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The Nearest Exoplanets

Karl Schroeder — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:51:26 -0700

How many planets are there within 20 lightyears of our sun? Even five years ago we couldn't have answered this question. Today, without actually having spotted any, we can give a fairly confident estimate of how many there should be, and what they should be like. Interested in finding out? Then read on.

The Studies

There's been a lot of commentary in the news in the past year or so about the Kepler mission's cataloguing of distant planets. Kepler has allowed the number of known exoplanets to balloon up past 700 at latest count. Of course, since Kepler is watching a vastly distant patch of sky, it can't tell us how many planets there are in our local neighbourhood.

A lot has been written about the significance of Kepler's technique, which involves watching for the mini-eclipses that happen when a planet crosses the face of its star. Very little has been written about a parallel hunt that uses microlensing to accomplish a similar end. Microlensing looks for the distortions in the image of a star made by a planet's gravity. These surveys have been going on for ten years now and the results are staggering.

For instance, did you know that by some estimates there are up to 100,000 nomad planets--planets without a home--for every star in the galaxy? In my 2002 novel Permanence I boldly proposed that there might be one or two brown dwarfs for every star, and that seems to be true; but even in my wildest dreams I couldn't have imagined there might be tens of thousands of planets Pluto-sized or larger drifting between Earth and Alpha Centauri! I still can't really believe it.

These nomads are interesting, because sufficiently large ones (many will be of super-earth size, 2 or more earth-masses) can sustain a trickle of heat from their interiors for billions of years. Though their surfaces may be frozen, they can easily support sub-surface oceans like the one thought to exist in Jupiter's moon Europa. In other words, they can support life. There should be some thousands of these worlds for every star in the galaxy.

This is just the beginning of what the microlensing survey data is showing us. There's enough data now to begin to estimate how many orbiting planets your average star has, and what kind of planets they are. And the combination of microlensing survey data and Kepler data lets us be really precise.

The Numbers

Kepler's preliminary data seems to indicate that one third of main sequence F, G, and K stars (sunlike stars) have at least one earth-sized planet within the star's habitable zone. There are nineteen such stars within 20 lightyears of us, so this indicates, conservatively, that there are six earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of sunlike stars within 20 light years of Earth.

These numbers don't include habitable moons of gas giants that might orbit within the zone. So the actual number could be higher by one or two.

The microlensing survey lets us be precise for the whole population of stars. Here, survey says that the average number of planets per star in our galaxy is 1.6. This leads to the number of bound planets in the galaxy being close to 200 billion, and the number of total planets (including nomads) being ten quadrillion. (There are thus trillions of nomadic super-earths, many of which will have sub-ice oceans capable of developing life.)

The microlensing survey data is so far limited to planets in the super-earth to Jupiter size range, and between .5 and 10 AU distance of their stars. Within those limits, it suggests that 17% of stars have a Jupiter-like planet; 52% have a Neptune-sized planet and 62% have a super-earth. Since the smaller the planet, the more likely it is, we can continue this trend-line to say that in all likelihood, each star will have at least a 62% chance of having an Earth-sized planet. This puts the number of Earth-sized planets in the galaxy at 60 billion or so. The absolute number within 20 light years is at least 42. There's 51 stars outside the main sequence (giants or dwarfs) within 20 light years; another study suggests that the absolute probability for all stars of having a planet within the habitable zone is about 12% (which looks highly conservative). That would add six to our local total, meaning that within 20 light years, there should be at least 12 habitable earth-sized planets. This doesn't count marginal planets, exomoons and Europan worlds. Or, of course, nomads.

To zoom in on a couple of famous local stars, we can say that it's highly unlikely that Alpha Centauri has no planets, given that it is a triple system all of whose stars could support planets. We know Alpha Centauri has no gas giants, but that's consistent with the numbers; but the odds that either Centauri A or B have at least one earth-sized planet within the habitable zone are very high. The Centauris are close to our sun in age, so their planets may still be able to support life.

