https://literallystories2014.com/2026/06/17/nickel-by-steve-eckroad/

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Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, in their book, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, write: “…every part of the body, every aspect of life, is instructed by a particular DNA sequence. Every sequence is vulnerable to mutation. … Most [mutations] are harmful, a few are helpful, and even the helpful ones may–like the sickle cell mutation–represent a tradeoff, a compromise. This is a principal means by which life evolves–exploiting imperfections in copying despite the cost. It is not how we would do it. It does not seem to be how a Deity intent on special creation would do it. The mutations have no plan, no direction behind them; their randomness seems chilling; progress, if any is agonizingly slow. The process sacrifices all those beings who are now less fit to perform their life tasks because of the new mutation…” [p.84]

Comment: The authors point to the imperfection, even the cruelty perhaps, of the evolution process. They aver that this is not the way “we” (i.e., humans) would do it. However, can we be so sure that our conception of the best way to do something, our idea of beauty or excellence in design, is better? What if a presumed “Deity intent on special creation” were to have made the process the way we think it should better have been made? What if there were no imperfections in the process, every step predetermined and carried out according to a “perfect” plan? Then would not this process in time evolve upward to the complete human being, a being having no power of choice? Every thought, every action carried out according to the plan of Someone else.

Yet we hold that humans DO have the power of choice. It is the one thing we do have that enables us to take advantage of opportunity or save us from calamity, if such should strike. That is, in the event of circumstances or events that hurt us or others we have the power to choose our response: inner peace or outward retaliation. Moreover our individual maturity is aided by the lessons we learn when we make the wrong response and must deal with the consequences. Learning by mistake, by imperfections. Or make the right response and garner the benefit for ourselves or others.

The power of choice is also the power to respond to the actions of the Deity who has allowed life, all life, to come into existence and then be driven by random, seemingly mindless alterations in its mechanisms, from the chemical behavior of the precursors to our DNA all the way up to the process of human maturation. The power to choose to believe in this Deity. To believe that despite appearances things will work out in accordance with a Divine plan, inscrutable as that plan may be. At least in an ultimate sense, acknowledging that many things that happen to us are out of our control. Except how we respond. That, and perhaps that alone is what WE control, what we CAN control. Our power to love instead of hate, to trust instead striking back, to believe instead of despair.

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Much of the science fiction genre known as Space Opera uses locations in the galaxy far from Earth. That is many lightyears distant. Generally, for a satisfying read, the story’s characters need to get to or move around in these locations with the same ease and timeliness that they would on Earth. Hence, the familiar trope: FTL. Faster than light travel. Authors of these stories vary widely in how they treat the ability to exceed the speed of light.

How much help does the writer give to their readers to support the needed suspension of disbelief? Because, FTL within a normal galaxy such as ours is impossible. Not just because it violates the Einstein theory of Special Relativity. FTL violates logic. For example, suppose a new type of baseball bat makes a ball travel faster than light. Fans in the bleachers would see the outfielder catch the ball before the batter hit it. Or fumble it. In either case, effect before cause. Travel to the past would also be possible with embarrassing or even disastrous consequences. Remember the familiar Grandfather Paradox. You could go back to the past and change something that would result in you not being born.

Even if technology someday overcomes Einstein and we can, in fact, achieve FTL, how do we deal with the illogic of FTL? There are some creative solutions that are believable. One is to use parallel universes with alternate timelines. The characters or events exist in both with little or no interaction. Another is to posit a dimension in which time does not exist but which is accessible to the protagonists. I have used both techniques in my stories.

Of course, many sci-fi stories simply ignore the logical implications. Other writers treat readers with mind-bending logical paradoxes as if they were obvious to anyone with a high school education. More recent episodes of Star Trek are especially guilty of this. I wonder what Gene Roddenberry would think?

How about the science of FTL? Here, science fiction stories vary from simply assuming FTL to be possible without further explanation to rather creative, and in some cases, nearly believable machines and theories. Take your pick—there are great stories out there all over that spectrum. And there are some that aren’t so great. These are often written by authors who do not have a science background or have failed to get expert help. They just wing it with facile references to or complex descriptions of FTL that get in the way of our ability to enjoy the story. A story does not have to either explain or justify FTL in order to be good. But if an explanation is attempted there should be something about it that appeals to our imagination, whether or not we are scientifically inclined.

