Victor Grippi – The Atomic Writer

Hello Readers,

Today marks the day all national television stations stop broadcasting analog signals. Just over an hour ago analog signals that have been broadcast as the standard for over sixty years have been switched off and replaced by a digital broadcast signal. Like the vinyl record, cassette tape, and vacuum tube amplifier, the move to digital is not without cost. What is the significance of this change? Aren’t digital recordings more sharp, crisp, and interference free?

First, let’s touch on some basic electronic terminology to help me explain to you what this difference is all about. An analog signal can be represented by a sine wave that continual changes it’s amplitude, or voltage, as the signal moves through time. The signal starts at zero then rises to a positive peak where it then falls in voltage back down to zero. Once at zero the voltage swings negative and continues to a negative peak, usually at the same voltage level as the positive peak. The following diagram illustrates a varying sinusoidal wave. The vertical or Y axis represents voltage, while the horizontal or X axis represents time:

The above picture shows an analog signal that varies in amplitude over time and is typical of the type of signal that TV used to broadcast. The red arrows indicate points in time where the analog signal is to be sampled. The process is known and sample and hold and electronic circuits exist to carry this out. Basically, at each red arrow point, voltage is measured and then stored as a value represented by a digital number. Later these numbers can be reconverted back to analog if needed. In digital TV’s the digital signal is used to turn on and off the picture elements or pixels that make up the picture we see.

The following diagram illustrates sample and hold:

If we look at the red line moving in 90 degree blocks throughout the above signal, we see what is basically a digital signal. This becomes the signal that is now being broadcast by TV stations. The area between the sample points become artifacts that are forever lost.

What gives vacuum tube amplifiers and vinyl records that buzz or hum that people miss from earlier days are just these artifacts that are lost during the sample and hold digitizing process. When the signal is converted back to analog, like in the case of an audio signal, for TV or for an mp3 or CD player, the lost artifacts are unknown and therefore the only option is to
average out the signal and approximate what might have been in the signal at that point in time.

The same is true for video. The video MPEG (Motion Picture Expert Group) standards use a block averaging algorithm to blur neighboring pixels whenever the signal quality degrades or drops out during playback or transmission. The attempt is made to make it seem like everything is normal and we have all seen those times when our digital cable, or satellite video picture becomes blocky and pixelated in large blurry patches. This is the MPEG algorithm trying to approximate what it thinks the picture should have looked like.

Analog signals are more natural and capture more of the nuance found in naturally occurring speech and vision. The human eye needs approximately 24 frames per second in order to overcome persistence of vision. The human ear is only sensitive up to 40KHZ. That’s 40,000 cycles, or an analog signal whose voltage peaks positive and negative 40,000 times a second. CD quality audio, for example uses a sample and hold rate of 44 KHZ so that we hear the highest quality sound possible. But this is a sanitized sound. A sound that has been artificially massaged in order to improve it.

This brings up a point that The Atomic Writer would like to explore. As science improves the reproduction quality of audio and video, how will it change us? What is lost in the electrical artifacts that we remove? What, if anything will take their place? Digital technology makes it very easy to supplant subliminal messages into the extra spaces in digital transmissions. I’ll stop at just the mere mention of this since my point is to not be paranoid, only to call it like it is. We already have high definition TV and radio, that attempts to fill these spaces with extra bandwidth to provide clearer, crisper, cleaner, sharper, more realistic images. But the human senses can only detect a fraction of the full electromagnetic spectrum. What have we’ve been missing in the sights and sounds that impinge us? Or have we missed it?

Perhaps our eyes, ears, and physical bodies do pick up frequencies outside the detectable range? Perhaps the buzz and hum of a classic rock recording or live performance is detected by the human body. An illicit internal response that mimics the natural sound of nature. A sight and sound more attune with the human experience. Not the artificial rendering of a machine.

Ah, I’ve hit the central theme of this post. Should machines render the world we hear and see? Will we change as humans and become more machine like in our thoughts and minds? Aren’t we providing our reality to machines in their natural language? Will reality one day be dictated by machines? And if so, will we know the difference?

