Some of the people who read the novel may wish for even more detail, so I decided to create a series of notes for each chapter which give “behind the scenes” information. There are major spoilers ahead, so I heartily encourage the reader to finish the novel and then come back to this section to see the details behind each chapter. If you absolutely must read the chapter notes, I advise you to keep four chapters ahead of the exact chapter notes you are looking at (i.e., … do not read the Chapter 1 notes here until you begin Chapter 5.)
!!! MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD !!!
Chapter 1 –
The very beginning of the chapter is written in Korean intermixed with English. Film director John McTiernan used a visual effect in many of his movies where characters begin speaking in their native language only to zoom in on their mouths and then zoom out with their speech then replaced by English. I liked this effect, and the beginning of the chapter is my literary version of this.
The Ancient Greek problem that Min-Hee just learned about is none other than the Dichotomy Paradox (often known to laymen as Zeno’s Paradox). The Dichotomy Paradox, which is very similar to the Achilles and the Tortoise problem, are part of more than forty thought questions posed by Zeno of Elea (490 to 430 BC). The answer to this problem for some is that of the mathematical limit, which was arrived at independently by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz in the late 17th century. The idea of the limit was put on a more solid foundation with the epsilon-delta definition as espoused by Weierstrass and Cauchy in the late-19th century.
The beach described is located at Byeonsanbando National Park in North Cholla Province, South Korea.
The novel takes place over an exact time frame that I leave up to the curious reader to discover. There are more than enough clues in the book to arrive at the exact year when an event is taking place.
Many of the characters in this novel are either real people or are based on real people. Yes, I have painstakingly obtained permission from each of them to appear. The locations in the novel are also all real-world places, many of which I encourage the reader to visit.
Chapter 2 –
The unusual symbols seen are called Sharpe glyphs. They are named after real-world cetologist Fred Sharpe (Alaska Whale Foundation). Their meaning will be explained later.
The name Valiria is used as a placeholder to ease understanding for human readers. This is, … perhaps not obviously, … not the co-protagonist’s real name. The reason Valiria was chosen as a name will be explained in Chapter 21. Her real name will be revealed in Chapter 37.
Humpbacks are fairly solitary creatures. The normal behavior for most female humpbacks is to migrate alone or with their calf or another adult female (for a pod size of two). Most male humpbacks migrate alone. Typically during a migration, 50 to 60% of humpbacks will be migrating solo, while another 40% will be mothers migrating with their calves or another female. Pods comprised of three or more individuals do occur but account for only about 4 to 7% of all individuals migrating. (These figures come from three separate papers but are primarily drawn from Miranda Brown and Peter Corkeron’s 1995 Behavior paper.)
For the purposes of the novel, I decided to use a larger pod structure (typically I have Valiria in a pod of about ~ five to six individuals) because it allows for more detailed and nuanced conversation and comparison of ideas.
Research done since the 1970s by Canadian cetologist Michael Bigg, has revealed that specialized transient pods of killer whales (often termed Bigg’s pods) do attack other healthy cetaceans. These matrilineal transient pods typically number two to six individuals. Bigg’s pods rarely exceed seven individuals because they must sneak up on other marine mammals in near-total silence. And that means that Bigg’s orcas cannot use their main method for sensing the world around them, … echolocative clicks. Managing a pod of more than about six or seven members becomes too unwieldy for a concentrated attack plan in total silence.
Chapter 3 –
Sensorium is the Internet felt physically and experienced emotionally. Certain experiences within sensorium that utilize emoshun (activation of mid-brain network circuitry through nanites) are as uplifting or destructive as they are in real life.
Allglish is the predominant language of the world by the time of the novel principally because it is the lingua franca of the AllThing (the evolution of the internet)
Jeonbuk National University (sometimes spelled Chonbuk National University) is in Jeonju, South Korea. It is one of South Korea’s ten highly competitive national universities.
Most of the public is aware of the importance of quantum mechanics and relativity, but very few outside the sciences know of the importance of Information Theory, the brainchild of Claude Shannon (who definitely should have received a Nobel Prize for it). Without his discoveries and equivalencies, our modern digital world would not be possible. He also wrote quite probably the most profound master’s degree thesis of the 20th century.
A “Cholla” man is a man who hails from either Chollabukdo (North Cholla Province) or Chollanamdo (South Cholla Province), which from the Jeoson period have been some of the most traditional and conservative provinces of Korea.
Chapter 4 –
Batari’s Point is located at 32.7 north latitude and – 154.5 west longitude in the northeastern Pacific Ocean.
It is difficult for human beings to imagine the incredible energy expenditure that many whale species invest in their migration patterns. As a very rough land analogy for humpback migrations from the waters of Hawai’i to the Gulf of Alaska and back, imagine a 100 kg (220 lbs) person who lives in Los Angeles walking slowly at 5 km/h (3 mph) to New York City (roughly ~ 4050 kilometers) over a period of 28 to 70 days. As a rough average, that would mean walking 81 km (50 miles) each day! … while eating almost no food! (To travel 81 km per day, you would roughly have to spend 16 of every 24 hours walking.) By the time they arrive, they weigh roughly 65 to 70 kg (143 to 154 lbs) (or, if they are a nursing humpback mother, they weigh perhaps 50 kg! (110 lbs)). They then eat dish after dish of food most days in NYC for three months until their weight balloons to perhaps 130 kg (286 lbs) and then begin walking back to Los Angeles. By the time they arrive back in Los Angeles, they weigh their starting weight of 100 kg (220 lbs). Further imagine making that trip at 87 years of age. The elderly in human societies usually get to retire and slow down, …. older humpbacks are allowed no such respite. That is the incredible fitness demanded by the ocean.
Chapter 5 –
Kirby’s “mind” is made of simulated neuromorphic, processing units (an advanced form of neuristors) run on superposition-enabled, quantum processors. More details will follow in Chapter 27.
I believe mental health “therapy” to be one of the most questionable treatment options of the last hundred years, but not because I don’t believe talking with someone is good or because I have some anti-psychiatry viewpoints like Tom Cruise and other Scientology adherents. If you are experiencing distress, talking with someone is wonderful and something I highly recommend. That which is suspect from my perspective is the idea that talking with a therapist for $120 to $500 an hour along with a prescription for Lexapro will in any meaningful way physically alter deeply laid neural networks. More specifically, behavior is an incredibly complex combination of genetic and epigenetic pathways altered by your growing experiences to produce unique connectomes that lose their plasticity after early childhood. The idea that one selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), or one agonist or antagonist is going to correctly balance a neural network made of many hundreds of thousands, if not millions or billions of neurons communicating in an intricate electrical wavefront is laughable.
To better picture the absurdity, imagine the road network which covers the entire Los Angeles metro area. Now imagine that an accident occurs at the intersection of Santa Monica Blvd and North Highland Ave. As traffic begins to back up and cause ever-growing difficulties, the transit authority decides to switch all the traffic lights of the entire LA metro area to green for a little bit longer (say an extra 10 seconds). This of course does nothing to alleviate the pinpoint accident that occurred on Santa Monica Blvd.
This is roughly analogous to using an SSRI medication across the entire brain to block the reuptake of some neurotransmitter (say, serotonin) to incorrectly alleviate the asynchronous firing of a few neurons at a very specific point in a large-scale network (say, the orbitofrontal cortex). The same is mostly true for CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), i.e. … the idea that talking about issues can permanently alter deeply laid neural networks that no longer display plasticity (for the most part) say, in a 45-year-old. The small gains that are seen due to CBT therapy are likely due to the placebo effect. Of course, SSRI medications and CBT are better than the crude tools of a century before, but I suspect that history will look back almost as unkindly on such treatments as it does phrenology, ice baths, and lobotomies.
The need for any treatment also calls into question the nature of “normality.” How does one define “normal” global states for the mind (as opposed to the brain). The Hippocratic Oath and good practice dictate that psychic pain of any subjective nature is abnormal and worthy of relief. However, until the last few hundred years, the normal conscious states for humanity were often intimately acquainted with stress, physical toil, uncertainty, disease, and limited lifespan. Just the realization that death approaches for everyone and is final must place some stress upon any psyche. Sadly, distress is actually a common phase of mental cognition. I know of no one who has never felt its presence at some time in their life. To mimic the adage that there can be no good without evil, does not distress to some degree mean that the absence of it makes the temporary state of happiness that much more cherished? (Let me be clear though, this viewpoint does not mean that psychic pain is not a serious condition or should not be treated immediately.)
Also, remember that psychiatry and clinical psychology have an inherent financial conflict in that a patient who feels they are getting better is no longer going to be paying. It is in the best interest of therapists to keep you blabbing forever at $200 an hour (although fictional, the example of Tony Soprano comes to mind, …. no better off than when he began therapy). It is very hard for even the most ethical to not feel pulled slightly by that profit motive. While no psychiatrist will ever admit this, … they have NO IDEA exactly what series of 187,973 interlinked neurons is malfunctioning in a person who suffers from a particular type of panic attack. They will try to see what slot in the DSM V you best fit into, what medication is recommended for that diagnosis, and then send you off to the pharmacist while charging you $400 for 90 minutes of their time.
