A speculative mind

Some months ago I talked about play writing. Time for a revisit: You don’t have to be a playwright to write plays. You don’t have to be a novelist to write stories either. You can just write for the fun of it. Play writing is like any other kind of story telling except that almost all of the story is told through dialogue. The first play I ever wrote was in junior High School. My friend and I co-wrote a play call “Revenge of the Ant-men”. It was just as good as you might expect could be produced from a couple of eighth-graders goofing off in an Art class (sorry Mrs. McKinley, wherever you are. I have no idea what it was we were supposed to be doing.) But we had a great time writing it, and laughed ourselves silly as we read it back to ourselves. You can write a play for fun, just like you can write a short story for fun. You might not ever see your play on Broadway, but you may get a chance to see it performed by a local community theater group. I encourage this. A play i...

“You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon .” I know it is not what Pink Floyd was saying with this lyric from “Shine On you Crazy Diamond”, but something about it makes me think of the Apollo One disaster. America was trying to win the space race and perhaps pushed too hard and tried to do too much too soon, which resulted in three astronauts dead in their capsule. It reminded me that sometimes we push the boundaries of science too hard. It is apparently human nature to try to do something as soon as we are able. History is full of examples of someone doing something just because they can, before considering all the ramifications. The most recent example is the Chinese scientist who claims to have created the first genetically edited baby by using Crispr. We don’t know if he actually did it or not, that is yet to be proven. Even if he didn’t, it is probably only a matter of time until someone does. The problem is, we are nowhere near understanding all o...

Science fiction writers, almost by definition, love science. Yet, ironically, they don’t seem to mind violating it. This happens with time travel, which is the main theme of many a good sci-fi tale. Yet scientists tell us unanimously that time travel (at least going backwards in time) is impossible. That doesn’t stop the author who wants to send his/her character back in time to watch the signing of the Magna Carta.   Similarly, science fiction authors can’t resist sending space ships out with faster-than-light drives (FTL). This makes sense. If you don’t have a faster-than-light drive, you are pretty much confined to our own solar system. Authors don’t like to be fettered as such. But that pesky Mr. Einstein gave us the laws of relativity, and over the last hundred years, no one has been able to prove Einstein wrong. Star Wars and Star Trek would have gone nowhere (literally) without FTL. The entire series of Battlestar Galactica would have taken place on Caprica where, ...