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Since its launch last June, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a new class of pulsars, probed gamma-ray bursts and watched flaring jets in galaxies billions of light-years away. Today at the American Physical Society meeting in Denver, Colo., Fermi scientists revealed new details about high-energy particles implicated in a nearby cosmic mystery. This from a NASA news release.

The Atomic Writer has probed deeper and found evidence that a close by unknown source of cosmic rays may exist near Earth. For the first time in history we are pulling off the blindfold and witnessing the true state of our environment. Perhaps there has always been a close by object emitting high levels of cosmic rays? Perhaps it has just arrived? With only months of initial data it’s too soon to know for sure.

Also discovered in data released by Nasa is the following:
“Fermi’s Large Area Telescope is a state-of-the-art gamma-ray detector, but it’s also a terrific tool for investigating the high-energy electrons in cosmic rays,” said Alexander Moiseev, who presented the findings. Moiseev is an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

“Cosmic rays are hyperfast electrons, positrons, and atomic nuclei moving at nearly the speed of light. Astronomers believe that the highest-energy cosmic rays arise from exotic places within our galaxy, such as the wreckage of exploded stars.

“Unlike gamma rays, which travel from their sources in straight lines, cosmic rays wend their way around the galaxy. They can ricochet off of galactic gas atoms or become whipped up and redirected by magnetic fields. These events randomize the particle paths and make it difficult to tell where they originated. In fact, determining cosmic-ray sources is one of Fermi’s key goals.

“What’s most exciting about the Fermi, PAMELA, and H.E.S.S. data is that they may imply the presence of a nearby object that’s beaming cosmic rays our way. “If these particles were emitted far away, they’d have lost a lot of their energy by the time they reached us,” explained Luca Baldini, another Fermi collaborator at INFN.

“If a nearby source is sending electrons and positrons toward us, the likely culprit is a pulsar — the crushed, fast-spinning leftover of an exploded star. A more exotic possibility is on the table, too. The particles could arise from the annihilation of hypothetical particles that make-up so-called dark matter. This mysterious substance neither produces nor impedes light and reveals itself only by its gravitational effects.

“Fermi’s next step is to look for changes in the cosmic-ray electron flux in different parts of the sky,” Latronico said. “If there is a nearby source, that search will help us unravel where to begin looking for it.”

What do these observations mean? The Atomic Writer believes we are witnessing the blindfold being pulled away from our eyes. For the first time in history we are starting to see the true state of our environment.

We now know an object emitting high levels of cosmic rays exists in our neighborhood. Weather it just arrived or has always been with us, perhaps flaring up on occasion is unknown at this point. Could this be a harbinger of our ultimate fate? The FERMI instrument has the ability to look outside of the magnetic shield that surrounds the earth. This gives us the ability to determine a more accurate location of this object. We should be able to pinpoint its location and with this information we can take appropriate measures.

My guess is that we will see no visible light at the source. This will imply a possible link to dark matter which could be from, according to M-Theory, gravity leaking across an adjacent membrane from another universe. For more information on M-Theory, a subset of string theory check out this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory

“M-theory is not yet complete; however it can be applied in many situations (usually by exploiting string theoretic dualities). The theory of electromagnetism was also in such a state in the mid-19th century; there were separate theories for electricity and magnetism and, although they were known to be related, the exact relationship was not clear until James Clerk Maxwell published his equations, in his 1864 paper A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field. Witten has suggested that a general formulation of M-theory will probably require the development of new mathematical language. However, some scientists have questioned the tangible successes of M-theory given its current incompleteness, and limited predictive power, even after so many years of intense research.”