In the writing of this novel, I did come across several mental health practitioners who directly attested to the fact that in their opinion SSRIs and some other psychiatric medications were beneficial. I do believe they were relaying honest impressions and yet at the same time, I am reminded of accounts from mental health experts in the 1930s who praised lobotomies (the originator of the procedure, Antonio Egas Moniz won a Nobel Prize in medicine after all), or those experts in the 1970s who believed those subjected to electroshock therapies showed improvement.
When it comes to actually curing (not alleviating) mental illness, depression, bipolar disorder, etc … modern psychiatry is at about the same rough level of advancement as cardio-thoracic surgery was in perhaps the 1890s or the very early 20th century. Later in this century, perhaps ~2060 or after, we will probably have the ability to exactly re-route in real-time errant connectomes and truly repair mental illness. Until that time arrives, I very much support seeking assistance in times of stress and the continued research of human neural networks. Talking with others trained in mental health is something I highly recommend but doing so for $200 an hour is suspect. Most urban areas now have free mental health counseling centers that will allow you to come in anonymously. I recommend looking in this direction as a first step if the stresses of life become too much (and we have all experienced that they have from time to time).
Within the Los Angeles city limits, there are approximately ~ 4500 traffic lights as of the writing of this novel. In the entire L.A. metro area, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 9,000 to 13,000 traffic lights.
Anomalous neural network connections (what we think of as mental illness today), … called connectopathies, … are classified according to their deviations from healthy standardized baseline connectomes in the late 21st century. The difference in node alignment along with loci synchronization from standard networks, is used to classify the severity of the mental illness in the late 21st century. The most prevalent treatment by far is targeted neural nanite arrays that up-regulate or down-regulate specific nodes (almost always synapses) of the network.
The Great Powers mentioned in the chapter would be China, the United States, India, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France. Russia is a failed state beset by strong-man rule that only commands attention because of its natural resources, nuclear arsenal, and space capabilities. America is a recovering state that was formerly beset by myriad internal problems which included crippled democratic traditions, rising religiosity, fascism, and unchecked debt. Brazil and Nigeria stand at the precipice of great power status at the time of the novel.
The American hegemony of the early 21st century has gradually dissolved to reveal a decentralized system of various competing nations. Due to debt loads, the United States has an economy and influence slightly less powerful than that of the EU. By several metrics, China is the most powerful nation in the world and according to some projections, will possibly be overtaken by India in the mid-22nd century if Singularity does not occur. The most rapidly expanding nations at the time of the novel are Nigeria, the Congo (DRC), Kenya, Tanzania, and India.
Chapter 6 –
Unlike humans, most marine mammal species possess adaptations to deal with conditions of deep diving in the ocean that often include high blood-to-body volume ratios, efficient exhalation, collapsible lungs, and higher concentrations of hemoglobin. It was sometimes assumed in the 20th century that marine mammals did not suffer from the bends (decompression sickness) but that is now known to be incorrect.
The dive Valiria undertakes is to a depth of 340 meters. A deep dive by humpback standards but not unusual. Remember that for every 10.06 meters (33 feet) deeper, pressure increases by one atmosphere (10.1 N/cm^2 or 760 mm Hg). This means that at 340 meters of depth, Valiria is feeling a pressure some 33.8 times greater than at sea level across every bit of her body including the surface of her eyes.
At the time this novel was finished, rape amongst Bigg’s orcas has not been demonstrated. In bottlenose dolphins, several males do often work as a unit to isolate and then forcibly mate with a female whether she wishes to or not. Of course, animal behavioralists might say, “We can’t misapply our Homo sapien norms to another species. It is impossible for us to know if female dolphins suffer the same trauma as a human woman who has experienced sexual assault.” That said, I would call it rape, plainly, and I suspect the only reason that it has not yet been documented among orcas is because they have not yet been observed enough in the wild in comparison to dolphins.
Some marine biologists and cetologists may also take issue with me placing a male as the leader of a transient pod when current research and observation point to a matriarchal society with females as the decision-makers. I did so simply for dramatic effect.
Chapter 7 –
Personalities can be adjusted by tuning neural nanite arrays that modulate primarily the frontal cortices and mid-brain using programmable array wireless technology. These adjustments are commonplace among the more wealthy and/or educated citizens of most First World nations. Personality tuning for example is commonly used to address anger management issues.
While writing this novel, I asked several female friends what medical advancement from the future would make their lives better. Three answered they’d love to see a complete end to menstruation, which is why we find the immenstration nanite regimens making an appearance.
Many readers are probably somewhat aware of the recent advances to bring fusion power to fruition but little realize its potential to spread democracy. For more than a century all manner of dictators, despots, and bad actors have gained or attained power thanks to mankind’s dependence on fossil fuels. Fusion power as a reality promises not only significantly lower emissions into the atmosphere but a sharp cut in fossil fuel dependence taking power away from bad governments worldwide.
Chapter 8 –
A philosopher requires a very rare mentality and there are usually only two to five per community. At the time of the novel, Valiria’s community, the Far Minstrels of the Center Seas, number some ~ 13,000 individuals.
Humpbacks do not organize their societies hierarchically as humans usually do but they do associate based on friendships or outlook. The roughest analogy is that the entire global Lamorian race ( ~ 115,000 individuals at the time of the novel) is broken up into communities (roughly ~ 3,000 to 20,000 individuals at the time of the novel (an example of a community would be all the humpbacks which migrate from Hawai’i to the waters off southeast Alaska)), which in turn are broken up into clans (~ 100 to 1,500 individuals), which in turn are broken up into kinsgrups (~ 2 to 8 individuals). Communities are usually held for life, clans upon becoming an adult, and kinsgrups for a migration or season.
Humpbacks like all cetaceans are conscious breathers and cannot allow their entire mind to sleep. Instead, they rest one half of their mind while the other half controls surfacing to breathe and basic defense response.
Many cetacean species are suspected of being sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field, which humpbacks in the novel call the “seafield”. This magnetoreception is often theorized by way of cryptochromes in the retina or magnetite in various bodily tissues. Amazingly this likely occurs by way of (quantum) entangled pairs of electrons. Since magnetite has been found in some cetacean species, I decided to write as if it is present in humpback eyes (which it likely is not). It is reasonable to guess that humpbacks can “see” magnetic fields along with aurora borealis/australis (independently of whether it is day or night of course).
Most baleen whales (mysticetes) lack both short wavelength cones (s-cones for seeing violet/blue) as well as long wavelength cones (l-cones for seeing red) allowing them to see only in shades of gray (hence they are rod monochromats). I altered this slightly to restore their l-cones along with discrepancy matching in the ganglion cells (normally two cones or more are needed for comparison to note a color, but I added in fictional “ganglion cell processing”). Humpbacks thus see the world in terms of black, white, shades of gray, and shades of red/pink. Please remember though that visual information through their retinas is not nearly as important as the auditory soundscape. The “world” of cetaceans is one of sound, … not vision.
Chapter 9 –
The cybernetic hand of Dr. Edisson is not as adept and agile as a human hand because it does not approach the Wiener Density and lacks full registration with the somatosensory and motor cortices. At the time of the novel, regrowing a new hand by stem cell manipulation (like a lizard’s tail) is not a fully mature biotechnology.
No one has yet built a large skyscraper in the shape of a tree (due slightly to structural engineering issues and mainly to prohibitive cost). Therefore, I decided to add the World Tree to San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. There are also two other smaller tree-like buildings in San Fran.
At the time of the novel, the United Nations has seven regional centers (one for each continent, located in Geneva, New York City, San Paulo, Shanghai, Kinshasa, Sydney, Scott Base station) along with its overall headquarters in San Francisco’s Presidio (the city in which the U.N. Charter was created). The U.N. buildings in NYC are now the regional center for North America. This was done in 2052 to reflect the growing size and importance of Asia’s population.
Chapter 10 –
The purpose of male humpback whale song is an active area of research and much debated. In the chapter, I picture whale song as males competing to vocalize the most beautiful “aural painting” of current affairs. In human cultures when someone is singing, we do not usually “paint” a visual image of their tones and harmony in our head because our auditory cortex does not wire into our visual cortex (although that can happen in those with synesthesia). In cetaceans, hearing is far more important than seeing, so vocalizations can actually “aurally paint” moving (stereoscopic) aural representations in the minds of the listeners.
Male humpbacks vocalize an “aural image” of recent affairs (which is why whalesong displays plasticity and variability) combined with elements of ancient legends. They do this to display their vigor and health, to entice mating, and as a challenge to other nearby males. A human male might ask his female date to come to the art gallery to admire various paintings with him. A humpback male takes the recent affairs of his home seas and then vocalizes them into the most beautiful “aural painting” with a particular signature that marks the “song” as his own. The male then hopes that his particular “aural image” (rendition) will entrance a female more than the competing “song” from other males.
The Lamorian name of Tahee’a’wa’poo is my alteration of the name Teahupoo, a village in Taihiti known for its powerful surf.
The thought trial that Milandria puts to Valiria at the end of the chapter is none other than a rehashing of H.G. Wells short novel The Country of the Blind only in auditory form. That novel in turn is based upon the Allegory of the Cave as told by Plato in his famous work The Repubic. The allegory is concerned with the true nature of reality.
