Iranian Ayatollahs and Science Fiction

Aliens or strange protocols…source

The following headers are surely no science fiction and may fit in any major press article about the hot events of the day:

….”President’s Barak Obama Al-Hazhar speech on 4 Jun 2009 to the Arab-Muslim world.”

“The lesson of the recent revolutionary events in Iran, after the Ahmadinejad fraudulaus election.”

These are major straightforward events with a global media dissemination and visualization (..Twitter, Facebook etc…). But despite their realness, they are only the top of the iceberg. The remote hidden part may tell stories on the verge of science fiction.

Now, perhaps the Iranian Ayatollahs should be interested to know that the US homeland security department in an unpredictable move discover that there is such a curiosity named science fiction , I quote:

…”U.S. Mission for Sci-Fi Writers: Imagine That Novelists Plot the Future Of Homeland Security…

The line between what’s real and what’s not is thin and shifting, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has decided to explore both sides. Boldly going where few government bureaucracies have gone before, the agency is enlisting the expertise of science fiction writers. … .Crazy? This week down at the Reagan Building, the 2009 Homeland Security Science & Technology Stakeholders Conference has been going on. Instead of just another wonkish series of meetings and a trade show, with contractors hustling business around every corner, this felt at times more like a convention of futuristic yarn-spinners.”… see here.

And going one step further, remembering the hidden part of the iceberg.

When I read the transcript of Obama’s speech I don’t explicitly think about the print paper the ink and the whole publishing process. The same is true for twitter, facebook or other social networking sites. I don’t care about internet protocols or any hardware apparatus. Moreover seeing the harsh Tehran clashes pictures on my monitor does not put me in a meditative mood about pixels or about myself as the one who implacably produce what in my everyday life I experienced as love, emotions, work, art, war, or the “twittering revolutionary events in Iran”. I am only the end user sitting on the top of the iceberg. No science fiction here.

To be more specific, in this inexorable implicit course of absorbing information I only see the real life pictures and don’t have any awareness of let’s say -invoking here some weird science (fiction..) – something like the Feynman diagrams, which is a mathematical protocol juggling with discrete energy jumps underlying every physical event, including analogously the internet protocols the paper and ink publishing and my physical self. They are all taken for granted at some hidden semi-science-fiction level like in the Minority Report movie where the police can predict future crimes leading to their prevention, (the film is based on a Philip K. Dick story).

Feynman diagrams.

A good example for this taken-f0r-grantedness is the neutrino effect, I quote..”I can illustrate that. [Your] thumbnail’s about roughly a square centimeter. Every second, about a hundred billion of these solar neutrinos according to our calculations would be passing through your thumbnail every second of every day of every year of your life, and you never notice it.” see here. ..pure science fiction..

In this context, to most people, jiggling diagrams and neutrinos seems to be a fiction far away from our real life.. But fiction is the name of the game because being well suited to dig into my shadowy activities working at some inside level in me without asking my permission to do so, a strategy well understood by the brainless swine flu.

And indeed if I am relying on today’s hard core science, exploring this sort of futurist fiction can create the new visual pictures and their interpretations my hint for the unseen part of the iceberg pointing in new directions where science fiction, fiction and non-fiction merge together. The Iranian events my act here as a good metaphor.

I remember Greg Bear’s science fiction novel “Eon”. Pictures generated by the novel, see here, following these new visual themes are in diametrical opposition to pictures from the electoral events in Iran (2009) . The first picture below, is the representation by the press, TV the bloggers and the social nets of the green Iranian opposition protest against the outcome of the vote. The picture is direct, violent and utterly emotional. For the great majority of media users there is no room for (science) fiction speculation, this the true real stuff.

