Shortly after Virtually Yours was published for the eighth time, in the December 2021 issue of Canadian magazine Speculative North, Issue #6, R. Graeme Cameron reviewed all the stories in that issue, including mine. His review appeared in Amazing Stories and here’s what he said about Virtually Yours:
Since its first publication in 2002 in Hadrosaur Tales, Virtually Yours has travelled well. In 2004, it went to British Columbia with Neo-opsis Science Fiction Magazine (Issue #3). In 2006, it moved to Poland and was translated into Polish in Nowa Fantastyka. It then returned to British Columbia in the Best of Neo-opsis Science Fiction Magazine: Anthologyin 2006 and was nominated for the Speculative Literature Foundation Fountain Award. It then moved to Israel and was translated into Hebrew in Bli-Panika in 2006. In 2014, it moved back to America for an appearance in Amazing Stories (Issue 88) then went to Italy in 2016 to appear in Future Fiction. Its eighth appearance saw its return in 2021 to Canada in Ontario’s Speculative North.
Virtually Yours continues to wander the literary landscape, most recently making its ninth appearance in the worldly MetaStellar Speculative Fiction and Beyond, December 2022 (where you can find several of my other short stories).
Cover art for 2006 “The Best of Neo-opsis Science Fiction Magazine Anthology” by Karl Johanson
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
Biohackers, currently streaming on Netflix, is a fast-paced techno-thriller created by Christian Ditter with synthetic biology at the very center of its intrigue. In the journal Science Dov Greenbaum describes the German show as “a fictional tale centred around the sociotechnological movement known as do-it-yourself (DIY) biology, in which amateurs, professionals, anarchists, and civic-minded citizens push the boundaries of mainstream biology.” Greenbaum describes the show’s main characters as “a wealthy biopharmaceutical executive, a group of medical students, a number of stereotypical biohackers, and a community of transhumanists intent on modifying their bodies for seemingly impractical endeavors.” The show stars Luna Wedler as Mia Akerlund and Jessica Schwarz as Professor Tanja Lorenz; but the real star of the show is biohacking: human enhancement or augmentation to improve health, performance, or well-being. Biohacking ranges from efforts to improve brain function to faster weight loss. Some are relatively safe to try at home; others may pose health risks. Among others, the show features glow-in-the-dark mice, gene-modded weed, underwater pills that extend your ability to hold your breath, and payment microchips in your hand.
Biohackers opens with a disturbing scene of bioterrorism on a train headed to Berlin. All passengers suddenly choke and fall unconscious—except for young med student Mia Akerlund, who tries to help and fails.*
From that explosive flash-forward scene, the show jumps back to two weeks prior, as college freshman Mia settles into Freiburg University’s prestigious medical school, and betrays a particular interest in synthetic biology, biohacking and genome editing. We soon learn that she is obsessed by celebrated professor and geneticist/entrepreneur Tanja Lorenz (who runs a biopharmaceutical company and has an entire building dedicated to her research with huge neon logo of her name). Both women are connected by a dark secret to do with Mia’s twin brother who mysteriously died when still a boy. Mia quickly gains a position working for Lorenz, which plunges her into the dangerous intrigue of illegal genetic experiences.
An early, rather enlightening, scene of the first episode is of Mia’s first introductory biology class given by celebrated gene therapy tycoon Professor Lorenz. Not only does the scene introduce the controversial subject of synthetic biology; it reveals a disturbing sense of what’s at stake and the danger of scientific hubris. Tall, svelte and confident in a smart haircut and tailored suit, Lorenz struts like a self-proclaimed goddess in front of a student-crowded lecture hall and preaches the benefits of synthetic biology. When she asks the class “What is synthetic biology?” and a student replies “with the help of synthetic biology, we can alter existing life forms or create new ones,” Lorenz prickles beyond her already frosty demeanor and impatiently berates the students for their lack of vision. She challenges them to think bigger: “Synthetic biology transforms us from creatures into creators. It’s not just the future of medicine, but of humankind. We can cease entire infections before the outbreak … We eliminate genetic disorders. But if we don’t do our work exceedingly well, it could end our species. It is on us to find a way; this is your future. Your responsibility. You are the creators of tomorrow. We make God obsolete…”
Mia uses Jasper (Adrian Julius Tillmann) one of Lorenz’s teaching assistants to get herself noticed and hired by Lorenz and we are soon introduced to the glossy Lorenz Excellence Centre, a prestigious biopharmaceutical firm. Mia also discovers that Lorenz keeps her illegally obtained DNA database and does illicit gene therapy work in a secret well-equipped lab in her home. Mia is after that database to prove what she fears is true.
