In contrast to Mr. George Carlin, I don’t intend for this post to be funny.  I’m not very good at doing funny.  While Mr. Carlin was adept at poking fun at many things and certainly used a more flowery vocabulary, the only thing I’ll do in his memory is to steal his title.  I recently learned that titles can’t be copyrighted, so, authors out there, go for it.  (My novel, Full Medical, for example, is often seen as some POD self-help non-fiction work.  Unless you’re one of the villains, there’s not much about self-help in it.  But I didn’t steal that title.  Well, just a wee bit, in tribute to Frederik Pohl and his sci-fi classic Gateway.)

We visited the D.C. area this weekend.  Usually a city trying to revert back to the swamp that it was, the humidity was low enough that the heat was tolerable.  A good day for demonstrations, I thought.  No, I didn’t go see Professor Mouth, Mr. Glen Beck, lead his mostly white crowd in their push to establish an American theocracy.  I also didn’t mingle with the mostly black crowd in their nostalgia fix of celebrating Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  I thought that was going to be on the Mall too, but I couldn’t find it.  Just kidding.  I wasn’t looking for either one.  But the drive from New Jersey gave me time to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going.

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A new book out, written by journalist Leslie Kean and called UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record, will surely stir up that old UFO hornet nest again.  My first acquaintance with serious works on UFOs occurred in 1956 with Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt’s classic The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.  (Yes, I was only ten years old—call me precocious.)  This report seemed serious enough (to my budding scientific mind)—after all, the Captain was the first head of the USAF Project Bluebook.  So what’s this all got to do with Fermi?

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I know my inadequacies.  I just can’t write about vampires and werewolves.  I can’t do dungeons and dragons either.  I can’t write fantasy period.  While I’m in awe at the millions of dollars this stuff generates for writers, screenwriters, and Hollywood film companies, my inadequacy and awe don’t translate into admiration.  On the contrary, I loathe the stuff, more now than ever.

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The sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge (more fi than sci), known for A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky (two entertaining but unscientific Hugo award winners), and others have postulated a singularity in technology where machines attain sentience and the next stage of human evolution will see humans become part machine, or vice versa (presumably the human part attains sentience also?).  Vinge’s contributions to this theme lie mostly outside his fiction.  The idea has enough popular science interest that most of an IEEE Spectrum issue was dedicated to the subject.

In fiction machine sentience appeared some time ago in sci-fi lit.  There were Asimov’s robots (no one can deny that Daneel Olivaw is sentient).  There was the computer in Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (I believe his name was Mike).  Greg Benford’s Galactic Center series maps out Man’s fight with a machine civilization.   Humans becoming part machine is a sci-fi theme from Heinlein’s hero with the toolkit arm to the GigaRAM bottling of the hero in Pohl’s Gateway series, i.e. from prosthetics to complete assimilation.

But there is another major sci-fi theme that bears relevance to the world of men.  I for one believe that we are seeing another approaching singularity, one where a small group of individuals, even just one, well meaning or otherwise, can bring about a world damaging, catastrophic screw-up.  Chernobyl came close.  The BP oil spill may come closer.  Sci-fi writers have treated this theme for years.  They just didn’t call it a singularity in human affairs.

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I apologize up front for this post.  I will reminisce about one of my previous careers and, as a consequence, may give some readers a royal headache with the technical jargon and pedagogical whining.  Please forgive and bear with me.  Memoirs are not my forte.  But Mr. Feynman is as much a part of our American cultural background as hot dogs sold at Fenway Park.  You will perhaps remember his role in leading the analysis team of the shuttle o-ring disaster.  I have more complicated memories of him, although that one even showed his genius.

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In high school I often studied and was often amused by the little cliques that were formed (in my school some of these were gangs, but I’m talking about the more harmless ones).  I was even a member of such a group, a nerd herd that dominated the math and science courses, appeared on local TV in a San Joaquin Valley version of the College Bowl, took the extracurricular early morning “humanities honor class,” and generally did things together to the point of ignoring everybody else.  We weren’t particularly popular considering my home town is the county seat of one of the richest agricultural counties in the U.S., both then and now.  Looking back, I suppose we seemed kind of strange.  Most of the popular kids had other things on their minds, like cheerleading and sports.  They formed their own cliques.

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A recent announcement made about thirty-two extra-solar planets brings the total to more than four hundred, if I’m not mistaken.  The discovery was made with the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Search) spectrograph at the European Southern Observation in La Silla, Chile.  This spectrograph can detect differences in radial velocity of only a few meters per second.

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Our bitter and sore loser Mr. Cheney keeps making neo-con noise, so I wonder what his motivations are?  Just as Ayn Rand’s free market philosophy was proven wrong by the fall of mighty Wall Street, the neo-con philosophy of making the world safe for the US by controlling the world’s oil and building nations in our own image is impractical, outmoded, and does nothing to make us safe or the rest of the world love us.

Of course, Mr. Cheney, the super-patriot, doesn’t give a damn what the rest of the world thinks of the US and doesn’t care what other Americans think either.  He knows he’s right and will not give in to the forces of evil (comprised of all those that even minimally disagree with him, including, apparently, ex-President Bush).  Unlike Mr. Kennnedy, Mr. Cheney has never brokered a compromise with anyone.  He doesn’t have to.  He’s always right.

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We now know that bankers are good for something besides transferring wealth from the middle class to the upper class.  I’m referring to the Seattle banker that shagged flying ducks much better than Manny Ramirez can shag flyballs, put all his ducks in a row, and led Mama Duck and her darlings to the nearest lake (this is an Eastern U.S. term – Seattle city dwellers call them rain puddles).  (I guess he had his fifteen seconds of fame – I can’t even find his name on CNN anymore and I would like to give him credit – my hat’s off to you, good citizen.)

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Traditionally in pop culture sci-fi there is a mad scientist.  Lex Luthor in Superman comics is an example.  The very bad grade B movies on the Sci-Fi Channel generally have one so they can call it sci-fi even though a lot of these movies are really just a series of blood and gore scenes for computer games (the scientist very often is lunchmeat for his own discoveries or creations).  In Jurassic Park we had our mad scientist, the same one that was in Independence Day (his purpose in the first movie was to spout nonsense about chaos theory while in the second he possessed prescient knowledge that told him the alien computer codes were the same as ours).  Yes, I know the names were different, but the actor played the roles exactly the same.

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