Cheers, pop some corn and enjoy.

1. M-A-R-C: The Martian Armed Resistance Corps

In the works:
2. Cydroid (should be this year)

3. Hyperion (hopefully toward the end of this year, if not next)

From:
M-A-R-C: The Martian Armed Resistance Corps

Following the paper-rustling, coffee-pouring preliminaries, the meeting in conference room 186005 was begun. Senator Tash introduced his speaker, Dr. Joyer Troose, and took his own seat. After nearly 30 minutes of lecture and comment, Tash could clearly see the orator becoming frustrated by the looks and questions he had been receiving. The natives were becoming restless, but in all truth, the subject matter of the meeting did leave a lot to be desired.

“Well, no…” Troose cleared his throat, his eyes darting from executive to executive. CEO presentations had never been this man’s forte. With a quick spin, he was returned to the tranquil display of his comforting chart. “No, there are easily three examples of straight-line theory.” He continued, tapping his remote control and flitting through the displays. “We have a line determined by slope, line parallel to axis, and — here we are — line determined by two points.” He turned back to the curious faces that circled the huge oblong table. “The more complex examples include perpendicular and para …”

“We covered this in high school, didn’t we?” asked Victor Apodaca, sounding a bit annoyed.

Senator Jonathan Quinard Tash VII, corporate chief executive officer for Tash Industries, chairman of the Tash Foundation, and president of the trans-orbital corporation of Tash Enterprises, faced the interruption, smiling to the image of his old friend. Victor was the Namericorp representative for JQT V and district VP for the Tash subsidiaries at Lunar Farside’s radio telescope, which was rigidly stretched across the expansive 437-kilometer basin of the Korolyov impact crater on the moon’s far side equator. Telecasting to the White Sands meeting, and with physics remaining physics, there was a full four-second delay in the full-duplex Earth-lunar relay broadcast, which included surface microwave line-of-sight stations from the moon’s far side to the Tycho Brahe Earth-shot transmitter station at the southern community of Tycho, making abrupt conversation interruptions from the lunar community a fairly common occurrence.

“Yes, Victor,” Tash replied, humorously casting a searching eye across the faces before him, “I hope we all did. A little recap, though, never hurts.” He turned back to the speaker. “However, Dr. Troose…” He was slowly shaking his head. “Whether time is a simple entity of physics or a straight temporal line is not the chief concern here. We understand the needs for design and stress to be properly quantified against the demands of physics. Physics is unrelenting. I know this. Everyone at this meeting knows this. What has been will always be. What will be, shall be, and time, while elusive to the physicist, to the mathematician, remains relative to the individual.”

Troose nodded his acceptance of this. “Yes, sir … but the idea of actually circumventing these laws and moving an object — a subject, if you will — either to the past or to the future is not new. The newness is derived from the thought that time per se … does not even exist. Not that the idea itself is new but that the theory has come to a wider acceptance among the scientific communities, the fringe, even among laypersons. Time itself is a fairly good, sound theory, but it is still just a theory.”

Tash nodded to this. “Go ahead, Doctor.”

Troose regarded his somewhat unsettled gathering. “Well, it’s just that we are all living in the here and now — the eternal instant of now — and that the past is nothing more than a recollection of what has occurred, while the future is represented by that which is planned to occur, or projected to occur via past occurrences, or simply will occur because it simply must … by what some might consider chance. Now bearing these notions in mind, we end up with a hypothetical time line…” he shook his head, “…but no line. The very concept of…”

June Michaels, one of the four research VPs on hand, was shaking her head. “No line?” she repeated.

“No, ma’am. In this preliminary presentation, where all we have is now, time becomes a figment of the imagination, while we remain faced with the problems of real physics. …And worse, the proposed straight line cannot not exist so long as we employ such references as time point A, that being here and now, and time point B, that being here and then … whenever then may be, or may have been. Other than some rather ubiquitous bit of activity, or a lack thereof, what has changed? What is there that is different? There was some form of atomic decay, granted.” He shook his head. “But even this remains unreliable. Atomic decay is not a true time reference. This is merely the act of material decay … of molecules breaking down and migrating as components, base elements, and the further breakdown of atomic elements — even loose electrons, protons, um, strings, quarks, pseudo-matter, and such — all in a set format, a set timetable, scurrying away in fairly predictable manners to wherever neutrinos end up. Matter breaks down, as it always has, as it always will.” He blinked out to the many puzzled faces. “Not much in the way of a timepiece, really. …And I think that’s about all I have on the subject.”

