The Space Music of Doctor Phibes

The music of space. Been on my mind a lot recently, with the thoughts of the poor Philae lander all on its own, batteries dying on a cold and hostile comet before it fell into what seems likely to be a permanent sleep.

What sounds does Philae hear in its sleep out beyond the orbit of Mars. Has The Sandman's sister Death called on it to take it across to the "other realm".

A band that always transports me into other space dimensions is Doctor Phibes and the House of Wax Equations. You almost certainly haven't heard of them, they were a very short lived concern in the early 90s, one that if I remember right very sadly came to an end when their charismatic vocalist Howie suffered mental health problems that ended in tragedy. I saw them live only once, at the 1993 Phoenix Festival, and can vouch for out there their music was. So hypnotic.

They were much better experienced live than on record, although their one album "Whirlpool" is a psychedelic classic. Enjoy their single "Hazy Lazy Hologram" and let those echoing guitars wash over you.

Painting the New Worlds of Space

Space is just out there waiting, an undiscovered, unspoilt quantum wilderness. I’ve written before about a planet of poets, trying to poet their way to a new society and watching the crops they sowed wilt in a blight of pretentsion.

Where do artists fit in in this creative universe? Well, I figure perhaps the best place would be the asteroid belt, great grey rocks that may soon turn out to be the future prosperity of Earth as the corporations mine them out for iridium, titanium and all manner of valuable metals.

But in the meantime, they are lifeless boulders with the complexion of ashes. From the size of footballs to hundreds of kilometres across.

Ready, and waiting, for interplanetary gentrification. Enter the artists.

“Art for an Intergalactic Race” proclaimed the flyers in every city. “One Small Step for a Man, a Giant Leap for Human Culture” was emblazoned on giant banners over the motorways/freeways/interstrada. “Leave Your Mark on God’s Creation” was painted down the side of a skyscraper in Salt Lake City. Applicants were required to do nothing more than proclaim their fitness, after all, there were plenty of asteroids to go round…

Every artist is given a small spaceship and a very large supply of paint, special paint that can coat with thick colour in layers only a molecule thick. The spaceships are on preprogrammed autopilot so all the artists have to do is eat their freeze-dried space food and urinate into a rubber hose. It is a very boring voyage, and all the artists have to do is talk to twelve other artists of their choice. All these thirteen way conversations are beamed back to Earth to be broadcast on very very earnest radio stations in the dead of night, listened to by no-one but a few insomniacs and deranged cultural commentators.

Eventually each spacecraft arrives at its randomly allocated asteroid, and every artist disembarks to begin their project under a glittering hail of stars. All wear spacesuits part from the Japense conceptualist Umagi who walks out of his spaceship naked and allows his decompressing intestines to form a ribbon around a minor planet the size of a house.

“Is he encompassing the asteroid, or is the asteroid encompassing him?” was the debate back on earth.

Other artists went for entire coatings of one colour, including one who claimed to have used transparent paint. One had taken along some of Rothko’s ashes, and used two colours before he realised he had hung the asteroid upside down. Abstract space squiggles - very tedious and predictable - decorated others, while another carved out the huge asteroid Vesta into the likeness of female genitals and coloured them in crimson reflective paint. He thought he was celebrating womanhood on an unprecedented scale. Most said he was a sad exploitative old man.

Asteroids ended up as moon sized pastoral scenes, fluffy clouds above fluffy sheep, green fields on a bedrock of scheiss and silicate. Thee are impressionist asteroids, expressionist asteroids, and a descendant of Duchamp urinated on the surface of one and said that asteroid was now both a urinal AND a work of art.

The urine froze into yellow space crystals before it hit the ground.

Asteroids were red, asteroids were blue, asteroids were Mondrians, others were Koons.

The asteroid that eventually caused a mass extinction on Earth was a Vettriano...retro dancers on the beach wiped out all life, as others had previously thought Vettriano had wiped out at.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26.07.14

The Unquiet Mind in the Universe

I'm not right in the head today.

I'm full of tics, twitches and glitches. Feel very uneasy.

I can get down on it sometimes, he thought of heading back into an awful job, and all that stuff. Modern day George Orwell in the workplace of dead souls.

And then you try and "think of the positives" to use an awful cliche. But there are some...the anxious mind, the Tourette's  mind, is one that is closesly tuned to the movement of the universe.

Every twitch, every judder, every flip thought of panicky thought, is the mind picking up a neutrino, or a graviton, or a Higgs boson. A major attack of tics is the intersection of the rippled, uneven edges of two universes within the eleventh dimension, causing all the n-s and p-s and superstrings to vibrate.

A major convulsive Tourette attack with yelling and raging, is a more substantial universe collision, resulting in a big bang somewhere in the multiverse.

Astronomers listen! Put way your expensive detectors and enormous tanks of dry cleaning fluid deep underground. Turn off your LHC. Just use your eyes.

