13 May 2025

The Winds of Winter

George R R Martin has seemingly paused the Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire series after book 5.  The TV show did not pause there, but it went its own way...some of which was entertaining storytelling, but which ended one of the greatest TV shows in history with a disappointing, nonsensical fiasco.

 One of Martin's stylistic modes is that he does a lot of foreshadowing--hints about what is going to happen.  Some of this is intended to make the events make a lot more sense, to deepen our understanding of what is happening.   He has announced that the next book will be called "The Windows of Winter" and that it will probably need to be split into two books.  He insists that he's well along the writing of it but that he's got so many other projects that he's making less progress than the books fans would like.

Jon Snow, Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, had made an alliance with the Wildlings to defend against the Night King and his zombies, but skeptics within the watch murdered him.   His allies, including the Red Witch, have recovered his dead body and have seen the clearly fatal wounds.  

Daenerys has escaped from the attack of the Harpies by riding Drogon for the very first time.  There seems to have been some telepathic communication going on there but it's not clear.  They have flown vaguely south, and have landed on a big hill, but she has no real idea where they are.  Drogon is severely injured and exhausted, and is unable to hunt on his own, and Daenerys is trying to bring him food while he recovers.

Barristan Selmy has survived the Harpy attack, where he was killed in the show.   Along with Jorah and the mercenary, they are planning a rescue of Daenerys, although they don't yet know where to begin.

Mance Rayder, leader of the Wildings/Free Folk, is still alive, the red witch having cast a spell that convinced Stannis to burn one of Mance's more challenging underlings, thinking that it was Rayder himself.  Jon Snow shot an arrow into the victim to spare him the agony of being burned alive. 

Arya is in Braavos, apparently still in training for the Faceless Men.

Sansa and Theon have escaped from Ramsey Bolton and are still in the woods running. 

Meera, Bran and Hodor are cornered by the zombies in what appears to be an alliance with the Children of the Forest.  The old 3 eyed raven is in there with them, trapped in the roots of a weirwood tree.  It doesn't look good.  The incident that tells us how Hodor got his name is very clearly in the near future and will very likely happen just as it did in the show.

Bran has seen that his aunt Lyanna has died in childbirth, and knows that who he'd thought was his half-brother Jon Snow is in fact his cousin, Aegon Targerian, and that Ned Stark went to extraordinary lengths to protect him.  He has a stronger claim to the Iron Throne does Danerys.  Whether Bran knows whether he's legitimate or not is unclear.  The only living person with direct knowledge of this is Howland Reed, Meera's father.

What's about to happen?  I think the TV show got some things right.  The explanation of how Hodor got his name is clearly correct, although it may differ in detail.

I suspect that the show also got the location of Drogon and Danerys right.  How this will play out is unclear but the TV show version is vaguely plausible.  Will there be another demonstration of Daenerys special fire-gift or will her win over the Dothracki come from the dragons and the collaboration of what remains of her loyal Khalate.  Drogon played no apparent role in this in the show, which I find completely implausible.

In the show, the Harpies are innumerable and overwhelming.  This is implausible, although there were certainly be enough of them to force Danerys to flee.  Jorah, Barristan, etc., will plan a rescue.  This too will go more or less as in the show, although I suspect Barristan's presence will change quite a lot.

In the show, Jon Snow seems to have broken his vow to the Night's Watch, which should have severely damaged his credibility.  In fact, because he died and was brought back to life, his vow has been completed, but several times this is explicitly pushed under the rug in the show.  Martin would not have done this.

I think Jon Snow's recovery will happen in a way that is much more public and surprising.  Here's my guess:  Targarian "Dragons" have a special power that gives them some immunity to heat, and also allows them to come back to life in fire, at least if burned before too much decay has set in.   My guess is that the Red Witch will try to revive him, but fail, and then they will burn the corpse as is Night's Watch tradition.  Midway through the cremation, Jon Snow will come out of the fire--hair and clothing burned off as with Daenerys, but his wounds completely healed and apparently fully alive.  The entire night's watch, including those hostile to Jon, the wildlings and Stannis and his army, will see this and recognize that Jon is truly something special.

