Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseThe Science Fiction Universe of "Meru" by SB Divya
Daniel and Kelly talk to the author of "Meru" about a future which blurs the line between humans and machines.
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Hey, Kelly, do you still remember your parents phone number from when you were growing up?
I do. I doubt I'll ever forget it. My fingers can still go through the muscle memory of pushing it on a touchtone phone.
And now do you know like all of your family phone numbers?
No? Absolutely not. They're on my phone. There's no need to remember them. They're on the brain in my pocket.
So do you think of your phone as like an extension of your brain?
I am not sure I could be a fully functioning human being without it anymore. So maybe do.
You ever wonder, though, if like our phones feel the same way. Do they feel like they're part of our brains or that we are part of them?
Oh? I hope not, because if my phone has feelings, I'm sure it's frumpy because I drop it all the time and I have filled it with photos of disgusting bugs and dumb beetles rolling poop. So I hope my phone does not have feelings.
We've all dunked our phone in places we'd never want to mention.
Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I think my phone is smarter than I am.
I'm Kelly Wiersmith. I'm an adjunct assistant professor at Greece University. And I am sure that my phone is smarter than.
I am because your phone told you so.
That's right, and I believe everything my phone says.
Well, my phone is definitely better at some things than I am. Though I still hold that hope that there are things that humans can do that phones can't do.
That gap is getting smaller and smaller every day, though, Daniel.
But maybe that's not the right way to look at it. Maybe instead of competing with our phones about who's most intelligent, we should just be thinking about us and our phones together working in harmony to unlock the nature of the universe.
The Ultimate Symbiosis.
And Welcome to the podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe in which we try to unlock the nature of the universe. We use all of the technology at our disposal, all the AI, and all of the biological intelligence to try to unravel the mystery of this beautiful and gorgeous cosmos, to boil it all down into a story that makes sense, at least to our human brains, if that's even possible. My friend and usual co host Jorge can't be here today, but I'm very pleased to be joined by our regular guest host, Kelly. Kelly, thanks again for coming on the pod.
Hello, thanks for having me on the pod. I especially love when you having me on the pode has to talk about science fiction books, so I'm super excited to be here today.
That's right. Usually we are analyzing the science of our actual universe, wanting to understand how quantum mechanics weaves itself together to make our reality, or what's going on with the latest advances in astronomy and cosmology. But part of doing science is being creative, is thinking about the ways the universe could work or might work, or ways alternative universes could work. And so that's why I like to read so much science fiction, and on the podcast we have a series of episodes diving into the physics of fictional universes in which we interview science fiction authors. It's an excuse for me to get to read science fiction and an opportunity for Kelly and I do fanboy and fangirl out talking to the authors themselves. Yay, But it's a fascinating process hearing about how somebody puts together an entire fictional universe, how they build it up from the rules, the consequences of living in that universe, what is it like to be human, and if the rules are fundamentally different, or if technology has progressed so far that it changes the nature of being human.
You know, I've always had a lot of respect for sci fi authors, but through the course of doing these interviews with you, I have so much more respect thinking about how much world building needs to happen before a book comes out. It's just it's so much more work than I would have imagined.
That's right, because you have to be creative not just about the science of your universe and the technology of it, but really thinking deeply about the human side of it. The best science fiction, of course, they're human stories. They're about people and what it's like to be human in that era, and you have to also bridge this gap. You can't write stories about people who are so far away from us emotionally personally that we can't identify with them, right, You need to somehow create that universe and make it adjacent enough to ours that we can connect with these characters. And care about them even though their lives can be so different from ours, and.
This book did such a good job of.
That, It really did. It also sort of puts us in our place as humans and makes us feel like, ooh boy, we better get our stuff together.
Yes.
So on the podcast today, we'll be talking about the science fiction universe of Mehru by sb div Diva is an author we've had on the podcast before. She is very acclaimed. She's the Hugo and Nebula nominated author of Machinehood, which we talked about about a year ago on the pod. Her stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. She's also a former editor of Escape Pod, which is a weekly science fiction podcast which is a lot of fun. She has degrees in computation on neuroscience and signal processing and has worked in the medical device industry, so she knows what she's talking about when it comes to post humanity, as we'll hear all about in our interview with her. And one of my favorite things in her bio is that on her homepage she writes quote, I am currently mortal and full of squishy organs, but I hope to outlive that.
I wonder what the timeline is going to be for that.
I think she's hoping that some of the stuff in her book happens soon enough that she can move beyond her earthly existence as a bag of squishy meat.
I'm happy as a bag of squishy meat, but I'm hoping things work out for her.