And look at me.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 25/07/14

The Intricacies of Multi-Dimensional Yoga

Just down the road from me is a yoga studio, yes that’ll be the place, another of those middle class emporia of spirituality, an overheated pine floored sweat box, where people get convo-knotted while things happen with their chakras.

All the lazy cliches any jealous, stiff as a board writer might fingerspit on to his keyboard as he feels his back begin to ache yet again, the fool. Yet, I always feel a faint contempt, spritzered with a splash of envy as I cycle past the yogistas every Thursday, either arriving or leaving, purple and green mats rolled up in a professional manner, leggings on the women, loose Boris Becker type shorts on the the men.

And yes, the cliche spits out again, there is more than a whiff of “the organic” about most of them.

The thing that amazes me is the number of them. Not that there’s many people interested in yoga in this town, but that they can all fit into the tiny end terraced house the studio is located in. It really is small, it must be like a yoga tardis up there to have so many people doing sun salutations in a two up two down.

This led me to wonder - perhaps the studio isn’t extra dimensional, but the yoga practitioners are.

Imagine, when doing your bow position, or dying dog, or cervix of the moon (half or full), in a crowded studio full of sweat trained buttock leggings shoved into your face, how much more comfortable it would be if you could alter your quantum state to actually move your ankles through your things, or sink your head back right into your back. Do the standing splits and pull your calf through your head, and that of the ripe old hippy next to you.

As well as alteration of quantum state, utilising my beloved eleventh dimension would enable more yoga folk to fill the space, than there is actual three dimensional space. But in order to maintain the eleventh dimensional bubble, they have to carry out ultra low frequency Hindu chants that warp space time and cause earthquakes on the far side of the world.

Sometimes the yoga carried out is of such intensity, the dimensional bubble opens up completely into the brane dimension, and the yogis can communicate with other alien contortionists...invertebrates who can fold up their 256, light year long tentacles into a the nucleus of an atom, insectoids who carry universes instead of wings within their shells and thus cause a big bang every time they do a cobra position.

There are even universes where Lycra itself is a highly developed life form.

No wonder the yogani look so contented when they come out of their tiny studio, mats dripping. While I scoff, their spiritual antics have indeed taken them to a higher plane of existence.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20.07.14

Gamma Ray Burst Creatures

At the time of writing, it seems the Gamma Ray Burst “observed” in the Andromeda Galaxy may be some kind of instrumentation artefact, but no matter.

It doesn’t change a thing.

There are creatures that live near black holes, neutron stars and other potential sources of super high energy gamma rays. They are intelligent yet tenuous, a loose collection of exotic particles with nervous systems based on the scintillations produced by hydrogen atoms emitting energy in transitions high above the Paschen and the Pfund. Their brains exist in the Plank fluctuations, and they “see” by registering energy transitions caused by these energy transitions I describe.

They enjoy nothing more than to observe the beauty of the hyper high energy universe, to us, I suppose it would seem as if existence was coloured in brilliant silver and glittering purple-violet.

Every time there is a cataclysmic event like a gamma ray burst, the tremendously energies cause these contemplative creatures to begin to sail the gamma breezes out into intergalactic space, communicating their happiness at motion to all their kind.

Each of these creatures, a hundred kilometres across or more, is encoded to breed by budding off in the 7^th dimension and so we don’t encounter their off spring for a thousand years or more, as they gradually drop back through the dimensions into our space.

This is just as well, because sadly, though these beautiful creatures mean us no harm, and would be highly distressed to think that they were, every time they encounter a planet of sentient life forms, as aetherially as ghosts, their Plank energies cause terrible damage to living beings. It causes the nervous system to spasm, causing Tourette’s and other worldly analogues in some creatures, but death in others.

Who it happens to is a matter of pure chance, as by a lucky quirk their Plank fluctuations are only in phase with living matter on rare occasions. But when it happens, it can be devastating.

 

And every time we observe a gamma ray burst, they are passing through something. And someone. On our world.

Copyright Simon Hodgson / Bloody Mulberry 28.05.14

Poets in Space

Is there a use for poetry in space?

Can the language of apogee, perigee, declination, right ascension, thrust vectors, newtonian mechanics and lagrangian points harbour those for whom words are a means to an artistic end? And not a means of requesting more oxygen be let into somewhere from a valve to ensure the survival of pocket humanity against the vast all but emptiness of space.

Space loves capital punishment, and is the harshest of hanging judges. Who can need beautiful wordsmiths where a single mistake of prosaic human or engineering frailty results in certain death.

Everything is checklist, double checklist, instruction manual and zero gravity suction lavatory. The incredible Commander Hadfield took beautiful photographs and sang a little Bowie, but if he had started declaiming Homer while bowing on a lyre, his fellow astronauts would have bundled him out of the airlock faster than you can say “tin can”.

Yet, when humanity does colonise the stars and planets, the arts will have to play a part. A society will surely go mad without them, without an outlet to perform and express. The all encompassing sterility of space must have an antidote; steel domes and plastic furniture won't be enough.

