Episode Transcript
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Welcome to Brainforest Cafe with Dennis McKenna.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Aitlin Dewaris McKenna is a science fiction writer whose passion for the genre stretches back to her elementary school's scholastic book fairs. She has chronicled the faraway worlds and strange beings of her imagination ever since. When not writing, she enjoys reading, gaming, and exploring the hiking trails near her home in Vancouver, British Columbia.
She grew up in the Minnesota woods, where on clear winter's nights she would look up at the stars and wonder.
And Caitlin Damaris McKenna happens to be my daughter of whom I am very proud. Caitlin, welcome to the Brain Forest Cafe.
This podcast is a chance to discuss your work, and of course, since you're my daughter, we have this family history, and I kind of know how you got interested. At least I guess I was some influence in getting you interested in science fiction and aliens and all things esoteric and interesting.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: Oh, definitely.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: What led you to decide to devote your efforts toward writing science fiction?
[00:01:43] Speaker A: Well, it was a combination of things, and growing up in Minnesota, that easily meant long winters, and we were in a very ex urban area as well. So I had a lot of time to read.
And I think even in my bio, I mentioned the scholastic book fairs were where I first got, I think where I first got interested in science fiction, specifically because they would have certain books that really caught my eye. There was one when I was about eight or nine at most, called extraterrestrials, field guide for earthlings. I got that it was this illustrative book about, you know, maybe, um, for people who can't see, about a quarter inch thick, very slim. But I was just fascinated by that. I would pour over the illustrations of different alien biomes and the kind of creatures that might end up living in them.
So I think really it was sort of by way of biology that I became interested in science fiction more than the technological side of it. And growing up in Minnesota, we were also surrounded by woods, rivers, nature.
The St. Croix watershed is protected watershed. There's some animals, like certain clams and mussels, that are endemic to that area and nowhere else on Earth. And I became very eco conscious at a young age.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: Right. Yes, I remember, I think one series you were reading when you were younger that was quite influential for you was the animorphs series.
[00:03:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Animorphs was a huge influence on me because that combines a way of science fiction. The author, Ka Applegate, wanted to bring kids into the perspective of animals, but that was her stated goal for the series when she pitched it to scholastic. And so for people who may be familiar. It's about kids who are given this alien technology that allows them to acquire the DNA of animals and then morph, change shape into them and experience all the senses of the instincts of the animal, and they use this to fight an alien invasion.
And I think animorphs, it took that seed of interest I already had. I was interested in animals, the biosphere and aliens. And it just kind of mashed it together in this story that spans, you know, light years of centuries, even eons and so forth. Like, it's a very mind expanding series for like a nine year old to get into.
[00:04:28] Speaker B: Indeed. And you've worked on it since then. Your first big series was started in high school, but you always had empathy for animals and things, more, I think, than most people, particularly things that many people don't have a fondness for. For example, insects were always fascinated by insects. And I remember whenever you would see an insect get injured, you became very upset.
And so when you were interested in, got interested in aliens, we had some conversations and I think I said, suggested if you were interested in aliens, study the most bizarre life forms on earth that you can because they are pretty alien too. You followed up that advice. You took some courses in invertebrate biology.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: That's right, like that.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: So you're science fiction.
There's been a consistent theme running through your science fiction for a long time, ever since the beginning. This idea of non human intelligence. And many of your earliest series, many of your much of your science fiction, starting with the first series, the expansion series is written from the point of view of the alien, not the people. Many science fiction writers write about aliens, but usually their perspective is human. You actually tried to instantiate the perspective of the aliens in this first series, which you called the Osch, was the kind of, were many aliens in that series, but it was the Oschs primarily, and they were the heroes. And the Terrans in the story were kind of the villains in this. So this expansion series that you started in high school, as you've gone through four or five different volumes of that, and each one has been, you know, quite an epic adventure, what you might call space opera, but space opera with a, with a political twist.
Tell us a bit about that expansion theory, expansion series.
What's the main thrust of it?
[00:07:06] Speaker A: So the main idea is exactly what you said. I wanted to look at some of the very classic space opera tropes, like human alien conflict, for instance, galactic empires, lashing and even alien invasion. But I wanted to invert those tropes and look at how might it appear from the non human perspective to have these sort of hairless apes encroaching on their territories and their pre established cultural exchanges and trade routes and so forth? Because I'm very much, having read a lot of space opera, my favorite ones have been series such as Ian and Banks culture novels, where the idea of the humanity as the norm is very much challenged and questioned.
And in Banks books, it's a matter of perspective.
His culture has humans, but encompasses a lot of different species, as well as artificially intelligent lions and so forth.