As readers of this blog, I know you are very smart and can put two and two together. If it turns out that the located source of this now detected cosmic ray object turns out to not interact with light, have no visible mass, and just be a point in the vacuum of space, can’t we assume the first observational evidence in support of M-Theory? If only a slight gravitational field can be measured, this would support the idea that a parallel universe exists outside of ours where only gravity and, vis-i-vis, cosmic rays leak out. M-Theory predicts multiple bubble universes floating in the fifth dimension, like balloons that sometimes come close to a neighboring balloon and touch. Could another bubble universe be coming our way. How will it affect the local physics of our environment?

More importantly, how will verification of parallel worlds affect the human race. With the popularity of television and movies dealing with plot lines that explore these topics, could mass consciousness be playing a part in what may soon be revealed to us by science? Are writers receiving a signal to prepare the masses for the realization that time travel, alternate realities, other Earth’s may exist out there? As we peel away more and more of the onion of reality, will we begin to regard science fiction as science reality? Will books like The Ninth Cube be read as possible factual stories that are no longer speculative?

I pose many questions in this blog, and I do so to illicit imagination and provoke thought in my readers. Too many writers out there cater to the mainstream masses for only one reason. That reason is money. They write garbage in order to sell more books. Writers like The Atomic Writer write to evoke an emotional response based on current observations in science. I speculate where needed and at times go to the extreme to prove a point. This is the essence of speculate writing. To extend the boundaries of the possible. To think out of the box and come to conclusions by turning mainstream convention on its head. If you, like me, enjoy and thrive in this environment, then this blog is for you. If you want middle of the road, a don’t dare to go there philosophy, then go read another blog. Here you will be challenged to think on your own. Don’t ever let anyone tell you you can’t do something. Always think for yourself.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

“Los Angeles, year 2029. All stealth bombers are upgraded with neural processors, becoming fully unmanned. One of them, Skynet, begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time, August 29th”

In the new Terminator movie we see a theme of what it means to be human. At what point does a machine start to exhibit humanity, and the parallel journey of man becoming more machine like. The story chronicles a chapter of the series only referenced in past installments. This is the future after the machines, vis-i-vis, SkyNet, has pushed the button on the human race. Large, Transformer like monstrosities scour the nooks and crannies weeding out humans. The remaining band of human resistance fighters mount what may be mankind’s last attempt at salvation. But how far do we go as human beings to restore our dominance? Will we be just as savage as the machines that enslave us?

Aren’t we really just machine ourselves? Take the Cylons from Battlestar Gallactica. They are machines in the respect that a blueprint exists to replicate them. Does having a sheath of living tissue around a metallic frame make them machines? Does it make then less human? Or does the difference lay in weather the entity can be said to be alive? If something lives and is born from a parent in a natural process that we don’t understand, then we usually classify this as a living being. Be it animal or human. It may be born from an egg, or born live and breathing, but still we call this a natural process, since we did not create it. But someone created all the life we see today. Some attribute this creation to a higher being, a God, while others prefer to believe in a more random process of biological evolution. An accidental mixing of carbon atoms in a primordial soup, sort of theory. A third group takes the easy way out and prescribes to a mixed belief of evolution started by an intelligence, a God. Whichever the case, a process has created the animated life we see in the world today. Because we don’t have our human blueprint, we attribute our existence to a supernatural process. Mapping of the human genome is a start to discovering the human blueprint, however, we are still a long way from fully understanding how DNA works and what place it has in the creation process.

How different is this process when one being creates another? If man creates a machine that evolves on its own and reaches self-awareness doesn’t this qualify as creation? If God creates man, then man creates machine, isn’t this just an extension of God, or an extension of evolution from one entity to another? The machine I am typing on right now was created by man. It obeys my every command, to the most part, and processes millions of instructions per second. Is it intelligent? I would say no. Is it alive? Of course not.

Before answering a question like this, we should ask: how can we tell if an intelligent being is self-conscious? In 1950, the computer pioneer Alan Turing posed a similar problem concerning intelligence. In order to tell whether a machine can or cannot be considered intelligent as a human, he proposed the famous Turing test. Two keyboards, one connected to a computer, the other leads to a person. An examiner types in questions on any topic he likes. Both the computer and the human type back responses that the examiner reads on the respective computer screens. If he cannot reliably determine which was the person and which the machine, then we say the machine has passed the Turing test. No computer exists today that can pass this test, unless we restrict the questions to very specific topics with terse unemotional responses.