Chapter 11 –
Juhkata is basically an optimized physical or verbal response to any potential situation, but particularly those involving other humans. I imagine it beginning as a series of visual overlays for those with autism and Asperger’s, and moving to all other areas of life. Business negotiations, elite military training, and combat sports will particularly benefit from decision trees that better help the user in dangerous or tricky elements of human interaction. Juhkata algorithms will eventually merge into algo-assisters, … so a mixed martial arts fighter may allow his own instincts to be overridden by a more optimized and efficacious combat juhkata decision tree or a diplomat may allow an algo-assister to overtake his speech due to long-term game theory considerations about another country’s uranium enrichment sites. Juhkata assisters will become even more important as real social skills suffer in the late 21st century as more people live their lives virtually.
Chapter 12 –
The story of Nallegam as told by Tahee’a’wa’poo should sound familiar. This is one of the more noticeable early curiosities that will possibly lead to other clues and the nature of some of the embedded messages within the book.
Yes, … whales shag, and they have fun doing it I suspect. I have never read about an erotic encounter through the eyes of a sentient animal anywhere in human literature so I had to add this in. After all, whales get hot for one another just as we humans do.
The “destiny” ceremony at the end of the chapter that is held when Live Long/Sadeeya reaches one lunar cycle old is based on the Korean tradition of Doljabi that arose during the Joseon Dynasty (1392 -1897) and is still practiced today. When a child reaches the age of one year old, a cloth is placed on the table or floor with several different objects representing different occupations, such as a brush for scholars, a thread for long life, currency for a merchant, a mortar and pestle for a druggist, etc…. The child is then released so that they crawl towards the objects, and the first object they grasp is supposed to indicate their possible future career path. My own son bypassed the cloth entirely and headed for the broom in the corner until we reversed him directly in front of the stethoscope. Ok, … I kid. He picked up the little spacecraft and we decided to change his name to Mark Watney.
Chapter 13 –
The reason nanites are used by Min-Hee (and all other neural researchers at the time of the novel) is due to both their excellent spatial and temporal resolution. Neural nanites exceed implanted EEG, optical imaging, FMRI, PET, etc …. and are therefore the go-to tool for understanding connectomics, fiber tract bandwidth, and Shannon entropy.
My vision of aircars is an educated guess based on real-world physical, charge density, and human behavior limitations. Any aircar that requires people to obtain a private pilot’s license or land at a conventional airport is not going to be headed to mass production. The same for any aircar that people actually pilot. Too easy to fly it into a stadium filled with sports fans. The weak link will be getting as many electrons stored as possible in the smallest possible mass (specific energy density), … id est, … battery tech. The lift system will also have to be multiply redundant and fault tolerant.
Many wonder if there will eventually be dual-use aircars, meaning that they can both fly through the air and then land to continue on the roads as a normal automobile would. I suspect at first (perhaps roughly from 2025 to 2050), such dual-use aircars will be few in number for the simple reason that adding the weight of both functions takes away from either function: An aircar that also has to carry around the weight of four regular wheels, drive-shafts, brake systems, and electric motors to turn them will have significantly less flight time than a single purpose aircar. Eventually, when energy density technology reaches a higher level, … perhaps after 2050, … there probably will be an expansion of dual-use vehicles. During the time of the novel, such dual-use vehicles exist but in few numbers. Most upper middle-class North American families and above have one octocar and one or two more regular ground vehicles.
As of the writing of this novel, no humpback vocalization has ever been matched to a specific English word or meaning. Some cetacean specialists believe this is because they do not have representational language.
Chapter 14 –
The solar eclipse taking place at the beginning of the chapter is a future real-world event that I leave to the interested reader to discover the date of.
Humpback society and culture are matrilineally focused. Female humpbacks are larger than males and the role of females is central to the species. For humanity, our sexual dimorphism affects our mythologies as our leading gods (God, Zeus, Odin, etc … ) are always male. In humpbacks, where females are dominant, this is obviously reversed (Nasqurili).
The story of Aelinor and Nilinor is my alternative to the Biblical accounts of Cain and Abel, and the origin passages of Genesis.
The time of great sickness is a reference to past asteroid strikes on the Earth, outgassing of volcanoes, and other natural incidents which led to local or mass extinctions. A recent example (at least with respect to geological time) would be the Quaternary extinction episodes over the last million years.
Chapter 15 –
By the time of the novel, a fair amount of the population of First World countries live out their lives online. They work, play, and enjoy sexual relations across sensorium and at the same time, have very little interaction with real-life flesh and blood humanity. It is not uncommon for a digizent to have accumulated thousands of hours flying a particular military jet while having never touched a real plane, or for the average online university student to have had hundreds of lovers while remaining a virgin in the real world. This has become so prevalent by the time of the novel that if the AllThing and sensorium were down for more than some hours, withdrawal and eventually death would result for some segment of the user base.
It’s unlikely that even when air cars become a reality, they will be allowed to queue in line for cheeseburgers over pedestrians below. But an implication of air cars would be all manner of aerial ingenuity, such as helium hotels. It follows that aerial restaurants, … in say the 30th floor of some skyscraper, … would become commonplace.
To those not familiar with more advanced mathematics, it is typically assumed that no infinity can be larger than another infinity (after all, … they are both infinite). Not surprisingly this was the view of the world’s greatest mathematicians until the late 19th century when Georg Cantor overturned this with his ingenious triangle proof. As amazing as it may sound (and it is amazing), there are infinities that are (infinitely) larger than other infinities. For example, the real numbers are more infinite (possess a higher cardinality) than the integers.
The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment advocated by Heraclitus of Ancient Greece concerning the fidelity of any replication. It would very much apply to any engineering process that attempts to copy the mind. Because the mind “re-weights” itself with every thought and experience, mind replication must consider several technical facets not normally captured in science fiction.
The Necker Cube, … or as I like to call it, the Sarasti Cube, … mentioned is an optical illusion where participants either see the front face or back face of a cube, … but not both at the same time. Some neuroscientists believe it is indicative of the ability to alter point of view.
Chapter 16 –
Only a minority of orcas (Orcinus orca) hunt and kill marine mammals, including whales. These pods are known as transient or Bigg’s pods and they may make up roughly 5% or less of the total global population. Most orcas are members of resident pods whose diet is composed almost entirely of fish.
Fake Eyes pod is an anomaly since most transient pods are led by females. Fake Eyes also slowly creates a super-pod in the novel which is something that has not been observed in nature.
The Internet is filled with videos of transient Bigg’s killer whale pods attacking gray and humpback calves for sport. In many of the cases, the orcas are not attacking due to hunger. Rather than bite the calves, they ram into them, attempting to cave in their skeletons as they seemingly enjoy the psychic torment it creates. Many readers may have ideas of friendly dolphins and killer whales in their minds from visiting ocean-themed amusement parks and both species certainly can and do display curiosity and openness. That said, there are elements of both species that can be just as bloodthirsty as any human serial killer, although I would warn against trying to overlay human morality onto the behavior of a different species.
Transient Bigg’s orca pods usually have 3 to 6 members and are led by a female. There are a number of theories behind this small pod size (in comparison to resident pods), but I tend to favor the idea that coordinating more members is very difficult for orcas whose main sense is echolocation. Trying to sneak up on healthy marine mammals while making no sound is extremely difficult for orcas because they “see” the world by echolocating (id est, … making noise). The main challenge for Fake Eyes in the novel is coordinating so many orcas (including the very young) while training everyone in auditory stealth.
Life originated some 4.4 to 3.8 billion years ago in water because of that molecule’s polar characteristics and role as a solvent. There is mounting evidence that the first animals on land may have been the euthycarcinoids around 510 million years ago. Whales descended from the artiodactyl order (even-toed ungulates) roughly 49 million years ago and became fully aquatic some 5 to 9 million years later.
Humanity likely began long voyages across the seas some 65,000 to 53,000 years ago.
Chapter 17 –
To sit on the summit of Olympus Mons, the highest mountain yet known in the solar system (Rheasilvia does not count in my book) at 21,287 meters above the datum, you would need a full vacuum suit (pressure is ~ 72 pascals vs 32,000 at the top of Mt. Everest). Unlike many Terran mountains that have sharp peaks that one can look off, the top of Olympus Mons is very flat and in most places, an observer would not be able to see down to the surrounding “plains”.
Some readers may wonder why almost an entire chapter is given over to a graphic description of late-21st-century sex. It is because I wanted readers to picture not just the changes to science or travel, but also the fundamental changes coming to human intimacy.
Physical sex as opposed to virtual sex is likely to decrease as each decade passes. Fetishes and experimentation that would be all but impossible to arrange in the real world or subject to venereal disease will be easily accessible through VR and sensorium environments by way of VR bands or optioimplants.
The average distance from the clitoris to the vaginal opening (CV distance) is for many women paramount to whether orgasm can be achieved during regular intercourse without hands. It is also the most interesting use of the phrase, “The rule of thumb … .” Distances of < 2.5 cm are typically seen as “good,” 2.5 to 3.5 is seen as average, and a length of 3.5 cm or greater often relates to poorer outcomes. For women in which this distance is large (~ 3.5 cm), the best sexual position for orgasm will be with them on top at an angle so that the clitoris can be manually stimulated by their partner’s belly as they are entered vaginally.