The second picture described by the visual artist Kaufeldt:

…” ..is supposed to depict the moment when Lanier is leaving Patricia with a bunch of books in the Alexandria Library (my words: named after the historical library see here), and she is just about to find the passage describing The Death, which will happen in just a few weeks in their timeline, although it is already ancient history for the historian who wrote the book in question.”…

The “Death” describe the annihilation of the planet Earth. A much greater violent event than the Iranian opposition protest but an event buried into science fiction fantasy so having lesser credibility than the actual immediate deadly events in Iran.

Kaufeldt’s drawing based on “Eon”. Click to enlarge.

Kaufeldt , depicting the heroes world of Greg Bear’s novel “Eon” presuppose in their world the explicit action of their modern physics in their everyday on all his aspects . We don’t presuppose such explicit acting of science and no author would written such fantasies: they are only science fiction..with no real credibility. For instance, black holes are invoked mostly as a metaphor not as the real thing described by science . . So you can always say that the Iranian opposition will be annihilated inside an Ayatollahs black hole.. and Twitter will spate them out in the reverse direction from within a white hole… the stuff for a good science fiction story..

In Eon the metaphor is becoming real. Historians from our future already wrote our own history: and events that where actually going to happen where already recorded in their history book called “the Death”, announcing from their timeline, the imminent destruction of Earth in in our timeline,. Their stories are embedded in what they see or feel or know as time travel, black hole singularity and gates to other worlds. For us this is only weird fantasy.

Most conventional fiction writers wrote their novels and stories representing our world without mentioning explicitly that their characters and plots are staged in an underpinning physical world who can act explicitly as some kind of character. The stories are told on a direct psychologist level and the physical environment is always here anonymously.

So when is the physical environment loosing it’s science fiction anonymity in the sense that we acknowledge it’s merging with the stories of our life..

With the violent events in Tehran, the social networks and in particular Twitter and You Tube moving explicitly to the front stage not only as social networks transmitting in real time the bloody events in Iran, but as building-up an underlying pattern of some sort of collective random mind sending bits of information revealing a resource that three decades ago would be considered as pure science fiction curiosity. The metaphor of the virtual and the non-creditable fantasy become a reality in the Islamic state of the Ayatollahs.

In this context look at what Paul Krugman 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics has to say. Being interviewed by Jim Lehrer, see here, he says:

..”Jim Lehrer
“When and why did you decide to become an economist in the first place?”

Paul Krugman
‘That’s a little embarrassing. I don’t know how many of your viewers read science fiction, but there’s a very old series by Isaac Asimov – the Foundation novels – in which the social scientists who understand the true dynamics save civilization. That’s what I wanted to be; it doesn’t exist, but economics is as close as you can get, so as a teenager I really got into it.’

Krugman is talking about the psychohistorians like Hari Seldon, who practiced the science of psychohistory; in the Foundation series, Seldon predicts the fall of the Galactic Empire and then works with a team to reduce the period during which civilization falls into barbarism to a single millenium.”…

Well let me guess, to the grand dismay of president Obama and many other political leaders who are not psychohistorians, they did not predict the events of the Iranian vote and this seems plausible. But the social earthquake of the Iranian revolutionary events, generating the twitter, you tube, sms and cellular phone cameras tsunami, may remind Obama and the Ayatollahs that we are already a world embedded in the science fiction of a viral eco-information era acting as a flue without a possible medication.

And if talking about the era of information here is the following quote:

…”Harry McDavid, chief information officer for Homeland Security’s Office of Operations Coordination & Planning, had a question for Catherine Asaro, author of two dozen novels, about half of them devoted to her Saga of the Skolian Empire. She also has a PhD in physics. McDavid’s job involves ‘information sharing’ — efficiently communicating information about response and recovery across agencies, states, business sectors. How, he wanted to know, did Asaro come up with the Triad system in her novels of flashing thoughts instantly across the universe?

‘It evolved along with the story,’ Asaro said. Basically, she applied principles of quantum theory — one of her specialties as a physicist — to a fictional theory of ‘thought space.’ “… see here.

And below pictures of funny information languages..

Are pixels an alien language ?