So that was also an influence. And for my series, for the expansion, yeah, I wanted to look at the main conflict of the first book is the OSC, the main alien species. They've established kind of a beachhead on this planet that's marginal now. Most of it's uninhabitable. And then humans have kind of established another colony on the other side. And this isn't a spoiler, because it happens very early on the OSC lose that planet, and it's a very devastating defeat. I wanted to look at what does it feel like? Because in a space opera, from the human perspective, that was seen to be a victory, that was seen to be a positive thing, but from. From the other side, from the off side, it's a devastating tragedy and defeat, you know? So I just wanted readers to question some of the things they maybe think they know, like some of the assumptions about the role of humans in the galaxy, if they were to ever make it that far. Because there's a lot of books where we're heroes, and I will say there's a lot of books where we are villains. But with the expansion, I did want to nuance that a bit and say the real sort of villain is the very idea of an empire.
Like anyone who sets out to create an empire on a planetary or galactic scale and bringing in the engines of war, domination, colonialism and so forth. That is the enemy, definitely.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: So these issues, even though painted on a galactic scale, on an interplanetary scale, are really quite timely. I mean, that's conflict between differences that we see much the same thing played out on earth, conflicts between humans.
The obvious one being most front and center, maybe, is the conflict in Gaza and that sort of thing, where different ethnic groups, different cultures are stigmatized and demonized by the dominating sectors. And so they expansion series is interesting because it addresses those issues, but it takes them out of the context, out of the constraints of daily headlines.
You can paint these epics, and I would say they are epics in a world that you've created, but many of the same issues that it addresses are, I guess, perpetual in a certain sense. We never really get past this issue of human dynamics and human dynamics with other human groups and also with the biosphere that we relate to.
So I thought that was something that you brought out very well in the expansion series, which you can find those. How many books are there in that series? I've read most. I've read them all. I think there are about five books in the series.
[00:11:44] Speaker A: So right now, there are four books in the series. It is ongoing, and the fifth one is in the hopper. It needs to be edited and polished, but it will be released. I don't want to commit to a date yet because I'm not sure, but I would say at this point, probably early 2025. There's also a novella which folks who are interested in could actually get that for free if they go to my website, expansionfront.com.
if they sign up to my list, they can try that novel out for free.
[00:12:17] Speaker B: What is it again? Expansion.
[00:12:19] Speaker A: Expansionfront, front.com.
expansionfront.com. They can get that novella for free.
And the first book in the series for interested folks is called Absence of Blade.
[00:12:39] Speaker B: Right.
The first one was the absence of Blade. So tell us a bit about that one, because that's the one that you launched the whole series on.
[00:12:50] Speaker A: So that one, that is the one I mentioned where the conflict is between two competing powers, Osk and human, who are both laying claim to this colony planet, and essentially how that conflict ends in devastating defeat for the OSC, the main characters of which are all combatants in the conflict, who, as a result of how the war ends, have to grapple with that, with how that sort of embroils them in different difficult situations and ultimately grapple with the idea of, now, can we salvage something from that feat? Whether it is building something new, whether it is revenge, whether it is showing to the rest of the galaxy how much of a threat the Terrans, humans are called terrans in the book, how much of a threat terrans truly are.
And from there, it evolves into. I did very much want it to be an epic. So the story is the longest one I've attempted so far, and book five should be out relatively soon, in a few months.
[00:14:02] Speaker B: Okay, so expansion series is not done. You're still working.
[00:14:07] Speaker A: It's ongoing. It's ongoing.
[00:14:09] Speaker B: But then this new series, you've taken a different direction, a very interesting direction, in my opinion. And also I think it reflects the maturation in your writing. I think the expansion series is great. It's very interesting.
But this new series, which you call a. The Dawnfall series.
[00:14:33] Speaker A: That's right, the Dawnfall saga. That's the name for it.
[00:14:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
That to me reflects really an evolution of the sophistication of your writing, I think. I mean, the writing is much tighter. Not that there's anything wrong with the expansion, but clearly it reflects the experience that you've obtained. And the theme is very interesting, very different and very timely. You know, it seems to me, because it raises all sorts of issues. There's a lot of conversation these days about the capabilities of biotech. Absolutely potential of reviving some of these extinct genomes.
A lot of conversations about bringing mammoths back, for example, and that kind of thing. You've gone to the next step. So explain to us what.
What the idea. What is the core idea behind the Dawnfall series?
[00:15:43] Speaker A: So the core idea behind Dawnfall is what if humans resurrected dinosaurs essentially to be our companions? So it takes off the idea of Jurassic park, but I took it in a direction that it's a lot more like a book that I really, truly love by James Gurney called Dinotopia, which is essentially an illustrated chronicle of a remote island where dinosaurs were never extinct and humans who have been shipwrecked on it end up becoming their companions and they sort of create this civilization together.