And so, in addition to the square jawed heroes, science nerds, brilliant women, engineers, doctors and folk who's hair looks good in zero gravity, so there will need to stained trouser artists, dusty sculptors, and lank haired writers in tweed jackets with elbow patches. And the poets, space berets and polo necks, astro beatniks, will have to go to.

It seems strange to think of it, but it is true. Mars needs poets.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 05.04.14

The Mars One Project (Murder on a new World)

News report today; a local news report on a very slow local news day. Amid endless film of flooding, and anticipation of a football match I care not a jot about, was a feature about a local fellow who has made it to the last 1000 potential candidates for the Mars One mission.

Mars One Homepage 

Mars One is no ordinary space mission. Unlike the Apollo moonshots, where JFK stressed the importance of the “Bringing them safely back to earth” bit, Mars One isn't selling return tickets.

It is a one way mission.

Now, they aren't planning to crash the astronauts onto the surface of Mars, although I have to say that my first thoughts were of a modern day Golgafrinchan B Ark designed to remove Earth's cretins from the gene pool in an imaginative fashion. They are going to give them everything they need, carrying out initial construction of a habitation using unmanned robot vehicles, before launching a human crew to their new world, with no probability of return.

Two years later, after the initial crew has successfully got the colony up and running, and expanded it sufficiently, a supply rocket arrives with more colonists aboard – think “Shipwrecked – the Rivals” from Channel 4 – and so on.

Eventually a fully fledged colony is up and running, that might perhaps get on with serious work like rare mineral mining, or perhaps terraforming.

The “Shipwrecked” analogy is an apposite one, because Mars One doesn't have any large scale financial backing. The enormous costs for the mission will be met through TV Advertising, because as much as a space mission, Mars One is a reality TV show. The 8 month voyage, the colonisation, the forever of it, is a celestial Trueman Show. And who should be surprised, for Mars One is a Dutch project, the nation that brought you “Big Brother”.

It may sound crazy on the surface of it, but there is an impression out there that sooner or later, the only way we are going to make these great leap forwards into interplanetary or interplanetary space is through one way missions. But surely by highly trained, highly psychologically assessed professional astronauts initially, not tabloid friendly prone to breakdown backstoried cuties – and financial pressures will mean it will end up that way. No-one is going to watch 24 or so REAAALLLLLY BOOORING people sit on their backsides in a space capsule for 8 months, before eternity in a series of what will essentially be Martian space sheds, each one sod all bigger than the Diary Room. Nope, there's got to be hotties, and there's got to be stories.

To be honest, they may not have to try very hard. The pressures on the crew will be immense – the boredom, the lack of privacy, the fact that there will never be a way home or no way to see families again. There will be suicides. There will be a guy who's habit of drumming his fingers on his chair, or farting, or constantly clearing his throat, will cause knuckles to whiten. There will be arguments...fights...

There will be sexual tension too. Imagine being the guy on the mission that no girl – or guy – fancies. The guy – or girl – you hate is the one who is getting the action. Imagine them in bed, having sex in the most filthy, sweaty way, low gravity orgasms, blood swelling engorged organs...and nowhere to go to escape it.

It would be too much to bear.

The certainty is that the first manned reality mission to Mars, would result in the first murder on another planet. Someone would get it, a space shower head cracked over a skull, strangulation with coolant cable. A geological axe through the spinal column, suffocation in a space helmet.

Someone will get it. And if no-one gets it, no-one will watch any more. And when that happens, no more revenue. And all the astronauts die anyway, as they run out of money for supply rockets and communication systems, and Mars' first colony becomes a futuristically materialled tomb.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 10.01.14

Terror of the Evaporation Chamber

Back in the day, the very late 70s or perhaps the early 80s, there was a time when children were actually catered to in the daytime schedules on BBC1.

At Christmas, Easter, and most excitingly in the long summer holiday, children's TV was shown in the early morning AS WELL AS in the afternoon by the Beeb. It was superior stuff too, because instead of the childish Play School, and to me the earnest, boring and tedious Jackanory and Blue Peter, you got action!

By action, I mean staples like Champion the Wonder Horse (“like a something something arrow from a bow”) - in which use of the dog Rebel was the most interesting thing to me – and Eastern European seeming stories like “Down on the Danube Delta”, “Silas”, ummm, the one with the cities at war; where all the children were dubbed into posh prep school, and all adults were as gruff as Tommy Vance after a Fisherman's Friend. Heidi was also doing the rounds at this time, but I dismissed that as far too girly and cissy.

The big treat however, for a young boy who thanks to an eccentric sea captain from Scotland was already a massive space fan, was a showing of Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars. I think I was possibly staying with my grandparents near Sellafield (true!) when the 15 or so 20 minute episodes from the 30s were shown in morning matinee fashion, with the voiceovered cliffhanger at the end.