Tash remained quiet for a moment, allowing the good doctor’s words to filter through the panel of muttering corporate officers. Smiling, he stood and stepped to the podium beside the doctor’s display screen.

“Thank you, Joy,” he said. “That was a fine presentation. Stick around.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tash faced his panel of experts. “Ladies, gentlemen, there you have it, our progress thus far in the Darel Huckle Plan. Eric? Is there anything you would like to add?”

Eric Parish, VP for Tash R&D at the sprawling White Sands facility, leaned back in his chair and drew a breath. “I had spoken with Dr. Troose just yesterday about all this, Jon. If we do go ahead with it, it looks to me that the next phase will have to be the development of an entirely new science. New mathematics, new correlations, new physical laws and constants…”

Tash nodded his own agreement to this presumption. “As we supposed from the start. In the previous century, Huckle himself had advised that this would require a new form of mathematics, and I’m sure he had private thoughts regarding the true immensity of such a simple statement. As it now stands, it appears our theories toward fourth through eleventh dimensional geometry could all be dumped. Geometry, he seemed to feel, was not the answer. Of course, the same was thought when Euclidean geometry was used to try and explain the shape and dimensions of a sphere. Euclidean or geodesic, it did remain geometry.”

“Right, as with the differential, hyperbolic, ultra-form, and super-static geometries,” Parish said, nodding. “But then base geometry may still be out. Possibly. As we know it, time may not be following the typical dyed-in-the-wool dimensional limits we all know and love but rather passing through and using several planes, several power sources at once. If so, we’ll need to concentrate on the development of something very radical. Now Foster’s team has been working with the theory that time may be sort of super-statically curved, a kind of non-Euclidian form, but with the expected interdimensional twist, a kind of wave equation that goes fully tubular. There, though, I think we’ll hit the same walls we did when we presumed that space was curved. Folded, yes, rippled, maybe — crumpled even — but then the universe turned out to be a big place, and the initial curve was simply our own limited perception of a local slope, a very minor bit of trajectory. The idea that time formally curls and twists the same way that space actually does is now being looked at.”

“Very good, but see if we can get a pod of his team into the nonlinearity of time. The thought of rippled or crumpled, particularly curved and folded time still implies a continuous, or repeating, linear curve with occasional creases and backtracking … but would it mesh with our nonlinear concepts … and if it is shaped this way, how does it relate to the trans-fabric multi-mess of space itself? What about quantum jumps in the multi-universal inflation fields? Rippled time also implies various histories and futures, supposedly colliding in the nodal regions, all up and down the line. Doesn’t sound particularly stable.”

“Could explain ghostly images, phantasms…” he heard Dr. June Michaels of R&D’s nonlinear mechanics department murmur.

He nodded his own acceptance. “Yes, all those things that want to go bump in the night. Very possibly, June. But to the point, as Dr. Troose has just pointed out here, must a time line even exist?” He looked around the room at the faces surrounding him. “I think that’s about it. Do we have any other questions?”

June smiled to her boss. “I have one, Jon,” she said. “Now I’ve only been with the company a little over a year, but I’ve already seen things happen here that completely blow me away.” She gave him a frowning, thoughtful smile. “But a new form of mathematics? Where are we supposed to dig this up?”

“Technically, that’s two questions.” The senator chuckled. “I don’t know, June. If I did, it wouldn’t be new and I wouldn’t be talking about it with R&D. We need to concentrate on the unqualified areas, things that cannot be physically touched, the ether regions, defining all the things time is not.” He looked up at the glowing ceiling and waved a hand to nothing in particular. “Something as complicatedly simple as a beam of light, perhaps the radiation groups … perhaps the entire EM spectrum. We can start there. We have devices that can physically measure radiations … that can measure the physical force of light, weighted gauges to measure gravities. What about time? We have clocks, both simple and complex, but these are merely counting devices. What do they actually, physically measure?”