So I came at that idea, but by way of genetic engineering, the idea of what if we could take the genomes of animals that currently existed and essentially manipulate them using gene engineering technology such as CRISPR, which is. A lot of people think CRISPR is poised to just revolutionize the field of genetic engineering. And what if we could use something like that to recreate versions of dinosaurs from modern animals?
And the twist I give that is also that the dinosaurs that are initially recreated are Deinonychus, which is a kind of raptor, and they are endowed with human intelligence in the very beginning of the saga and his prequel, actually, which is called the Athabasca project.
And that I don't want to give away exactly why that's done, but I wanted to explore this idea of what do we owe to creatures that we recreate using genetic engineering now, do we want them to be sort of on the same footing as humans? Do we want them to be companions, tools, entertainment, many of the same things Jurassic park also tackles.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: Right well, in the Athabasca project, which is kind of where you set the stage for the entire series. It starts out in a kind of dark way because the genesis of the project was to create these creatures that are not exactly dinosaurs, but they use elements of dinosaurs DNA. They also incorporate genomic elements of human neural structures and so on. So these genetically engineered animals are not exactly dinosaurs. They looked like dinosaurs, but they are a construction of biotechnology.
And the motivation of the people that are funding this project, it's actually the Department of Defense and how Department of Defense, that is conducting this secret, super secret project in northern Saskatchewan.
Where no one is paying attention.
And the idea is to develop these genetically engineered dinosaurs. As potentially bioweapons to be used in combat. But it turns out that the people working on this project, the geneticists, the animal bowl behaviorists, and that sort of thing. Actually have some moral compass.
They're concerned about the ethics of developing a species that is actually sapient, that is intelligent, and the misuse of that species and issues around the respect.
What are the legal protections for a sapient species? I hope I'm not giving away too much. But as a result of their misgivings, they rebel and they develop this technology. But then they conspire to liberate the dinosaurs. Or a certain way, kind of sabotage the warlike goals of the Department of Defense program.
And can you talk about that to any extent?
[00:20:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I can. So I think that's a good enough synopsis. To hopefully whet some people's appetite to check it out.
I want to actually begin with where I first got some of the underpinnings of this idea from. And that was way back in, I believe it was 2015.
I just stand in theaters. Jurassic world, which kind of is the reboot of Jurassic park. They made.
After a couple of decades of not having released anything in that. And there's a subplot in jurassic world. Where some of the velociraptors. I think they call it velociraptors, in that film. Are actually being trained as military units, similar to canine units.
And one of the main characters is actually the trainer responsible for that project.
And that really sat uneasily with me. Because the way that they characterize the raptors in that film. Is very much buying into assumptions of dinosaurs as aggressive, as monstrous, as antagonistic to humans. Where there's really no reason why they would be. Especially if they're raised in captivity around humans. Now, there's a lot of speculation obviously, involved in that. We don't know necessarily what neural structures actual dinosaurs had. But my point is, in the Athabasca project, that doesn't really matter. Because, as you said, these are not dinosaurs, per se. You know, they are chimeras like Genoa constructs than humans create for human reasons. And as a result, they are actually, like, fundamentally predisposed to be social, to be cooperative, and to be friendly toward humans. They see us as part of their family or their path.
So I want to take that idea in jurassic world and just kind of twist it and say, like, well, why would these animals actually behave in some kind of aggressive way?
They don't actually have a reason to do that. And I tried to make the most I could of sort of taking what we know from paleontology about Dean Onychus behavior as little as we know, and extrapolating from that to make some educated guesses about how these animals might behave.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: And also the ethical questions it raises. This DoD funded project to create this bio weapon, this biological bioweapon that has intelligence.
But the ethical question raised, so these are chimeras. They are a human creation.
But the scientists working on the project reach a point where just because they're a human creation, you do not have the right to enslave this species and use it for your own purpose.
This is the interesting thing. And I think the same thing might actually be applied to a lot of species that we haven't genetically engineered, but that we still misuse. So I think that was an interesting.
Do you know if there is UN guidelines being developed for the respect of the rights of non human intelligent species, or is that something that you project? A legal framework that you project might be developed, or is it being developed?
[00:24:03] Speaker A: So, the framework for the rights of sapien species by the UN was my own invention, but I was inspired by existing frameworks that they have developed, particularly in 2007, the UN created the Charter on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was marriage, a landmark declaration by the UN that codifies a lot of the rights of people who have lived in a place for thousands of years, who essentially were tucked under the rug and ignored and disenfranchised for a long time. So that was one piece that I was inspired by. There are also, even if it hasn't been codified in a charter like the one that appears in my story, I know that the UN is developing much more of an eco conscious set of guidelines for how are we going to sustainably live in our various environments on earth? Because that's obviously a huge question that has been mounting in importance, I mean, quite literally, for decades. But I think that it's reached some watersheds with some of the UN councils on climate change and carbon dioxide emissions, for instance, that are ongoing. And there's much more discussion, I think. And importantly, there's a lot of discussion and collaboration with indigenous peoples around the world because their stewardship of the land is really, I think, a model for us all, and it has been ignored for far too long.