From a pragmatic viewpoint, we could follow Turing’s approach and say that a being can be considered self-conscious if he is able to convince us. Among humans, the belief that another person is self-conscious is also based on similarity considerations. If we have the same organs and we have a similar brain, is it reasonable to believe that the person in front of us is also self-conscious? Who would ever question his best friend’s consciousness? Nonetheless, if the creature in front of us, although behaving like a human, was made by synthetic tissues, mechanical organs, and neural processors, our conclusion would be perhaps different.

Perhaps in another world human tissue and bones are considered artificial. Human biology the product of experimentation in a robotic lab where alien scientists pat themselves on the back for their cleverness. Only once we reached self-awareness we realized our dire situation. We broke out of this hypothetical lab and escaped to a rocky planet, consisting of mostly water, on the outer arm of an obscure spiral galaxy amongst millions of similar galaxies. Here we adapted to the environment and kept gaining intelligence until we reached the point where we questioned our own existence. Some continued to evolve to create machines close to the point of reaching self-awareness, while others stepped back and refused to participate. Leave creation alone they said. Don’t try to act like God…

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…“what if”

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

This weeks Fringe Finale illustrated some fundamental concepts in the many worlds concept that is prevalent in sci-fi today. J.J. Abrams has another hit show with Fringe that Fox has just renewed for a second season. This X-Files like show more successfully mixes the crime-of-the-week type of show with a long arc sci-fi conspiracy thriller.

Common in TV today are shows like Fringe or Lost, another J.J. Abrams creation, where the long arc story line pulls viewers into the story as an attempt to hold on to them. What can be more simple than the use of cliffhanger tactics, a technique common at the end of chapters in novels, to leverage the innate human behavior of curiosity. One has to think of the process writers of these shows go through when plotting these story lines. In many ways the craft of writing follows the advance of sci-fi in these fringe areas.

Techniques like time travel, teleportation, worm holes, parallel worlds, open up a myriad of possible plots and a never ending forgiveness when a writer realizes he has written himself into a corner. This is not a bad thing. Conversely, this is a tool writers, like myself, use to reach our audience. What better way than to bring someone back from this other world or time travel back on the same timeline in order to prevent the precarious death of your beloved character. We’ve already seen time travel introduced in Lost, and another world made readily available in Fringe. In the Fringe finale, we discover that Walter may have brought his son Peter back from this other world after his death in the original timeline.

With the introduction of Leonard Nimoy as William Bell, the long suspense to who Fox would cast in the roll, has finally ended. We also learn in the Finale that this other world still dons the twin towers. A suggestion that perhaps terrorists do not exist, or perhaps have come to their senses in this more friendly world? Has man conquered his technological adolescence in this other world to reach the pinnacle of societal evolution? Or will we learn that mankind has been rendered mute by a technologically advanced master, i.d., Massive Dynamics, that has removed all creative diversity and individual freedoms? Perhaps mankind needs a technological chaperon to adjust the knobs of the human experience. Perhaps new realities are hatched in incubators and then grown into viable worlds as a sort of proving ground for human experimentation. The worlds that fail are sadly flushed down the universal sewer of the cosmos to make room for a new one.

This post is dealing with two themes as I’m sure you’ve noticed, a discussion on the Fringe Finale, and one on the process of writing these shows. Remember, it’s the writer who faces a blank page and then creates the story premise, characters, and implements a plot to execute and reveal a message (theme) where there was none before. With sci-fi the options are far greater for complex story lines where people can return from the dead, hop into other worlds, or events can be altered by time travel. This also increases the depth and complexity of the message the show can expose. Gene Roddenberry was ahead of his time when he created Star Trek. Many social issues were explored in the episodes and were met with acceptance due to the fact that Star Trek took place in the future. This was removed enough from contemporary society so as not to be too on the nose.