I don't really remember the storyline of this at all, but the penile rocket ships with the drone of a World War 1 aircraft and a sparkler for an engine were present and correct. So was Ming, Dale, Aura, Barin, and I think the Hawkmen too. There might have been sort of “clay men” living in underground caves too. The presiding Flash was Olympic swimming gold medalist Buster Crabbe with his immaculately stylish hair.

For a children's show, there was something quite horrendous thrown in. 1930s torture porn in a sci fi sense. This was seen in the shape of the terrifying “Evaporation Chamber” where Flash, Barin and Co found themselves thrown in more than once for Ming's pleasure.

What was evaporating about it, I'm still not clear about. It resembled a sort of electrical playroom which General Pinochet's secret police would have had massive wet dreams over. Huge Tesla coils crackled and spat bolts of electricity between their arcs, and these conical devices shot showers of sparks over our writhing heroes.

Whatever the evaporation was, it was clearly very painful and I certainly didn't want it happening to me. I had nightmares about it a few times, and I was always afraid that I'd go into a big shop and find those big Tesla Coils waiting for me.

These big shops were already scary enough to a child. They had those slowly moving cameras that looked like Death Star Imperial pain droids. Brrrrrrrrr....

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 27.12.13

A Mind Full of Spaceships

My mind was always full of spaceships. To contradict Arcade Fire, it was always a place where all spaceships went.

My mind first became full of spaceships aged about 5 or 6 at infants school. Buck Rogers had appeared on television, and I was thrilled with those wonderful twin pronged starfighters with their exciting double fin at the back that I could never draw at the right angle. Meanwhile, my parents met for the first time, and my now stepfather played me Jeff Wayne’s “War of the Worlds” through headphones to keep me out of the way while he made dinner for my mum.

I thought it was the most exciting thing I’d ever heard.

After that, although I couldn’t draw for toffee, let alone a curly wurly from the swimming pool sweet machine, any piece of paper I could find was filled with crudely drawn Martian tripods destroying everything. Meanwhile Buck flew overhead lasering unidentified craft out of the universe.

The Blakes 7 “Liberator” cruised through deep space, the “ball” at the back always drawn with green felt tip.

My head was then filled with technical specs for spaceships that were either taken from television, or real life, so that a Gemini capsule from the 60s could be spiced up with guns and an engine capable of “Standard by 9”. Salyut 6 acted as a base for a cast of heroic space fighters, who piloted their Firefox craft from a sort of spoked wheel arrangement of docking hubs around the Soviet era space station.

Rival and incompatible technologies were conflated together and I told endless mental stories about the whole thing. I still do, although the characters have long since been transplanted into a 50s retro tech environment flying early jets like the Meteor, Vampire and the Messerschmitt 262. My heroes also spend rather less time being threatened with the tesla-coil filled “Evaporation Chamber” from Buster Crabbe era Flash Gordon, a fate that to my childhood mind was the grimmest imaginable.

I wish my mind was still full of spaceships, and the desire to draw them, no matter how badly. But, the Tourette brain grows older, and it becomes full of the far less exciting, but far more terrible, trials of modern life.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 25/10/2013

The Beauty of Soviet Space Art

Beautiful? That is a very strange way of speaking of Soviet Art. You normally associate words like "utilitarian" or perhaps "propagandist" about the imagery of the Soviet Union; it is after all designed to unite and uplift the masses, and get the manufacture of tractor parts and beetroot production in line with the latest five year plan. Or something.

The fact is it is far more beautiful than that.

Yes, it serves a purpose. It shows the superiority of the Soviet Union over the rest of the world; it shows the superiority of the men, women and even dogs of that nation. These are heroic figures, in heroic poses, who are somehow still portrayed as doing their all for the Motherland and not themselves. But the colours are vivid and lush, the retro space technology something to drool over, and the art itself is far less bombastic than other forms of Soviet propaganda with its giant Lenins and Peasants of Progress.

There is a tremendous feeling of exploration, and of pushing back frontiers. There is the blackness of space, and these people and vehicles bringing life, light and colour to it. I think it is wonderful.

A general piece of Soviet Space Programme promotion

The heroic, and tragic, Laika aboard Sputnik 2

The all time hero Gargarin of Vostok 1 commemorated

Still an all time heroine in Russia, Valentina Tereshkova

Soyuz 10 mission badge

My all time favourite: Soyuz 18 mission badge

The late 70s - Soyuz 26 / Salyut 6 stamp

Mention must also be made of the great Soviet cosmonaut artist Alexei Leonov. He made the first walk in space aboard Voskhod 2, showing considerable presence of mind to save his life in the process. He made many paintings of space subjects, including the one below, "Near the Moon", which inspired the famous shot from 2001 A Space Odyssey, although Kubrick made it vertical for aesthetic reasons.

Cosmonaut Leonov's "Near the Moon", inspiration for 2001

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 23/10/2013

A Journey to Andromeda...