So, Kelly and I both read this book. It's called Meru Meru, and it's available for sale now. We encourage you to get it. Kelly, what do you think this book is about? How would you summarize the topic of the book for our listeners?
Oh, I wish you had told me you were going to ask you that ahead of time. There's lots of moving pieces in this book. It's like complicated in a great way. But so I guess in summary, humans have sort of messed up, and another branch of humans have evolved and they've been sort of taken care of things to make sure we don't mess up again, and this is sort of the story about whether or not we deserve to be released back out into the universe. What do you think how would you describe what the book is about in just a few sentences?
Either? That was a great summary. Yeah, in my view, it's like near future science fiction, and so it's close enough that we can imagine it happening. And the major movements that happened between now in this near future are that there's a new race of humans, humans that have sort of machines built into them. More than like your phone in your pocket. These are like really integrated into what it's like to be these beings, and they don't call themselves humans. They call themselves alloys. In the way that you can mix metals together to get a stronger metal. Here she's mixing organic and machine parts together to make an alloy. And you have all sorts of really fascinating mixtures, including beings that can fly through space. They're basically living ships, you know, humans that are ships that fly through space that have other humans inside of them. It's really very creative.
It's such a cool idea, and I feel like that is maybe the part of the book that kept me up the most sipnight thinking about like one thinking about the social dynamics, but then two thinking about you know, if you're traveling through space, it takes you like months to get somewhere. What do you do on a trip like that? But it's just you and anyway. I could talk about this all day long. It is such a cool idea, and she does great things with it.
She does great things with it. She really thinks it through, what it's like to be that and the emotional relationship you have with this ship. I was just also pleased to have so many new ideas. When I read so much science fiction, I feel like the same five ideas for getting from one place to another are recycled over and over again. And so I just love seeing something news. I mean, you haven't seen before. It's really creative. And I was also really impressed by the reality of the experience, you know, the human side of it. A lot of times when you find yourself in a new world in science fiction, it's a bit cartoony, you know, it's very simplified. But she is such a rich description of like the politics, the arguments. You know, there's no monolithic organizations here where like all of the alloys think this and all the humans think that. You know, there's currents and there's factions, and there's disagreements among every group in a way that I think is very human and realistic. I mean, these days, nobody can seem to agree about anything.
That's right, that's right. And she built out this huge history to sort of support the story, and you get glimpses of it every once in a while, but this is like, this is a complete world that she has built, and you immerse yourself in it and it's yeah, I agree. So politics don't feel corny. The history makes perfect sense and it's it's awesome.
Yeah, And I love that she has like massive failed projects in the book. This is time in the book where so many builds like a mega habitat out in space, and then everybody's like, nah, I don't really want to move there. Eh, it's like, wait, trillions of dollars, that seems like something that's likely to happen. You know. That's basically what Mark Zuckerberg is doing right now with the metaverse.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, very very realistic. I imagine when we start eating out into space, there are going to be things that people like that work and things that people like that don't work, and it'll be you know, interesting to see how things pan out.
Yeah, there'll be all sorts of fascinating dead ends and the equivalent of like abandoned apartment buildings and all sorts of stuff in a way that I think will be totally unpredictable, right, and so people make lots of money and people who don't, and so I love seeing that in the book. It makes it feel very much like you're actually visiting another universe.
It does. Yeah, it's's got multiple different things that failed, from like biology experiments to engineering experiments, and then you just sort of see how you've learned from those failures and you move forward. And you know, one of the ways that they move forward and learned from a failure was humans tried terraforming bars and just totally blew it, which is super interesting to think about from the perspective of you know, current things that are going on right now. But anyway, in the book, humans totally blew their chance and destroyed things. And now the alloys are taking care of the humans. But humans aren't really leaving Earth that much because they've sort of been contained. And this is the story of a human who actually gets the option or the opportunity to travel out and show that humans can do the right thing. We've learned our lesson. But you know, they're also upond between all these different powerful forces. They've got these different factions that are fighting that think human should have a chance, and others that think that they shouldn't, and and then you'll have to just see what happens.
That's right, no pressure. You're only standing in for all of humanity, right right, right. So let's talk about the science of the book a little bit. She has some really fascinating innovations here. She has these really deep human computer alloys. This is more than just like I've got something wired to my brain where I can control a machine. These are people where they have organic and metallic machine based elements really of their biology. She talks about like programming these things, having these things really be an outgrowth of their DNA. You're the biologist here, do you think that that's something we could have, you know, in fifty years, one hundred years, five hundred years sort of ever? Or is that implausible?