The first season (of two) unravels an unconventional conspiracy plot delivered through slow-building suspense, using flashbacks and flash-forwards, until its cliffhanger ending. Science, academia and intrigue are skillfully woven in an intelligent mystery-thriller that not only represents science accurately but delivers commentary on the ethical and moral questions of this highly dynamic and rapidly evolving field of science.
Biohackers touches on several ethical and moral questions, such as genetic modification of stem cells, access to advanced gene therapies, and privacy and consent surrounding genomic data. Synthetic biologist Elsa Sotiriadis warns that, “this topic will likely become an ethical minefield in the coming years. On the one hand, we need large and diverse datasets to train medical AI and develop therapies. But on the other, there’s nothing as personal as your literal blueprint. Unlike stolen credit cards, you can’t change your genomic data. I like that Biohackers brings this up.”
Dov Grenbaum’s article in the journal Scienceentitled “Biology’s brave new world” celebrates the show for its accurate representation of complex laboratory equipment and procedures and how it accurately represents the intricacies, motivations and ethical issues of biohacking from sophisticated big-business gene therapies to DIY homespun biology. Jasper, Lorenz’s teaching assistant, has his own biohackspace where he develops the gene therapy for his rare genetic disease. It’s housed off-campus in a makeshift van on some scrubby property in the woods. With professional lab machines being extremely expensive, Jasper relies on DIY lab equipment.
Professor Lorenz’s university lab in the Lorenz Excellence Centre, where she runs her official studies and where Jasper and Mia work, was actually located in LMU Biocampus Martinsried and used by students and professors for their regular research.
Smartlab Architects also designed Professor Lorenz’s secret private lab located in the basement of her mansion: “We designed this lab with the goal to build he most futuristic automated and sexy laboratory one could imagine.”
Thanks to the emergence of the open-source movement, greater access to reagents and devices, lowered costs of sequencing costs, and increased access of tools and methodologies for non-experts, expensive genetic engineering experiments that could previously only be carried out behind the walls of big institutions can now be done on a kitchen table with ingredients bought on eBay. For instance, there is Chen-Lu (Jing Xiang), the “introverted nerd,” a DIY biologist who genetically modifies fungi and plants (to make beef-tasting mushrooms or to create a bio-piano); Ole (Sebastian Jakob Doppelbauer) does various bodyhacking self-experiments and uses an NFC microchip in his hand to pay in shops. It’s worth noting here that biohacking is illegal in Germany.
Sotiriadis notes that, “the cut-throat Machiavellian culture of Lorenz’s secretive big-budget lab clashes with the free-spirited biohackers who are engineering mushrooms with new flavours to make livestock farming obsolete and “CRISPR together” in a camper van lab in the woods and at home. It’s a nicely captured contrast.”
Sotiriadis adds that, “the series shows experiments as multi-step scientific protocols that sometimes go wrong, which is refreshing.” Sotiriadis further describes the show as: “Part revenge plot, part young adult love drama, part dismantling a large-scale conspiracy; the unconventional pieces sometimes move smoothly together and sometimes clash, but the plot is glued together with lots of visually appealing synthetic biology experiments and bioluminescent matter of diverse natures.”
Greenbaum has the last words: Biohackers “serves as a pedagogical vehicle to raise many timely and interesting ethical, legal, and social concerns. From bioluminescent mammals to the collection of genetic material for clinical trials, the series’ storyline highlights how cavalierly we sometimes approach genomic data and genetic engineering.” Greenbaum cites one of the characters who suggests that the ends of her research justify the experimental means, even though her methods demonstrate a gross disregard for test subjects who may suffer as a result. The show also offers insight into the motivation for DIY biology: a friend confides to Akerlund on how Lorenz is willing to sell a cheaply acquired drug to desperate patients for inflated prices. “Such frustrations are what drive many citizens operating outside traditional institutions to develop their own pharmaceutical solutions.”