“Well, they don’t really measure anything,” she murmured. “They count … clicks … vibrant waves…” She shook her head. “Oh, this is definitely not going to be an easy one.”

“…And that’s why we get the big bucks, June. Dark matter … dark energy. I believe we’ll find our answers out there, perhaps beyond the borders of the Milky Way, but look around.” He gazed around the table. “Anything else?” He nodded to the silence. “Then let’s go. You might say … time is of the essence.”

“Oh, I heard that one coming,” Parish whispered to Michaels, rising from his chair.

“Dr. Troose?” Tash said. “If you’ve got some … time … how about a trip to my office? I’d like to hear a little more.”

The man returned a good-natured smile. “Of course, sir.”

“Good.” Tash checked his pocket watch, causing in Troose the need for a surreptitious check of the digital display from his imbedded thumbnail cutichron. “Looks like we’ll take this through lunch. I’ll have Carl whip something together for us.” The double doors to the boardroom opened at his approach. “Janet,” he said, passing the reception desk. “Get me Corsair down in security, would you? We’ve been thinking about an expansion over in Las Cruces and I have some questions for him. I also have some about Sky-One. I’ll need legal on that one though. Let’s say, security at one … legal will be about 1:30, 1:45.”

“Yes, sir. Senator MacDonnell touched base. Said she was not completely up on the Three Meadows Project but would get back with you ASAP. I think later this afternoon.”

“Good, good. We’ll be taking lunch in my office. Tell Carl we’ll be two.”

She tapped the intercom. “Right away, sir.”

Tash led the way through the wide corridors across the 86th floor of the research high-rise to his private quarters and offices. “After you, Joy,” he murmured, holding the crystal door open.

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’re working with Dr. Travers, aren’t you?” he asked, following the doctor in.

“Yes. He’s in charge of abnormal anomalies.”

“Mm, bad title,” Tash muttered. “Maybe we can come up with a better one.”

“Well, he created the position and says the title suits him.”

“Mm-hm. Sit, please. My father worked closely with Travers on a few projects back in the ’20s. A little before my time, but he told me that if I ever needed the untrappable trapped, or the untappable tapped, Travers was my man.”

“No doubt, sir. He is good.”

Tash settled into his chair behind the huge oak desk, shaking his head at Troose. “No, Joy. Not good. The man’s certifiable. Look up genius and you’ll find two pictures there — Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Travers, a renaissance man to the core.”

“Well, I can’t argue that.”

“I wanted to speak with you about him though. It’s pretty well confirmed that he’ll be moving over to the VP slot in virtual mechanics. We’ll be looking to you to replace him.”

“Well, thank you, sir.”

“Oh, you have no idea what we’re throwing you into. You’ll find out. The move will be within the year. That’s about as close as I can call it now. What I need you to do, though, is to work closely with him up to that move. I need you to sponge as much of what he knows as you can.” He chuckled good-naturedly with the doctor. “I’ll speak with him about letting you inside that labyrinthine brain of his.” He then waved a hand toward the door. “Now all that bull from the meeting was just that, dead ends, all of them. Time travel can work. I already know this beyond a shadow of a doubt. What I now need to know is … what is the cheapest form of time travel? I need to know if it would be cost effective for, say, a corporation, a small company, an individual even, to finance a project to traverse and control the 37 known dimensions of space and time. I’m looking at cost, not safety. I don’t care if you think success could, in some way, destroy the planet or the entire universe. Forget about whether it can be done. Just do it.”

“But, sir, if we…”

“Joy, listen. What you said in the meeting about time not existing … how can that be possible? A little while ago we were walking through the exec corridor and now we’re sitting in my office. How could this be without time?”

