Predictions and Two Cool Things

Two cool things "borrowed" from jaylake:

Cool Thing #1

I give you The Law of the Tongue, a "treaty" between men and killer whales.

Cool Thing #2

Apparently, as late as 500 million years ago, massive floods were still happening on Mars. It sure looks like there'd be lots of water on Mars today, just buried underground.

Predictions

Jason Kuznicki at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen makes some interesting predictions. I think he's overly-optimistic about some of them (solar and genetic engineering) and right on about others (driverless cars). Two that I want to discuss briefly are the "Great Filter" and a physics paradigm shift.

I've discussed the great filter before, and suffice it to say I don't believe it exists. I do think there are a lot of small filters (we dodged one of them by avoiding a nuclear war with the USSR) but the great filter doesn't exist. The real reason we haven't discovered intelligent life in other planets is simple - space is big and we've only been looking a few decades. I also don't think intelligent life is an inevitable result of evolution nor is it the apex of evolution. There could have been intelligent dinosaurs. In fact, if an intelligent species of dinosaur had existed but been at a Stone-Age level when the rock hit, would we be able to recognize it now?

The physics paradigm shift is more of an observation. Much of modern astrophysics hinges on things like "dark matter" - stuff that we can't detect. As Kuznicki puts it - "the invocation of epicycles is a standard sign that your model is missing something really big." If this is true, then part of why we haven't seen aliens is we're waiting for them to send us a telegraph - a technology they abandoned long ago.

Advances

As those in the publishing world may have heard, Random House created a set of "publishing imprints" in which they 1) don't offer advances and 2) charge the author for various (unspecified) publishing expenses. To say the business-savvy authors of the world Are Not Amused is an understatement.

This led into a charge by John Scalzi to argue that if a publisher wasn't offering advances, you shouldn't deal with them.

I didn’t take an advance on my book. In part that’s because it’s with a small press, and the advance wasn’t going to be very much to begin with. But I was offered an advance, and since I had planned to use any advance for marketing expenses (again, small press) I decided to take the alternative, which was a higher royalty rate.

Shorter Scalzi – if they’re not at least offering advances, y’all need to take a hard look at whether or not they’re worth doing business with.