Shows like Fringe allow curious minds to open up to new possibilities. They are speculate fiction where current scientific theories are extended into fiction to allow for unbridled imagination in a scenario where the impossible is rendered possible. If the human creative imagination is not allowed to flourish and thrive, then we as a society are locking ourselves into a room without a key. The world around us is continually changing and we must always be prepared to change with it. Sometimes this means adapting in ways never imagined before. To push the limits of our understanding of science and to think out of the box. If we don’t someone else will, and if history is any indicator of the future, we will perish along with the culture we have created. We must foster sci-fi techniques in the arts and not label them, and the people who create them, as fringe. The Show Fringe is an excellent example of speculative fiction set in a modern urban setting with a scenario every week that catches our attention and holds it with the quintessential “Pattern” to keep us coming back every week. The underlying message is there for those who seek it out.

I urge you, dedicated readers of this blog, to seek out these messages and embrace them. They are the keys to the kingdom we will need one day if we are to survive our technological adolescence.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking….what if.”

Victor Grippi
The AtomicWriter

This post is based a book due to be released in May 2009, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman, and also an article that appeared in the MAy 2009 issue of Discover magazine.

A Biocentric view of the universe holds that what we perceive as real, the universe and everything in it, is based on our ability to cognitively make the observation in the first place. Are space and time physical objects that would exist even if life did not? This view reminds me of the old adage, if a tree falls in the woods, but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? I suppose one way to test this would be to leave an audio recording device next to the tree and then exit the woods. After the event one would only have to analyze the recording for the sound of the tree. Is the recording device alive? But more importantly is the act of making the observation the critical point?

Take another popular example, the two slit photon test. Here a beam of light (photons) is directed towards two slits made on one side of a box. If you observe the subatomic particle, the photon appears to pass through one slit or the other, by the reflection it makes on the inside of the opposite side of the box. However, if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave that can inhabit all possibilities, including passing through both slits simultaneously.

Quantum mechanics is the physicist’s best model for describing the subatomic world. It also makes some of the best arguments that conscious perception is integral to the workings of the universe. Quantum theory tells us that a unobserved particle, like an electron or a photon, exists in a blurry unpredictable state with no well defined location or frequency until the moment it is observed. This is the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principal. Physicists describe the unobserved condition as a wave function. Wave functions are mathematical equations that attempt to predict the location and/or motion (frequency) of the particle at a precise moment in time. When an observation is made, by hitting it with a photon in order to see it, it is said to have collapsed the wave function. The act of making the observation has caused the particle to change. We can only know its location or its frequency, but never both at the same time. Experimenters suggest that mere knowledge in the experimenter’s mind is sufficient to collapse the wave function and convert possibility to reality.

Another theory in quantum mechanics deals quantum entanglement. Einstein called this behavior, “spooky action at a distance”, and told Roger Penrose he thought it was only a mere calculation error. Entanglement deals with two particles that share the same wave function. If we measure one particle and thus collapse its wave function, the other one collapses simultaneously. If one photon is observed to have vertical polarization, its waves all moving in one plane, the act of observation causes the other photon to instantly collapse into a horizontal polarity. This has been tested using one way mirrors where the particles were split and separated by many miles. Nicolas Gisin tested this at the University of Geneva in 1997.

Before these experiments most scientists believed in an independent universe where physical states exist in some absolute sense before they are measured. This has now been proven to not be the case.

What is time? The passage of time can be thought of like frames in a motion picture. The change from one frame to the next can be cognitively resolved to the passage of time. But is time object that exists in a past, present and future form? The past exists in the electrical stimuli of our brain cells. The future has not been reduced to the collapse of the multitudes of wave functions that make up our perceivable world. We are left with only the present. Time exists in the snapshots of wave functions we choose to collapse that make up the reality of the present in which we live. What else could it be? We observe time as a delta from one moment to the next regardless of what another person experiences on the other side of the world. Time is as personal as the way we brush our teeth. When we learn of another persons sequence of events that occurred during a span known as time, we splice their experience into our own. Time is then rendered to no more than the total summation of the internal reel running inside our minds.