Troose couldn’t help the smile. “…And that, Senator, is the rub. Time was merely invented to explain away the rhythmic periods of light and dark … day and night. These were further broken down into increments called hours, minutes, and seconds. You see, we’re trying to deal with the situation in a space/time sense where the only binding attribute is space. We managed to travel from the corridor to your office simply by walking a precise measure of distance while navigating an exacting path through the dimensions of … space.” He shook his head. “Time was never an issue … and Earth simply continued to rotate its day/night scenario beneath us.”

Tash was shaking his head at this. “Time remains an essential attribute, Doctor,” he argued. “My grandfather has been dead many years and his grandfather far more. This is an issue of time, not space.”

“True but only in the concept that a quantity of imagined moments have passed since the occurrence of some happening, perhaps, as you say, the death of a family member. This is relative to the aging of space, which is not a temporal effect. What we’re then dealing with is erosion on the subatomic level. Electron migration, photon emission, even ion regeneration — all these refer, in theory, to the circadian phenomenon we call time.”

Tash took a deep breath. “Physics, Joy. I’m not great with it, but I do understand far more than most … and I do see where it is you’re coming from. Now let’s take it a step further. You just mentioned something called ion regeneration. What exactly is that?”

“Well, an alternative to big bang. It’s an old steady-state idea that the universe is constantly replenishing itself with new material while at the same time depleting its used, actually destroyed, resources. The problem with this theory is that there is no known way to garner solid evidence one way or the other. It was estimated that one ion would be created, in lieu of a better term, once every 10,000 years for every cubic parsec of space, while one photon would be destroyed every 10,000 years for every cubic parsec of space. Since we’re dealing with subatomic particles in a monstrously huge arena over many eons, there is no real way to say whether this is true or not.”

“I see.” He leaned toward the doctor. “…And what if we do happen to find one?”

“A suddenly created or destroyed particle?” Tash smiled and nodded, but Troose just shrugged the possibility away. “It would be heeded as certification of the theory, certainly, but still would neither verify, nor refute its validity.”

Only slightly deflated, the chief executive officer settled back in his chair. “Rather akin to the assumption that gravity is actually a force of attraction rather than that of Einstein’s theory that it’s your own force of acceleration acting upon your being as you traverse the space/time continuum. You exist, ergo you accelerate, ergo you respond to gravity. Is a ship accelerating at a steady one-G affecting you any differently than the gravity of a relatively motionless Earth? We can only assume that it’s the same. No matter how many tests you run, both would claim you are under the influence of one gravity. …But is there more?” He slowly shook his head. “Unknown.”

“That’s a pretty good analogy, sir. Not everyone can grasp a concept like that one.”

“Like founding a new system of mathematics, or science?”

“Oh, yes.” He chuckled. “But there is also the problem of the speed of time. It appears that time, or rather subatomic decay, occurs at different rates in different areas of the solar system. Now granted, the further you are from the influence of a large gravity well, like our own proximity to the sun, the slower time appears to flow, but there are also areas of temporal flux that seem to have no reason, like the Lagrangian points. We’re not certain what it is that creates these regions of temporal flux, but they do seem to be related to gravity and definitely do exist, minute though they are. It is also believed that the matter of the universe exists merely to keep time going, which, in turn, allows the matter of the universe to exist.”

“Ouch.”

Joy smiled at his reaction. “The catch-22 ribbon that ties the theory of trans-general relativity into a nice, tight, mobius package. My personal beliefs were not employed in my presentation, Senator, merely my arguments. As it is, I believe very strongly that time does exist. Travel through time, while extremely controversial to the mainstream sciences, is a limited possibility as we know that quarks do appear to shift in time, though only within the range of a few hundred nanoseconds.”

“Nanoseconds,” Tash muttered and then sighed. “Nature’s limitations. Throw a small twig into a flowing stream, and it follows the stream. Throw my Elektra III into the Mississippi, and I’ll run it upstream, downstream, across stream. It’s the characteristic of man to face the challenges of nature, and it is in this challenge that he finds methods better than those nature can readily supply. My cruiser would defy the descending currents of the mighty Mississippi River with ease, just as we shall one day learn to defy the nanosecond rule imposed by the quark.”