I will say, as long as we're on this topic that I'm podcasting from the ancestral Theta territories of the sleuth muslim is Qwamish peoples, as well as the high hat and Valkyrie speaking peoples in Burnaby, British Columbia.
And there is at this point, many encouraging initiatives for indigenous stewardship going on in British Columbia right now. I think, and hope it will be a model for other places going forward.
[00:26:18] Speaker B: But these guidelines that are being developed are also potentially templates for expanding that idea, because effectively, especially what were learning about what non human intelligence is, how its found in other species, even while, for example, you could talk about entire forest ecosystems as being intelligent systems, it seems that brains are actually overrated. Whats important is these hyper connected networks. Thats where the complexity comes. So a forest ecosystem that is tied together through these mycelial networks is every bit as much an intelligent organism as something like an intelligent dinosaur. So we need to, I think, re understand our perspective on what it is to be intelligent, what intelligence is, and what does that mean in terms of the rights of these non human species? And your series deals with this, and I think that's very important to kind of bring that front and center. And it does a way that's very engaging. It's a ripping good story. I mean, it's just a wonderful page turner. But theres a serious subtext to this.
So in the Athabasca project, which sets the stage, this technology is applied, these chimeric dinosaur, human dinosaur, I dont know what you would call it.
I mean, theyre not exactly dinosaurs, but they have those genes, and they also incorporate human genes, at least in terms of their neural structures. So I guess they are in fact dinosaur human hybrids, essentially.
[00:28:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I think thats the appropriate term, or I would think of them as chimeras. They incorporate genes from several different organisms, really, although their template is the, the cassowary bird from New Zealand.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: Right. Right. What I, I like many things about your, the way you've described this, but what I like about this particularly is the science is solid. You know, this is not fantasy. This will be actually possible to do within the next five to ten years if we choose to do it. And that, and what we have to think about is that desirable to do something like that? It probably won't be dinosaurs initially. It may well be mammoths. There's a lot of interest in reviving mammoths. And we both read this book by Ray Nadler called the tusk of extinction. That is about that. But the same principles could be applied to creating these Saurians, which is the term that you developed for these genetically engineered reptile human hybrids. And then, so the Athabasca project sets the stage for how this came about, how this technology was developed. And then in the first book, in the next book, the Halcyon series, that's really the, you know, based on that first platform, that's really the first novel in what's going to be a series of novels. Is that right?
[00:30:22] Speaker A: Yes, that's right about.
[00:30:25] Speaker B: So in Halcyon, the next book in the Dawnfall series, you flash forward to a hundred years from now, a couple hundred years from now, where humans and Saurians and Therians, which you also talk about, which are genetically engineered human hybrids with, for example, felines and canines and that sort of thing, people that choose to actually take on characteristics of more familiar animal species like cats and dogs and so on. So a hundred years from now, a couple, I think the time frame is like about a couple hundred years from when the Athabasca project is situated. At least a number of things have happened. For one thing, we've developed hyperspacial jump technologies. So now we've expanded into the galaxy and we've formed this partnership with the Saurians working more or less equally, but not really. And there are political aspects of that. There are, some of the Saurians are pushing back against being exploited by the humans and trying to assert their independent rights and so on and their religious movements that have taken shape around this. So can you explain some of that?
[00:32:11] Speaker A: Sure. So essentially, when you look at where they start in the Athabasca project, the Saurians don't have any resources of their own. I mean, they're completely dependent on humans for developing a material culture and also learning the ropes of how to be a sapient species.
And I mention in the, in Halcyon, through some sort of intertextual entries, how that history develops, where the Saurians begin to develop their own culture, especially religious beliefs that end up centering around this idea of the universe being cyclical, where the fact that they, their ancestors perished when the asteroid hit the earth 66 million years ago, but that kind of gave rise to the era of mammals and that ultimately gave rise to the Saurians who are reborn. So that's where the basis for their religion, which is called Dawnfall. And that's where the series title also comes from.
But I think that given the history where they start, they're very disadvantaged, and slowly they do become more independent. But they have to have fought for a lot of that. They had to fight to be recognized as sapien in the first place. They had to fight to become independent and develop their own colonies and their own cultural spaces. And the way that things have developed in the main series is there are worlds where Saurians and humans and Therians, I'm glad you mentioned them as well, people who've chosen to merge their DNA with that of an animal as kind of an expression of their connection to the biosphere.