You know, I just don't know. So, like, as you might remember from Sudish, I really hate putting dates on things, but you know, I will say that it does seem like on the one hand, biology is super complicated and traits are controlled by many, many genes, and so if you're going to have part of your body growing as like you know, a computer part, that you're going to be able to control. That sounds very complicated, but you know, on the other hand, Crisper is an amazing tool that we sort of surprisingly came across in the near future. So maybe we'll stumble upon more surprises that shorten the timeline on these sorts of things. But I guess, if I had to guess, if I'm going to have like a leaf blower arm, I don't think my grandkids are going to have this sort of technology, let's just say, but I couldn't wrong.
Is that your top choice if you have some modification you're like leaf blower arm, I could use it to what brush my teeth to clean off that do the dishes just like sort of blow all the dishes into the sink.
I'm in my garage recording right now, and I just looked at the leaf blower and so that would not be my first choice.
It reminds me of all those Internet videos of people blowing leaf blowers into their mouths. I don't know why that's so fun for people. Anyway, one day, maybe we'll have people with floor arms and we'll see weird movies about it. Another really fascinating aspect of the science of this book is how she gets from star to star. So in loss of science fiction novels, there are warp drives or there's wormholes, there's sort of these standard solutions to getting from star to star not having it take thousands of years. But in this book she has something totally new. She has invented like another layer of physics beneath what we know. So she's taken our universe. She says below that there's something else. There's this thing called a famite field, and there's particles in that field, which we would call famatons, and we can use that field as an energy source and as a way to manipulate space time itself to get between stars. I thought that was really clever.
Well, okay, now it's by troom to ask you, as a physicist, is this plausible?
So in general, like, is it plausible that there's something beneath space time? A completely different way to think about the universe? Absolutely, Like the message that we send on this podcast all the time is that we really just don't understand the way the universe works, Like we don't know what space time is. Is it actually built up from like weird little quantum dots that are woven together using theories and forces that we don't understand. It certainly could be. We have no idea. We have this theory of general relativity that tells us about space time, but we suspect it's probably wrong because it's not quantum mechanical. So we're always looking for that next layer of knowledge about what's going on in the universe. And so it's certainly possible that there's something going on deep down there which could allow us, if we understood it, to control space time in just this way. I mean, her description of it is a little bit more like spiritual and fantastical than scientific. You know, she has these ships and they sort of will themselves. They interact with this famity field through their minds, and they will themselves from star to star. But could there be famity fields and famatons and in a way that lets us travel. Yes, absolutely, that's totally possible.
So like when my grandkids have we flow our arms, maybe they'll be a trap into distant stars.
That's right, and then when they get there they can use their leaf blow arms to like hover over the surface.
Right, So maybe it wasn't such a bad idea. It seems like a very versatile attachment.
Yeah, I keep thinking of new applications for it all the time.
Well, you know, maybe we should see if we can get a leaf blowing company to support the show. But here's some commercial from someone who supports the show.
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Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here and talking about this book.
So you're the first author we've actually had back on the podcast for a second round, and usually we ask a series of silly questions to get people warmed up. But we've already asked you about your thoughts about Star Trek transporters. So I have a different question for you to get us oriented in your space of philosophy of science, which is in your view, is Star Wars fantasy or science fiction?
Oh that's a good one. I'm going to do a why not both and say there is a subgenre called science fantasy, and Star Wars falls squarely into that.
For me, is that because there are elements of it that are sort of like hardcore science and also elements that are sort of like left unexplained a little bit magical.
Yeah, exactly. I mean notwithstanding the mediclorians, the rest of the force is very mystical, right. I thought the original stood a little better that way than trying to explain it with science, especially as a retcon. So, yeah, science fantasy is you know, things like dragons in space. There are books out there that involve this very topic, things like Binti by Nettie Ocarfur. You know that involves space travel, astrolabes, but also certain forms of indigenous magic. So it's a very why not both the genre and I feel like that's one of the reasons so many people love Star Wars, right, is because you have all the cool tech, but then you have the mystical force and you have magic as well.
I must be one of the very few people who thought it was cool to try to explain the force in terms of science, because you know, that's like kind of who I am. I'm like, how does that work? You know, what is the microscopic process that makes that happen? So I was kind of into that. I was like, oh cool, and then I discovered it was very uncool to like that.
I think if it had been that way from the start, I would have been on board with it. But trying to, like I said, trying to shoehorn it in after the fact just felt kind of forced to me.
All right, well, we'll try to get our science in on draft one every time as well.
Yes, for sure.
All right, So let's talk about your book, which Kelly and I both read and really enjoyed, and the focus of the book is on this sort of post human or transhuman I'm not sure what the right word is, experience far in the future, when there's more than just like biological humans is humans have all sorts of modifications that are really quite different from the humans that we know that you call alloys in your book. Tell us about your inspiration, What made you write this book, Where did the idea come from? What's exciting to you about post humanity?
