Worldcon Day 3

On Saturday the information flow rate intensified exponentially. It is the major day of the Con. Where before (e.g. Thursday) there was a smattering of people apparently lost in a great convention hall, today there are thousands of multicoloured, multishaped, multicostumed examples of homo sciencefictionus wandering the halls and corridors preprogrammed to head off to a room to listen to the latest analyses on Manga, satire in literature, why Firefly should be resurrected/concluded, or how thoroughly the Klingon language database has been developed. There is something for everyone here!

We, in Clan Lampen, have developed more prosaic concerns, threatening the academic enjoyment of the day's information flux. After the previous night we find we have no money! Moreover, our cards have been rejected by four separate and independent ATMs and we see no immediate solution to the problem before our presence is required at the next presentation at 1100 hours. This threatens to make David & Linda very cross indeed (and is not helped by the fact that David has a very minor but noticeable hangover). So, in the same vein as yesterday:

1100: Wiring the Brain. This one Gary picked out and it turned out to be one of best presentations of the day. A guy called Ramez Namm presented a slideshow to demonstrate the research he did for his book, Nexus, which is about wiring the brain for communication and mind control (in fact, his whole talk was a plug for his book but I'm so sold already I don't care). He started off with the familiar: cochlear implants for artificial hearing. Then, low resolution optical implants for a test subject who lost both eyes, one after the other, in separate accidents. Inserting chips into the hippocampi of two rats to improve memory has now led, and this is where it really gets interesting, to wirelessly connecting them over miles of distance so that the experience of one is transmitted and retained by the other. The sci-fi kicks in when you realise you can do this with humans. Think telepathy, mind control, brain hacking. My god! Why doesn't everyone read this stuff?

1200: Planning a Starship. Greg again, still pumping away at his starship project or, as David Brin said: "Enabling the enabling technology that will enable us to enable the technology to build a starship". They don't see a problem with that. In fact, Greg's optimism is based on the statement by President Truman a few eons ago to the effect that Americans, colonising the new continent westwards, would "reach the Pacific" in a thousand years. In fact, because of the railroad, a technology they already had, he was out my an order of magnitude. All Greg needs is a starship version of a railroad.

1400: What Does SF Tell Us about Dealing with China in the Future? Had to miss the talk on AI conciousness to go outside and get some money (finally had some limited success) and just made this panel. Greg again, plus some sci-fi writers who have worked in China plus a couple of Chinese girls who write and translate Chinese SF. It made for some interesting perspectives but the need for translation made an active discourse difficult. What was interesting is the fact that most of the political leaders of China are also the top scoring engineers from the Chinese education system. Unlike American politicians, notes Greg, who are either lawyers or illiterate!

1500. Consensual Reality: Your Relationship to the World. There is little to add to the introduction blurb so, for the sake of my own record, I'll just copy that: "Google Glasses, augmented reality, kinetic gaming, tactile transmission systems. These and other new technologies are on the horizon to transmogrify sense and sensation. Google glasses are the first step to putting an overlay on the reality we see. This opens the door to hiding the ugly and changing what we see. When we do this socially it leads to possible consensual reality as in the works of Vinge, Schroeder and others. What will such capability mean in reality? Has science fiction explored the societal consequences?"

1600.Reclaiming the Solar System. Four heavy-hitters in SF: Greg Benford (again? Is he cloning himself or something?); Alastair Reynolds; Joe Haldeman; Kim Stanley Robinson; happily discussing their favourite vacation spots -- virtually or otherwise -- in the solar system. All these guys have been around for a while so once they get going it's very difficult to shut them up. Very entertaining. Must try zero G rock climbing on Miranda sometime. (Memo to self: KSR, or Stan, as he's called, is an incredibly intelligent and articulate writer; must get his Mars terraforming trilogy sometime.)

1600: The New Era of Commercial Space. Now this was something I was looking forward to and was a bit disappointed. With all the recent success of visionary Elon Musk's SpaceX company in progressing private launch capability in America (not to mention our own Richard B) I was expecting a panel with a bit more charisma; some  razamatazz, even. There were two older, and no doubt wiser, advocates of reusable launch vehicles and one representative of an extremely unpopular NASA. In fact, I get the feeling that most people at the Con see private spaceflight as the way forward and NASA as the evil government watchdog. Especially since they don't actually do anything except pay Russia billions to launch their spy satellites. The data was there but the entertainment definitely wasn't.

And that was it, really. We had planned another two hours of "Astrobiology and the Problem of the Fermi Paradox" and "Nanotechnology to Mine Asteroids". If anyone has managed to read this far they'll be glad to know that, simultaneously, Linda complained that her backside ached and my back was killing me. We surrendered in the time-honoured tradition and made our way to the hotel bar.