What about All these People? Drought, Population, and Writing Scifi

Recently, the UN changed its estimates for the world population by 2100.

Credit: Scientific American

Like it says, the revision is for Africa. The estimate has doubled from 2 to 4 billion.

Overpopulation is a key issue in The Pathfinders (working title). How do we fund or justify interstellar travel, against a backdrop of overwhelming need? Population is one thing, climate change is another. Both are intersecting.

Climate Civil Wars
There's good reason to believe the Syrian Civil War is a water war. Thomas Friedman gave his assessment of this in the New York Times:

"This Syrian disaster is like a superstorm. It’s what happens when an extreme weather event, the worst drought in Syria’s modern history, combines with a fast-growing population and a repressive and corrupt regime and unleashes extreme sectarian and religious passions, fueled by money from rival outside powers..."
It is perilous to analyze a recent conflict, more so a current one. Historians are often uncomfortable with this, because we simply don't have the sources yet. We certainly do not have the benefit of detachment.

Bearing this in mind, let's try. Here are some factors that can trigger climate civil wars:

- Underdeveloped, growing population (lots of young, angry, uneducated men)
- Poor water access
- Shit government

- Neighbors with these problems, too.

There are many places in Asia and Africa that already match these criteria. Global warming and increasing population will aggravate these. Religious fundamentalism has already been fueled in particular by the first. It will be interesting to see if decades from now, historians decide to attribute recent religious extremism partly to climate change. It is of course, too early to tell.

What does this have to do with my book?
The dislocation climate change will bring is important to the book. In part, because it's expected. I can't write about 2050, unless I try and depict 2050 as best we can predict it. "Cli-Fi" is also in right now.

Secondly, war means action scenes! If I can have a stealth Abrams fight an exo-suit, I will. Writing needs to be fun. For me, that's Chinese aircraft carriers and US drones-on-the-ground.

Thirdly - I wanted to explore a conflict it can create, over the use of space. One camp wants resources committed to getting people off the planet. The world's powers are building orbitals as new, stable, living spaces. The other camp wants to send expeditions to the nearest stars.

How do you fund exploration and science, during a challenge as great as a World War? 

Or can we? World War optimism.

Navin Weeraratne

Won a Short Story Competition!

Won a competition run by Lexicons, a body that promotes Science Fiction and Fantasy writing in Sri Lanka. The contest is once a quarter. Last time I got my ass handed to me, but this time things went better.

Full disclosure: my wife runs Lexicons. She's not one of the judges though, and the submissions have their names removed.

Here's the story:
http://lexiconwordart.blogspot.com/2014/11/project-scrybe-iii-winning-entry.html

Astronomy at 550 AU
I wrote this story mainly explore a neat idea I bumped into recently. Gravity warps space, and so bends the path of light. Light passing around a body will converge at a point. This is a good place to put a telescope. We already use gravitational lensing, it's nothing new.

Light passing near the sun, converges 550 AU away. What if we placed a telescope, there? It's a tremendous distance (about 10 times Pluto's distance), but the sun itself would act as a lens. Such a telescope would be staggeringly powerful. Not only could it identify the gases atmospheres of Earth-like worlds, but even show us their surfaces!

The idea was pioneered by Von Eshelman at Stanford. Physicist Claudio Maccone is probably its biggest champion. He's suggested a mission to 550 AU, named FOCAL. For more information about him and FOCAL, there is an excellent link here.

Gravitational Lensing. Credit: Martin Kornmesser & Lars Lindberg Christensen

Making the Solar System feel Huge
I also experimented with creating a sense of deep space and deep time. Deep time is quite straight forward - names get strange and you add a few centuries here and there. There's a bit of extrapolating ahead (have the Jovians been terraformed? What's the post-Singularity like?), but nothing too taxing. Most of it, you won't use.

Deep space was tougher - I was dealing with just our solar system. Generally, we treat it as it were relatively small (and it is). However, we don't think much about how truly distant the planets are they from each other.

Then, there are Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. How often do we consider them, when we think about the solar system? How many people even know about them? Even within the Oort Cloud, bodies are (on average) as distant from each other, as the Earth is from the Sun.

There's plenty of space in the solar system to found nations and set up empires. In "The Wardens," I tried to convey this.

Parting Thoughts
I don't think I'll revisit the world in "The Wardens," but it was fun to write a short story again. I used to do a fair bit when I was younger, and I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed it.

Navin Weeraratne