Humans are Weird - Crow

Original Post: http://www.authorbettyadams.com/bettys-blog/humans-are-weird-crow

Commander Eighth Click saw the shadow that fell across the entrance to his office and finally glanced up with what he mostly hoped was not a threatening glare on his face. It had been a long day. The newly arrived humans had done far more damage since their arrival than even the most pessimistic engineers had predicted. It was almost as if you imported a giant bipedal species and set them loose in Winged architecture they would put stress on foundations and platforms not built for them and only hastily remodeled. Having to deal with the fourth report of a buckling undergirder this week had not put the commander in the best mood to deal with whatever was making Private Twenty-fourth Click’s footsteps drag so slowly.

As Commander Eighth Click suspected the private’s ears were drooping, his eyes were wide with some hurt, and his fur lay slack against his body. The faint hope that the private was just popping in for a moral boosting glance at his wing commander puffed out of existence.

“What is it Private Twenty-fourth Click?” Commander Eighth Click tried not to demand harshly.

The private cowered a little but started talking fast enough to show that his tongue was working fine at least, even if his wings were drooping.

“I think one of the humans is offended at me,” Private Twenty-fourth Click burst out. “I just showed him the math. I even used human calculation methods in base ten! I don’t know why that made hims so angry but now he won’t even look at me and-”

“What math?” Commander Eighth Click cut swiftly across the current of conversation, not that he expected that to be the relevant thermal, but math at least an engineering wing understood.

“He was wrong!” Private Twenty-fourth Click burst out puffing up. “It came up on the non-feedback stress tolerances discussion. It was a simple linear equation on the load-bearing side. A hornless, flightless knows that, but the human was so confident that I checked the math. I wrote it out and everything-”

The private waved the paper on his winghook vigorously.

“In base ten, yes, yes,” Commander Eighth Click redirected the drift of the conversation now that he felt he had a decent lead under his wings. “So you wrote out in detail how the human was wrong and showed him-”

“And he didn’t even make a pretense of thanking me!” Private Twenty-fourth Click sputtered out.

His nose, frilless enough to mark his genes as coming from the far north or south, positively rippled with indignation.

Commander Eighth Click heaved a massive sigh as he stared at the seething bundle of offended propriety. He found himself wondering if a human engineer would understand why that interaction might have been a touch offensive without having his horns guided into it.

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Figured I might post this here as well in case there were any other Appalachian writers out there

As an added benefit you don't need real physical twins for this as the twinning is making digital twins either of people, families, hardware systems, and even the internet itself potentially. Digital clones are the form of AI that most people are familiar with as in you have an AI processes a body of data algorithmically and it produces something that predicts what a person, system, or even other AI might do. It's quality depends on the quality of training data, and the length of time that it's collected. At a certain point that data collection stops and the clone is born perhaps with some added tweaks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin

A digital twin on the other hand is something that is being trained continously and each update to the information adjusts the weights of the system. In essence the model is refining itself in real time, and that might include a model of itself in that system.

This sounds science fiction but digital twins have been used invisibly for decades. If you get your heart checked out at the hospital it doesn't monitor your heart for particular patterns or behaviors which then triggers an alarm. What it does is continually update its model and tries to predict what happens next. If it sees enough of the simulations going in a bad direction then it triggers the alarm. So it's not making a decision about the present but instead the future. This is used in critical infrastructure like bridges, power plants, even your car might use this and you wouldn't realize it.

Now here is where the human element comes in. The fiction part that explores what happens when astronauts don't leave their families behind but instead have been wearing digital twinning technology for years before the actual mission starts. This would be something like an EEG coupled with life signs monitoring. The families also would wear this as the mission is ongoing, and in return a version of them stays behind, and they continue to interact with it as the astronaut is interacting with their twins on the spaceship. So there is this very real and more importantly in real time link to those people. As the distance increases the signals would slow down and the twin would increase the weights of the inputs so that something like continuity was possible.

You might be getting messages, but on top of that what happens as distance increases is that you become influenced by that new environment as the mission happens. Those twins would increasingly mature and have their own identity, but it would be like if you could be your own descendants but with relativistic time dilation thrown into that weird mix.

I'm working on a hard science fiction novel built around a rogue intermediate-to-supermassive binary black hole passing through our stellar neighborhood.

I've been working through the physics as rigorously as I can — lensing geometry, the mass-distance degeneracy in single-epoch astrometric measurements, realistic observation/confirmation timelines — but I'm not a professional astrophysicist.

Looking for anyone with real domain knowledge (astrophysics, astrometry, gravitational lensing, orbital dynamics) willing to take a look at specific plot mechanics and tell me honestly where it holds up and where it doesn't — not looking for a rubber stamp. Happy to share individual worked sections rather than a full manuscript. Appreciate any pointers. Thanks for reading.

Even if it is a fleeting moment. Kinda wild.

