Archives for exodus
What would we take to settle new Colonies?
I've written about motivations for sending new colonies on starships to settle earth like planets on other star systems. Astronomers have found thousands of these, so assuming that we don't wipe ourselves out before we develop the technology, one day we'll land on planets lit by another star. Technology for New Colonies First some assumptions. Planets we settle are in the Goldilocks zone and have breathable atmosphere. We can travel faster than light (either Einstein was wrong, or there's some alternative dimension or something) There are people with both money and motive to start new colonies With that, what technology do we take with us to start new colonies? Bear in mind that a lot of common tech is constrained by its history and the pre-existing infrastructure. On the new colonies there won't be any infrastructure, so there's more freedom…
Cell Tradecraft – Plot Hole Plugged
The cell tradecraft in the first draft of Perfects had a plot hole. I found in my first editing pass, it relates to the cell tradecraft when it is compromised. Background Core and infrastructure from a typical cell system (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The main characters in Perfects are a group of genetically modified people. They're illegal and trying to help other genetically modified people escape from the country under false identities. The parallel here is the evader networks in nazi occupied Europe during WW2. Indeed the group has consciously modelled it's way of working on the SOE manual. They have a compartmentalisd cell structure to prevent the whole network being compromised. The Plot Hole The story involves the cell being compromised. The police raid their identity factory and arrest of a couple of the cell members, including the leader. In…
Autonomous Vehicles pt.2
Social Impacts of Autonomous Vehicles Perhaps Autonomous mobile homes will cruise round here: Catford Road (South Circular Road), London SE6 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) My previous article on Self Driving Cars covered some of the technical points, that self driving cars are starting to look safer than human drivers and that there are traffic management benefits to most vehicles being self-driving. But there's more to it than that. For a start there will be more than just 'cars' that drive themselves around, so properly one ought to talk about autonomous vehicles (AV). No More Professional Drivers The most obvious consequence of autonomous vehicles is that those who drive for a living will rapidly be out of a job. The cost base for taxis, truck haulage and bus companies involves driver pay plus the costs of the vehicle. I expect that initially there…
Editing Perfects
Over the last few weeks I've been editing Perfects for a second draft. I finished it over two years ago and it has sat in the metaphorical drawer waiting until I had time between uni courses to focus on it and apply what I learned from A215 to it. As a re-cap, Perfects is an evolution of Exodus, which was my multi-threaded NaNoWriMo 2012 story of a mid twenty first century exodus of people from Earth into space as space travel became an order of magnitude cheaper. I decided when I re-looked at it that there was an interesting world there, but that the strands needed loads of work to knit together. One of the strands became the novella Crisis Point, which I released in 2013. Perfects followed a group of genetically engineered teenagers and twentysomethings living mainly in Cambridge.…
Self Driving Cars
I've written over the last couple of weeks about advances in police technology, but one of the other technology changes that has a major societal impact is self driving cars. People have been talking about this for years, and recently both Google and Elon Musk are seriously working on self driving cars. Other companies are too, but not to the same extent. Progress Report on Self Driving Cars Last week Google released a report on where they'd got to with self driving cars. They plan to report monthly from now on. Their self driving cars have clocked up million miles in autonomous mode, and have been involved in 12 accidents. None of those accidents have been the fault of the self driving cars, in fact for 8 of the 12 the vehicle was stationary. If you ignore the five accidents…