I've been imagining a fascinating experiment in human psychology.

Endurace type events have always been an obesession of mine. Long distance running. Cycling. Nordic Skiing. The idea of walking the entire coastline of Britain, waterproof clad, relishing the rain.

So, watching a cosmological Horizon on BBC4, a programme going boldly to the outer edges of my knowledge - about a five second jouney - I was inspired to imagine another such voyage.

A journey from here to the Andromeda galaxy, 2.25 million light years away. I'm making assumptions like no one has assumed before here; that perhaps the people at the British Interplanetary Society can come up with a working design that would get us there within, say, ten million years or so, that ayone would want to make such a journey, and that they could survive it.

Allocate those a variable, x,y and z. Matrix them, forget about them. It can be done. I want to put someone in a spaceship, alive and conscious the whole time, for ten million years. Face fixed forwards perhaps, contemplating the doppler shifted stars at insane velocities, Plato's cave in space.

Could you stand it, fed and watered, somehow entertained, for ten million years. If the sanest person on Earth started the journey, how far beyond the bounds of madness would they have reached after a mere ten years? Suicide could not be allowed to be an option, so restraint and feeding tubes may have to be employed. Would the brain evolve into a new lifeform in its own right? Would it discard the body, would the body discard the brain?

Would the endless dark of intergalactic space be enough to drive you mad without everything else.

If anyone could do it, I envy them. Life isn't long enough to take in these feats, and that makes me sad. I doubt I'll be around to confirm extraterrestrial intelligent life exists, and that makes me sad too.

Doctor Manhattan says it best. When we die, the Universe doesn't even notice.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26/09/2013

Bioshpere 2 and Mars One - the Daydream Lives On

I remember very many years ago, when I was still just about at school, I remember one of the science programmes of the time – Horizon or Tomorrow's World probably – featuring the commencement of the Biosphere 2 first mission. It seemed so attractive, 6 or 7 people sealed into an enormous laboratory with fields for growing crops, various other biomes like rainforest and desert. and most attractively, a big pseudo-ocean filled with fish that you could swim in. The whole thing reminded me of Douglas Trumbull's “Silent Running” movie, one of my favourites.

The whole point was that it was supposed to be a closed circuit environment – nothing in or out, the “bionauts” having to survive with nothing other than what they could grow themselves.

And so initially they starved. And I remember there being stories about the supposedly sealed environment letting in bacteria and air from the outside, and the whole thing wasn't really self sustaining anyway as a lot of the food was planted before the Biosphere was sealed. In the days when to most people the World Wide Web didn't really exist, and for those that did - like me in my first year at university – it was used mainly for playing MUDs based in California. Therefore you couldn't really follow the project like you could do now.

There was a second mission, but apparently this dissolved in acrimony after management takeovers and an attempt by members of the first mission to break in.

Sad. It all seemed so idyllic on Horizon, the image of a guy swimming in “the ocean” has always remained with me. It seemed like such a cool thing to do, the dismal reality of ant takeover and falling oxygen levels never registering on my radar. It seemed like practice for a really long space mission, and indeed since then various other experiments, with greater success, have run along these lines to see if a Martian mission is possible without everyone going mad and stabbing each other.

Of course, if you want, you can try and take part in the Mars One reality show mission, where various lucky folk will be sent to spend the rest of their lives on Mars in capsules about the size of a caravan stood on end, by the looks of things. And all this while having your decaying psychological state being observed by Big Brother type fans 24 hours a day!

On the other hand, this is how our colonisation of the solar system will eventually have to start, it's just not cost or resource effective to send people that far with a plan to bring them back. But imagine having the fact that you are the only person on the mission who is so ugly they can't get a partner.

I think the first space murder investigation will be on the cards.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 15/09/2013

CONCEPT - The Multi Eyed Organic Telescope

We have telescopes, optical and otherwise, that massively multiply the aperture of the individual telescopes concerned by combining their light slash information, into one focal point, or place.

Probably the original design of this type was the Multiple Mirror Telescope in Arizona, where 6 1.8 metre mirrors operated in combination to produce the light gathering capacity of a 4.5 metre one, in a revolutionary design like a football, on an altazimuth mount.

The Multiple Mirror Telescope

The concept was used in radio astronomy, such as the Very Large Array, where it resulted in a radio telescope with an effective diameter of 27 miles or so.

The Very Large Array

So, as I patrolled the racking in my workplace, letting my brain escape from the confines of the stifling warehouse, and uncomfortable polyester uniform, I thought of replicating a similar instrument, but with the human eye...

What would you see, I wondered, if you were to somehow network every pair of fully operational eyes on the planet, and get them to all look at the same thing in the sky? Collating the information at a single nexus  - presumably done by scientists with non networked eyes, because that would get freaky - what would be the result. If you got half a billion eyes to look up at the Andromeda galaxy, would you get a superior result from one pair of eyes looking alone? 

And then, on a smaller scale, get a hundred folk to stand round a statue and look at it, to get a really good three dimensional image of it? If lots of people look at a fly, would you see it in great detail?

Or really, is this just an excuse to come out with a fantastic way of giving everyone the mega-willies? People walking around with 3g slats in the backs of their heads, wifi ariels installed in their spleens...non-concensual installation of eyeball CCDs on people's retinas as they beg for mercy?

The Anti-Carbon Ghosts of Warminster

This is not a post about inhabitants of the spirit world who have an inexplicable hatred of element number 6 in the Periodic Table, but rather, it is based on a conversation I had with a strange man from Warminster I met last week.

He was an elderly fellow, just about turned 70 give or take, but his hair was only lightly streaked with grey and his face relatively young looking, but he walked with a stick and his eyes were such a pale blue I thought initially he had cataracts.

Anyway, we were sat waiting in the Betjeman at St Pancras station, and talk turned to his Wiltshire hometown. Warminster has long been famous as a strange sort of place, and in 1964-1965 had been the home of the Warminster "Thing"  - a bizarre series of UFO sightings and strange  happenings - men in balaclavas wandering country roads late at night, that sort of thing. Anyway he told me of what was really going on, as we both drank JD and cokes while waiting for a delayed Brighton train.

It wasn't Aliens. It was far stranger than that.

Apparently, Warminster is historically located around various nexuses (nexi?) of ley lines. This old guy - a former maths professor -  believed rather than being rooted in organic hippy dippy lore, the ley lines are dimensional rifts, less than a quark in width, that are so narrow they don't normally affect our space time.

However, at Warminster, at a hub where several of these rifts intersected, there is a larger interdimensional intersect, where matter from dimensions 8 and 11 is able to find its way into our universe. The stuff from the 8th Dimension is an irrelevant mess of random open superstrings that don't correspond to any of our standard theory particles, and thus don't interact a whole lot of bugger all with anything.

But the 11th dimensional matter is different (He explained to me over another drink)  - it's anti matter carbon, atomic number -6, valency 4(1+i). To put it simply, as he was eventually able to after a fifth drink as rain shorted out the rails, it's ghost carbon. Reverse carbon. Graphite hard as diamond, diamond you could write with.

A carbon that in our world has negative mass, yet thanks to the positron complex root 1 valency, it can actually covalent bond with our hydrogen. And its low energy state means it can substitute out native carbon atoms from the organic chemicals found in such things as...living matter.

This was a lot to take in. He himself didn't believe it until he saw the effects on night in Warminster in 1965, where a farmer, his two sons and flock of sheep suddenly glowed black, and vanished from the field in which they were working. Three days later they re-appeared, the sheep unshorn, and the farmer wild with tales of "some other place" he had visited that he could not describe, but was wonderful.

He was sedated and locked in a padded cell, from which he disappeared three weeks later, this time permanently. 167 pupils and 9 teachers were sucked out of a Warminster primary school the next month, and neer seen again apart from eerie imprints certain short sighted people could see, ghosts on the landscape, apparently smiling, but as insubstantial as the wind.

And it wasn't just organic forms disappearing from our world. We had visitors from the 11th dimension too, velvet soft trees you couldn't see, but you could bump into, and climb, before their trunks swept back into the dimensional rift from which they came.

Clouds came too, from worlds as indescribable as love, and it was these, sailing high in the sky, inverse-gravity lensing their background, that were mistaken for UFOs. And it were MOD spooks, confused but excited by the goings on, that were running around on Norton motorcycles in black in the middle of the night, chasing the shadow people that had fallen foul of the leaking ghost-carbon as they flitted between states of being no one had ever been able to comprehend.

And as he told me this, the fellow's eyes twinkled, and I wondered if he had been one of the chasers, or one of those sprites that could flit between our world and the eleventh. And as I looked into those odd eyes of his, I barely noticed his hand pass straight through his own glass, before it picked mine up. And then as his hand reformed, it seemed, that glass of his shattered, and began to bleed pure molten silicon while his own flesh was whitely untouched.

And then, after draining my drink, he winked and left the bar, heading in entirely the opposite direction from where the Brighton train was shceduled to leave, if indeed it ever arrived.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 17/08/13

The Television of the Apocalypse

Watching films like "Deep Impact", where humanity is looking directly into the dark abyss of extinction, always makes me wonder.

Aside from solemn Presidential broadcasts telling us to keep our faith in God as humanity prepares to be squashed flat by an asteroid God himself could have stopped if He so chose, what is on television or the radio when the event occurs?

I'm sure plenty of people would just swarm out of their houses and choke the roads heading for the high ground while continuously screaming, but plenty of folk, perhaps the older ones without young familes facing immolation, would stay home. Surely caring, sharing governments (ha) with advance warning of the earth's destruction, would arrange for there to be media to entertain us in humanity's death throes?

No doubt, religious programming would take up a fair amount of scheduling; can you imagine the number of death bed conversions the various deities would be dealing with as firebrand preachers sounded their joy at the last trump being sounded at last?

Other programming would be more contemplative; gentle pastoral sounds on classical radio, scenes of cloud and sea on television, perhaps overlayed with a ticker of dedications to friends and families scrolling along the bottom, a veritable requiem of tweets as the St Matthew Passion gently poured from the speakers.

Perhaps some channels would just think "fuck it" and decide to broadcast the dirtiest pornography imaginable, figuring no-one would be bothered about hairy palmed deviant onanists as the sun set on life itself forever. No doubt ITV2 and BBC3 would broadcast the usual "100 Worst" type clips or rolling film of Del Boy Trotter falling through the bar to give mankind a smile on its face as it met icy cometary death from above.

Or, as is so common in our current age, would people decided to watch rolling news coverage of Armageddon? I'm thinking they would. Even in the darkest hours, there would be plenty of broadcasters willing set their egos above their families and the prospect of death, and see who could get the highest ratings - and who could go on the longest as the oceans boiled and lava sprayed from the fractured crust onto the sweet land of ours. And no doubt, folk would want to see how long they could go on watching. I know I would, if I was watching.

But I wouldn't be. I'd be outside, with a rum and coke and Radio 4, waiting with joy for the hammer blow from space. God bless it, and all it would bring.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 10/08/2013

CONCEPTS - More thoughts on super fast space travel

I spend a lot of time travelling through space (inner) considering methods of travelling through space (outer).

I was reading about relativistic jets, the beams of energetic particles emitted from the poles of objects like neutron stars and the supermassive black-holes found at the centre of galaxies - the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 has a particularly fine example.

Consisting of streams of electron-positron or electron-ion matter marshalled into energetic jets by tightening magnetic fields around a black-hole's accretion disc, or by frame-dragging, a "way out there" phenomenon associated with super massive objects sitting in space time.

These jets move at anything up to tiny fraction below the speed of light, and so it occurred to me, you could out a craft in these jets, suitably heavily shielded against the tremendous energies and ration involved, and surf the jet to a phenomenol speed in a guaranteed constant direction. In my notebook, I even drew a picture of this thing happening! As a three year old physicist would.

The other idea I threw into the space above my head, was a craft employing a generator that projected a major stream of Higgs Particles at a point in space, to generate a super massive singularity ahead of it in space-time. The craft can then fall towards it's self created gravity well, and when sufficient acceleration is gained, it can then project the stream to a further point to keep its momentum up.

Yep, this probably violates every newtonian law of motion under the sun, but this isn't newtonian space! And in my space, perhaps these things can work!

CONCEPT - Sailing the interstellar wind

I was in a reflective mood the last couple of days, so I day dreamed myself out of the solar system, and set myself adrift on the winds of deep space; a silent lonely drift, but a perfectly peaceful one where you could enjoy the beautiful universe undisturbed for all eternity.

It is the case that as I write, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are in the process of crossing the Heliopause, the point at which the solar wind is overcome by the prevailing forces produced by the the stars and cosmic rays. Although arguments continue as to what degree if at all the craft have finally crossed it, this is regarded as the edge of the solar system, the beginning of deep, endless space.

And how would I like to explore it.

Of course, I cannot, but I dreamed up a vehicle that could. It would perhaps launch and journey outward like a Voyager, designed to produce high end science of whichever solar system bodies it encounters, and powered by an ion drive for long term thrust.

But as it crossed the Heliopause, marked by a change in "wind" direction and an increase in galactic cosmic rays, the nature of the craft would change. A set of gigantic, charged particle sensitive sails would emerge, thrust would be turned off, and the craft would use the gentle thrust of the prevailing radiation to sail down stream, out into interstellar space. It would feature a longer lasting nucelar power source than the Voyagers, enabling a more powerful transmitter to be used, enabling earth to remain in contact longer with the craft and perhaps the sails could be used to harness the power of cosmic rays and the solar wind to provide a little extra power.

And on and on, until the end of time, shall the interstellar ship sail upon the galactic trade winds, perhaps with my ashes upon it. Who knows?

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 28/04/13

CONCEPT - The Solar Lighthouse

I was in a mood for thinking today, and as I sat scrawling in green biro in my notebook - like Kingsley Amis' demonic LS Caton - a few interesting ideas came to me as I stared at my fruity tea bag leaking bits like a demonstration of entropy.

Question; assuming we decide that the risk of  "How to serve man" or rampaging martian tripod scenarios is low enough, how do we signal our existence to whatever lifeforms on Goldilocks zone planets there might be?

We can send space probes with cutesy drawings or gramaphone records on - bad luck if our aliens have reached the mp3 stage like we have - or we can wait for our radio and tv signals to leak out into space far enough, by which time they would be so weak as to be incomprehensible.

OR you could make our solar system into a lighthouse.