Im young (still in college) but i would love to get into writing, the idea of wich was further boosted after i read Cixin Lui’s Remembrance of earths past trilogy, and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of time trilogy.
I feel that i should start off by writing some short stories, just to get into the flow with things. On top of this im also a good illustrator so i might do some of that for my stories too.
A plan for my first short story is to be centred around a moon of a gas giant in a solar system not to far from ours, but 200 billion years from now, when all that can be seen is our galaxy (Mildromeda) and nothing else.
The inhabitants of this world will look out and reasonably assume that the entire universe is just this galaxy. (I forgot the name of the researchers who came up with the lone galaxy thing). Eventually they happen to look towards a system (now a white dwarf star with remnants of the gas giants and possibly still a rocky planet), and they notice some artificial leftovers, a large orbiting information monolith, or simply some large piece of technology. Anyways in the end its revealed the solar system was humanity’s system, and that most of the galaxy is actually occupied by a long distance transhuman. There’ll be an actual plot with climax and everything. I want some feedback on my idea

Hey, I’m an amateur writer and am writing my first ever sci fi story. I’m developing of said story, I ran into an issue I wanted some feedback on. So the story premise is similar to red rising and other oppression revolution stories and I was planning on said oppressed people not being human. So I was wondering what people like you all who like sci fi would prefer to see in a sci fi book if you were reading it, and what would readers in general prefer to see in a story.

So my idea was for the oppressed people to either be humanoid aliens, typically seen in lots of sci fi genre like Star Wars, ETC. they could either be entirely aliens or to justify why they are humanoid is because they are evolutionary branches from humans in space. and the second idea was for the oppressed people to be entirely alien, not humanoid at all. Like variations in height, skin, eyes, ears, limbs, ETC.
My plan was for humans to be the dominant social class(because of the historical context and lore of the story) so which of those two options would be most intriguing and compelling to read about?

Also for context, the story would be adult and consist of mature themes like war, violent, revolution, and 18+ stuff(not smut)

As of today, my new book, "The Cleopard and Other Tales from the Second Skin Universe" is published and available on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0HDCTYNDR

Hello everyone:

I have this design for a new type of propulsion system to enable the sought after "Warp-Drive" engine, based in a Photophone I designed initially for recording signals, but it can actually transduce electricity into coherent light waves in general sense. The laser(s) will be placed in the front of the hull pointing forward, like the propeller blades of an aircraft. I expect the laser to transmit the acoustic modulation to the space plasma and "entangle" or ionize symmetrically in a unified electromagnetic field a relatively large volume of space populated by ions, and create such as an electrostatic field that would pull the ship forward. My vision is a spaceship with ionic or chemical back thrusters, and a few lasers in the front ionizing the medium. Once the ship picks up speed and enters the ionized region, the back thruster will expand the matter getting past the horizon events formed right in front of the laser lenses, expanding the bubble backwards. And there you go warp-drive.

I am having many issues with posting this because I had become long ago a dissident of Physics' today's state. For years I used to read many papers and some books. I did not studied Physics but I studied Audio Engineering and worked for some years in radio, and I have a good background in electronics and signal analysis, and I certainly can understand most Physical theories and even most equations. But I do not agree with many postulates and approaches of today's Physics. Simply I think that nowadays theory has become a vast valley of speculative knowledge without too many actual results other than experiments and more experiments, and there is a very generalized subjective hope that from the discovery of a single property of the universe or a single type of energy or "particle" the collective would be able to engineer steadfast a certain engine that uses that special property or particle to do its thing.

In my case I am offering a simple and feasible engineering solution, as simple as must inventions that have worked are. And I can explain it with my own words, just like if you asked an inventor, not a theoretical scientist that will overflood you with knowledge but without practical solutions.

I am posting this here asking for suggestions of what mathematical model(s) and Physics theories you would use to explain what happens when an acoustically modulated laser interference pair excited the plasma in the outer space, if I wanted to explain this to theorists who only say they agree if it sound similar to the rest of their knowledge. Also, I looking to invite people to join me if they wish to participate in the project of creating an engineering venture, to apply for funding programs with several institutions and organizations to research on this specific subject and build the constant-velocity-device or Warp Drive that this can become. I am looking for people for the positions of CEO/foreman, CTO/foreman (or forewoman), mathematicians, physicists, designers, engineers and researchers; I only want to be a researcher. So please DM me if you feel like, aside contributing with the theoretical and mathematical models to study this proposal.

(The diagram shows the recording head I invented first, which is not the propeller but is very similar. Just let's say we are using a negative lens to expand the beam past the optics instead of condensing it... and that we use heat-resistant audio drivers).