Yeah, so, first off, I will say I prefer post humans to transhuman only because transhumanism is a thing now and it's particular philosophy about improving humankind, and this book is very intentionally interrogating that very idea, right, which can and should we even talk about improvement when it comes to biology, humanity, life in general. And so the idea for this book, especially for the Alloys, was that I did want to carry some of the themes of genetic engineering and cybernetic enhancements for my first novel, Machinehood, but much much further into the future. You know, we talk a lot today in the media about designer babies and the ethics of genetics, and I thought, Okay, well, let's assume that genetic editing is happening right the genies out of the bottle, and let's say that one day, just like we write software code, we can build DNA up from scratch. And that's not as hypothetical as it sounds. We've already done that with yeast. So there are yeast legos that people in the lab play with today, and so, you know, a thousand years from now, I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that we'll have the technology to do that with our chromosomes. And at that point, I think, you know, it really begs the question of what kind of DNA is allowed, what kind of beings might exist, you know, and why, And so this book explores a lot of those questions.
I'm really interested in the designer baby's angle, and so I thought it was really interesting that, like, right at the beginning of the book sort of you start with an interesting ethical question here, and so in my mind, people are more comfortable with thinking about designer babies when you are tinkering to make an improvement to make their lives better. But in the book there's some tinkering that is negative, but maybe it'll end up being better at some point. Like, what do you think the future looks like in terms of our ethical sort of roads. Do you think at one point we'll feel comfortable making these tinkerings that might not make someone better.
I think we're already making tinkerings that have the potential to not make someone better or perhaps in a more nuanced way, better here, worse there. Right Again, it can be a combination of things, and as we know, gene expression and how it translates to your health, your behavior, your biochemistry can be pretty complicated. You know, certain things rely on one or two genes, but a lot of other things rely on many, and the combination of how those different genes are expressed in your body. And so I don't think we have the tools right now to model that in detail enough to know what we're doing. But assuming at some point we do, I think the risk of doing it in an unintentional way like, without very specific rules and regulations, is that, yes, this idea of making someone's life better can land us on a very steep, slippery slope to eugenics. So upfront I wanted to establish that in this world they've gone through that. Actually, you know, in the history of menu, there's the directed mutation catastrophe, which is when things went bad for life because we tinkered a little too much and we oversimplified actually to where genetic diversity was reduced and that ended up working against us from natural selection factors. So they come to the realization that a you have to allow for transmutations in order to just have innovation in general, and b you have to allow for various types of diseases and disabilities to exist in the population as well. You do your best to accommodate them and make their lives good, and you give them the option of treatment if it really can't be good, But you don't eliminate it from the gene pool, because you never know when the environment might demand that those genes exist, and we might find it useful to have people who have expressed those so that we understand how they work. And I think that applies today. Actually just as well as a thousand years from now. It's just that we don't necessarily have the tools.
So that's a very good argument from a practical point of view, like we can't predict, we can't model, we don't know the impact of any decision, and also we don't know what the future will need from us as a gene pool in terms of diversity to survive. But what about the moral side of it? Can we drill down on that? Are you suggesting that people don't have the right to do this kind of thing or that it's a bad idea from a policy standpoint? Can we make that decision for everybody? I mean, are you suggesting we should like not allow anybody to do this for their own babies?
I think what we have to sit down very carefully and consider what rules and regulations we're going to build around this, and it's going to be, you know, as complicated, if not more complicated than something like the FDA regulating drugs.
Right.
It's there's a lot of parallels. There's a difference, I would say, between gene therapy, which is something you change in gene expression or certain types of cells in the body, but that are not necessarily psychotic that aren't going to be hereditary, right, so you're not necessarily changing the gene, not changing the eggs or the sperm, And so I think there's an important distinction to be made there as well. So parents or in the case of METO, a person when they become a consenting adult, can choose to have gene therapy to correct for certain conditions that they're not happy living with, right, And I think that absolutely everyone should have that choice. Whether parents should have that choice for their babies is another ethical argument, you know, moral or ethical argument that we're having already today, right the deaf communities having it, Cited communities and uncited communities are having it, right, anything where it's hereditary but livable, right, like you can still have a good quality of life. You know, we're having these conversations with autism, with down syndrome, like who gets to decide, you know, whether or not they want to raise a child with these conditions? Right, So there's important considerations for the parents for the children, and then there's the social considerations, and then there's this species wide considerations and so ad maybe I was really trying to tackle that that final scale, right, which I don't think a lot of people are talking about today, because again we don't have that capacity right now, but species wide survival and people who've paid close attention to certain animal and insect population studies have noticed that things that sound good as adaptive behaviors, when taken to the extreme, can often lead to species extinction right aggressive mate selection for example, or certain types of decorative mutations that you know, take into the extreme end up reducing survivability overall. And so that I think, you know, is a consideration a little bit more for the future compared to parents' children and family and society, which are a little bit more pressing. I would never arrogate the power to myself to sit here and say that I know best. I certainly don't, And I think this is the sort of thing that, you know, we need to tap millions of people from across the world and attempt to achieve some kind of global consensus ideally on where we go with this.