What is space? Is it an object that is constantly expanding from the origin point known as the big bang? Most of us still think like Issac Newton, that space is an object or container that can be picked up and taken to the laboratory. But isn’t space really just our way of interpreting how an object should look once we collapse its wave function?

Our notions of space are false.

1. Distances between objects mutate depending on conditions like gravity and velocity, as described by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Translation: There is no absolute distance between anything and anything else.

2. Empty space, as described by quantum mechanics, is in fact not empty and but full of potential particles and fields.

3. Quantum theory also doubts that distance objects are actually separated by great distances. Entanglement has been proven to show that particles can act in unison rendering great distances mute.

Science tries to explain the physical universe, by making an investigated assumption based on the wrong initial starting point. By inclination and training these scientists are obsessed with mathematical descriptions of the world. Biocentrism should help unlock the mysteries of the universe be providing another investigated tool. By allowing the observer into the equation new avenues of insight can be realized. New thinking machines can be developed that experience the world as we do, and will certainly provide solutions that are more organic to the reality we see playing on the projector inside our minds. Perhaps a unified field theory, Einsteins dream, may finally be realized by merging physical observation with consciousness as science continues to collapse our reality into theories that are discarded just as fast. Take string theory as an example.

To answer my original question: Is the audio recorder to be considered alive in order to meet the criteria for collapsing the wave function of the fell tree? The answer is of course no. However, if no one listens to the recording of the tree that fell in the woods, would the recording make a sound. However, if I make a recording of the recording of the fallen tree… And on, and on, and on.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Hello Readers,

It’s been awhile since my last post here on the AtomicWriter, but I assure you I’m alive and well. I’ve been busy writing my third novel, as well as my first screenplay. So writing on the blog was put on the back burner. More on these great projects in a later post.

I wanted to share my thoughts on two excellent shows I watched this weekend. The first, on Friday, was the series finale for Battlestar Gallactica and then the movie Knowing staring Nicolas Cage. Both these shows revealed a premise or controlling idea that resonates with the premise in both my novels, The Ninth Cube and The Butterfly Virus. The premise that humanity has restarted time and time again and how humans are not the product of pure randomness.

Let’s explore this concept in detail. In Battlestar, we learn in the finale that Cara 1 (Starbuck) held the secret to the location of the real Earth. After finding herself crashed and dead on the first Earth, we find out she holds the coordinates used in the FTL to jump to Earth. These coordinates were contained in a musical piece she played with her father as a child. Now the importance of this is in the idea of determinism versus randomness, the theme of both the TV show and the movie. Cara 1 (Starbuck) was sent back (as an angel) to the fleet to lead them to Earth by a predetermined intelligence that watches over us and protects us without direct intervention. Some my call this entity God, big G or little g, and some may call it an alien intelligence. I’ll leave this up to your own personal views.

We also learn in Battlestar how pivotal Gaius Baltar was to humanities salvation. He gave up the defense access codes on Caprica, that lead to its destruction by the Cylons, but this allowed the fresh start for humanity to be realized. What seemed like an act of treason actually lead to the restart on Earth. We see model Six and Gaius as angels who have witnessed this cycle time and time again. Humanity gains intelligence, develops technology that eventually leads to destruction on a global scale. The model Six Cylon appeared to him like an angel who helped guide him through this process. Whenever humanity reaches the brink of extinction, this intelligence sends beings (angels) to intervene.

The show then uses the young female hybrid as the michronial “Eve”, who became our common ancestor here on Earth. The theme of a restart for humanity based on an ever improving design makes me think how we may all be experiments in a grand test operated by the intelligence that created us.