“I believe you’re right, sir,” Troose remarked.

“Oh?”

“As it is, I presume that my own belief for the existence of time could even rival that of your own.”

“…And your belief is derived from research.”

“Yes, while yours is largely based upon faith.”

Tash opened the lower drawer to his desk, hiding his smile from the man as he bowed to lift out a small silver device, approximately 10 centimeters cubed. “When we’re finished here, I would like you to take this down to the lab, Joy. Don’t worry about it. I want you and Travers to treat it like a toy. …And if you should lose it, don’t panic. It always comes back.”

Joy regarded the device with a very questioning look. “It does? Well … what is it?”

“A … timepiece of sorts I suppose. In a few days, I’ll be asking you what you think it is.”

He looked to his CEO. “A timepiece?”

“Let’s just say that it has something to do with my current push. I’ll see if I can answer your questions on the matter but not now. I want to know what you and Travers think of it.”

“Glazed thylinium?” Troose noted, regarding the toy. “An expensive little bauble.” Troose picked up the contraption and turned it over in his hand. “It’s light, one of the older Tash Industries logos,” he murmured, stroking a thumb across the decal. “We’ll give it top-drawer attention.”

There was a light rapping at the door, and a hover cart was floated into the office. “Lunch is served, Senator,” announced Carl Lambert, the company’s executive chef. “Today is crème de champignon and pain à l’ail,” he said, guiding the cart to the side of Tash’s desk.

“Oh, you are in luck, Joy,” the executive assured, accepting the offered napkin. “Carl’s cream of mushroom surpasses any I’ve ever had. I think I know the secret…” he smiled to his chef, “…but that’s my secret.”

The Independent Variable

There is no past and there is no future.
One is but a memory, the other just a dream.
All we really know is an eternal present,
suspended between regret and anticipation.

You cannot choose to travel to the past
or refuse to move into the future.
The first is the map of a vanished city.
The other, the score of an unplayed symphony.

All we’ll ever have is the infinite Now.
And all else is the convenient illusion
of an imaginary journey
to an unknown destination.

We cannot plan unless we remember,
nor can we recognize what we see
if it is unlike all we have ever known.
So we create this illusion of passing time.

What is gone was once the now,
as will be what comes to pass.
One was, the other will be,
the never-ending moment

Past and future do not exist,
Everything happens at once.
Time is just a number we’ve made up
to help predict the paths of moving objects.

God was created by beings bewildered by the glory that surrounded them, particularly in the untamable skies. I believe the first divine entity was the Moon, followed closely by the Earth. Then there were the comets, and then those wandering stars called planets, thus creating the concept of heavenward.

Time, too, was created by beings using the same basic logic, explaining away the circadian rhythm of day and night by cutting the intervals up into hours, minutes and eventually seconds. Trouble is, time was apparently mathematically proven to exist. Not so for god(s).

It’s all so … confounded…

Chemistry was of little use in my undergraduate astronomy, where most matter is either an ionized plasma, an extremely tenuous and very cold gas, or a lump of ice, slag or cosmic dust floating in hard vacuum and bathed by extreme radiation and intense magnetic fields. I only took one year of General Chemistry at the college level, and I forgot most of that a lifetime ago. Chemistry is the science of complexity, the chemical bond is nature’s way of putting together truly elaborate structures. And complexity is just another dimension, along with space and time, along which matter organizes itself.

Having said that, I’m still a water and carbon chauvinist, although I can see other possible biochemistries can’t be ruled out, and some good people have given them a lot of thought. Still, I suspect water/carbon life is probably the most likely to be found in space, its precursors have already been detected in meteorites, the interstellar medium, and in the reconstructed chemical history of the primitive earth. Of course, there are all sorts of really exotic possibilities even if we restrict ourselves to C/H20–and it seems that that arose on earth early in its history, suggesting it is probably pretty common elsewhere.