Male sexual release is fairly one dimensional, … applied friction. Female sexuality on the other hand is very much high dimensional and even in societies where sexual education and literature are more open, a surprising number of women are never really able to max out their own climaxes and inner satisfaction. This is addressed in the late 21st century by tailoring neural nanite arrays
Worth noting is that there is some speculation about the neural differences between females and males at orgasm. It is a question of whether the experiences felt are equally pleasurable. Those few individuals who have changed sexes and experienced orgasms as both male and female say that the amount of excitation is similar but of different natures. Physically this likely means that slightly separate neural networks are synchronously firing. In the latter 21st century, by adjusting neural nanite arrays, both sexes will be able to not only heighten their pleasure but also experience orgasm from their partner’s perspective.
Both Wes and Min-Hee by the time of their bonding have had sex with hundreds to thousands of virtual partners in sensorium. They’ve already tried oral, anal, same-sex, threesomes, foursomes, orgies, fetishes, etc …. as almost all young people in First World nations have. Many have tried both heterosexual and homosexual encounters and even adjusted their sexual identity for short periods. Wes and Min-Hee also augment their experience with somatic nanites that increase pleasure both in the brain and at the penis and clitoris, making their orgasms more powerful than those in un-augmented humans.
Chapter 18 –
The Meal of Vilanthia is none other than the bubble net feeding method that actual humpbacks employ to eat more herring, particularly in the rich waters off southeastern Alaska.
In this chapter, we begin to get a sense of the Lamorian (humpback) worldview; A series of thought spaces separate from what appears to be worldly reality. It is an initial clue as to the true level of humpback complexity.
The middle of the chapter is an account of what life might be like through the sensations felt by a jellyfish’s simple nerve net. Jellyfish have no brain, no thoughts, no emotion, and quite probably, very little feeling. For them to have feelings would violate the Moreich Hypothesis of Chapter 6.
Solipsism and immaterialism would normally just be intellectual curiosities except that they are profoundly intertwined with the dual slit experiment from quantum mechanics and the idea of open free will. For that reason, the resulting complexity must be adequately explained in any true theory of consciousness.
Chapter 19 –
The 24th caprice that Min-Hee is attempting to learn is just one of several extremely technical pieces that Niccolo Paganini (1782 – 1840) composed, considered by some today as one of many benchmarks that indicate true mastery of the violin. Long before his caprices, Paganini grew tired of the boring chamber music of his day and composed a piece entitled “Duetto Amoroso,” where the violin is used to mimic the sighs of lovers during coitus.
The idea that neural networks implicit in pareidolia and apophenia are responsible for human religion is something that has been suggested by several, but never so clearly as through the words of Canadian marine biologist and author Peter Watts. Wes’ allusion to his writing is actually an excerpt from his novel Echopraxia. I independently came to the same conclusion as Peter and the manner in which I wrote the chapter was almost identical. So identical it would have appeared to Peter as plagiarism. It does make me wonder with so many writers worldwide, how often true incidents of unintended plagiarism are actually occurring.
The idea that causality is linked to the rise of religion is advocated by some researchers and fiercely denied by others. There are many competing ideas for the neurological foundations of religion including causality, shared social bonding, and group identity. Wes throws out the idea of causality merely as one among many to consider.
First, … the bad; Religiosity maxes out at about an IQ of 94. It begins rising at an IQ of 73, reaches a plateau at 87, which contains a slight peak at 94 and continues fairly flat until about an IQ of 107, after which it begins to decrease. By the time you reach those with an IQ of 145 (about one person in nine hundred), the amount of agnostics and atheists has significantly risen.
Also, anthropologists and religious scholars have identified at least 13,210 religions (many of which had 10,000 or more followers) since the invention of writing (roughly 3300 B.C.). During all of that time, there have been religions that worshiped trees, religions that worshiped death, and religions that worshiped ritual cannibalism. The one thing that unites this vast body of separate religious beliefs though is the fact that most of the adherents of any particular religion have always been pretty sure that their religion is the one true way to heaven or nirvana, etc …. while everyone else is either dead wrong or at least misguided. I believe these truths speak more to co-opted belief connectomes in the cerebral cortex than they do to any external supernatural deities.
And now the good; Over the preceding two decades or so, a wide number of “new atheists” have arisen asserting their views that major religions are mostly negative. While they offer many good viewpoints (and many I agree with), they are also missing the neuro-protective role of religion. Religion serves to protect believers from their own inadequacies, their own mortality, and provides a framework to deal with loss (entropy). That is the real reason why some large percentage of people will never become atheists unless wide-scale genetic engineering or the Singularity arrives.
In the modern Western world, if you met a friend or neighbor who told you that they had to sacrifice a lamb at the local Temple to Zeus for their next promotion at work, you might fall down laughing. It is in this exact same manner that I suspect those from 4000 AD will regard Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc … (Actually, the “people” of 4000 AD are likely to be post-Singularity incorporeal intelligences but I digress.)
Almost everyone I have ever spoken to who is religious is fairly to completely sure that their worldview (and cosmological view) is absolutely correct (and that everyone else is wrong or misinformed). If I ask, “Where did you learn or adopt your religious viewpoints from?” I am almost always told that their parents or their uncle or their grandmother or their friends or their social media community, etc … introduced said religion to them. And then I begin to wonder what religious views they would follow if all those around them said nothing and practiced no religion. Noticing the sun shining every day, would some begin to observe a sun god? No baby is born a priori believing that a certain amount of Hail Marys is going to absolve their small sin or that Joseph Smith found golden plates not far from his home. It is a very powerful clue as to the tribal aspect of religion as a bonding ritual, distinct from a religion’s ability to inform on the true nature of the Universe.
One out of many curiosities which leads to skepticism of religion is that if one faith were the correct and one true way of belief, why don’t people of other faiths clearly acknowledge that. If Christianity were, say, the one true way, …. how come no one in Saudi Arabia experiences visions of Christ or the Mother Mary? How come no one in Ireland sees a miraculous floating image of Muhammad the Prophet? If Christianity were, say, God’s chosen message to the people of Earth, why doesn’t He just make a giant flaming, fusion cross 120,000 miles high by 80,000 miles wide that orbits over the Earth every day, so that all can look to the sky and clearly know what religion to follow?
Whatever religion is or is not (as emergent from human neural network structures), it does appear intimately connected to a sense of time and approaching mortality. It begs the question, “What if death is nothing more than the peaceful regression of synchronous neural networks to a timeless state?” A lack of synchronicity equal to an altered sense of time. Perhaps an element that will be better elucidated by neural nanites in the coming decades.
If you ask Grannie Mayberry, a good Christian woman what existed before the Universe, you are likely to get an answer that goes something like this, “There was only God, seamless and formless. He was all and everything, and nothing was apart from Him.” … Many people are not going to get the point at the end of the chapter, but if something is everything, … then it does not exist. Let me give you an example, …. if everything in the Universe was green and no other colors existed, then there would be no green. (In fact, no color would exist at all.) Green is only defined as “green” because of its contrast in comparison to other colors. If everything in the Universe were pure goodness, there would be no concept of “good.” Good only exists as a contrast to “evil.” Likewise, if everything is God, … there is no God. Now, religious people upon hearing this, would probably say something like, “Ah, that’s bullcrap! God is God. He can be ALL green and still be God at the same time. He is all powerful. He can do anything he wants in ways our minds cannot even reason.” Considering answers that obey an internal logic though, one may see the silliness.
The idea that God has always existed = The pre-Newtonian belief that all things are naturally at rest.
Outside of our physical universe, which is governed by a clear entropic arrow, I suspect that the very idea of before lacks meaning. Human minds have a very tough time even imagining something that had no beginning and that was not created by an external event.
If our universe was birthed by a place ungoverned by time, then the idea that something always existed (an argument that always ends in an ouroboroian circle) becomes meaningless. The statement that something always existed is not true because time is not an entropic (linear) vector.
Philosophers of logic may notice that in one paragraph, Wes argues for there possibly being no beginning and no “outside,” while a few paragraphs further down, he argues for the limitations of an all-encompassing God. The fine point here is that an original state of being need not be universally isotropic.
Chapter 20 –
Above roughly 50 degrees north latitude, it becomes almost impossible to see the Milky Way clearly during summertime because the sun shines for so much of the day. It does not become dark enough to notice the faint Milky Way, especially near the summer solstice. The Milky Way and aurora borealis do appear together in northern skies although again, they are rarely seen clearly during the summer months due to the short nights.
The structure of the humpback eye indicates that they are likely nearsighted. It is probably true that they cannot see the stars in the sky at all or only poorly, but I thought it was a travesty that they be denied the beauty of the constellations.
Sadeeya is caught in the nets of a modified gillnet fishing operation. Every year across the world, countless animals from whales on down are lost to a huge floating array of nets that sometimes drift hundreds of meters behind large fishing vessels.
Chapter 21 –
The UR-374 Aronnax is my homage to a famous fictional character of the past. The UR-374 nomenclature stands for University Research Vessel of the 374 type used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Ha-EP-4 means the fourth eastern Pacific segment of the Hawai’ian humpback population (community)(as opposed to humpbacks that migrate from Central America to the Gulf of Alaska. This is my own fictitious nomenclature and is not used by NOAA/NMFS.