One of the best explanations of how spacecraft achieve FTL use the theories propounded by the astrophysicist Miguel Alcubierre. By assuming the existence of negative mass (not that remarkable) Alcubierre showed that a ship could warp space in such a way that it could get to distant reaches of space without moving at all in its own spacetime location. Make distant space locations come to you more or less instantly instead going there at impossible speeds. That’s not really FTL but the effect is the same. And there is no violation of the Einsteinian dictum. A similar mechanism is the use of wormholes, which may be found to exist in our universe someday. Except that current physics suggests that the only way to keep a wormhole open is to salt it with Alcubierre’s negative mass. So travel through a wormhole is not much different than using a warp drive.

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I used my homemade Pinhole Camera telescope again to capture photos of the solar eclipse today (4/8/24). Here in LA area it was less than 50% at maximum (about 1115 am). The problem with this Camera is the translucent window I used. It has a wavy surface that distorts the image. Someday I’ll put in a better view screen. See other photos and stories of times I have used this camera in other of my posts here, and on my Facebook page.

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Presentation on the Everyday Spacer Show, March 22, 2024

Ever wonder what superconductivity is? Or, maybe you’ve never heard of it. But in the coming years this amazing feature of the natural world will increasingly become part of your world. Spoiler Alert: It already is a part of your world!

If you want to know more, check out my Layperson’s Tutorial on Superconductivity. Last Friday (March 23) I appeared on “EverydaySpacer” as the guest presenter. See me and my presentation on the YouTube link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4p9RGi_HgI.

See the following links for some of my professional work in the area of superconducting power:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0953-2048/26/11/113001

https://www.epri.com/research/products/000000000001020916

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A pinhole camera is an inexpensive means to capture images of the Sun, including the transit of the inner planets, Venus and Mercury.

When a planet passes in front of a star (e.g., our Sun) between the viewer and the star, one can see the dark spot passing across the bright disk of the star. That is, by the way, how some exoplanets are discovered: the light from the star momentarily lessens and repeats this with a periodic interval (corresponding to the planet’s orbit). For us on Earth there are two transits of our sun: the planets Venus and Mercury. Only those planets get between us and the sun.

Transits of Venus are among the rarest of all predictable astronomical phenomena. There were two in the 21st century: 8 June 2004 and 6 June 2012. I captured the one in 2012 when we lived in Charlotte NC. The previous transits were in 1874 and 1882 and the next transits are not until 2117 and 2125. It is likely that my children and possibly my grandchildren will not live to see those. So, very rare event and I got a photo (see below). A good article on transits of Venus can be found here.

I didn’t have (and still do not have) a solar filter for my camera so I needed another way to see the transit. A pinhole camera is an inexpensive way to get an image of the sun without burning out the optics on a camera (see this article that explains all about pinhole cameras, aka camera obscura). The pinhole camera can show the planet crossing the disk of the sun. I built a pinhole camera using FedEx cartons, a piece of metal with a hole drilled in it (at one end of the tube) and an image pad at the other end to focus the image. My 35mm DSLR on a tripod captured the image formed by the pinhole camera. This was a bit crude but it worked, MOL.

In the photo Venus appears as a black dot moving across the face of the Sun. See it at lower left of Sun’s image (about 5 o’clock at edge of disk). The black and white inset at lower right gives a slightly better view. The time of the transit was on the order of an hour.

The experience with my “solar pinhole camera” back in 2012 led me to improve the camera and I got to use it today for the annular solar eclipse. See my post on that here.

TOP: Steve with homemade pinhole camera (in Charlotte NC, June 2012)
MIDDLE: Image of Venus passing in front of Sun (small black dot at 5 o’clock edge of solar disk); black and white inset at lower right shows the planet image better.
BOTTOM: Close up of the image end of the pinhole camera and the DSLR camera I used to get a permanent photo.

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I was able to capture some decent photos of the annular solar eclipse today. (Annular eclipse = a “full” eclipse that does not fully cover the sun because, due to the position of the Moon and Earth relative to the Sun the shadow the moon casts on the surface of the earth is not quite as big as the diameter of the sun as seen from Earth. Therefore, at full annularity what you see is a ring of sun around the shadow of the moon.)