But there's worlds where they all collaborate, and there's worlds where Saurians live apart, and there's also worlds where humans live apart because there's this political dimension that's happening where the idea, the question that's posed can this civilization cohere with these very different species? It's an open question. Know, there are thoughts on both sides that it can't or it can.
And it's very much a theme in the book, that understanding others viewpoints and collaborating with them is messy and hard. It's hard work.
People are bringing their own bandage and history to it from all sides, and there's no easy answer. And I think that the characters in the book, they are.
They come to this world that is the Saurians only world, because that is where this alien machine has been sighted landing. And their mission is to make first contact with this alien artifact. But in order to do it, they also have to work with Saurians that don't necessarily want them there. And it's nothing. A simple question whether they should be there or not, right?
[00:35:25] Speaker B: So, yes, that's another twist in the plot. The plot starts off with this existing situation, as you say, where there are worlds that are saurian and humans, where they live together more or less in harmony, inequality. Other worlds are separatist. Only Saurians with maybe only a few humans, or the Saurians are not open. They don't want to be enslaved by humans and they want, effectively, their own identity. And then other worlds are. And so there are these mesozoic worlds that you. That you described, which are basically run by Saurians, but then they have applied these genetic engineering techniques to recreate all sorts of dinosaurs, essentially many species of dinosaurs.
And this is pretty well scattered throughout the galaxy at this point because we do have by this time, the jump technology whatever it might be, has been developed. And one of the sort of things that this species alliance, cross species alliance, is understanding as they explore the galaxy together is that life, intelligent life, is extremely rare, apparently, and that they found many planets. They find many planets on which there are simple forms of life, plant life, that sort of thing. Nothing that exemplifies intelligence. And so this has been the quest, and this is, I think, even at this time in our own planetary situation, we wonder. We wonder if alone in the universe, and there's reason to think, not that we're alone, exactly, but that life, complex intelligent life is potentially extremely rare. You know, so then. So there is this longing to find other intelligences in the universe, and then all of a sudden, there is this discovery made on Halcyon that really kind of changes the game. Can you describe what that is?
[00:38:11] Speaker A: Yeah. So on Halcyon, what spurs the plot to begin is there's an alien, I call it an artifact, essentially, what is cited as a sphere of sort of aquamarine, glassy material that is entering the atmosphere of the planet. And it's clearly a powered object. It's not an asteroid or anything like that. And, of course, as soon as the human saurian polity alliance gets split of this, they want to know what it is, because, as you said, this is a watershed moment. That's the first evidence of what I would call our kind of intelligence tool using technology, making intelligence.
Because I want to go back to what you said earlier about the idea that a forest might be a sapient network.
There could be many different kinds of intelligence we're surrounded by at this very moment that we just don't understand or know how to connect with. But because it's not necessarily obvious, it kind of goes under our radar. And I think that longing is for something we can kind of recognize intuitively, that, oh, that's a machine. There's nothing else that could be right. And that's an artificial structure that was not built by human hands, or in this case, human or sorian hands, like it is something from elsewhere.
And I had a lot of fun with playing with the idea of intelligent life as being rare in the universe, because it's just a complete inversion from my first series, the expansion where intelligent life is incredibly common.
And I hope that in Halcyon, I've seen some questions as to why intelligent life is rare, because I do want to explore that as the series progresses.
And there are going to be breadcrumbs that point toward some possible reasons why that I don't want to get into here.
But that's the fun of science fiction, is you can ask why, and then you can actually try and answer that with a story.
[00:40:28] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. That is the beauty of science fiction. You compose these really way out there scenarios and. But the interesting thing about this work is it's not that way out there. We probably won't live know, it will be several hundred years before. But you can see in the Athabasca project how the seeds of this are planted. And that's, well, that may well be something that we will live to see. You know, we will see technologies applied ethically or not. You know?
You know, as we know about technology, technology can be deployed, but inherently it doesn't have its own morality. The morality comes from the choices we make in terms of how we're going to deploy it.
This applies to basically any technology with the whole conversation about drugs. For example, I'm fond of saying on my podcasts and elsewhere, there's no such thing as a bad drug.
There's no inherent quality in a drug. There are plenty of terrible ways to use drugs, but those reflect human choices, not the properties of the compound itself or the technology. And the same can be said of this geneering technology. It could be tremendously beneficial, and it could be used for nefarious purposes, like to build biological bioweapons like this. So, and then, you know, toward the last of the novel, this twist comes in where this alien, clearly not saurian, not human from somewhere else, but clearly intelligent. So that comes into the story, and then the, the interest becomes to investigate what this is, if possible, make contact.
