Starglider<\/em> is its name, and it represents a civilization that is cataloging planetary systems through probes scattered across a host of nearby stars.<\/p>\nStarglider<\/em> has a 500 kilometer antenna to communicate with its home star (humans name this Starholme), and in the words of a report on its activities within the novel, it more or less \u2018charges its batteries\u2019 each time it makes a close stellar pass. Having explored the Alpha Centauri trio, its next destination after the Sun is Tau Ceti. The game plan is that each stellar encounter will gather data and open communications with any civilization found there as a precursor to long-term radio contact and, presumably, entry into some kind of interstellar information network.<\/p>\nThis is rather fascinating. For Starglider is smart enough to have studied human languages and is able to converse, after a fashion. From the novel:<\/p>\n
\nIt was obvious from its first messages that Starglider understood the meaning of several thousand basic English and Chinese words, which it had deduced from an analysis of television, radio, and especially broadcast video-text services. But what it had picked up during its approach was a very unrepresentative sample from the whole spectrum of human culture; it contained little advanced science, still less advanced mathematics, and only a random selection of literature, music, and the visual arts.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nLike any self-taught genius,therefore, Starglider had huge gaps in its education. On the principle that it was better to give too much than too little, as soon as contact was established, Starglider was presented with the Oxford English Dictionary, the Great Chinese Dictionary (Mandarin edition), and the Encyclopedia Terrae. Their digital transmission required little more than fifty minutes, and it was notable that immediately thereafter Starglider was silent for almost four hours \u2014 its longest period off the air. When it resumed contact, its vocabulary was immensely enlarged, and more than ninety-nine percent of the time it could pass the Turing test with ease \u2014 that is, there was no way of telling from the messages received that Starglider was a machine, and not a highly intelligent human.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Clarke slyly notes the cultural differences between species as opposed to the commonality of, say, mathematics, saying that Starglider had little comprehension of lines like this from Keats:<\/p>\n
\nCharm\u2019d casements, opening on the foam
\nOf perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
And it drew a blank on Shakespeare as well:<\/p>\n
\nShall I compare thee to a summer\u2019s day?
\nThou art more lovely and more temperate\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Well, these are aliens, after all. We have enough trouble with cross-cultural references here on Earth. Humans broadcast thousands of hours of music and video drama to Starglider to help it out, but here, of course, we run into the messaging problem. Just how much do we want to reveal of ourselves to a culture about which we have all too little information other than that it is markedly more advanced than our own? You\u2019ll find that aspect of the METI debate explored as a core part of the Starglider<\/em> subplot.<\/p>\nSome have panned Starglider<\/em>\u2019s appearance in the novel because it seems intrusive to the plot (although I suppose I could argue that autonomous probes cataloging stellar systems almost have to be intrusive to get their job done). But in the midst of the Starglider<\/em> passages, we learn that the chatty aliens, now freely talking to humans via radio, catalog the civilizations they find on a scale based on their technological accomplishments. Is this Clarke channeling Nikolai Kardashev?<\/p>\nWhatever the case, Clarke as always takes the long view, and the long view by its very nature always pushes out into mystery. Consider the scale used by Starglider<\/em>:<\/p>\n\nI. Stone Tools<\/p>\n
II. Metals, fire<\/p>\n
III. Writing, handicrafts, ships<\/p>\n
IV. Steam power, basic science<\/p>\n
V. Atomic energy, space travel<\/p>\n
VI. \u201c\u2026the ability to convert matter completely into energy, and to transmute all elements on an industrial scale.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/ul>\n
On this scale of one through six we can place our species at level 5, as Starglider sees us. But are there further levels? Clarke is wise to imply their existence without exploring it any further, as this lets the reader\u2019s imagination do the job. He\u2019s expert at this:<\/p>\n
\n\u201cAnd is there a Category Seven?\u201d Starglider was immediately asked. The reply was a brief \u201cAffirmative.\u201d When pressed for details, the probe explained: \u201cI am not allowed to describe the technology of a higher-grade culture to a lower one.\u201d There the matter remained, right up to the moment of the final message, despite all the leading questions designed by the most ingenious legal brains of Earth.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