Tau Ceti, a very sunlike star only 12 light years away, probably has a couple of planets. It's an older star, however, and any earth-sized planets are probably getting arthritic: their plate tectonics will be shutting down somewhere around now. They'll be more like the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels: ancient and dying.

There's a lot more being discovered and theorized; for instance, one new study suggests that having a Jupiter-like massive planet in your solar system doesn't protect your planet from massive impacts, but on the contrary is a actually bad for you. Another suggests that at least 12% of earth-sized planets have a moon large enough to stabilize their axial tilt (a supposed necessity for planetary habitability) and another suggests that axial tilt won't affect climate all that much anyway. The prospects for life look good around the nearest stars.

The galaxy is literally overflowing with planets, far more than can be crammed into the orbits of its stars. Many of these planets could support life. The question now is, do they?

And if so, where are our nearest neighbours?

The Sunless Countries paperback

Karl Schroeder — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:06:04 -0700

Yeah, it's about time. The Sunless Countries will be arriving in trade paperback edition on May 8 or thereabouts. This is another fine edition and looks great next to the Cities of the Air and Pirate Sun trades. When it's out you'll be able to buy all the Virga books except for Ashes of Candesce in this format. They're beautiful editions and I highly recommend going this route if you want to quickly get up to speed with the editions.

On the other hand, I'm hoping to set up an offer on this site of signed original hardcover editions of all my books... hopefully in the next week or so. So maybe you want to hold out for that hardcover original...

Speed forecasting on Feb. 10

Karl Schroeder — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:19:20 -0700

On the evening of February 10, 2012, I will be joining Jody Culham and John Godfrey at the Toronto Reference Library, where we'll be doing some cool stuff. As part of the Treehouse Talk series, we'll each present and do a short exercise designed to provoke thought and discussion, starting at 6:30 in the evening and running until 8:15. I'm not sure what Jody's talk will be on, but John's will be on "Is Global Citizenship Possible?"

My talk/exercise will be "Tomorrow's Toronto: A Foresight Exercise on the Future of our City." I'll be using some foresight-oriented brainstorming techniques with the audience to try to derive a set of sketchy but evocative scenarios for Toronto's future. My part of the evening should take about 40 minutes.

Of course, this will only happen if Toronto city employees are not locked out. I'll keep you posted on that one.

Reviewing the never-before-reviewed

Karl Schroeder — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:19:45 -0700

If you head on over to Tor.com, you'll find a review I've just posted of the Shell Energy Scenarios to 2050. A review of a foresight project? Hell, why not? Foresight exists as a kind of parallel world to science fiction--a realm of official futures and aspirational texts that plays off of SF tropes but also invents its own. There are a lot of foresight projects out there and their findings can be fascinating, illuminating and controversial (remember the Limits to Growth and all the ink that was generated around it?).

If people like this little review I'll be happy to write more. Should be interesting, because there's an obvious subtext to this first review: it's the question, is the science fiction readership actually interested in other visions of the future?

Let's see what happens. Should only take a day or two to find out.

Wicked (3)

Karl Schroeder — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 08:49:05 -0700

Last summer I wrote a guest article on Charlie Stross's blog about wicked problems. Some of the characteristics of wicked problems are:There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem (defining wicked problems is itself a wicked problem).

There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem (defining wicked problems is itself a wicked problem).
Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse.
There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation"; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every attempt counts significantly.
Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution.
The social planner who tackles a wicked problem has no right to be wrong (planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).

