 500 years or 1,000 years. Are we limited in our ability to think about what the experiences are like for humans in 100 years and 500 years? I mean, considering the enormous changes and experiences of a person just over the last 50 or 100 years? I think that not every writer, not every speculative fiction writer has the gift to really

extrapolate to see what things look like. But I also think that if you write something to show, to feel, to feel, to feel, to hold up a mirror to your society as it is now. Sometimes that is what survives. And the reason I mention this is one of my favorite books is Flatland. And for a book that was written in like, you know, the mid-1800s, that book holds up extraordinarily well. Not just, of course, in terms of mathematics, which is entirely accurate, but the sociology. And all he's doing is critiquing Victorian society. But so many of the aspects that he talks about, in the guise of flatland society, are still with us today.

So you could say, you know, if you're just going forward 150 years, you can talk about society, and it still will have some of the same problems, some of the same challenges, some of the same things that we're trying to work out. I think in a way that's why I wanted to introduce these alien humans who had constructed such different societies that they were influencing the mostly Earth societies to think differently, to imagine a different. way of being. Sometimes I do wonder whether we need some kind of, I don't want to call it quite an external shock, but maybe an external inspiration to realize, okay, this is how it

can be done differently. Well, it certainly will be fascinating when the aliens decide that we're worth it and come talk to us and tell us how we should be really. Wonderful. Well, thank you very much for talking to us about your book. Will you tell us a little bit about the projects you have going on now that might be coming out soon? There is a manuscript that I've just written, which would be touching again on the world of the best well possible worlds in the galaxy game but you know with the pandemic and all things a bit a little delayed so i probably shouldn't talk about it yet because we're looking at 2022 or so before you'll see it um i've been working on plenty of zoom type conferences and festivals and so forth so coming up in september the boca slit fest which is based in shirang tobago

is going to be having an all-virtual festival and you can expect to see me there. I'll probably tweet about it closer to the time when I can give up the dates and what have you. And prior to that, there's also the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. I may have called that wrong, but I think I have it right.

That is going to be the weekend before. So again, those are things that if anybody follows on my Twitter, I'll be sure when I have, like, you know, the nice shiny graphics and all the right dates and times, I'll be tweeting forward about that. Sounds good. Well, we're looking forward to reading the next book in your series and anything else you write, frankly. It was a pleasure to read your book and a pleasure to talk to you today. Thank you so much. All right. Awesome interview, Daniel. It's so interesting her background and also how she kind of uses science fiction to talk about societal issues and like human character issues.

Yeah, at the same time, an exploration of the future of our society and also like shining a light on how we live and the issues that we face today. And I think one of the points she's making is that as humans were likely to face the same kind of struggles and conflicts, no matter what the setting, whether it's on another planet or on a spaceship or just here on Earth trying to survive. Yeah, and I like how she totally avoided the question of why do all these aliens look like humans, as I feel like most science fiction authors do. Yeah. You're like, I don't know. Or it's not a central part of the story. Yeah, I like that actually. She said she owned that.

She was like, you know, assume a mythological beginning to my universe and then take it forward from the science. at that point. It's a cool, it's a really a fascinating blend of like cultural heritage and mythology and then, you know, hardcore science fiction. So it's definitely not like any other book I've read, but I really enjoyed it. Well, again, the book is The Best of All Possible World by Karen Lord. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that and give it a try. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. 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. Kids Vap Serious, which warrants a serious conversation from a serious parental figure, like yourself.

Not the seriously know-it-all sports dad or the seriously smart podcaster. It requires a serious conversation that is best had by you. No, seriously. The best person to talk to your child about vaping is you. To start the conversation, visit Talk Aboutvaping.org. Brought to you by the American Lung Association and the Ad Council. Tune in to All the Smoke Podcast, where Matt and Stacks sit down with former first lady, Michelle Obama.

Folks find it hard to hate up close. And when you get to know people, you're sitting in their kitchen tables, and they're talking like we're talking, you know, you hear our story, how we grew up, how Barack grew up, and you get a chance for people to unpack and get beyond race. All the Smoke featuring Michelle Obama. To hear this podcast and more, open your free IHeartRadio app, search all the smoke and listen now. I'm Simone Boys, host of the Brightside podcast, and on this week's episode.

I'm talking to Olympian, World Cup champion, and podcast host, Ashlyn Harris. My worth is not wrapped up in how many things I've won. Because what I came to realize is I valued winning so much that once it was over, I got the blues, and I was like, this is it. For me, it's the pursuit of greatness. It's the journey. It's the people. It's the failures. It's the heartache.

Listen to The Bright Side on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.