I totally respect that we don't know what we're doing in this area, and that makes it terrifying, and it feels like a bad idea to give people power to make these decisions which could have crazy consequences. But I also feel like we're kind of already in that situation. I mean, as a parent, I'm making decisions all the time. They're going to totally influence the path of my child's life, how to educate them, where to raise them up, how to solve this problem, how to deal with this discipline issue. I certainly don't know what I'm doing, and I'm probably messing them up in all sorts of ways I can even imagine, and I see other people making choices that I think verge on the edge of child abuse. You know, how can you teach your kids those things about the universe? That's just wrong? And so I guess, you know, to me, the argument is like, well, at least we're limiting our power a little bit, we're bounding ourselves. We're doing this stuff that we've been doing for thousands of years, and we're still here. So I guess, in a sense, it's a conservative viewpoint to say, like, let's not give ourselves too much power too quickly to change the direction of the whole species.
Another change that you allow to happen in your universe is you have these human machine hybrids. I'm interested in brain computer interfaces and all these various ways that we're sort of augmenting ourselves with technology these days. Do you think these kinds of human machine hybrids are the future? And how near term is this future?
If so, I guess my hopeful vision of the future is that we will have a spectrum of beings, you know, everything from Homo sapiens to artificially intelligent machines right that are sentient, conscious and have full rights as individuals, and you know those who are blends in between with MEDU and with the alloys. And the reason I call them alloys is that they organically through their DNA, express parts of their bodies that are not purely organic, right, So it's not just carbon based, So they have silicon, they have heavy metals, but the instruction set for how these things are organized in their bodies comes still from their chromosomal sets. And this is something I think we're definitely going to have the capacity to do going forward. There's already a lot of bleedover between DNA and silicon, so I see no reason why we couldn't get a lot more interesting with that going forward. And again, we have life on Earth that show us how some of these things can be done, so we can already steal creatively from what we have around us, and so yeah, I don't see any reason why we couldn't coexist, right, Like, that's my hope, as pass fist an optimist, that we will coexist with a variety of forms of consciousness, some which are living and carbon based and some which aren't.
And so tell us more about this idea you developed of humans traveling in se alloys. This concept of ships that are essentially living beings that have as you say this, like non organic component that can travel through space. That's a really cool and creative idea haven't seen somewhere else where? Did that come from?
That came from me wanting a cool and different way of space travel. I'm a very idea driven writer, and so when I sat down to envision this, I knew I wanted it to be a space opera, and I thought, what can I do with space travel that hasn't been done that I have seen? And it's like, we've seen sentient spaceships, right, We've seen all the old school space ships from the previous century that are warp drives, etc. Ion drives that are just very complicated machines. And we've even seen living spacecraft. Again, I will raise the example of Binti, but also in Escaping Exodus by Niki Drayden. Some of these I haven't actually read them, but I remember from a blurb one of these like dragons in spaceships type things. Right, So we've considered having creatures that can transport us in space. So I guess the natural progression to me was, well, why not people, you know, especially if we can genetically engineer them. We know whales can get pretty big, we know dinosaurs can get even bigger, and certainly some of those animals were large enough to have a small human being inside them, right, or even a regular size human being. So then it's just a matter of in this magical thousand years from now genetically engineered future, creating a person who has organs that can carry smaller people inside them, and also has organs that allow them to travel through space to absorb energy from sunlight to basically meditate their way across interstellar distances. I definitely went a little, you know, maybe arguably quite a bit towards space fantasy with this, Like I came up with science ish reasons and ways that all of these things could happen. But certainly there's no such thing as a family feel today, right, And there's no such thing as reality transits where you can you can see all of space time in your mind and decide where you want to go.
I wish, yes, right, But I definitely got very Jonah and the space whale vibes from that sort of structure. Yeah, very cool.
I loved how much you thought through what it would be like to live in an alloy. So my first thought was like, oh my gosh, if I was living inside of someone else, every step I took, I would worry about in like privacy. And I'm a person who has social anxiety and needs them alone time And how do you get alone time? When you were like living in the person who is transporting you? And I like, yeah, how long did it take to think through all of the like, you know, what would be the social implications of talking to the vehicle that's taking you from place to place and not being able to escape?
Yeah, before we get into that, I do want to point out that females are already vehicles for other people. That is right, Like I.
Was suddenly like, yeah, there's there's this one other obvious parallel in my mind where it's like, yes, we can already carry people around inside as granted they are people who are highly dependent on us and symbiotic or parasitic in some ways, and for a long time are arguably not people yet And.
Then they kick you and it's uncomfortable, and then I guess that's what made me think about, like, you know, if you're walking around inside, like is it unable to have those footsteps?
And that definitely was on my mind. You know, in late stages of pregnancy, it's pretty clear that there is a person in there with a will and a lot of punching and really bad sleep habits. So definitely, you know, in thinking about transper rotation in general, right, And once I had the main character Giante inside the other main character of Aha having this chamber, I was like, she's an adult. She's going to need some privacy in there, right, And they're also going to need ways to communicate, and it's got to not be squishy, like I think it would be really disconcerting as a mammal to constantly be in an environment that's warm and squishy. Like maybe eventually we would adapt and get used to it, but you know, we definitely prefer our firmer surfaces where we have always constructed our houses and footing.
Are you pretending waterbeds don't exist?
I mean they do, but you wouldn't want your entire floor to be a waterbed, right like.
You could spaceship I mean I read that in the seventies, right, No.
You're totally right.
Yeah, Well, there is that story where there's a male space traveler inside a highly sexual, very very oft spacecraft. And I'm just I'm blanking on the name. It'll come to me at some point or hopefully one of your listeners will know what I'm talking about. I very distinctly remember that story because wow, that was quite creative. And so, you know, putting all that together and thinking about again, what examples do we have today on Earth? I was like, oh, we have snail shells, right, shells are exuded from the soft part of the snail, the calcium, and so why not be able to you know, exude it the same way internally, right, just like and we have bones obviously too, right, So you just need to map it into something that's more spheroidal shape, right, So then the human being can be in there moving around relatively comfortably, and the alloy pilot that's carrying them also will experience less discomfort.
Hopefully, Let's just hope nobody sits on their bladder, right, all right, we have lots more questions for our author and guests, but first we have to take a quick break. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, Know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient intents dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit usdairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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All right, we're back and we're talking to Divia, author of Meru, about the science of her fictional universe. Something I really enjoyed in the book is the angle where the allies are sort of the grown ups. Humans are sort of like have misbehaved in the past and made some big mistakes, and the allies are sort of like now they're to keep them in charge. It makes the humans somehow feel, i don't know, almost subhuman in comparison, and specifically in your book, humans have attempted to terror for Mars and ended up destroying it in the process. So people are talking about terraforming Mars. Elon Musk has plans to live there, and he talks about like nuking the polar ice caps to release additional atmosphere. What are your thoughts for some of the wild proposals for how to go about terraforming Mars. Are you afraid we're going to end up living your novel?
I don't know that afraid is the right word there. I certainly see the possibility of hitting tipping points in terraforming that we don't even know exist, right law of unintended consequences, And again, we don't have good enough simulations, modeling, and understanding of geophysics to be one hundred percent confident of what we're doing. I have similar concerns with a lot of the atmospheric engineering that they're talking about right now to reduce global warming, right like spraying silicates and aerosols and all kinds of things in the upper atmosphere to try to reflect sunlight. Like, okay, we could do, and there are models, but how confident are we You know that these aren't going to have bad repercressions down the line, But at the end of the day, we are human beings today, We are not the human beings of Meru, who were properly chastised and actually chose to be confined on earth and treated in some ways like arent children, right to be well taken care of and still live very free, good lives, but let go of a lot of human nature and allow their genes to be altered. We're not there, obviously, We're here today, and in today's world the dominant factor is still survival and expansion and consumption. And then, you know, as long as those are the things that are driving our social values and our progress and our ideas of progress, I don't know that we're going to stop the elon Musks of tomorrow from taking action right and maybe to some extent, damn the consequences, because you know, we did that with the industrial age, and I don't think there are huge regrets with the level of industry and technology that we have today, but I hope that there are at least some regrets in how we got here right and the level of side effects pollution, climate change and everything else that we are now dealing with and having rushed into it without thinking it through.
So you mentioned that at one point in the future you're hoping that there'll be sentient machines that will have full rights with humans with artificial intelligence like just booming lately. What do you think the future looks like? There? Are we close? Is that going to happen in our lifetime? And like, what is the line at which the machines should be getting rights?