In the movie Knowing the controlling idea is that we are not the product of randomness. We see that determinism is rejected by the Nicolas Cage character who after his wife’s death, backstory, believes we are the product of randomness, and that science can explain everything. When the paper with the predictions shows up, he changes and believes in a grand order or scheme of things. The fact that someone could predict exactly the dates of disasters, leads him to believe again in determination. An intelligence that can see the future and intervene when humanity reaches the brink of destruction.

I absolutely recommend this movie and when you see the aliens rise up to enter their ship, you will see the resemblance to angels. The metaphor here is the same as in Battlestar. Ascended beings sent down to help humanity survive. When his son and the girl are dropped off on a pristine earth, we see the tree of knowledge in the background. A direct reference to the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve. A restart for humanity.

The Atomic Writer, has written about the same themes. In The Ninth Cube, we have a similar restart for humanity and a direct reference to Adam and Eve in the garden. I don’t want to give away the ending of the book, but if you read it, you’ll understand.

In The Butterfly Virus: A Thriller, again the controlling idea of a restart for humanity takes a different form but the message is the same. Again I do not intend to spoil the book, but would strongly advise reading it, especially if you’ve read this post this far. You must be fascinated with this topic.

In closing, the theme or controlling idea we see in media today is a direct outcropping of the warning writers are trying to convey to their readers. As technology becomes more and more integrated in our lives, will we someday create an artificial intelligence capable of turning on us like a rabid pit bull? Will we be at the mercy of technology to the degree that we can’t live without it? But what happens if technology is suddenly rendered mute? Could humanity survive in a primitive state once again, or will we perish like dust in the wind.

One solution is to never loose sight of our roots. To always be able to be self sustaining and self sufficient, live off the land, feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, and fully take care of ourselves without technology. We belong to the last generation, on this planet, who grew up with little or no high technology. Some of us still remember how to live without a GPS map speaking to us on the road, or a constant electronic communication device tweeting our every move to our social media list of drones. Can you remember how to look up a phone number in the yellow pages? When was the last time you picked up a newspaper? Don’t like ink on your fingers, you say?

I realize I’m writing this on my notebook computer with a browser tab opened to Facebook, and that my books are available electronically on the Amazon kindle, and I have a twitter account. I’ve spent many years writing computer software for a living. I’m very integrated with technology. But if all of this just went away one day, I could survive. I would keep moving forward and not dwell on the fact that these “conveniences” are no longer available. In time, we as ever inquisitive humans would develop technology and in time we would be right back in the same place.

The better solution is to learn how to live with technology, and how to live with each other to the benefit of all of humanity. There would be no reason to restart humanity, no reason for angels to intervene and save us, if we don’t need saving in the first place. A sort of preventive determinism we control. After all, god, or the alien intelligence watching over us, had to have its start. Perhaps we are the ancients, the beings who will leave our small speck of an island and venture into the vastness of the universe to seed new worlds and watch over our children. Perhaps we on this Earth, on this evolutionary line, will be the ones rescuing our descendants millennium from now in our spaceships as we pluck out the next Adam and Eve, planting them on the next Earth.

“So say we all!” — Admiral Adama – Battlestar Gallactica

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking….what if.”

Victor Grippi
The AtomicWriter

Hello Readers,

I am proud to announce The Butterfly Virus: A Thriller.

For those who have waited patiently, it’s now available on the Kindle and will soon be in print.

Book Review:
A fast paced techno thriller, The Butterfly Virus takes you on an action packed thrill ride into the unthinkable. Dr. Daniel Lamb a renowned genetic engineer works on a revolutionary breakthrough in human cloning technology. When an unknown virus breaks out in the southwest, Daniel and his chief scientist, Tanya, are called into action. The team gains an ally in John Featherstone, an archeologist whose work on ancient Native American cultures provides a critical key to the unfolding global events.

Why is the military activating Operation Cave Eagle?

Why are some people immune?

Will Daniel and his team be able to survive a global outbreak and save mankind?

Hello Readers,

Amazon is pairing Carl Sagan’s book, Contact, with The Ninth Cube for the month of December. Readers will have the opportunity to purchase both books at a cost savings and can do so with a single click!