Deployable sheets of solar panels are a common technology by the time of the novel. They unfurl like blankets and float on top of the water behind a vessel until its batteries are fully charged and then are wound back up and stowed away until needed again. They are used extensively for smaller pleasure craft, as emergency aids for medium or larger-sized vessels, and almost never with military vessels.
Much evidence has built up that many cetacean species mourn their dead. Perhaps the most famous recent example of this is Tahlequah, a female orca, who pushed her dead calf in the waters of Puget Sound over sixteen hundred kilometers for 17 days in the hope it would breathe again and regain life in 2018. Anyone who has watched the video of that incident could not turn away without being deeply touched.
Chapter 22 –
There is mounting evidence that humpback calves begin to emulate their mother’s calls and behavior from a very early age. For purposes of the novel, I decided to accelerate the language acquisition skills of the calves so that mother-daughter conversations could serve as an aid to help the reader understand humpback society, history, and culture better.
Egnargal’s Path is intimately connected to the first person to calculate the amount of work done along a particular path. I leave it to the reader to investigate further.
There are many currents in the ocean (and trade winds above them). Using those advantageously can take days and effort off a long migration.
Chapter 23 –
To minimize congestion, accidents, and road rage incidents, I see voluntary driving slowly decreasing by the late 21st century. Eventually, the human driver will have no ability to drive at all because A.I. algodrivers will be far more efficient and safe. Master algorithms will also be able to mass organize hundreds of thousands to millions of commuters in major metro areas cutting down on rush hour timing. I do see rural areas and some equipment as allowing for human control into the 22nd century.
All police units will have onboard labs built into their vehicles and aircars by the late 21st century. They will also be able to request and receive search warrants signed by a judge or critical documents while in transit. Police shooting it out with deadly suspects will for the most part be gone as capture bots that are essentially immune to small-arms fire, knives, flame, etc … apprehend the most dangerous criminals without harm to human officers.
If a lazy afternoon appears, I suggest taking a gander at some of Edwin Markham’s poems.
Chapter 24 –
While it is never stated in the novel, I roughly associate the Anciens (ancients) with any forebear occurring 1000 generations or more before the present time. Since a humpback generation is roughly ten years, this would mean 10,000 years or more before the present. The Old One’s are the generations 999 down to 5 before the present time.
Tambuko is modeled after another famous fictional character who was absolutely determined to do what no one else of his race had done before. In avian fiction, you can locate him.
The oral history of the Lamorian peoples is much longer and larger than the corresponding oral traditions of early human cultures. Lamorian’s stories reach back, … millions, … of years to a period they refer to as the Dawn Age. This compares to perhaps the oldest oral traditions of humanity as told by the Aboriginal peoples of Australia which may stretch back to between 7,000 and 11,000 years before the present. Evolutionarily, humpbacks have existed in their current form for about 660,000 to 930,000 years ago, but their forebears who were extremely similar, stretch back at least 13 to 18 million years before the present.
American whaling peaked in the 1840s but global whaling peaked in the 1960s. According to research estimates, for example, the blue whale population fell from roughly 340,000 in 1890 to perhaps 4,700 by 2000 AD, … a 98.5% reduction. That is how amazingly short-sighted humanity can be. Current blue whale populations as of publication (2023) have returned to perhaps 12 to 25,000 individuals only.
Chapter 25 –
I wanted to provide a possibly realistic answer to the question of whether the Korean peninsula will ever be unified, and if so, what it might look like. Many Westerners unfamiliar with North and South Korea assume that there will be an eventual unification similar to what occurred between East and West Germany. What some may be unaware of are the drastic differences in economy and political paradigms that did not exist in East Germany. While I do not agree with some Korea observers that North Korea is always close to collapse, I do feel the personality cult of the Kim family in North Korea is essentially incompatible with the greater Korean people. While the trickle is slow, an ever-growing percentage of citizens in the North are also becoming aware of how others live, which I suspect will eventually lead to internal change.
The inscription on Dok-Me’s burial mound translated to English says, An Dok-Me, … Not one day goes by that we do not remember.
There are many different variants of the story about Song Chunhyang and Lee Mong-Ryong. I tried to take the “middle route” so to speak and remain true to the essential essence of their commonality. Their names are sometimes spelled Sung Chun-Hyang and Yi Dor-Yang (or Song Ch’un-Hyang and Yi Mong-Ryong).
Pastafarianism is a parody religion created in 2005 by Bobby Henderson in rebuttal to the state of Kansas considering the inclusion of Creationism in K-12 schooling. Pastafarianism lays out the claim that an omnipotent Flying Spaghetti Monster created the Universe. It makes light of the fact that there is no more objective evidence to support or refute the Spaghetti Monster than there is to support or refute a Christian God. Interestingly, heaven for Pastafarians includes giant beer volcanoes and stripper factories.
Chapter 26 –
The title of the chapter comes from the character of Jack Aubrey, a fictional Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic Wars and protagonist of the eponymous novels by Patrick O’Brian. At one point in the first novel, Master and Commander, Captain Aubrey’s (as per the title, his actual rank is master and commander, … equivalent to lieutenant commander in most modern navies) 14-gun sloop Sophie is being chased by a superior ship as night falls. Aubrey has his crew construct a floating raft made of barrels with lights atop poles. He then allows the little raft to float away just as he douses his own lights on the Sophie. The enemy believing the raft to be the Sophie, follows after it as Aubrey escapes. This tactic was actually employed by Captain (later Admiral) Thomas Cochrane of the Royal Navy as described in his autobiography. The tactic employed by Valiria and the kinsgrup is the auditory version of Aubrey’s ruse.
Chapter 27 –
First, let me say that I am sorry to push Chapter 27 on the readers. The chapter is admittedly going to be hard on some folks that lack a science background, … but more and more people would like real-world answers to how the mind emerges (as separate from the brain) and how it operates. Of course, many will find the chapter long and confusing, and take little from it. I apologize but also realize that any detailed discussion of what the mind and consciousness truly are and how they function must include detailed specifics. Many readers will likely assume I just made up a bunch of mumbo-jumbo terminology to fill in the chapter. I didn’t. Everything written is a very careful estimation of trends I believe will become more evident as the 21st century progresses. And even if the guesses I have made turn out to be wrong, I believe they will be wrong in interesting ways that will generate good discussion and debate in the neuroscience and neural engineering communities.
As of the writing of the novel, the vast majority of neuroscientists are entirely wedded to the idea of axon-to-dendrite synaptic transmission as … the … basis for human thought and cognition. I believe that paradigm to be only half the answer, … with the other half based upon ephaptic communication (both locally and globally). Since the majority of the world’s neuroscientists know very little about Maxwell’s Laws, they have not yet become aware of their importance to human thought. The mind as distinct from the brain is very much an ephaptic/electromagnetic phenomenon, and there are many neuroscientists that (for many reasons) simply cannot accept that at this time.
As noted, the overall amount of neurons is not nearly as critical when compared to how they are wired up and the resulting thought space topologies that arise. This is key to Homo naledi’s ability to observe funeral rights and Portia’s ability to hunt other spiders. This will likely be a major area of research by the 2040s if current trends hold. As of right now, sadly, the field of paleoconnectomics has not even been created (so, … I am creating it now, … yay!) (These are separate from the poorly defined neuroanthropology).
Before I could write this chapter, I had to look closely at what human thought and consciousness actually are, … from a mathematical, physical, and neural engineering point of view. I then needed to take those imperfect conclusions and weave them into a hopefully realistic extrapolation of where I believe neuroscience and neural engineering will arrive at many decades from now. After speaking with numerous computational neuroscientists, neurologists, and neural engineers, I decided to demarcate neuroscience into three eras:
First Era (1600 BCE – 1842 AD) – Also known as the Pre-Brain Era. The period beginning with the Edwin Smith papyrus of the Second Intermediate Period of Ancient Egypt from around 1600 BC, which contains the first recorded mention of neuroanatomy. The period covers the slow transition from pre-scientific beliefs concerning the brain and nervous system to the increasing application of the scientific method and the beginning of Victorian science.
Second Era (1843 – 2051 AD) – Also known as the Era of the Brain. This period began when Bois-Reymond discovered the action potential in 1843. It was defined by the physical study of neurons and populations of neurons using a variety of techniques (EEG, PET, MRI, FMRI, optogenetics, EcoG, etc…) culminating with neural nanites and an appreciation of the electromagnetic aspects of large-scale neural network behavior. The age in which neurology slowly transitioned to neuroscience which in turn transitioned to neural engineering. Marked increasingly at the end by the application of large-scale machine learning to neural network simulations.
Third Era (2052 onwards) – Also known as the Era of the Mind. Roughly 2052 until the time of the novel. An era defined by the nonlinear dynamics of how one thought influences another without being directly tied to an underlying framework of membrane potential and ephaptic wave behavior. The era of metacognition. The role of thought space hierarchy, their topology, and their nested qualities. The period in which human neuroscientists are pushed to the periphery (as idea initiators only) by vastly superior superposition-enabled, quantum, neuromorphic-like algorithms that simulate large-scale real-time neural networks.
As of the writing of the novel, and looking ahead several decades into the latter half of the 21st century, I remain skeptical that quantum mechanical effects are important to large-scale neural network behavior. Quantum biologists and physicists are finding quantum effects throughout nature (the ability of the European robin to navigate, the odor detection of isotopes, chlorophyll excitons, etc …) so there certainly is a place for the “weird” in the “wet and the warm.” Quantum effects are critically important to enzyme function, electron transport, and basic cell metabolism cycles. That said, I believe the overall contribution of quantum mechanics to neural behavior will mainly be found in places like enzyme catalysis and possibly, slight changes to Hodgkin-Huxley. I see the effects possibly as small changes to gain (an electrical engineering term) and downstream non-linear behavior.
Among neuroscientists I have known, some large number are primarily concerned with their GABA inhibitor, knockout mouse, or bird song. Why? … because that is where the funding is. Specializing in consciousness without being laughed at behind one’s back has only really sprung up in the past few decades. Bringing up the question of human consciousness used to produce the same facial reaction as asking operagoers if they ever listened to Hank Williams. Many neuroscientists would vehemently disagree with me, but from where I am standing, the central question of the entire field is understanding consciousness.
No computer or machine learning program has yet shown anything approaching even a limited sense of self-sentience. Part of this I believe is because the hidden layers of machine learning algorithms do not capture the nonlinear characteristics of large-scale neuronal computation. I had to make some educated guesses about what it would take to allow true artificial intelligence to arise; 1 – Standard integrated circuits from a hardware perspective are possibly unable to represent the logic functions of neurons and must be substituted by task-specific neuromorphic circuits where electric interference is allowed and manipulated (reverse biased p-n junctions must be reworked), and 2 – Advances in large-scale nonlinear dynamics must be made in order to understand what physically and electromagnetically composes a “thought,” thought space, or consciousness.
Chapter 28 –
The ship (Noisemaker kuween) that the humpbacks hearsee at the beginning of the chapter is a 400-meter-long container ship.
There is a reference to “six times five generations ago”. The average humpback can reach sexual maturity by seven to ten years old, so I guesstimated that the length of a humpback generation would be about nine to ten years. This part of the chapter refers to the unprecedented wholesale slaughter of whales that took place from the eighteenth century to the 1960s when the International Whaling Commission ban commenced.
The height of the American whaling trade was from the 1820s to the 1880s and declined after the discovery of oil in Texas. Humpback whales were typically the fifth most hunted whales after the sperm, bowhead, right, and gray whales. About half of humpback whales sank after they died and hence did not provide the economic incentive to whaling ships as other species. This is also the reason that Blue whales were not hunted before about 1890.
The Pogrom of Baha honors one of the most famous stories of the sea ever written. I leave it to the reader to investigate further.
Tigaloo was chosen as a name to honor Migaloo, the male albino humpback whale that annually visits the waters off the Great Barrier Reef of northeastern Australia.
Chapter 29 –
Since antiquity, people have recognized the lack of active consciousness that accompanies a coma after an accident, injury, or illness. One idea that I play with is that a coma may be the purposeful overexcitation of neural loci within the claustrum and prefrontal cortex (and other neural correlates of consciousness (NCC)) so that large-scale neural loci and binding loci are not lost. In the novel, specific densities of neural nanites are able to “awaken” consciousness on a limited basis to be passed through sensorium (the haptic meta-net (a vast extension of today’s internet).
Chapter 30 –
The form of Nemahotas partially resembles a Mandurian (a sperm whale) because sperm whales are among those cetaceans known to dive the deepest. Elephant seals have been tagged diving to 2388 meters, sperm whales to 2,250 m, and Cuvier’s beaked whales to 2,992 m.
Chapter 31 –
I apologize to readers, but I had to pull a trick on everyone until Chapter 31 appears; All the descriptions of the humpbacks communicating indicate that they are vocalizing. There is never a mention made of how they actually communicate because I purposely wished to play into the long-held belief that humpbacks express their communication through non-song vocalization (and whalesong). Only by luring readers into my trap, could I then spring the surprise on them that it is actually their long pectoral fins that are facilitating most of their communication. I also did this because all the cetologists I spoke to for this novel were fairly certain that non-song vocalizations were their primary method for communication. I wanted the secret of the pectoral fins to remain just that until Chapter 31.
The pectoral fins of humpback whales are so large that they beg rethinking. That much added mass and drag were naturally selected for a very important reason. To get a layman’s idea of how much more energy it takes a humpback to swim through the ocean than a gray whale, try swimming through the ocean for a hundred meters by primarily kicking your legs. Now grab two longish t-shirts and tie one to each wrist as you swim the hundred meters again. It is quickly apparent how much extra drag you encounter.
Marine mammal biologists and cetologists have hypothesized that the large pectoral fins are involved in fish herding, heat regulation, and maneuverability in shallow water. The problem is that a host of other baleen whales meet these challenges just fine without large pectoral fins. Therefore, I am proposing something novel, … humpbacks may use their pectoral fins to sign (conduct sign language) to others.
By placing humpback pectoral fins in a commercial CFD (computational fluid dynamic software package) it becomes apparent that the huge pectoral fins add drag from a swimming standpoint. The pectoral fins also make movements which do not assist in swimming (which then must be analyzed to see if their a sub-component that is not simple due to relaxation). Noticing this, I decided to run with this as part of the framework for humpback “language.”
If humpbacks are using their pectoral fins in a signaling/language capacity, then the questions of why, and being noticed by another humpback arise. I lean toward the idea that being quiet in the ocean for females and calves likely means less predation by orcas and attention from amorous males. After looking at the amount of “acoustic daylight” (the ambient noise of the ocean from a variety of sources), I suspect that this daylight aurally illuminates objects in high detail for humpback ears and jawbones. If harassing orcas are nearby, it makes more sense to signal intent and action by use of your pectoral fins than by non-song vocalization.
It may be, … ironically, given that they are known for their songs, … that humpbacks are actually the “quiet signers” of the Baleen community.
Even if humpbacks were utilizing their pectoral fins for language, the question would immediately be one of matching which motions to which meaning. Which pectoral swing means “orcas ahead,” and which means “you’ve got a bit of feces hanging onto your tail?”
It does not matter how powerful the pattern-matching decoder you use (say, a machine learning algorithm running on superposition-enabled, quantum cores), until you can decrypt the first few hundred “words,” you cannot establish a primer.
With reference to Min-Hee’s third dream and the crab who speaks to her mind, Omega (zero) refers to the relative density parameter of general relativity. If Omega (zero) is one, then the Universe is flat (3 dimensional Euclidean space). If Omega (zero) is greater than one then the Universe is positively curved (3-sphere) and if less than one, then the Universe is negatively curved (hyperbolic space). (Omega (zero) is different than Omega (k), the curvature parameter as these two are sometimes confused by those new to general relativity.) These possible outcomes fall out of the Friedmann equations. Current observational evidence (from the WMAP, BOOMERanG, and Planck space probes) imply that the Universe is either flat or very close to it (0.4% margin of error for Omega).
Chapter 32 –
There have been many different ideas proposed for why whales beach themselves. In some instances, it seems they are driven there by predators, in others because their sense of navigation fails or because they have become ill. I wanted to use this chapter to throw out the idea that a whale beaching itself may have a bit in common with both the seppuku (harakiri) committed by samurai and curiosity. Obviously, whales can see the shore and are familiar with land. Would some of them knowing that death is at hand not wish to see what life is like on the land before they pass away?
Chapter 33 –
If you’ve never met someone before (whether human, humpback, or alien) and speak no words of their pheromone or microwave-based language, you can still find commonality by establishing basic numerosity, ordinality, and parallel individualization since the base language of the Universe is mathematics.
As of the writing of his book, there is evidence for archaic Homo sapiens being 315,000 years old but I suspect that will be extended slightly as more discoveries are made, so I extrapolated the 340,000-year-old lineage figure.
Chapter 34 –
Thanks to movies like Wargames (1983), Terminator (1984), and the The Matrix (1999), the general public and many in the scientific community are somewhat fearful of the increased use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (actually, neither is anywhere close to “intelligence” yet). The problem with this is that we likely occupy two very different niches. A human ruler might be driven to dominate others due to resources, riches, land, slaves, sexual conquest, or jealousy. Likewise in movies, godlike A.I. usually seems to be motivated by a need to possess physical territory and wipe humans out. In real life, however, an artificial intelligence living virtually across (for example) the internet is unlikely to be concerned with such needs. The desire to physically possess land, own slaves, or be motivated by a sex drive is unlikely to be a point of concern for an artificial intelligence. It would be similar to humans fighting over a particular backyard flower that emits a certain nectar. Insects and humans occupy two totally different niches. Just as we usually aren’t concerned with wiping out bumblebees (unless they make their nest in our garage), I am inclined to feel that the coming artificial intelligences of the mid and late 21st century will not be much concerned with the bees buzzing around them unless we mean them direct harm.
The Seldon Code (statistotype) is named in honor of Hari Seldon, the fictional mathematician of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels.