Yeah, that that's not a line. Unfortunately, it's a zone or even just an infinite continuum. And unfortunately, I suspect that our incentive structure is in the wrong places for giving machines rights, and we're probably going to get to it far later than we should. Daniel knows from my previous novel Machinehood. I got into this quite a bit more there, into this exact question of you know, how will we know when they're sentient? Will we want to admit to ourselves when they're sentient when it's not to you know, to our advantage to do so? Right? And I think that's where some of the existential fears come in that people like Stephen Hawking have expressed that, well, the ais are at some point going to be sentient and intelligence enough to like rise up and either destroy us or claim personhood whether we like it or not. And you know, possibly violence will ensue, because that's what biological creations always do. I'm not convinced that violence has to ensue for artificial intelligences. I'm not convinced we know what sentience and consciousness is today. We don't have good testable definitely of any of these things, and they're very fuzzy, and it's sort of like, what was I forget who said the quote about pornography and obscenity that I know it when I see it, Right, there's very much that kind of attitude, And yet I think you push people on that and suddenly they're like, oh, wait, you know, is an ant sentient? Is it conscious? Does the ant deserve rights just because it's less sentient and less conscious than us? Like, at what point do things with some iota of that deserve rights? Are plants? Sentient? Plants are definitely conscious. We have experiments that have anesthetized plants and put them to sleep, so there is some kind of consciousness there. And that's where with Metu, I decided to step past all of this into a world in which everybody grants that there are degrees of consciousness and sentience and also livingness. Right, what does it mean to be alive. What is a life form versus non life If you have an android that is using cultured human skin, but everything else inside is you know, metal machine parts. Is that android now biological because some parts of it, you know, is it alive or is it non living? Right?
Like?
It gets complicated so fast, And that's where I personally prefer that we err on the side of too much rather than too little. Like it's always better to give too many rights than not enough.
It's not historically, how exactly exactly historically we've we've really fallen on that, and so I'm hoping that going forward, you know, we don't make that same mistake.
So I asked you earlier your thoughts on whether Star Wars was fantasy or science fiction because I was also very curious about the physics of your interstellar travel. I love that you invented a new way to do this. You know, I've read so many science fiction novels. I felt like I'd seen everything for how to get from star to star in less in the zillion years. So I love that you have a new idea. And my question is how much of the science did you develop that of these family fields and famatons did you do a whole like physics background, only the tip of the iceberg ended up in your novel, or did you want to leave it a little bit.
Fantastical for the Famity fields. I gave it some thought. I kind of took what I know about physics and my own physics background, and figured, you know, we could have something operating on scales different than what we can measure today, and we can certainly have physics that we aren't aware of today a thousand years from now. I guarantee you that we will right like that, you know, I will put I'll bet money. I like my science to fit my story. So it's a very symbiotic relationship. And so I wanted alloy pilots to be able to fly through interplanetary scales of space, right and ultimately even intertellar and have a way to gain momentum from these Famiti fields.
Right.
I wanted it to be an energy source that they didn't have to use fuel, so that there wasn't a need to mine, consume and pollute, right Like, I wanted to break that cycle. And I'm sufficiently aware of current physics. At least the solar power and light isn't going to be enough, right, So I came up with these fields that have gradients. And what I liked about that was that, in my mind, you know, sort of like when we draw space time and we draw curvatures, that it's an easy way to give readers something to grab onto, that these pilots are going, you know, upslope or downslope, right, So it's something that we can relate to as human readers as Okay, when we go down, we get faster, and when we go up we go slower. So we have this in other physical fields. It's just that we don't necessarily always talk about it in those terms. So I decided, yes, there are there are gradients, there are things that they can measure. So I think I touched on a lot of that in the book, but I tried to do it in a more fun way rather than like, and now I will give you a physics lecture I made up.
You know, are you implying physics lectures are not fun? Is that what you just did?
I imply that they're not necessarily fun to read in the middle of a science fiction novel. My caveat. But you know, even still, I've had readers comment that there's too much terminology, and that it's too complicated in science, because I think when you start throwing around where it's like fields and gradients, some people are already like I don't know what these mean, and now I'm confused, versus readers who you know, maybe have some understanding and familiarity with those concepts. Right, So obviously it depends on the audience.
Well, I find that most science fiction is really technology fiction, like here's some new widget, or here's some new what's it that does this thing? Very few actually dig into the science and really write science fiction. And in your book, I felt like I was in another universe. I was in a universe where the science was fundamentally different from our universe, and that was exciting to me. I was like, I want to know more, and how does this work? And I'm want to dig into this and stuff, and so yeah, I wanted more. I wanted math.