 Lady Stoneheart (Caitlyn Tully/Stark)  will hear of this and of Jon's true parentage, and realize that her hatred for Jon Snow was entirely misplaced and that Ned was protecting his nephew, not his own bastard, at great sacrifice to himself and her, and that Ned had probably been loyal to her the whole time.  Since Caitlyn is a POV character, we will see her agony of this revelation first hand.  She cannot speak, but will communicate that she now supports Jon/Aegon as not just King in the North, but King of the seven Kingdoms.  her deadly gang of assassins will play an important role in defeating Cersei, and possibly the battle against the night king.

Daenerys will initially be skeptical of Jon/Aegon's claim, but will eventually accede, including encouraging the dragon and Jon to join.  I suspect the incest in the TV show will not occur, but it might.   I suspect there will be an alliance to fight Cersei and there will ultimately be some cooperative Aunt/Nephew alliance.  Daenerys /is/ the mother of the dragons and will demand a more equal role despite her sex.  Several Targaryan sisters have effectively co-ruled, so this is not without precedent. The fact that the middle dragon is named Rhaegal, after Jon's true father, is some serious forshadowing.

Jamie will join Jon/Aegon/Daenerys after he comes clean about why he tried to kill Bran and how tired he is of his sister's destructive scheme--and buoyed by Tyrion's existing alliance with her.    I suspect the consumation and knighting of Brienne will happen much as it does in the show, but they will marry and live relatively happily ever after.

 I'm not sure who will actually strike the final blow against the night king.  In a way, I hope it's the red witch melesandre, who will kill herself and save the world by doing it.   Arya, with her drop move, is seriously implausible although I admit it was fun to watch.  Theon's dying heroism is very plausible, and he has shown signs of it in rescuing Sansa, but Bran's helpless inactivity is not.   I really like the blue flames coming from Viserion's injured neck, and I do think Viserion getting turned by the night king is a very plausible part of the plot.



 

07 May 2025

Colonizing Space

 I'm a fan of shows and movies that depict the colonization of space: Firefly, The Expanse, 2001 a Space Odyssey, etc.     I'm a true believer: Unless we manage to destroy ourselves first, the Human Race will eventually have extensive colonies in space.

 Space colonies are a lot different than colonies in the new world, India, China, Africa, etc 4 centuries ago, or by various cultures around the Mediterranean and other places 2000 years ago.   For starters, there were already people living in most of these places--they had air to breathe, soil to plant crops in, etc.  This is not true in space.  We will either have to bring these things with us or make them there.  Colonization opened people up to new diseases and other problems in the old days; that will also be true of space: Radiation poisoning, lack of gravity, price of air and water, etc.   My dad, who worked for decades designing satellites, is skeptical that we will ever be able to overcome these, but I think we will.  But it will be hard and it will take much longer than people like Elon Musk imagine.

 The first nasty problem is the difficulty in getting people and goods from Earth's surface into space.  This is very hard, but there's nothing completely intractable about it.  Chemical rockets can do it, but at great expense.  SpaceX, to their credit, have moved the needle considerably.  Several science fiction writers have proposed some sort of fusion rocket, which can be profoundly more efficient.  This will require a breakthrough to achieve, although it's superficially plausible.  Several SF stories, Such as The Expanse and Firefly have followed this route.  Breakthroughs, unlike more straightforward engineering, are difficult to predict, but I understand enough of the physics to be pretty confident that the breakthrough will happen, most likely in the next half century or so...I'm guessing it will be some sort of rocket fueled by Nuclear Fusion, but I expect to be surprised...