Now Chris Smith has introduced me to a great article on How Complex Systems Fail by Richard I. Cook, MD. It's a very similar summary, but wickedly (if I can use that word) clever and, for anybody who's actually dealt with complex systems, so utterly true. Some of Cook's observations on the failure of complex systems include:

1. Complex systems are intrinsically hazardous systems.

3. Catastrophe requires multiple failures - single point failures are not enough.

4. Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them.

and one of my personally favourites:

5. Complex systems run in degraded mode.

For any of us who watched the Fukushima fiasco last summer, some of these will have an uncanny familiarity:

7. Post-accident attribution of accidents to a 'root cause' is fundamentally wrong.

8. Hindsight biases post-accident assessments of human performance.

15. Views of 'cause' limit the effectiveness of defenses against future events.

16. Safety is a characteristic of systems and not of their components.

...and finally,

18. Failure free operations require experience with failure.

It's a sobering list and every single item on it bears a great deal of thinking. The article as a whole is brief, but each of the items is explained in enough detail to make the ideas understandable and to provoke some thought. Everything in here is applicable in many different contexts, from Fukushima and Chernobyl to the Eurozone meltdown, to current electoral issues and the unintended consequences of urban planning decisions anywhere in the world. Check out the article.

...And stop thinking in terms of root causes, damnit!

Polyethylenimine

Karl Schroeder — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 06:53:50 -0700

Slashdot. Ah, Slashdot! So much gets reported there, and so often is it mauled in the comment threads. Take this recent thread on the discovery of a way to increase the CO2 absorbent qualities of a particular plastic. I actually made this subject one of my projects at school, and have posted a tiny summary of our findings elsewhere on this site.

Slashdot's usual pundits reacted to this little news item with derision and bewilderment. However, if this simple plastic both absorbs and releases its CO2 rapidly, and if it can withstand more than a few hundred cycles of doing it before deteriorating, it could literally save the planet. There's really nothing else out there you could say the same about.

It's like this: if you chase the references at the bottom of my page on carbon air capture, you'll discover that no amount of emissions reductions nor geoengineering of global temperature will prevent climate disaster at this stage. Even if we stopped putting new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere overnight, what's already there will continue to acidify the oceans and alter the climate for centuries. We are already on an irreversible course to mass extinction.

...Unless it somehow became feasible to remove the CO2 that's already in the air. Some of the Slashdot commentators naively suggested planting trees, but that's not actually a viable solution (especially as we are cutting trees down far faster than we can reforest, and the climate will kill forests faster than we can replant them anyway). What's needed is an industrial-scale solution. People like David Keith and Klaus Lackner have experimentally proven that it can be done, and even Keith's system, which uses off-the-shelf chemicals and processes, is economically viable provided there's a high price on carbon. However, if the polyethylenimine results hold up, they'll represent an orders-of-magnitude reduction in the difficulty of capturing atmospheric carbon. This translates to commercial viability at a credible carbon price.

In other words, we don't have to either bury our heads in the sand or accept the inevitability of mass desertification, mass extinction, ocean anoxia and economic catastrophe. When combined with actual emissions reductions, carbon air capture technology has the potential of returning the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels of CO2 within our lifetimes. It is the only measure that can actually reverse climate change.

So remember the word polyethylenimine. This unassuming plastic might just save the world.

Read the prologue to Ashes of Candesce

Karl Schroeder — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:19:23 -0700

Ashes of Candesce will hit the shelves on February 14, but meanwhile,Tor.com has an excerpt you can read online! I hope you like it.

Ashes brings together all the disparate plot threads from the first four books, and wraps them all up in one epic adventure. You'll encounter all the main characters from the previous books, and some surprising new ones. And, we finally get to see more than just a glimpse of the strange posthuman world that lies outside Virga.

The Virga series has been a great ride, and I hope you enjoy reading the cataclysmic ending as much as I did writing it.

If I had a Billion Dollars: Holiday Edition

Karl Schroeder — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 09:48:34 -0700

I've played this game before--and I will again. I find it clears the mind wonderfully to wonder what you'd do for the world if you had a billion dollars to spend. Build a secret volcanic island lair? Check. Cure necrotizing phlombosis? Check. Oh, there's all kinds of stuff you could do.