When the University of Chicago\u2019s Department of Philosophy transmits the whole of Thomas Aquinas\u2019 Summa Theologica<\/em> to Starglider<\/em>, all hell breaks loose. I turn you to the novel for more.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mycbh.com\/Games\/spaceperium\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2023\/12\/Screenshot-from-2023-12-06-13-47-36.jpg\")
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Image<\/strong>; Hubble took this image on Oct. 12, 2019, when comet 2I\/Borisov was about 418 million kilometers from Earth. The image shows dust concentrated around the nucleus, but the nucleus itself was too small to be seen by Hubble. We are on the cusp of a windfall of \u2018interstellar interloper\u2019 data as the LSST comes online within a few years. Will we ever find a Rama, or a Starglider, amidst our observations? Credit: NASA, ESA and D. Jewitt (UCLA).<\/p>\nAs I mentioned, some critics fault The Fountains of Paradise<\/em> for Starglider<\/em>\u2019s very presence, noting that there are essentially two plots at work here. In fact there are in fact three plots taking place on different timescales here, one of them dating back several thousand years, and recall that the voyage of Starglider<\/em> itself spans millennia, the mission having began some 60,000 years before the events of the main part of the novel \u2013 construction of the space elevator \u2013 take place. This kind of chronological juggling, allows Clarke to inspire deeper reflection on humanity\u2019s place in the universe and I find it enormously effective. <\/p>\nWonders fairly pop out of Clarke\u2019s early novels and much of his later work. On that score, I likewise refuse to fault him severely because he cannot achieve complex characterization. A case can be made (James Gunn makes it strongly) that science fiction of Clarke\u2019s ilk needs to put the wonder first. Rich, strange and complicated characters confronting rich, strange and wondrous events may lead to one richness to many. For we, the readers, to absorb the mystery, we need to see how a relatively straightforward character reacts. It\u2019s that contrast that Clarke aims to mine.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s only one way of doing science fiction, but much science fiction of the 1950s, which I consider the genre\u2019s true golden age (with a nod to the late 1930s, as one must) often operated with precisely this conceit. And that\u2019s okay, because when writers of greater literary style began to emerge \u2013 writers like Alfred Bester, say, with his staggering The Stars My Destination<\/em> (1956) we were able to see complex characters confronting the deeply strange in ways that simply added depth to the experience. Look at Robert Silverberg in the 1960s as an exemplar of an almost magical insight into what makes the individual human tick. Once you\u2019ve begun on that journey, the field is altered forever, but that doesn\u2019t negate its rich past. <\/p>\nIn fact, none of this subsequent growth nullifies Clarke\u2019s accomplishment in the realm of big ideas. Consider him a writer of a kind of SF that flourished and fed a mighty stream into what has now become a river of wildly untamed ideas and insights. And sometimes only Clarke will do. Thus when i read, for the umpteenth time, The City and the Stars<\/em>, I\u2019m again dazzled by the very title, and the first few pages take me back into a realm where there are suns not quite our own casting a numinous glow over landscapes we learn to navigate through characters who learn with us. Like Stapledon\u2019s, like Asimov\u2019s, Clarke\u2019s is a voice we\u2019ll celebrate deep into the future.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mycbh.com\/Games\/spaceperium\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2023\/12\/tzf_img_post.jpg\")
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Talking to Starglider When we\u2019ve discussed interstellar \u2018interlopers\u2019 like \u2018Oumuamua and 2I\/Borisov, the science fiction-minded among us have now and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1715,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-space-testing-of-earth-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycbh.com\/Games\/spaceperium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycbh.com\/Games\/spaceperium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycbh.com\/Games\/spaceperium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycbh.com\/Games\/spaceperium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycbh.com\/Games\/spaceperium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycbh.com\/Games\/spaceperium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1714\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycbh.com\/Games\/spaceperium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycbh.com\/Games\/spaceperium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycbh.com\/Games\/spaceperium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycbh.com\/Games\/spaceperium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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