In Camarillo, where I live (50 miles northwest of Los Angeles), we got only about 75% of the show since the “path” of “full annularity” went over the US at higher latitudes. What we saw here is a large “bite” out of the cookie. See my photos below.

The way I took the photos was with a pinhole camera. A small hole in the wall of a darkened box will cast an image on the opposite surface that is an inverted image of what you “point” the box at. In my case, the box had to be about 2 meters long in order for the image to be reasonably large. That’s because of the thing being “photographed” is very small. There’s a relationship between the diameter of the hole, this size of the image and the length of the optical path inside the box. Since astronomy is one of my hobbies, this was a fun activity.

I first built a a pinhole camera like this to photograph the transit of Venus across the Sun (as seen from Earth, Venus appears as a black dot moving across the face of the Sun). Transits of Venus are among the rarest of all predictable astronomical phenomena. There were two in the 21st century: 8 June 2004 and 6 June 2012. I captured the one in 2012. The previous transits were in 1874 and 1882 and the next transits are not until 2117 and 2125. It is likely that my children and possibly my grandchildren will not live to see those. So, very rare event and I got some photos. See separate post here.

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Telepathic Teleportation of Electric Power

Remnant, the fourth novel in my Telpher series, improves the Telpher to provide telepathic teleportation of power over long distances. In addition to teleporting a person, a mini-Telpher can teleport a superconducting electrical cable (ordinary copper cable could also be used). Two mini-Telphers are used, one at the power source and the other at a distant power consumption location. The near end of the cable is connected to the power source while the far end of the cable is inserted into the mini-Telpher at the power source (entrance Telpher). The far end of the cable is telepathically transported, appearing at the distant mini-Telpher (exit Telpher). Here’s how this would work.

How it Works

A telepath interconnects the two mini-Telphers via the fifth dimension. The two mini-Telphers join together two 3D spaces at interstellar distances (hundreds of lightyears apart). Or, they join the local spacetime of a solar power array in orbit with the local spacetime of a power receiving rectenna on the planet surface.

Source: U.S. Department of Energy

Source: European Space Agency

A useful picture is to see that the Telphers intimately cement one spacetime surface to another. Therefore, the molecules of one surface intermingle with those of the other. Or, the space of the departure location glues to the space of the destination location. This means that there is zero space between the Telphers. Two spatially separated realities become one.

Telepathic Teleportation

One way to picture telepathic teleportation through a Telpher uses the image of two rooms. Teleportation is walking through a door from one room to another. The two Telphers are the two rooms. It is important to realize that the wall between the two rooms has no thickness because it exists only in the fifth dimension. This would be the case if the “thickness” of the 5th dimension is less than the Planck scale dimensions (see my post on Telepathic Teleportation). For the Telphers the 5th dimension thickness is Planck scale. Moreover, the energy of the fifth dimension field is mental, not physical.

The traveler’s physical 3D body transforms to a thought as she passes through the field. But it’s a thought that exists concurrently in both realms, as if there were just one location, one reality. So at the distant Telpher her same 3D body exits, shifting smoothly from thought to matter. However, any object inserted into a Telpher retains its physical continuity in both of the interconnected spaces. Two Telphers establish a single reality for the object.

Teleporting an Extended Object

What would you see at the destination Telpher if you partially inserted a long object, a stick perhaps, into the departure Telpher? The answer is that you would see the end of the stick that was inserted. The other end of the stick would instantly appear at the exit Telpher. And, if you moved the stick back and forth through the entrance Telpher would you see it move at the exit Telpher. The stick would retain its original length and constitution in a continuous form. From that idea it is an easy jump to replace the pole with an electrical cable transmitting power. This would be a better way for power to travel long distances. Because the cable could be very short, eliminating losses in transmission. And saving money.

The Telpher Power Conduit is still an unrealized dream but superconducting electrical cables are here today. Over three decades of intensive research and development has led to many demonstration projects worldwide of which this project in China is one of the latest.

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New Perspectives on a Common Science Fiction Trope
by Steven Eckroad

Teleportation is now a reality—at least at the quantum level. It is information, not matter, that is teleported in the subatomic world. Science fiction sometimes invokes quantum teleportation of information to explain teleporting. The information encodes a person’s matter (e.g., for example, see the description of the Transporter in Star Trek). For my Telpher series of novels I wanted to add a little more specificity to the process and some new ideas by introducing human telepathy and the fifth dimension. The process is telepathic teleportation.