--There's one rule, though: whatever you spend your billion on, it has to be something nobody else is doing--and something that's worthwhile in a completely game-changing way.

After all, in today's market a billion dollars will get you a few miles of subway, or a new sports stadium. Yay. But it can get you so much more, as Elon Musk has demonstrated with his reinvention of the space launch business (and he hasn't spent more than a fifth of a billion on that). In fact, a billion is enough to solve more than one problem, if it's properly distributed.

I play this game regularly because the world keeps changing, and what's important keeps changing. Some items remain from previous lists; some are new. Here's today's list:

$200 million to studying and developing new systems of governance. --No, I don't mean e-voting, or even e-democracy. I'm talking about a systematic study of how humans govern themselves, and how our cognitive biases and interactions at different scales scuttle effective problem-solving among groups. Think this is fringe science? I happen to think it's the most important problem in the world, the only one that counts. Because if we reinvented governance (on the level of individual self-control and choice, on the level of small-group interactions, and all the way up to how millions of people make collective decisions) then every other problem facing us now would become tractable. So I'd be exploring cognitive science, promise theory, structured dialogic design and a lot else besides. $200 is really far too little to spend on this, but it's a start.
$200 million to develop efficient and economical carbon air capture and sequestration. Carbon air capture is the only potentially feasible method of returning Earth's atmospheric CO2 balance to pre-industrial levels in less than a hundred years. Emissions controls won't do it, neither will renewable energy, or even the complete disappearance of human civilization. The CO2's there. It has to actually be removed from the atmosphere. Currently, far less than $1 million is spent per year on how to do this. And that's just crazy.
$200 million to develop a microwave space launch system. --Again, this sounds wacky. But the physical resources of the solar system are effectively infinite; and the world looks like a very different place if you play the game of imagining that access to space was really cheap. All sorts of currently impossible problems fall like dominoes if it costs as little to get to space as it does to fly across the Atlantic. And, in space development, there is only one problem, and that's the cost of going the first 100 miles. Literally every other issue becomes tractable if you solve that one. So let's stop dicking around with incredibly expensive launch systems and solve it. (Why microwave launch and not laser launch? Because microwaves are more energy efficient, and can be done now; and because I think laser launch is a political non-starter, because accidental or deliberate straying of a laser launch beam could blind or fry anything in the sky, including airliners or other nations' satellites.)
$200 million to finally realize the dream of nuclear fusion energy. We are that close. Most of the money would be divided up between the chronically-underfunded research projects that are getting close: IEC fusion, magnetized-target fusion, and several others. I'd fund General Fusion's steampunk pneumatic-fusion system, for instance. But I'd also fund one method that nobody's trying right now, but may be the best of all: levitating dipole fusion.
$200 million to prototype the business models, supply chains and build a first-generation Vertical Farm. Because sane governance, free energy, a solution to global warming and unlimited material resources aren't enough if half the planet's starving, which will be the case in forty years if we don't act now. This one seems like a no-brainer, if it can be properly optimized.

An odd set of priorities? But, what if they all worked? Simultaneous breakthroughs in energy, resource access including food, removal of the threat of global warming, remediation of the natural environment destroyed by intensive agrivulture and, most importantly, a Renaissance in collective problem-solving would literally mean the world to us.

The point of all this should be clear. Even in a global recession, money's not the scarce commodity. Audacity is.

What can you do with a billion dollars?

You can build a new sports stadium.

Or, maybe, you can save the world.

The Deepening Paradox

Karl Schroeder — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:54:09 -0700

Okay, Keith B. Wiley's new paper does have a somewhat daunting title: The Fermi Paradox, Self-Replicating Probes, and the Interstellar Transportation Bandwidth. But it's a pretty easy read and hugely well worth it--because in this paper Wiley provides what may be the clearest discussion yet of the core puzzle Fermi first proposed sixty-two years ago: if alien technological civilization is even possible, then they should be here; at the very least, such civilizations should be visible to us. That we are instead faced with 'the great silence' is one of the most troubling and, yes, paradoxical, results of modern science.