I figured, as I sat scrawling over my sievable cherry and vanilla tea, that you could costruct an enormous reflective surface, or perhaps rather a flexible array of many many mirrors, or even nano-reflectors (I'm not a scientist!). This orbits the sun in such a way that the sun is at the focus of the reflector, and thus its light can be beamed in selected directions. Perhaps a form of lensing could be added to intensify the light, I have no idea.

It would be perhaps best to site the array out above the north or south solar pole to avoid interfering with our sleeping rhythms and is out of the reach of most asteroids.

So yes, initially I thought this would be a method of sending powerful morse type signals to selected targets. You move the array around as required, and then control the signal by changing the alignment of the individual reflecting surfaces so at times they are perpendicular, essentially, to the sun's light. But then I also thought you could use it for perhaps lighting and warming selected solar system bodies, perhaps as part of a terraforming process.

Anything else? Well, it could provide impetus for a solar-sail powered craft. It could even, perhaps, deflect asteroids away from the earth by the phenomenon of radiation pressure. It cant be that much more far fetched than painting half of such an asteroid white to save humanity.

It might also be totally pointless, an impossible to construct folly borne of idle thought by a writer with a wonky cuppa. But I love thinking these things up! And (I hope) bigger cranks than me have changed the course of our existence...

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26/04/2013

Playing Tennis on the Moon

I've been having the most vivid dreams as of late, often rather nightmarish, often downright strange, but last night's was pure fun for a change.

For some reason, to commemorate the London 2012 Olympics, the LOCOG people were inviting people to go to an olympics base on the moon for £20. You had to wear black tie for some reason, and of the journey itself, I remembered nothing because "the human mind could not comprehend it." The lunar base itself had no windows - perhaps it was all a Capricorn One type illusion - and was all metallic inside.

I played a game of tennis with a lunar resident, a long legged female tennis player, and despite the low gravity, the game was dead slow, with the tennis balls barely bouncing. I could barely hit the ball over the net. Recognising this disaster, I was invited to play Moon Pool, which involved a triangular table, with holes around the pointy end rather reminiscent of bar billiards. Hanging over the table was a basket ball net, under which was a netting bag filled with fruit and mushrooms. This, apparently, was for "Fruit Basketball".

Fruit Basketball!!! Shades of Zig and Zag.

This has got me wondering however. We are constantly reminded how astronauts on long missions must constantly exercise in order to maintain musculo-skeletal integrity and vascular performance; to this end they spend hours a day in space on boring looking treadmills and similar devices. I remember Skylab had a primitive sort of hand cycling device.

This is just not going to be stimulating enough in the long run - the long mission astronauts of the future will want to play more competitive sports. I figured some sort of variant of squash or handball would be a possible option - doesn't require a huge amount of space, and would probably be enhanced by playing in a weightless situation. Badminton's a non starter, so is volleyball, but no doubt it would still be a spectacular sport for the naturist astronauts of the future. Darts would be cool in zero g, but not very strenuous, and hey, watch those windows and vital systems.

Perhaps you could play ping pong, but in a sort of square tunnel with a net all the way round. That might just work!

Danny Boyle's Sunshine

Sunshine has always been one of my favourite films, yet Danny Boyle was so put off by the response it got he announced he was never going to touch the sci fi genre again, and Prof (Then Doctor) Brian Cox who worked as a science advisor on the film before his current TV omniescence jokes about what a complete box office disaster it was.

I can't understand why, and yet I can understand why.

The film itself suffers from an attack of schizophrenia about 2/3 of the way through. Prior to that it had been a work of hard sci fi, with lots of lovingly constrcuted shots of technologically non far fetched spacecraft heading towards a vivid, beautiful and active sun; a sun that acts as a major character in the film, a sun that causes some of our intrepid group of scientists and astronauts to undergo a kind of solar psychosis.

Then the Icarus 2, the spacecraft on a vital mission to save humanity by launching a manhattan sized nucelar device into a faltering sun, docks with its predecessor, and the film lurches awakwardly into slasher mode - Mark Strong with a growly voice and a bad case of psoriasis rampages around with vibrating knives and an artistic sense of how to pose murdered botanists. You never see the maniac in any other than a hyperactive blurred fashion, which I always assume was done to hide dodgy make up work. It really doesn't work as horror or science fiction, and this combined with its hard sci fi credentials ensured its box office doom.

Yet there is so much to enjoy about the film, I'd happily watch it again and again - this piece is prompted by two viewings last night. The cast, including Boyle's favourite actor of the period Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans and Hiryoki Sanada, is great; the music by John Murphy and Underworlde is stunning; and finally the celstial spectacle mindblowing with a huge sun burning its way into the minds of the characters and the viewers and a simple, affecting scene of the crew watching a transit of Mercury that has become one of my favourite shots in cinema.

I'd recommend this film for late night viewing with a strong rum and coke - turn the lights out, and the sound up, and let its beauty wash all over you.