But that doesn't lead. That doesn't mean that all the rivalries that have grown up over time between the Saurians and the humans and these separatist planets go away.
[00:42:50] Speaker A: They're very much not. Yeah.
[00:42:53] Speaker B: They want to control it and dominate it.
[00:42:56] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:42:57] Speaker B: I don't want to give the whole story away, but that's definitely not.
[00:43:00] Speaker A: Yeah, but I will say without giving anything away, the first contact becomes very much kind of a political football between the separatists and then the polity. Because you're right. Both of them sort of want to be first on the base there and first wants to make contact, and there's implications for who actually is first to make contact.
[00:43:25] Speaker B: Right. Right.
So what is your feeling about personally? What do you think? Is intelligent life in the universe rare or abundant?
[00:43:39] Speaker A: That is such a broad question. I know what I hope is the answer. Of course I want it to be abundant, but I also think that there's a lot of challenges that get in the way of intelligent life getting started and thriving, as we can see with our own history.
If you look at. I actually took a fair amount of paleontology courses and paleoanthropology when I was in university.
And if you look at the record there, there are probably at least a dozen hominid species of a fossil record, and there's currently one extant hominid species on Earth, and that's homo sapiens sapiens.
[00:44:25] Speaker B: Right.
[00:44:25] Speaker A: So there are a lot that failed and died out for various reasons, and homo sapiens sapiens may have contributed in some cases. In some cases, I think climate change or environmental loss build the end for those almanads. I think that that pattern may very well persist on other planets. It's hard to say.
For one thing, the challenges of even finding like, life at all on other planets are already pretty daunting, let alone intelligent life. So I think it could be that the very narrow band of things we're looking for, such as atmospheric oxygen, fresh water, radio signals, and so forth, you know, it could be that we're just missing entirely some other signature we don't even know how to look for.
[00:45:19] Speaker B: Yeah, we don't even know we're looking for techno signatures. All intelligent civilizations may be technological in that way, you know?
[00:45:31] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:45:32] Speaker B: So it's. It's just impossible to say. We are. We're narrowing very much narrowing our perspective that if they're not technology utilizing species, then.
Well, then, for one thing, we will never contact them. And I don't know how I feel about the abundance of alien life. I mean, I think in some ways, I would like to believe that life is abundant, but it's one of these questions that you can't actually answer, because we have only an n of one. We know that on this planet, there is an intelligent species, even though often it's an extraordinarily stupid species. But we attribute intelligence to it, and actually, the stupidity is nothing, something to be dismissed, because many. Even when circumstances are favorable for an intelligent species to arise on a planet, then, as you point out, there are so many bottlenecks that might lead to its destruction sooner or later, destroying the environment, destroying the civilization through mass weapons of mass destruction, technology. There are many hurdles for any civilization to reach a point of stability that it may almost be impossible. And you're familiar, of course, many science fiction fans are familiar with the so called Fermi paradox, which is, well, if there are so many intelligent species, if the galaxy is permeated with intelligence, where are they exactly. We haven't seen them. And that may just be a function of the vast distances that separate solar systems. And without faster than light or some sort of hyperspatial technology, it seems that our species will forever be confined to the solar system. And maybe much more narrow than that. Maybe that.
I think its possible that well be able to colonize and utilize cislunar space close to the earth. Beyond that, it may not be practical to expand beyond that. And we have no idea of the other factors that might influence the emergence.
Certainly in this particular, particularly critical juncture of evolution, I would say, as well as history right now, we're becoming more and more aware of all the factors that could basically undermine and destroy civilization.
[00:48:39] Speaker A: Absolutely. And I think I am very much a proponent of getting out into cislunar space with the O'Neal tubes and so forth because those might be viable colonies. But at the same time, as I've become more aware of the challenges facing the biosphere, I think that our focus really should be right here. As much as I am in my imagination, out there in the stars. The earth that we are on right now is the basis for all of that, really.
That's the basis for life, human civilization, all the organisms that share the planet with us. So I think that in a way, we're at this juncture where space colonization can kind of wait.
We need to learn how to live on one planet because we're not doing so hot of that before even thinking about Mars colonies, that titan colonies and so forth. That might happen in a couple of centuries. In fact, I hope it does. But I also agree with you. I think theres barriers we probably havent even imagined yet because I think there are, of course, technical limitations, but I think equally important are psychological and cultural limitations.
Who is going to volunteer to live on this barren sort of planet like Mars where theres no vegetation or anything? How do you psychologically, like, create a healthy human society in that environment? Or can you.
[00:50:17] Speaker B: Right. This is something that I think is not talked about enough.