The next problem is gravity.  It turns out that humans need some gravity to be healthy, although we can tolerate its absence for a little while.  Many SciFi stories imply or require some sort of artificial gravity--Star Trek and Firefly are two notable cases, although little detail is given. Gravity Plating, as suggested by Star Trek, will require a pretty big breakthrough--comparable to the Warp Drive of that same milieu.  It's plausible that they are related--In Einsteinian General Relativity, gravity is an artifact of the warping space by large masses.  There may be other ways to warp space, ways which allow faster than light travel or gravity plating, but these are completely outside our present understanding of physics.  

 The Expanse does away with artificial gravity: they make it the old fashioned way, by accelerating.  In space ships, they are designed so that thrust is aligned with the axis of the ship, and any acceleration or deceleration gives the occupants a pretty realistic impression of gravity.  In the stories, which are mostly about warfare in space, accelerations well over 1 G are commonplace, but I think the vast majority of ships will remain comfortably 1 G or less the vast majority of the time.  The second way, of course, is to spin things--centrifugal space ships.  Several of the space colonies in the stories are asteroids, which have been spun up to create artificial gravity and hollowed out.   A little engineering shows that this is implausible.  A 1 G force on a several mile long cable exceeds the tensile strength of most rocky-based materials, including iron.  Centrifugal colonies will be largely artificial and their diameter will be only a few miles at most.    They may be very long--more like O'neill cylinders and less like those envisioned by von Braun and Chesley Bonnestal.   They might be made from material harvested from asteroids like Ceres, but they will not simply be those asteroids.

Present chemical drives can only produce an acceleration sufficient to get out of the earth's gravity well for a few minutes.  But if there is some sort of fusion drive that can produce a sizable fraction of a G for weeks on end, this will have a profound effect on travel around the solar system.  A ship that can accelerate for many days at one G can go to Mars in a few days.  This would profoundly change economics of a colony.   It could even bring the duration of a trip to another star down to a few decades. 

The third difficult, but not intractable problem, is radiation.  All manned space missions so far have been one of two things:  very short or, beneath the van Allen Radiation belts, which protect us from a lot of radiation.  A colony on the moon, Mars, or in a space station or elsewhere, will need considerable radiation shielding.   The simplest way to do this today is using many feet of shielding.  Heavy metals like Lead are the most effective by thickness, but a much thicker layer of dirt or water is much more effective.  I'm think that most space habitations, including those in centrifugal stations, will be protected by ten meters or more of whatever material is most convenient.  Digging deep underground will be the simplest way to provide this on a planet or moon, but an O'neill cylinder will need to have a thick shell of some sort..

 Water is relatively common in space, but it will be a limited resource for most colonies because it'll need to be mined and transported.  Air is a little more problematic, but not really.   We can breathe any non-poisonous gas mixture that contains enough Oxygen and CO2.  On earth, Nitrogen is most convenient and likely will be in space too, but we're far from limited.  Oxygen can be made from water and other things by Electrolysis and is a byproduct of photosynthesis.

 We will need plants growing in space to feed ourselves.   Simply dedicating surface area to plants is not particularly efficient: The most solar-efficient plants are well under 1%, where present photovoltaics can easily do 15%.  Put photovoltaics on all possible surfaces and grow plants underground under efficient electric lighting.  The photovoltaics are much more tolerant of radiation than plants are and are relatively easy to replace, and to manufacture from materials that we already know are on The Moon and Mars and other objects.

Presuming we don't drive ourselves extinct first (and Elon Musk and Donald Trump are presently the leading individuals working towards making us extinct)  I think we will have permanent colonies in space by 2050 or so, and self-sufficient colonies some time after 2100.  The sorts of populations on Mars and Ceres envisioned in The Expanse are unlikely to occur until there is a major breakthrough, such as the Expanse's Epstein Drive, but I'd think that by 2200 there will be tens of thousands of people living, breeding and dying entirely in space.  Far from the millions portrayed by the Expanse.