The situation may be very different if advanced alien intelligences create their own life, using exotic chemistries mentioned in the article or even others we can’t imagine. Its highly possible that some forms of truly bizarre biochemistries are possible, but unlikely to arise and evolve naturally. They could be the artifacts of highly sophisticated civilizations with advanced technologies utilizing alternative biochem as weapons, data distribution or storage systems, computing machinery, construction material or heaven knows what else. That’s what the two fictional examples I mentioned are all about. The possibilities are endless; maybe silicon life can’t evolve naturally, but perhaps someone out there can grow it in the lab. After all, we can build thinking machines now, and soon we may be able to construct artificial intelligences that can rival our own, but those robots would not be likely to arise as a result of “natural” evolutionary processes–whatever the hell THAT means.

Remember in high school when the religious kids used to tell us; “If you find a watch (a mechanical timepiece) in the woods, its not likely it evolved naturally through natural selection. It had to have been built by somebody.” This logic is supposed to lead us to the conclusion that if we find a complex artifact in nature it must have been built by God.

Of course, it doesn’t. It only leads us to believe it was built by somebody, not necessarily a supernatural being. Complexity seems to be able to arise spontaneously in nature, it does not require a conscious Creator (although that does not mean that hypothesis can be ruled out). Watches, after all, serve a purpose. They were built for a specific reason, to tell time. Most of the complexity we see in nature seems to serve no purpose at all. It just is. As ER used to say, “There is a reason for everything, but a purpose to nothing.”

And that, to me, is a much more wonderful and meaningful mystery than the idea that it was put together by a supernatural being of infinite power and wisdom. Maybe it just arose naturally for no good reason at all. And when complex “natural” systems evolved to the point where they were able to mobilize matter and energy in space and time, they learned to create. God did not create living, thinking beings, it was the other way round.

I think that setting RNA/DNA as a basis for all life in the universe is quite a jump even for NASA, considering no other life than what we have here on Earth has ever been found anywhere — other than Hollywood.

Or even looking at some of our tiniest life forms, such as the viruses you mentioned. These are considered to be non-living beings simply because no reason can be found for them to be alive (with no RNA/DNA structure), yet they hunt for suitable environments and they infest.

A condensed and enlightening read is available regarding Hypothetical types of Biochemistry on Wikipedia®.

Sci-fi Stuff:
Viruses are just plain weird, and built up into a complex life form would probably make a pretty decent motion picture alien.

In making movies, I really hate it when the solution is that the alien attack ships are designed using the most basic Earth-programming and all we had to do was to insert a virus (Independence Day). It was also a tongue-in-cheek moment calling to mind the genius of H. G. Wells who used viruses to defeat the aliens (Martians) in his “War of the Worlds” novel. Then there was the movie “Signs,” where the invading forces were purposely coming to take over a planet that, for them, had a deadly acidic atmosphere and even rained acid. Defeated by H2O?

Ridiculous.

I think the monkeys-in-charge need to dig into the sciences a bit more, as had Herbert G. Wells, Jules Vern, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, etc… David Howard and Robert Gordon found a clever zig the that zag when they had a previously fictitious spacecraft built by aliens to work exactly as the actors had shown in their canceled TV series, so he never had to explain how it worked — it just did. That’s what made “Galaxy Quest” work for me, a far better flick than either “Independence Day” or “Signs”.

If viable alternatives to DNA are possible, then we should be able to identify organisms that evolved totally independently of life on earth. And if more than one alternate working DNA can be synthesized, it suggests advanced alien technologies could seed the galaxy with tailor made life-forms capable of interstellar travel using starlight and stellar winds as a propulsion system.

Consider

Once the genetic material finds a suitable environment, organisms would arise, evolve, and carry out their programming, or parasitize existing life forms the way viruses commandeer our own cells’ reproductive machinery. Its directed panspermia initiated by an aggressive, colonizing civilization, think of it as microscopic von Neumann probes, self-replicating machines at the molecular level. No anti-matter drive, space warp/wormhole, star gate or other superluminary tech required. All you need is plenty of time.

It has been calculated that at lower-than-light-speed, an entire galaxy could be colonized in just a few hundred million years with a simple Brownian or drunkard-walk dispersion scheme.