You know, it's not that the technological capabilities to travel to someplace like Mars and even survive there are beyond reach. I mean, they are beyond reach, but they could be developed. But the factor that is not being addressed is the unpredictability of the human, of human dynamics.
If you read, for example, some of the recountings of polar and antarctic explorers who were in situations for months at a time where they were lost on the ice, they weren't lost. They had locations. But it was psychologically very, very difficult for them?
[00:51:15] Speaker A: Absolutely. In fact, I was very recently reading about the Franklin expedition that was lost in the Arctic in the mid 18 hundreds. And it was a fascinating. I wish I could remember where this piece was, because it was fascinating. It was oral histories of the Inuit people who had lived in that region for millennia and their encounters with the lost survivors of the Franklin expedition. And they described these just absolutely like ghoulish husks of men who had lost most of their sanity at that point. They were eating their boots. They just completely were practically nonverbal. And the Inuit people tried to take them in, but eventually they kind of had to leave because they were just so unnerved by these people. And these british explorers just didn't have the psychological preparation or the survival preparation to be in this environment.
And the Inuit people, of course, knew exactly what to do. They knew how to live off the land, but they couldn't teach it to the Brits. They just didn't have that context.
[00:52:24] Speaker B: Right.
[00:52:25] Speaker A: I think about the first Mars expedition and the fact that as far as we know, there won't be any Martians waiting to show us how to live there.
[00:52:35] Speaker B: At least, we assume not as far as we know.
[00:52:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:52:39] Speaker B: Right, right. Most likely. But then. So we're going to have to learn how to live there on our own. And I think, I mean, there's a science fiction story you should. Right, Caitlin? I mean, not that I'm going to advise you on what to write, but nobody's written about.
We look at these long term isolation experiments that are going on that are, the biosphere was, biosphere two was an early instantiation of that. Now they're doing more controlled environments, but these are places where people are deliberately isolating themselves. I think if things get really bad, they can basically open the door and step outside.
[00:53:23] Speaker A: Yeah, pull the rip cord.
[00:53:28] Speaker B: And Mars is not a very compatible. I mean, in fact, it is inimical to life. It is toxic to life in every way. So I think that's why all of these fantasies about Mars exploration, Occupy Mars and so on, they are fantasies. It's not going to happen because human nature can't support this.
[00:53:53] Speaker A: No, it's not going to happen without, at the very least, a lot of preparation by way of automated probes and so forth. I think, and honestly, I don't think. I personally don't see Mars as the way forward. I think that cislunar colonies where you can have, let's say, an asteroid or something that's been hollowed out, and you can have inside the cylindrical expanse of land that then you could have farming and arable and habitable.
[00:54:23] Speaker B: You could crazy in the earth. You couldn't exactly hollow out these asteroids, and you couldn't.
Bruce Damers talked about this technology where you basically create little mini with large, green, effectively orbiting greenhouses.
But the key thing is that these cislunar colonies are a couple of days from the home planet. They're not six months or they're not years away from the home planet. So it's much more, I think, possible that people could endure that kind of thing, you know, because you always have the possibility of getting home.
[00:55:14] Speaker A: Exactly. And you're also in communication with the earth. I mean, it's within a reasonable, in.
[00:55:20] Speaker B: Times realistic, not hours, not days. I mean, despite the current situation going on with the two astronauts that are stranded on the International Space Station, because Boeing created this technology that's not working so good, but they will find a way to get down sooner or later. Maybe they have to send a SpaceX to pick them up. But it's not easy to live in space, and especially for, you know, so it's a fascinating period of time where we're living.
[00:56:06] Speaker A: I think it's the chinese proverb that goes, may you live in interesting times.
[00:56:13] Speaker B: Well, they're certainly interesting, and we remain interested. What's your feeling 20 years from now?
How are we, are we going to get through this bottleneck or are we going to destroy ourselves?
[00:56:30] Speaker A: I don't think it's that simple.
And that might sound like a cop out, but I genuinely don't think that the next 20 years, at least, I don't see it in terms of. So Buckminster Fuller wrote a book in the 1960s called utopia or oblivion, where he essentially lays out the case. For now, we're either going to create a utopia or we're going to destroy ourselves. Those one or the other. I see a middle path that's honestly a lot more messy and complicated in some ways, for lack of a better word, kind of boring.
That I think.
I think that both destructive and creative forces are going to keep moving forward, and in some ways things are going to get worse, in other ways, they're going to get better.
It's hard for me to even project some of that stuff other than just go back to some of the things we were talking about, the de extinction idea that you were mentioning, that we may, for instance, recreate the mammoth.
I'm fascinated by this idea, and for one thing, our ecology is kind of already out of balance and has been for the past 10,000 years or more. Because of the extinction of the megafauna. There are some plants, like the eau Saint George, that relied on being fodder for large animals like mammoths to propagate themselves. And they're now suffering because those animals don't exist.