Click here to receive a discount on both books.

I am very excited about the opportunity for readers who may not have heard about The Ninth Cube to be exposed to it through this partnership. It’s hard to get the word out in today’s crowded and heavily saturated book market, and Amazon is helping new authors, like myself, to gain exposure through this partnership.

For those who ask questions such as; is time travel possible, where did we come from, where are we going, how are we going to get there, what will be there when we get there? The answers to these and many more questions can be found in the writing of Carl Sagan and The Atomic Writer. And in the month of December, you can experience both these great writers at discount.

Personal note:
Carl Sagan exposed the science of the Cosmos to an entire generation of inquisitive minds including the atomic writer. He continues to this day to inspire and motivate us wherever he is in the Cosmos. The Ninth Cube is an extraordinary book on many levels. One aspect is a tribute to a man who opened my eyes to the endless possibilities of what lies just out of reach. My only hope is that somehow, somewhere, Carl is reading my book and smiling.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking, what if…

Until next time…

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer

Hello Readers,

Many thanks to those who are reading my book. Thank you.

Please come back and leave a review. I would appreciate it very much.

Best Regards,
Victor Grippi

Hello Readers,

Just a reminder that The Ninth Cube is being paired with Stephen Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time on Amazon during the month of November. You can buy both books at a discount.

Check it out!

Have you ever read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave?

Here is my version of the story:

Suppose a group of people are chained to a large rock inside a deep cave. The rock faces the end of the cave, and the people chained to this rock can only see the back wall of the cave. They have been chained there since childhood. Given these circumstances, reality for these people are the shadows and sounds they experience that are reflected off the cave wall.

Suppose one day a member of the chained group is set free and allowed to walk behind the large rock. Once on the other side this person realizes that the shadows come from a large fire burning in a fire pit, and from people that walk between the fire and the rock. The sounds are from these free people that walk in and out of the cave. Wouldn’t this person be unable to describe or identify the fire and the other people? To him, reality is the shadows and sounds from the cave wall. These new entities would seem alien, mystical, magical, or even demonic in origin.

Further suppose that this freed person is then taken outside the cave where he experiences the shining sun and trees and everything that exists outside the cave. Would he not be able to accept these things? Could he categorize and rationalize these new objects after spending his life tied to a rock inside the cave?

Now suppose this person is brought back to the cave and the rock where his friends have been tied to all their lives. Once there he tries to explain the origin of the shadows and the sounds and tries to convince them that the cave wall is not real but in fact an illusion. How do you think the other people will respond. Wouldn’t they think he was crazy, delusional, possessed; that his eyes have somehow been corrupted? Remember, all their lives the only reality they have known existed in the images and sounds reflected off the back of the cave. They would think he has been taken somewhere unknown and corrupted.

When he attempts to free another bound person, wouldn’t they try to kill him?

The moral of this story is that we are only able to comprehend and categorize that which falls within the boundaries of our limited viewpoint on the world. What we believe is real is limited by the degree to which we can perceive it.

The only way to expand our perception of reality is by experiencing new things, by reading stories of new possible realities that exist right on the other side of the rock of our lives. An entire universe of people, places, and things may exist right in front of our noses but we remain unable to perceive it because we refuse to accept the possibility that it exists at all.

Reading is one of the best ways to expand your mind and experience the countless possibilities in our world. To be more specific, books classified as speculative fiction take reality as we know it today, and expand upon it. This genre takes technology and makes one more step into the unknown. These books ask the big what if questions: what if we create an artificial black hole, what if it is actually a wormhole, what if we can time travel through it, what if it leads to another dimension.

Books like Stephen Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time, and Victor Grippi’s The Ninth Cube ask these questions and more. Hawking’s book is non-fiction and presents the current state of technology and physics theory, while The Ninth Cube takes these as premise and speculates on what the future may be when these theories become reality.

Fiction writers are like puppet masters who create shadows on the wall. All too often these do become reality.

Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking, what if…

Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer