Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
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Sunday Starlinks
February 24th, 2013
Got some stories to write, as well as a Hubble Space Telescope proposal, so let me procrastinate by blogging.
Speak up for science! Petition the U.S. Government in advance of the sequestration.
Recently I mentioned that the Blade Runner setting of 2017 is going to be in China, not LA. Scroll down through the cool pictures here and see exactly what I mean. They even have the big, glowing, animated billboards.
Great essay on interstellar travel: starships of the mind.
A nice press release (including spectra, yay!) on a topic that overlaps my research: 3-D Observations of an Outflow from an Active Galactic Nuclei.
Meteors are real and you can see where they’ve hit in recent millenia.
I doubt it will happen, but hope otherwise. Millionaire spaceflier to send astronauts past Mars this decade.
Only five possible explanations for why we haven’t found alien life yet?
Have a faster-than-light colony ship? This is what you should know about exoplanets.
Whose more at risk, redshirts or goldshirts? In any event, I expect to be wearing blue when I’m part of Starfleet.
Neat statistical look at science and science fiction in the real world. Bonus: Asimov’s psychohistory.
Not only are Card’s views making it hard to work in comics, there are concerns it could be a problem for the big-budget film “Ender’s Game.”
Republicans dominating state politics, destroying science. Second part got my attention. For instance, this story about a bill that would force students in Kansas to be misinformed about climate change.
Dangers of carbon trapped in the permafrost.
On the intellectual gravity of former baseball players. Funny stuff from the addled mind of Jose Canseco.
Can boosting your immunity make you smarter? Some evidence to suggest so, but being healthy is a good thing, too, all by itself. And in other brain news, it’s argued that the brain is not “computable,” which would derail or delay the Singularity indefinitely. Seems like a false dichotomy, to me, if I had to place a bet.
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Regarding Nicolelis, I don’t see why we couldn’t build a brain, when evolution could.
As for “consciousness” — who knows what Nicolelis means by that. Difficult to argue. The article quotes him that consciousness’s “most important features are the result of unpredictable, nonlinear interactions” — LOL, I wonder what those features are, and how he knows this.
Yes, Ojvind, I agree. Shades of Penrose and his quantum consciousness. It may be difficult to impossible to duplicate a thinking, conscious mind with conventional computer architecture. If it is, alternative approaches can be taken. If nature can do it, absolutely yes, we ought to be able to do it, too.
“The brain is not computable and no engineering can reproduce it,” – is a bold statement to make. If it’s currently possible to simulate the brain of ant, then in x number of years with quantum computing and likewise higher scanning resolution, I think it will be doable. The more unanswerable question is, *should* it be done?