“It is ironic that Biohackers is set in Germany,” says Greenbaum, “one of the few places where genetic engineering experimentation outside of licensed facilities is illegal and can result in a fine or even imprisonment.”
*An interesting note here; the show was initially slated to first air in April 2020; however, given the highly disturbing opening scene and its likeness to COVID-19 currently raging at the time, the show’s premiere was pushed to August. While Biohackers isn’t about a pandemic, its chilling first scene was thought to stir up too many fears from an already disease-stricken public. Another science thriller that covers similar themes and issues of synthetic biology is Regenesis, a Canadian TV show currently airing.
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
Article originally published January 2023 in Rewilding Our Stories (edited by Mary Woodbury) then January 2, 2024 on Dragon.eco.
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
It all began with my discovery of an emerging bioacoustic tool, soundscape ecology, that measures biodiversity and ecosystem functionality. I’d just read the disturbing 2019 Science article by Rosenberg and team who determined that our slow violence of habitat degradation and toxic pollution has reduced the world’s bird population by a third in just five decades. I was devastated; I could not imagine a world without the comforting sound of birds. What would it be like if all the birds disappeared?
Already primed with research into genetic engineering for the sequel to my 2020 eco-novel,A Diary in the Age of Water, my muse (often delightfully unruly) played with notions of the potential implication of gene hacking in ecological calamity and how this might touch on our precious birds: when nature “is forced out of her natural state and squeezed and moulded;” her secrets “reveal themselves more readily under the vexations of art than when they go their own way.”
I also recently sat down with Rebecca E. Treasure of Apex Magazine for a conversation about story, ecology, and the future. Here’s how it begins:
Apex Magazine: The Way of Water in Little Blue Marble is such a powerful piece touching on water scarcity and friendship, a dry future and the potential for technology to overtake natural ecology. Robin’s Last Song explores extinction, human fallibility, friendship, and again, that conflict between technology and nature. Do you think we’re heading toward the kind of dystopia shown in these stories?…
p.s. May9: I just learned that Robin’s Last Song was selected by the NYC Climate Writers Collective as part of an exhibition in the Climate Imaginarium on Governors island. The exhibition, starting May 18, will run throughout the summer of 2024.
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
One of my favourite bookstores in Vancouver is Banyen Books & Sound on the southwest corner of W 4th Avenue and Dunbar. So, whenever I go back to my home town to visit family and friends, I stop there to linger amid the shelves of wonder and erudite adventure. Then I usually cross Dunbar to Aphrodite’s Organic Pie Shop for a delicious fresh pie—usually peach, if it is available. So good! Two things I love: books and pie!
During my recent visit this year to Vancouver, my friends and I had a fulfilling walk one morning through the big tree forest of Pacific Spirit Park near UBC. Margaret suggested we go to Aphrodite’s Organic Café for lunch, located across 4th Avenue from Banyen Books (the sister restaurant to the pie shop). After a delicious lunch, we wandered into Banyen, like desert nomads looking for water, and lost ourselves in a treasure of books, magazines, crystals, cards, singing bowls and other spiritual/healing items. Like a braided river, we dispersed according to our wayward interests.
Then friend Anne soon found me and pulled my sleeve. “Your book is here!” She led me to where my book Water Is… stood, face out, on the top shelf marked ‘Water: Life Force & Resource.’ In truth, I already knew through Pixl Press that the book was selling there. But here it was, showcased so nicely! It sat rather stately amid Emoto’s Secret Life of Water and Ryrie’s Healing Energies of Water.
One of the perks of Banyen Books are the comfortable seats for easy browsing. When I teasingly asked one of the clerks if they noticed people lingering for the day, they said, “yeah! They might leave for lunch then come back for the afternoon!” I can see why; Banyen is an entire world to discover. It is called Canada’s most comprehensive Body-Mind-Spirit bookstore, “offering a broad spectrum of resources from humanity’s spiritual, healing, and earth wisdom traditions…Our service is to offer life-giving nourishment for the body (resilient, vital), the mind (trained, open), and the soul (resonant, connected, in-formed). Think of us as your open source bookstore for the ‘University of Life’.”