I addressed the Paradox in my novel Permanence, coming up with a possible new solution for it; although Milan Cirkovic and other astrophysicists haven't disproved my central contention, they've since shown that it's not a show-stopper. As Wiley points out in this paper, even if the lifetime of an interstellar civilization is short; even if they're all doomed; there is no credible argument as to why they couldn't create self-reproducing probes (SRPs) to investigate the entire galaxy that, collectively, outlive the originating civilization. This is the very scenario I paint in Permanence. SRPs are a cheaper solution than one-off expeditions. In fact, SRPs are so efficient a solution to exploration and colonization that, plugging in some highly conservative numbers of how many civilizations there might be out there, Wiley shows that hundreds to billions of such probes should actually be here, in our solar system, right now!

Wiley blows up some of the keystone explanations for the Paradox, including Geoff Landis's percolation model, which previously I'd considered a pretty solid argument. Wiley is so good at demolishing easy explanations, in fact, that he brings us almost all the way back to square one, where Fermi had us in 1950. Where are they? We haven't a clue.

The mystery deepens almost by the day, because we've now identified 700 extrasolar planets and the count is increasing rapidly. We should shortly be racking up lists of Earthlike worlds, and we're closing in on good estimates of how many there must be in our galaxy. And the number is in the billions. So one central argument against the existence of alien life--the 'rare Earth' argument that environments to host it must be rare--has been more or less disproven. And that, just this year.

As possible explanations dwindle, we are being drawn inexorably toward the one explanation that is no explanation: that we really are alone. Why should this be? As Wiley shows, all it would take would be one alien species with our capabilities appearing, sometime in the past couple of billion years, and for that species to surpass where we are now technologically by, oh, say, a couple of hundred years... and the evidence for their existence should be present right here in our own solar system. It's an astonishing conclusion.

So are we alone? Well, there is one other possibility, at this point. I've lately been trumpeting my revision of Clarke's Law (which originally said 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'). My revision says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. (Astute readers will recognize this as a refinement and further advancement of my argument in Permanence.) Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don't exist, or we can't see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter.

This vote has consequences. If the Fermi Paradox is a profound question, then this answer is equally profound. It amounts to saying that the universe provides us with a picture of the ultimate end-point of technological development. In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies, until our machines approach the thermodynamic equilibria of their environment, and our economics is replaced by an ecology where nothing is wasted. After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don't produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained.

And as to why we haven't found any alien artifacts in our solar system, well, maybe we don't know what to look for. Wiley cites Freitas as having come up with this basic idea; I'm prepared to take it much further, however.

Elsewhere I've talked about this particular long-term scenario for the future, an idea I call The Rewilding. Now normally one can't look into the future; in the case of the long-term evolution of technological civilization, however, that is precisely what astronomy allows us to do. And here's the thing: the Rewilding model predicts a universe that looks like ours--one that appears empty. The datum that we tend to refer to as 'the Great Silence' also provides the falsification of certain other models of technological development. For instance, products of traditionally 'advanced' technological civilizations, such as Dyson spheres, should be visible to us from Earth. No comprehensive search has been done, to my knowledge, but no candidate objects have been stumbled upon in the course of normal astronomy. The Matrioshka brains, the vast computronium complexes that harvest all the resources of a stellar system... we're just not seeing them. The evidence for that model of the future is lacking. If we learn how life came to exist on Earth, and if it turns out to be a common or likely development, then the evidence for a future in which artificial and natural systems are indistinguishable is provided by the Great Silence itself.

Check out Wiley's paper. And just think: the Great Silence may turn out to be no paradox at all, but positive data about what our own future will look like.

Thank you all!