So if there's an initiative to recreate them, that may actually bring some parts of ecology imbalance, but it's also going to open up a pandora's box.
We don't know what other impact reintroducing those kind of animals might have, but I think that may be something we have to increasingly consider, because the more that human activity unbalances things, the more that we have to think about how we might have to give it little nudges here and there.
But at the same time, I think any kind of purely technological solution to climate change and ecocide, it's not going to work. I think we need to think about how we can actually have less impact. In some areas, managed impact and technological wonder solutions are really just kind of spring from the same arrogant place of trying to engineer and control nature, in my opinion.
[00:59:02] Speaker B: Yeah, they're fantasies.
[00:59:05] Speaker A: They are sort of messianic fantasies.
[00:59:08] Speaker B: They are distracting us from solutions that will actually work.
For example, all this carbon capture technology, you can't deploy it on a scale that's going to make any difference. Yet billions are being directed toward developing these technologies when actually we have the perfect carbon capture technology and requires no infrastructure. They're called trees.
[00:59:39] Speaker A: Right. Trees and plants.
[00:59:41] Speaker B: If you can plant a trillion trees, I read some statistics. If you can plant a trillion trees, you could reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 35%.
And the cost of doing that would be less than an annual us defense budget. It will take $300 million to plant a trillion trees. So that's about thirty cents a tree. That's well under what we spend on defense every year.
They're the perfect carbon capture technology. You just have to find a place to, to deploy them. So these simple technologies that have actually worked and have worked for millions of years, that's what we need to be deployed. Forget this carbon capture stuff. Same considers, I think, considerable considerations go into the electric vehicle scenario.
Yes, electric vehicles do not emit so much carbon. On the other hand, the, the environmental costs of building them, the rare minerals and so on that you have to exploit to construct these batteries and so on, so that they have a huge carbon footprint. It's just upfront, not in terms of their operations.
So we have many challenges.
[01:01:12] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think, like you're saying, the solutions to them are often the true solutions that would actually make a sizable impact are often they're not sexy, they're really not algae wiz technology. They are simple things like planting trees or for instance. Rather than.
[01:01:28] Speaker B: Hardly the problem. They're not sexy enough, but they do work. That's the thing. No technological breakthroughs are required to simply plant lots of trees and develop sustainable methods of agriculture. These things have existed for thousands of years. We just need to deploy them on bigger scales and so on. So. Well, very interesting conversation, Kate. I really appreciate you taking time. What have we said that we should have said? What have we not said that you'd like to be sure we touch on anything?
[01:02:08] Speaker A: Well, I think.
I mean, thank you for having me. It's been a really fascinating conversation.
I just want to close out by letting listeners know that you can get Halcyon now. It is up now on all the major online bookstores. Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo.
I don't know if I'm forgetting one.
[01:02:31] Speaker B: These are available as Kindle books.
[01:02:33] Speaker A: These are available as ebooks. Yeah. And if you're curious about the Alphabet project, you can actually pick it up for free for a limited time. If you buy Halcyon, there's actually a free download to the Athabasca project.
So I really hope if you found this interesting, you check it out. And I want to say thanks again for having me. It's really been a great conversation.
[01:03:01] Speaker B: Well, it's been wonderful talking to you. Yeah. So Amazon or any of the usual places you can get these things? Yeah, any of the major fan website. You have a website that represents your work?
[01:03:18] Speaker A: Yeah. So currently my website is expansionfront.com.
[01:03:23] Speaker B: Expansionfront.Com. Okay. And the Halcyon series is on there too.
[01:03:29] Speaker A: You can find the Halcyon series on there. Hopefully you can also drop a link in the show notes.
[01:03:35] Speaker B: Okay.
All right. Well, hopefully people will notice this. People will hear this podcast and read the book because I'm your father, so I'm biased.
I also know science fiction and this is as good as any you'll find. I mean, it really is. And I say that sincerely. And I hope people discover you because it's great stuff. You could just read it as wonderful space opera, but it's also thought provoking and, you know, raises some of the most interesting questions of the day. So keep up the good work.
[01:04:18] Speaker A: Well, thank you so much.
[01:04:20] Speaker B: Have a great day.
[01:04:22] Speaker A: You too. Thank you.
[01:04:28] Speaker B: Join our mission to harmonize with the natural world.
[01:04:32] Speaker A: Support the McKenna Academy by donating today.
[01:04:48] Speaker B: Thank you for listening to brain Forest.
[01:04:50] Speaker A: Cafe with Dennis McKenna.
[01:04:53] Speaker B: Find us online at McKenna Academy.