Telepathic Teleportation with the Telpher

The first thing to point out is the derivation of the name Telpher. That is, where did I get it and does it have any meaning other than the one I give it in my novels? The the web site: Real Telphers will show you pictures and descriptions of modern day telphers. They are cars that provide transportation between distant mountain tops by stringing overhead cables between the peaks.

So, the teleportation Telpher in the 24th century is a transportation device between distant locations that are otherwise hard to reach. My concept of telepathic teleportation involves a symbiosis between Machine and Human. The Machine is a device that opens a fifth dimension portal. The Human is a specially trained telepath. I gave the Machine the name Telpher (which is the title for the first book and then the series). The Telpher uses exotic energy to condense, to a quantum level, the baryonic matter of the person or thing being teleported. (Dark energy is another name for exotic energy. Baryonic matter is just the constituents of the atoms we are made of.)

The resulting quantum field in a purely 5th dimension, obeys a scaling factor of 16 orders of magnitude. That is, the energy of matter in the 5th dimension field is greater than what it is in our 4D realm by a factor of ten to the sixteenth power (the physics of this is quite reasonable – see Warped Passages by Lisa Randall). This higher energy is more than enough to efficiently encode a human being.

Role of the Fifth Dimension in Telepathic Teleportation

The 5th dimension field extends over all of four-dimension spacetime. (Think what a 3D person would see when looking at a 2D “Flatland” world. The 3D person can “see” and “travel to” all of the 2D world at once.) The 5th dimension allows timeless (instant) travel from one 4D location to another.

I built on this idea. I postulate that the 5th dimension field is essentially matter converted to mental energy, which a telepath may sense and/or manipulate. Current physics postulates that gravity is a force that exists in the 5th dimension at extremely high energy levels. Gravity “leaks” into our 4D realm at much reduced levels (see Randall, below). So, like gravity, I postulate the mental field in the 5^th dimension to extend into our 4D world, though attenuated.

The machine portion of the Telpher converts the baryonic matter of the person being teleported to 5th dimension mental energy. Then the Human Telepath interacts with the attenuated (4D) field. She forges a synergistic link with the Telpher to access the 5th dimension and direct the teleportation process. The Telepath perceives the teleported person or object as a hologram of the information stored in the 5th dimension field. She mentally directs the initial encoding and subsequent decoding of the hologram. She also establishes the interconnection between the departure and arrival locations of the traveler.

Some Physics to Support Telepathic Teleportation

In her book, Warped Passages, Harvard physicist Lisa Randall conceives a five-dimension universe with two domains, called branes. One brane, the “weak brane,” is the four-dimensional world we live on. The other brane, the “gravity brane,” lies close by in the direction of a fifth dimension (i.e., along a fourth space dimension).

Of all the known particles and fields in our 4D world Randall shows that only the graviton (the particle of gravitation) is free to move into the 5^th dimension. However, the mass (or, energy by E=mc²) of the graviton increases as it moves from the weak brane to the gravity brane. The math that describes the change in mass is renormalization. [Renormalization specifies relationships between fundamental properties (e.g., mass of graviton) in a theory when properties at large distance scales differ from properties at small distance scales.]

Scaling Factors

Randall uses a scaling factor to mathematically replace the the weak brane graviton mass with a theorized gravity brane mass. The scaling factor is 10¹⁶. The graviton’s mass (energy) on the gravity brane is 10¹⁶ times what it is on the weak brane. The scaling factor is exponential (that is, mass increase along the 5^th dimension is not linear). Randall sets the distance between the two branes (i.e., along the 5th dimension axis) over which the scaling occurs to be less than the Planck units for space (<10^-33 cm) and time (<10^-43 sec). Since space and time are not defined at Planck scale dimensions, movement of quantum particles in the Planck realm is independent of space and time.

Incidentally, the exponential scaling factor and the fact that only gravity extends into all four space dimensions explains its relative weakness compared to the other known forces. These extend into only three space dimensions. According to this the additional dimension “dilutes” gravity.

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