Karl Schroeder — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 07:07:04 -0700

The second SFContario was a roaring success according to everybody I've talked to--and I had a great time too. Of course it was an honour to be the GOH this year, and I tried to meet and talk to everybody I could. The panels were fun, but most important for me was the opportunity to connect up with people I don't get to see too often.

There are lots of people to thank, from the con committee to the diligent volunteers. My primary contacts were Alex von Thorn and Diane Lacey, who made sure I was provided for and my weekend organized.

It was good connecting up again with the Hartwells, the Swanwicks, John Scalzi, and many other American friends who braved the November weather to come up.

I think the high point of the convention, for me, was being interviewed by Lawrence M. Schoen on Saturday morning--not for the ego-boo, but because I've known Lawrence for a few years and our conversations are always wide-ranging and surprising. This one was no exception, and it was a delight from start to finish.

I hosted the English-language Aurora Awards this year, which was also a stellar honour. I don't feel I completely lived up to the responsibility because I accidentally sent my dress clothes home with my wife Saturday night and only discovered the gaff just prior to the ceremony--so I had to host it in a T-shirt and jeans. My apologies to everyone, particularly the Aurora committee, for looking like a slob at such an important event.

The ceremony itself was packed, however, and the atmosphere was actually quite electric. I've never seen such an enthusiastic and engaged crowd at an Aurora ceremony; it was the audience and participants that brought the event back to the peak of significance it deserved. I thank you all.

I wish the convention all success next year, and the same for all my fellow writers and the winners and nominated Aurora alumni. You deserve your days in the sun.

Previewing this Saturday...

Karl Schroeder — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 12:42:44 -0700

Yes, it's finally (almost) here: the graphic novel version of Sun of Suns! And I'll be doing the full reveal and talking extensively about the project this weekend at SFContario, at the Ramada Plaza Hotel in downtown Toronto.

Sun of Suns is set in the world of Virga, the ultimate hyper-technological-post-singularity-cannons-and-swordfights-pirate-infested steampunk playground of the imagination. There's much to say about the new project, and I'll be unveiling the artists, our writer and editor and their work on Saturday night at 6:00 p.m. For now, you'll have to get by on this teaser image.

Hope to see you there!

Ashes of Candesce cover art can be yours

Karl Schroeder — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:02:25 -0700

Hurry on over to Stephan Martiniere's website and you can acquire a poster-sized copy of his wondrous cover art for my upcoming novel Ashes of Candesce. Here's a teaser.

By the way, this is an actual scene from the book. The lady at the top of the stairs is someone we've met before; the setting is not Rush, nor any of the other cities we've seen, but it is a city whose presence has hung like a promise behind everything Hayden Griffin has done since the beginning of the series... And I'll say no more for now.

Need something to do?

Karl Schroeder — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:06:33 -0700

I've been reading Global Risks 2011, the sixth edition of the World Economic Forum's Risk Response Network report. It reviews the various major issues that face the world--and there's a lot of them. Most interestingly, though, it also mentions, almost in passing, what some of the solutions might be. Many of them are things that are not being done, but that could be done, and could in fact be the basis of entire careers, business models, or academic careers. So for instance, take the following:

For the potential problem of global governance failures, they say that "A counterbalance would be a well-informed and well-mobilized global public opinion sharing norms and values of global citizenship, but this is not yet fully developed." Okay, I sense a truly massive business opportunity here. CNN and Al Jazeera were just the beginning; what if we treated all news as local? We've been edging this way for decades, but we can automate things now we couldn't have imagined just a few years ago. So, I want an interactive map of the world that shows all of today's reported murders as red dots; and a weddings overlay as well; and... well, everything. I want to know what's going on. News reports themselves should just be the last level of drill-down in the process.
For resource security, the WEF advocates something they call sustainable consumption. Becoming an expert in this or getting in on the ground floor of this new business movement could make the next generation of billionaires. There's many opportunities here, eg., garbage design, which should have its own degree programs.
The WEF views potential retrenchment from globalization as a risk. I understand this position, but see my last post on the perils of interconnectedness; there's a space here in the early 21st century for building local resilience for food, water, energy, and other resources. Call it a new kind of insurance--not a step towards a "new medievalism" but part of a general strategy of keeping our civilization robust. DARPA's recent announcement that they want to put 1000 3d printers in U.S. schools points in this direction. Globalization is a strong trend, naturally; but the counter-trend is also strong and should be encouraged.