Thank you in advance,

Ennis

Hey, I’m an amateur writer who recently started developing a space sci fi story and wanted some help with a problem I ran into. So I have been trying to come up with a bunch of different story concepts but all feel kind of flat or generic without anything going on that makes it stand out. Except for this one idea I had. But the problem is that this idea is very similar to the concept of red rising in the sense that there is a ruling class of people and then there are these unique low class people with unique features and specific jobs to their race. And the simplest premise would revolve around a revolutionary type war to break down the system of oppression. What makes my story different though is the characters being extremely different, having completely different story arcs and personalities, ETC. along with story arcs that would be different from red rising. Now the feedback I would like is if the premise of oppressed people and a revolutionary war to break down the system of the ruling class too similar to red rising and is a risky story to make. Or would the story as a whole with different characters, different events, and Arcs be sufficient enough to be original in its own way.
I know I’m not giving a lot of context of the inner workings or the entirety of what my story is about but those are the big aspects and qualities that I worry about and want feedback on

The Goal is to mathematically evaluate transforming high-entropy, low-frequency electromagnetic radiation (diffuse thermal waste) into high-frequency rest mass (stable electron-positron pairs) using cosmological metric tethers.

In static spacetimes (like a Schwarzschild vacuum), pulling generated matter out of a gravity well costs exactly equal to the energy gained from gravitational blue-shift. The net loop energy is zero, where the closed loop integral ∮ F · ds = 0.

The Loophole is that the universe lacks a global time-translation Killing vector field because the FLRW metric is explicitly time-dependent. This means that ∂g_μν / ∂t ≠ 0 and dE / dt ≠ 0. By tethering the particle extraction boundary to macro-scale metric expansion, we shift the mechanical work of particle extraction directly onto the global dark energy field.

The 3-Phase Inversion Cycle begins with Phase 1 (The Loan), where micro-potential wells are induced via high-intensity phase-matched electromagnetic fields. Local time dilation fields freeze Hawking evaporation signatures. Phase 2 (Blue-Shifting) occurs as diffuse infrared waste (λ_∞ = 10.0 μm) falls down the gradient, compressing its wavelength following the equation λ_loc = λ_∞ · √(1 - 2GM / (r_loc · c²)). To blue-shift these photons (E_γ∞ ≈ 0.124 eV) past the Breit-Wheeler pair-production threshold (>0.511 MeV), the required metric compression factor is C_m = ν_loc / ν_∞ = 4.12 × 10⁷. Finally, during Phase 3 (Extraction) inside the photon sphere (1.0 r_s < r_p ≤ 1.5 r_s), blue-shifted channels collide, executing Breit-Wheeler pair production (γ + γ → e⁻ + e⁺). Magnetic arrays map to a frame-dragging Ernst metric profile, utilizing cosmic expansion to stretch space and lift the new mass out of the gravitational potential well.

The Scaling Data per gram of matter reveals that the raw energy input required is approximately 89.88 Terajoules (E = mc²). This requires a photon population of approximately 4.52 × 10³³ photons per cycle.

Critical Structural Failure Modes must be accounted for during operation. The Schwinger Blockade dictates that exceeding E_s ≈ 1.32 × 10¹⁸ V/m causes vacuum self-polarization, creating a virtual plasma shield that screens the well. The solution to this is to use ultra-short bursts (Δt ≪ 10⁻¹⁸ s). Under the Hoop Conjecture Limit, if the mass-energy density injected exceeds the core spatial volume radius (R_core ≤ 2GM / c²), the system suffers irreversible gravitational collapse into a black hole, consuming the facility.

Thermodynamic Bookkeeping ensures the ledger remains balanced. The massive localized reduction in entropy (ΔS_local < 0) is paid for globally by the energy expended running the containment fields and the release of background gravitational wave radiation (ΔS_gw), satisfying the second law via ΔS_universe = ΔS_local + ΔS_fields + ΔS_gw > 0.

The Quantum Alliance by David L DiLaura (Kindle + Kindle Unlimited + paperback), is a hard science fiction novel of the near future.

The Deep Space Network detects Voyager 1 slowing, stopping, and returning. Something found Voyager 1 and is bringing it back to Earth. During its return journey, Voyager’s downlink contains an image cribbed from the golden record. It is a warning.

Then a second message appears: Voyager is carrying an artifact meant for Earth. Something that enables a form of communication with the stars, grounded in quantum measurement. The only entity that can use it is ORIN, Earth’s quantum AI, and it becomes humanity’s ambassador.

The book leans hard into engineering realism: DSN cadence and light-time delays, mission operations constraints, instrument limitations) and treats “first contact” as an engineering and ontological event rather than an adventure. It also explores biological and nonbiological consciousness, and the global response to a planet-wide threat.

This isn’t space opera. It is hard science fiction written for readers who liked The Andromeda Strain or Rendezvous with Rama, expect and welcome some technical density, and are willing to ruminate about the nature of our own minds.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GFTDY4ZL

/* PERCEPTION LAYER: OBJECTIVE SENSOR FEED */

Pit Matson has a question.

If their batteries eventually run out, and no robot remains active to perceive Deep City… does Deep City disappear with them?

[Blender3D — No AI]

Basically not even set in the future, just the present, with a scientific/technological focus but without any fictional science or tech.

One example would be Mr. Robot, which is about hacking but does not have speculative elements AFAIK. Any movies about the moon landing. I guess Gravity would also be one but I haven't watched that.