The world population at the time of the novel is approximately 9.67 billion people. If you look at the “medium growth” projections from the United Nations, the world population may be roughly ~ 10.2 billion people or so by the time of the novel as this figure tries to better account for under-reported growth in Africa. World population though is intimately tied to female education, birth control, and employment opportunities. In any place in the world where women gain greater autonomy over their own destinies, education, and bodies, birth rates begin dropping. Considering this, I chose the population estimates put forth from a well-known Lancet paper funded by the Global Burden of Disease Study that predicts global population will top out around 9.7 billion in 2064, and thereafter fall due to increasing women’s rights, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia. Africa which had only 17% of the world’s population in 2020 will rise to almost 37% of the world’s population by the time of the novel. (Obviously, this speaks to the incredible need to protect the biodiversity of the continent, or else some of the planet’s richest megafauna will be wiped out.) In 2020, Kinshasa was the 14th or 15th largest city in the world (with about 15.9 million people in its metro area) but by 2100, the city will have perhaps an incredible 76 to 84 million residents and be one of the three most populous metro areas on the planet. Five out of the ten largest cities on Earth will be in Africa by 2100 and the continent will comprise roughly 38 to 42% of the world’s population. That means for every ten people on Earth, roughly four will be Asian, four will be African, one will be of Hispanic descent, and one will be caucasian. (To put this in perspective, as of 2022 approximately 59% of the world’s population is made up of those of Asian descent, 17.5% of African descent, 17% of Caucasian descent, and 5.9% of Hispanic descent.)
Chapter 35 –
One of Stephen King’s many great novels is The Long Walk about a group of young boys who begin walking in Maine and are not allowed to stop on penalty of death until only one walker remains. King perfectly captures the psychological aspects of such a competition and his writing was an inspiration for the chase in this chapter.
The reason that everyone calls Nathan, “Gunny” is because he holds the rank of Gunnery Sergeant in the Marine Corps Reserve. This is the seventh highest (E7) enlisted rank in the Corps.
When Egerius finally cracks the first “words” of the Center Seas dialect of the humpbacks, Min-Hee, working with linguists, eventually decides to represent their complex combination of pectoral fin motion (and other body motions) and non-song vocalization with Sharpe glyphs (named after cetologist, Fred Sharpe because he is one of those rare guys out there earnestly trying to communicate with humpbacks in our era). A typical Sharpe glyph looks like this:
Because Min-Hee has discovered that humpback communication is multi-modal, comprised of pectoral fin motions and other body motions which are sometimes mixed with a non-song vocalization component, a representation is needed which shows both the pectoral fin and its motion along with the accompanying audio aspect. Often, two glyphs are used because a humpback is moving both pectoral fins at the same time in communication. (If you see a Sharpe glyph with no treble or bass clef, then of course that means that there is no audio component. Likewise, a Sharpe glyph with no pectoral fin indicates audio only.) As I tinkered with these ideas, I gradually changed the way they appear to vaguely resemble Mayan glyphs.
Chapter 36 –
Any list summing up the most persecuted cultures of the last two millennia would have to include the Jewish people. Because they have managed to persevere and thrive, they have adopted a wry sense of humor that is often self-deprecating and which often cracks me up. One summing example might be this:
Two Jewish men sat in a coffeehouse discussing the fate of their people.
“How miserable our history,” said one. “Pogroms, plagues, discrimination, Hitler, Neo-Nazis, … Sometimes I think we’d be better off if we had never been born.
“Sure,” said his friend. “But who has that much luck? …. Perhaps one in 50,000?”
One would think that the Jewish peoples, who underwent the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto (1940-1943) would recognize the horrific irony of pushing 2.3 million Palestinians into a strip of land forty kilometers long by nine wide. I am hopeful that some of the brightest people on the planet will eventually come to their senses.
Just as drug companies have isolated captopril (from snake venom) or digitoxin (from a medicinal plant), similar processes will soon be applied to mining the human genome. (Humanity is all one “race,” and groups of people that share common traits (say Caucasians from Norway or Africans from Botswana) are just concentrations of alleles). If a particular group of people has unusual alleles that code for more rapid fast-twitch (Type II) muscle fibers or neurons that sprout more dendrites, you can be sure that some company will want to commercialize that (by selling it to parents who want their child’s genome “corrected”). At the time this novel was finished, those investigations were only in their infancy, but I suspect they will be fully underway by the 2030s. Of course, one of the first series of alleles that the gene miners will wish to study (ie, … make a profit off of) will be those responsible for Ashkenazi intelligence.
While Intelligence Quotient (I.Q.) testing does have general validity, there is also much it leaves out. At the time of the novel, IQ testing has been replaced by the far more precise Connectome Quotient (CQ) testing that relies upon the speed and interconnectedness of several critical connectomes in the human brain as measured by neural nanites. The CQ also provides a measure for “neural emergence” which is the reason that the seventy to two hundred thousand neurons of Portia (a genus of jumping spiders) are more emergent than the billions of neurons available to a cow.
While I’m on this topic, let me also say that if you meet anyone (in person or online) who says they have an IQ above 160 (or for many, above 120), smile politely and then walk in the opposite direction. Why? Sample size and statistical measure. Since there is only one person in roughly 31,000 estimated to have a 160 IQ, it becomes very, very difficult to gather a large enough pool of such individuals to norm the upper range of an IQ test to. This is why IQ tests cannot reliably measure individuals with a 170 or 180 IQ or higher, … they exist in too few a number to set a benchmark by. This is why the modern WISC V and WAIS both top out around the 155 to 160 range. Once you get above the 160 IQ range, it also becomes difficult to determine exactly what the difference is between say, a 180 IQ and a 190 IQ. It is clear that there are differences between say a profoundly gifted individual and John von Neumann (a prodigy), but it is not clear how you discretize those differences into something that can be measured through testing.
There is not currently (nor has there ever been in my opinion despite claims by folks like the MEGA society) any IQ exam that can validly measure individuals above the ~ 155 to 160 IQ range. So at any time, you read an article that says Einstein had a 163 IQ (intelligence tests did not even exist when Einstein was young, and after they did, he is never recorded as having taken any) or that Stephen Hawking had a 169 IQ or that Marilyn vos Savant has a 230 IQ please know that for the complete bullshit, it is.
Sidenote for the philosophers of the mind: A state of sleepwalking is not equivalent to being non-conscious.
By the end of the chapter, Min-Hee has experienced four lucid dreams throughout the book, each revealing something. The reason behind these four revelations is left to the reader to discover.
Chapter 37 –
Gracie and George are named for the two humpback whales in the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
This would be the chapter I reworked the most. Linguistics is a deep and multi-faceted field, and I wanted to portray realistic linguistic methods that might be used during first contact. Sadly, after nearly attaining a master’s degree in the subject (I joke …) and numerous rewrites, the chapter still caused confusion for test readers, so I decided to go with a bit simpler format for clarity’s sake.
From all of the preceding chapters, a reader might come to believe that the humpbacks are using subject – verb – object type grammar common to the English language when in fact they are not. I had originally planned to represent humpback language as a mirror to their thought processes, but this turned out to be far too confusing for readers.
No cetologist has yet identified a context where non-song vocalizations are being used as “names” by real humpbacks, although it appears that sperm whales and dolphins do have personal names. In my invented and fictional humpback experience, humpbacks typically take three names throughout their life. The first is a placeholder name assigned to them during their first lunar cycle of life. (Humpbacks believe it is unwise to assign a name until the dangerous period of those first days has passed.) The second is given by the mother just as humans give their own infants names. The third is a name chosen by the humpback itself upon reaching adolescence or young adulthood. This third name can be something the humpback chooses for themselves or adopted from the nickname that friends use for that individual.
Unlike human names which are a series of acoustic signals, humpback names are multi-sensory, meaning that they are a complex combination of both acoustic signals and pectoral fin motions combined. Valirias’s real name is Auooee / yaaaaeee \ eeeeeeh, which in the Center Seas sub-language (far dialect) means “The One Who Considers Things Unconsidered.” Unfortunately, trying to use vowel sounds such as, “Aaaaauuuuee” as an onomatopoeic rendition of the acoustic aspects of a humpback “name” is problematic for human readers. This is the reason, simple placeholder names like Valiria were chosen.
The term “First Speaker” was taken to honor the leader of the Second Foundation in the Asimov Foundation series.
Last I checked, there were more than fifty-one reasonable proposals to explain the Fermi Paradox. One of those is labeled, “the great filter,” the idea that alien civilizations destroy themselves or damage their own planet’s biosphere, etc …. which leads to their extinction. One of many reasons for writing this novel is to explore the idea that perhaps technology has nothing to do with it. Perhaps out of all species (both Terran and alien) to develop sentience, only those who encourage love and empathy are able to pass through the great filter (not that I believe in the great filter idea). We humans always hold the belief that our next technological innovation will save us (at the time of this writing, that upcoming invention would be fusion power) but we never look inside ourselves to see if our tribalistic nature is actually the culprit we need to re-invent (by means of genetic engineering or by singularity).
Let me put in a little nod to a fellow scientist who also writes science fiction. One of the best science fiction novels I have ever read is Blindsight (2006) by Canadian marine biologist Peter Watts. The book describes a first contact situation with alien intelligence where the main characters come to a truly startling conclusion (which I am not mentioning because I highly recommend buying the book and reading it for yourself). In the work, Watts expertly sends a chill down reader’s spines when explaining how the phrase We come in peace might be perceived by another intelligence. I liked the way he removed himself from human thought processes to examine what it might mean to another intelligence, and had to mention my own interpretation in Chapter 37.