There's a lot of worry and hang-wringing today about the financial system and jobs. The fact is, though, that certain aspects of the future are very, very clear. Water will be an issue throughout the U.S. midwest. Some new measure of prosperity other than GDP will become the norm by which nations are compared. Economic growth, in the traditional sense, will have to slow, but something much more interesting could replace it. These things are crises only if you are desperately trying to hang on to old ways of doing this. For those willing to try something new, they're gigantic opportunities.

The firebreaks

Karl Schroeder — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 14:03:01 -0600

Here's an image that's gotten wide exposure in the past week or so: In their article The network of global corporate control, Vitali et al. mapped out the global network of ownership that constitutes what some would call the Oligarchy. This, in other words, is a chart of the famous 1% who control 50% of the world's wealth.

It's an interesting chart, because it shows several different kinds of information. The size of the dots represents companies' operating revenue; colour indicates their influence on the network. The large red dots are the companies that run the world.

This might seem a little abstract, so here's a zoom-in that shows how the network works:

Now what's interesting to me here is not the usual paranoid recognition that a very small number of entities control the world; 'control' implies they can actually steer the course of events, which is not the case. They have disproportionate influence, and that's not a good thing; but control? Nobody's actually in control.

No, what's interesting and disturbing to me is the level of interconnection itself. In my 2005 novel Lady of Mazes I introduced a future world where interconnections on all levels of the economy and society were carefully pruned by the all-powerful anecliptics. These non-human powers worked tirelessly to prevent critical states of interconnection, where a tiny event at one point in the network can suddenly cascade through the whole thing and realign everything.

(These are sometimes called sandpile models, because they reflect the same physics as sandpiles: you can drop grains of sand one at a time onto the pile, and most of the time, nothing will happen. The pile just grows. Then all of a sudden, you drop one grain and the whole pile collapses. Why does this happen? It has to do with self-organized criticality.)

When the 2008 economic meltdown happened I felt like Cassandra, because you could watch the collapse of the over-connected financial network in real-time. All kinds of causes have been advanced for the collapse, but really, any specific cause for the failure of a given node of the network is secondary to the fact that the failures propagated. This is because the network was over-connected and had reached a critical state; the same thing is happening again.

So, my interest in this model is not because it shows that a small set of companies 'run the world;' it's because it shows that we live in what Brian Cantwell Smith calls a frictionless 'gearworld' where turning any gear, no matter how small, anywhere in the world, may cause everything else to revolve.

In Lady of Mazes networking limits called 'firebreaks' were used to prevent interconnections reaching a critical state, and influences from spreading too far. In a New Scientist article on the above-cited study, George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a complex systems expert, is said to have advised a tax on interconnectivity for corporations. That would be a kind of firebreak in the Lady of Mazes sense. We need something like this now, not just to prevent a consolidation of power but to prevent the vulnerable collapse of a sandpile-model of the world economy.

Polish edition of Sun of Suns arrives

Karl Schroeder — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:00:51 -0600

I received my comp copies of the Polish edition of Sun of Suns today. You never know when stuff like this is going to show up, so surprise packages are always exciting. I love the edition, it's a nice substantial paperback with original cover art.

This edition joins the Japanese and German translations, making this my most internationally successful book yet. (Other languages I've had books translated into? French, Spanish, Lithuanian and Russian. Not a bad haul--though I still don't have actual copies of the Russian editions, sadly.)

The Poles recently bought ebook rights to Sun of Suns as well, which should make for an extended run in that market.