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
Critical reception for Christopher Nolan’s science fiction blockbuster movie Interstellar was widely mixed. Reviews ranged from being dazzled and awestruck to thinking it utterly ridiculous and silly. Much of the range in opinion had in fact to do with the hard science: hard science that Nolan insisted he get right by hiring theoretical physicist Kip Thorne to best approximate what a black hole and a wormhole will look like and behave. Science so good that it generated a discovery worthy of reporting in a scientific journal (see below). The forums and chats that debated the last half-hour of the movie and its significance were entertaining, if not informative. Interstellar also generated a spate of vitriolic, accusing the film as propaganda for American colonialism (see a few examples below).
I first watched it in an IMAX theatre (the only way to see such an epic—it was filmed using 70mm Imax film, after all), which helped achieve its grandness. Since I was five, I’ve always wanted to be an astronaut. And I’ve always been a sucker for good space adventure—especially well-researched, realistic depictions defined by a good story. And that is exactly what Interstellar is. And so much more…
I’ll admit openly that this film swept me up like a giant wave. I sat humbled yet exalted as I journeyed to some magnificent alien worlds: deep space; a powerful spherical wormhole; vast shallow waters between mile-high waves of a tidally locked planet; skimming beneath ice-clouds of a barren ice-planet; and falling—literally—into a black hole. All to the recursive echoes of a mesmerizing score by Hans Zimmer. While I was openly moved during the film, its aftertaste caught me unawares and impressed me the most about Nolan’s talent for subtle paradox. I realized that the journey—and deep space—felt inexplicably vast and intimate at the same time.
The research by Thorne and Nolan’s visual team generated a scientific discovery. To accurately portray a black hole in the film, Thorne produced a new set of equations to guide the special effects team’s rendering software. Black holes apparently spin at nearly the speed of light, dragging bits of the universe along with it. Based on the notion that it was once a star that collapsed into a singularity, the hole forms a glowing ring that orbits around a spheroidal maelstrom of light, which curves over the top and under the bottom simultaneously. The team then discovered that “warping space around the black hole also warps the accretion disk,” explained Paul Franklin, senior supervisor of Double Negative (the visual experts). “So, rather than looking like Saturn’s rings around a black sphere, the light creates this extraordinary halo.” Thorne confirmed that they had correctly modeled a phenomenon inherent in the math he’d supplied and intends to publish several articles in scientific journals, based on these findings.
Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer defines good science fiction as: the literature of change; it’s about something “large” (world-important), arises from a scientific premise; and is generally pro-science. Interstellar achieves all of these criteria, particularly the latter.
The movie begins in the near-future on a post-climate change Earth, plagued by dust storms and failing crops in a society reverted to parochial superstition. Cooper (Mathew McConaughey), once a NASA pilot and now a farmer, laments: “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”
In a scene reminiscent of present day schools removing cursive writing from the curriculum or the controversy of teaching evolution (e.g., in favor of creationism), Cooper’s daughter’s teacher, Ms. Kelly, informs him at a parent-teacher meeting that the history textbooks have been rewritten to make known the “truth” about the moon landing: “I believe [the moon landing] was a brilliant piece of propaganda,” attests Ms. Kelly, “that the Soviets bankrupted themselves pouring resources into rockets and other useless machines…And if we don’t want to repeat the excess and wastefulness of the 20th Century, then we need to teach our kids about this planet, not tales of leaving it.”
The danger of turning away from scientific exploration—particularly space exploration—in times of great social and economic insecurity is a theme that runs deep in the film. Not only are scientists and engineers portrayed as whole individuals, both smart and compassionate, but they are also marginalized in a future world looking more to blame than to fix. “We didn’t run out of planes and television sets,” the principal of the school tells Cooper. “We ran out of food.”