As one who has conducted research into human neural networks and possible mathematical frameworks behind them, my own feeling about those who are autistic is that they let too much in. I lean in support of the view held by neural engineer Henry Markram that the autistic may be suffering from a lack of ability to dampen. (I recommend the biography of his son, The Boy Who Felt Too Much, by Lorenz Wagner.) One idea I would throw out for consideration is that the autistic cannot control emotional saturation, … for example, they often refuse to look into the eyes of others because the emotions that the eyes pass can overwhelm them. So avoiding eye contact is a self-defense measure. Likewise, being hugged or physically held affectionately overwhelms several emotional connectomes, particularly in the frontal cortices and mid-brain. Being warmly held and kissed on the cheek may paradoxically allow them to feel too much love, … a love that can be painful in its beauty, … so much so that they need to turn away. This is why the autistic in Chapter 37 are mentioned as sometimes able to hear the voices of the Others.
Many readers have wondered if there is a religious connotation implied at the end of this chapter. There is not. Views by Emanuel Swedenborg that God is essentially love or that the universe is adequately described by Pantheism are not my intention despite the seeming similarity. Without any disrespect meant to Swedenborg, the idea that God is love is a very small thought space that I suspect Nature far outstrips.
Chapter 38 –
There are several places on the planet that might vie for the most stunning views. One of them would definitely have to be the Teatro Antico of Taormina, Sicily (Italy).
Chapter 39 –
Some readers might wonder why I don’t have Augustus and his parents visiting genetically engineered dinosaurs, a’la Jurrasic Park (by Michael Crichton). The reason is that DNA is not stable once an organism dies. DNA has a half-life of 521 years, which means that after 521 years, half of all the DNA inside an organism’s cells will have degraded. After 1042 years (521 x 2), one-half of the remaining DNA will have degraded (meaning 75% of all the DNA), and so on … until after 6.8 million years, there will be no DNA. (Actually, it is worse than this because DNA chains bound around histones degrade randomly after death with no chance of finding long intact sections after more than perhaps 50,000 years.) This means there is a theoretical limit of 6.8 million years in the past for any extinct animal that humanity might wish to resurrect. But that is the theoretical limit, … the real limit is more likely to be something like 50,000 years or less. Since woolly mammoths likely went extinct only twelve to four thousand years ago, it is very possible that they could be genetically resurrected. Dinosaurs which went extinct (except for their avian descendants) 65 million years ago, are creatures that cannot be genetically resurrected even if one tried to extract their DNA from mosquitoes (trapped in amber) that had sucked their blood in the Cretaceous Period.
Dare mighty things, … is the motto of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, an organization I very much support! It is administered by an institution that most of the MIT student body couldn’t get accepted into. (Okay, okay, …. don’t throw things beavers, I’m joking.)
Callisto would probably be the most likely of Jupiter’s moons to host human settlement due to the amount of radiation that bathes the surface. An average human living at sea level on Earth is exposed to about ~ 0.61 rem (610 millirem to be exact) of radiation every year. Of that, 300 millirem comes from natural sources (radon in the air, cosmic rays, etc … ) and the other half comes from man-made sources such as television screens and medical imaging tests. The primary protector for humans on Earth is the planet’s magnetosphere generated by its iron-nickel core. When humans land on Mars, which lacks a magnetosphere, they will be exposed to about 24 to 30 rem per year (about 40 to 50 times higher than on Earth) on the surface. Future colonies are therefore likely to be built at least partially underground (at least until cancer-repairing nanites become a reality). In comparison, a human living on the surface of Io would receive about 1,314,000 rem per year (enough to kill an average healthy human in about 4 to 6 hours), about 197,100 rem per year on Europa (enough to kill an average healthy human in about 30 to 40 hours), 2350 to 2650 rem per year on Ganymede (enough to kill an average healthy human in about 4 to 6 months) and about 7.3 rem per year on Callisto (which is only twelve times higher than Earth levels). While radiation-repairing nanites may be a possible future technology, it is difficult to see any permanent manned bases on Io, Europa, or Ganymede unless they were built deep underground. Even coming into orbit around Io or Europa would cook unaugmented humans, while orbiting Ganymede for more than a few weeks would produce serious radiation poisoning. Callisto also has arguably the best surface of Jupiter’s moons to form colonies on with the main downside being the weak gravity (100 kg on Earth weighs only 12.6 kg on Callisto).
Chapter 40 –
Having written this novel, … do I actually believe that humpbacks can display sentience that equals or perhaps surpasses humanity’s? … Probably not. I’m a realist who is a big fan of the scientific method. While I do not agree with some cetologists who feel that humpbacks are marine ungulates, I do not (yet) see clues that humpbacks can display the emergent thought structures necessary for higher sentience. The scientific method leans toward that conclusion at the time this novel was written. That said, I am inclined to agree with Iain Kerr’s (of the Ocean Alliance) wonderful statement that, “Humpbacks may be wise but not intelligent.” I also believe that Rebecca Dunlop (of The University of Queensland) put it nicely when she said, “… humpbacks face many situations of social uncertainty that require more than a hardwired response.”
We, humans, usually assume we are the most intelligent species on the planet. We are taught from infancy that we are the apex predators of the globe, partly because we can kill off other species at our leisure while they cannot do likewise. It is a never-challenged maxim of human societies that the power to destroy a thing is equivalent to a superiority over it. If we concentrated on it, we could drive humpbacks to complete extinction while they could not do the same to us. I believe this imbues in us a false sense of superiority that I very much doubt we possess. There are species that have been on this planet far longer than we have and although they have not developed a tool using sentience, they may in fact far exceed us in areas that we might not notice, … such as empathy. What if the key to understanding the underlying truths of the Multiverse is not mathematics, general relativity, or quantum mechanics, … but empathy? What if more advanced actually means a more empathetic neural network structure that can alter its own space-time path? We recently evolved simians I suspect, have a great deal to learn before we can call ourselves “masters” of anything. Would we not be in for a shock if we found that humpbacks far exceeded us in sentience? … or ability to love? This final chapter is a nod to the humpbacks across the globe who cannot speak for themselves as we desecrate and pollute their home. It is also to our shared responsibility to recognize that all life is sacred and only by learning more about others do we come to know ourselves better.
The middle and end of the final chapter may be a surprise for many (like myself) who believe strongly in the scientific method and generally hold a disdain for the supernatural and pseudoscientific. However, that does not mean that things we cannot explain presently, cannot be allowed. In the 19th century, the ability of geckos to walk upside down on freshly cleaned glass was a point of curiosity for many Victorian scientists. The science of their day could not account for Van der Waals’ and electrostatic forces as they relate to the geckos’ setae. Even though they could not explain this unusual behavior, those scientists were nonetheless confident that future science would be able to explain the behavior, without a need to resort to supernatural explanations. It likewise follows that some Earth species may be capable of feats that we cannot as yet explain (the ability of the European Robin to navigate possibly using quantum entanglement comes to mind). This last chapter is an homage to all that we do not understand about the universe. Let us never forget that what we understand is likely a thimble full of water compared to an entire ocean of the undiscovered.
There is also another reason I wrote the final chapter as I did, …. hope. To quote Andy Dufresne, “ … hope is a good thing, … maybe the best of things … .“ At the very core of my being is an inherent optimism that humanity can better itself. I wanted to end my first novel with a sense of that optimism and hope that a wonderful path lies ahead. I hope I succeeded.
We, humans, always believe that other animals live at our leisure. If wild boars get out of control in Texas, the state can simply issue more hunting permits, bringing down the population. If deer in Pennsylvania become too numerous, the state can authorize hunters to take multiple kills. Would we not be in for a surprise if we learned that we actually live at the mercy of say, humpbacks, … or sperm whales? Bit of a role reversal to realize we might not have the power we think we do.
Some pre-readers asked me what motivated to write such a book. Part of the reason is that as a small child, if I asked an adult, Why are we (meaning all humans on Earth)? or Why do children get cancer? I would usually be met with an answer of, “We can never know that,” or “God works in mysterious ways.” I always thought that was a cop-out or a side-stepping of the issue.
There are many people who would desperately like to have a better answer to:
Why are we all here? (Meaning humans, now, on this planet, in the Orion Arm, in the Milky Way)
What is my purpose? (What is the purpose of all of us collectively?)
Where am I headed?
If I don’t awake tomorrow, will it make any difference in ten thousand years?
All of you who ask such questions deserve to get a better answer than the ones many authority figures currently offer up. In that same direction, Min-Hee is also engaged in a profound search for meaning, if there is any. I believe that you, the reader, deserve to get a more informed answer and that was part of my motivation.
If it has not become apparent yet, … the message I hope readers take from this work is, … love. Simply, … love. The sublime and redeeming quality that is evolove. Bask in it, … share it, … bestow it on others. Love is not a thinking thing, … it’s a doing thing. Loving can hurt, … trust me, … I know. To offer love is to risk true loss but only in the giving up of ourselves do we supersede what we alone are. Every opportunity that presents, … simply love.
I hope the information for all the chapters has proved useful!