Image via WikipediaI'm overloaded this week, despite it being the 31st anniversary of the publication of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Thus, today's truly trivial is another recycled Geek Trivia with a Douglas Adams bent:
The "formal" search for a 10th planet (to abuse the term loosely) began in the early 1900s when none other than Percival Lowell — the astronomer who basically bankrolled the search for the eventual discovery of Pluto — predicted that another Jupiter-esque gas giant must reside at the edge of the solar system. ... It turns out Lowell and his contemporaries just didn't have good data on Uranus and Neptune. When Voyager 2 finally did flybys of these orbs in the late 1980s, suddenly all the mathematical basis for Lowell's "Planet X" disappeared. Nonetheless, the Planet X concept was now a part of public consciousness, and an untold number of writers set about to use the "10th planet" as a plot device in their stories. ...
Still, one name seems to appear more often than most when authors and screenwriters christen a fictional Planet X. Inspired by the traditions of naming local worlds after figures from Greco-Roman mythology, several notable science-fiction scribes — including Douglas Adams, Arthur C. Clarke, and Larry Niven — coincidentally managed to "agree" on this planetary moniker.
WHAT NAME FOR A 10TH PLANET DID AUTHORS DOUGLAS ADAMS, LARRY NIVEN, AND ARTHUR C. CLARKE COINCIDENTALLY "AGREE" ON?
Uplift (n.) - The process by which one species genetically engineers another into a more "advanced" state. In most science fiction examples, this involves gene-hacking animals to give them human-level intelligence, and possibly anthropomorphized bodyshapes. This notion was first popularized by H.G. Wells in The Island of Dr. Moreau. In other equally famous stories, uplift by extraterrestrial agents led to the rise of humanity, as was implied by the presence of the monolith in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. (The same aliens/gods/unknowable beings would uplift life on Europa in the 2001 sequel, 2010.) The specific term uplift is today most often identified with author David Brin, who wrote a series of novels set in the Uplift Universe, notably including the classics Startide Rising and Sundiver.
I bring it up because: 151 years ago today -- June 18, 1858 -- Alfred Russell Wallace sent a copy of his theory of natural selection to Charles Darwin, one which matched the latter's own ideas to a striking degree, prompting Darwin to finally publish his theory of evolution. Uplift is often mistakenly referred to as "forced evolution" when evolution itself is a natural process with no more a goal than a rainstorm or an earthquake. We aren't "destined" for intelligence or opposable thumbs, it just worked out that way, and playing with the notion of applying our own human-centric ideas of "advanced states" to other species' biology makes for some philosophically intriguing fiction, and often some pretty compelling space opera, too.
Image via WikipediaI'm overloaded this week, despite it being the 31st anniversary of the publication of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Thus, today's truly trivial is another recycled Geek Trivia with a Douglas Adams bent:
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