I didn't want math. I thought you hit the right the right tone, so like, I don't I'm not a physicist. I know a little bit of physics, and I thought you explained it well enough that I thought, for a moment, gosh, I don't remember you said specifically. I thought I don't remember Daniel ever talking about family fields, which makes me think that maybe this is a thing in this world that doesn't exist. But I'm going with it, and like anyway, I thought it very nicely blended into the world. I believed it. I wasn't sure, but I didn't need that.
That's awesome. And I will tell you, Kelly, You're not the only one to think that I wasn't inventing physics for this book, to which I made a little like oh no face, like somebody going out there like, why can't we build family spaceships today? Because it's not real.
Sorry, you don't know, it's not real.
That's true, It's true, it could. And I will admit I was inspired by dark matter and dark energy and that something needs to be accelerating our universe outwards, So why not Fama de feels? You know?
So tell us a little bit about your process of writing the book. Are you a plotter or a panther or somewhere in between?
These days, I'm definitely one hundred percent plotter. I learned my lesson with my first novel that a loose outline isn't necessarily the best idea for me and for the way I like to write, mostly because I hate revising. I much prefer the drafting stage, and so the more you can plan out, the better. I will say that actual plot as a plotter is my weak point. I'm much better at world building. I enjoy it. I love thinking about my characters and their interactions and story and themes. And then when it comes to the actual like nitty gritty what happens next, I often just steal liberally from other stories, and then because of all the other stuff, it changes enough that it becomes my own plot. But I found that, Yeah, I'm not very good at inventing my own plot. Maybe that will change with experience, but for now, I encourage all artists to steal liberally from other artists as long as they then, let's say, chisel away until it becomes their own.
My husband is an artist, and he agrees with that completely. He says it all the time. So I heard you're working at a sequel. Can you tell us anything about that?
I can. There's already pre orders up, so I'm definitely committed to this sequel. Without giving too much away for readers of Menu, I will say that whereas book one is largely a space adventure. As I'm sure they could tell from our conversation. Book two concentrates more on adventure around the globe and my very loose elevator pitches. It's a bit around the world in eighty days and a bit Greta Thunberg's you know, eco challenge to travel with minimal footprints, and I kind of mash those two together into this world, and there's a time skip. There's a different set of characters that book two focuses on, so it's not really a direct sequel so much as you know, part of the series set in this world.
And when can we have that in our hands? Do we know yet?
No, because this author is going to be late. We were supposed to have it in the world sometime in February of twenty twenty four, but I'm not super happy with my manuscript and I would like to be before I get it out there, so it'll it'll probably be if I had to guess, summer, summer or early fall twenty twenty four, hopefully. But like I said, you can pre order it today, So if you love book one that much, you know, definitely show your support for book two because publishers like to see that and then maybe there will be a book. Three.
I love that you're already selling copies, even though it's not Finnah right, it's finished ish, fin ish, like everything, every part of my life is finished.
Is yes, I've gotten to write the words the end. So there is a manuscript. It's just you know, it needs a little bit more than spit and polish.
Let's say, all right, well, thanks very much for joining us. Tell us where people can find a copy.
Of me room hopefully anywhere books are sold. In most of the English speaking world and some parts of the non English speaking world, you can find it on audio, ebook and trade paperback. I will always encourage people to go to bookshop or their local indie bookstore just to support, especially if you're buying print books. I will also say, if you're going to buy it for your kindle, starting on May first, it's going to be on discount. I think it's part of Asian and Pacific Islander Month in America, so at least in the US you'll be able to get it a little bit cheap for if ebook is your jam.
All right, well, thanks very much for coming on. We really enjoyed chatting with you about all these hard questions.
Thanks for having me, and you know I love hard questions.
All right, that was super fun interview, Kelly. What do you think about that?
I had so much fun and I can't wait for the next.
Book me too. I'm just glad that there are people out there thinking about other universes and what it's like to be human in them and the politics of it, and then setting out compelling stories that entertain me for hours. I'm just glad I live in the universe where science fiction exists.
Me too. And I'm also glad that there are authors who can have positive takes on how humanity is going to move forward eventually. I like positive books.
And she was also realistic. She wasn't promising she was going to finish the next novel anytime soon.
Right, Yes, like that about her too. I'm sure my editor would like me too. Channel set a little.
Bit more, all right, And thanks to all of our listeners were coming along on this ride into another universe. We have a lot of fun in these episodes, and I hear that a lot of you enjoy this listening to them, So thanks again everyone for listening, and thanks Kelly for joining us today.
Thanks for having a lot of fun hie.
Everyone All right, everyone tune in next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use an aerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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