When a gravitational anomaly leads Cooper and his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) to a secret NASA base in the middle of nowhere, an old colleague, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), recruits him to pilot the interstellar Endeavor, NASA’s “Noah’s Ark”, into the far reaches of outer space to repopulate the human race. NASA has turned covert due to public pressure against “irrelevant or politically unfeasible” spending. After showing Cooper how their last corn crops will eventually fail like the okra and wheat before them, Brand answers Cooper’s question of, “So, how do you plan on saving the world?” with: “We’re not meant to save the world…We’re meant to leave it.” Cooper rejoins: “I’ve got kids.” To which Brand answers: “Then go save them.”
Unbeknownst to us—and to Cooper, who leaves his precious children behind on Earth for what turns into a one-way mission—the intention is to literally leave the rest of humanity behind. You see, Cooper’s ship—headed toward one of three potentially habitable worlds beyond a wormhole near Saturn—contains the seeds of humanity and other life that the four astronauts aboard are meant to distribute and nurture. Cooper and Brand’s daughter, Amelia (Anne Hathaway), one of the other three astronauts onboard, both believe that the real ark sits back on Earth in the form of a huge spaceship—awaiting Brand’s solution to the gravity issue. Brand knows, but keeps to himself, that the solution is insolvable and sends his intrepid crew off, knowing that Cooper will never see his young son and daughter again.
While Nolan admits to some iconic comparisons with Kubrick’s 2001; A Space Odyssey, Interstellar actually shares much more with the film Contact (in which Kip Thorne and McConoughey also participated). Contact also centered on a ground-breaking scientist daughter who misses her lost father. Mark Kermode, in a Guardian review also saw the relationship:
“In both movies, it is these daughters who detect the first stirrings of an “alien” encounter: Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) identifying recurrent sequences in the white noise of interstellar radiation in Contact; Murph (very affectingly played in her younger years by Mackenzie Foy) spying Morse code in poltergeist disturbances in Interstellar. From such discoveries are missions launched, voyaging across time and space at the apparent instruction of a superior intelligence offering cryptic hands across the universe. Intergalactic portals are breached, timescales bifurcated, science and faith reconciled. Crucially, for all their astro-maths exposition, the constant in both stories is neither time, space, nor gravity, but love. More than once I was reminded of Contact’s Ellie striking the outer limits of the universe and breathlessly declaring: ‘They should have sent a poet.’”
Interstellar received widely mixed reviews, described as anything from sublime to ridiculous. Its American-centric presentation generated some criticism (e.g., NASA acting alone without any international help; all American actors; American flags erected on settled colonies). Some even vilified the film as “a dangerous fantasy of US colonialism”. Journalist Abraham Riesman raises valid issues to do with human-centric expansionism in Interstellar:
“Coop and his coterie make one assumption that the movie never questions: Humanity (which, for all we ever see, is white, English-speaking America with a couple of black friends and one British guy) deserves to go to the stars and will suffocate if it’s confined to its current environs. That logic was, of course, one of the main justifications for most imperial expansions since the dawn of the 1800s. No one stops to ask whether this civilization (which, in the movie, appears to have murdered its home planet through human-caused climate change, though, for some reason nobody talks about that) needs to make some fundamental changes in its approach to social construction and resource use. Indeed, when we see the bright new future on Cooper Station, it’s all baseball and manicured lawns. Perhaps more important, no one questions whether human expansion will kill off the new planets’ current residents. Sure, we’re told that the planets are uninhabited … but uninhabited by what? Carbon-based humanoid life forms? What if we immediately kill off whatever fragile ecosystems we find once we take off our helmets and exhale our Earthly germs? Of course, I’m reading too much into a movie that isn’t even implying any of the messages I’m inferring, but that’s the problem right there: No one’s even asking the questions, and for humans, that kind of attitude usually leads to bad answers.”
What saves Interstellar from skidding into 20th Century pseudo-jingoistic expansionism with undertones of patriarchal rationalism, is its subversive theme. And because of it, the movie transcends into artistic commentary.
I speak of love.
Love embodied by two of the main characters—both women: Cooper’s daughter, Murph, and his shipmate, Amelia Brand. Love that is irrational. Love that is unscientific. Love that is inexplicable. And love that is all powerful. Inviolate. Eternal. And, I believe, our salvation.
Aspects of “imperialist expansionism” and “patriarchal rationalism” interplay through Cooper, who embodies both in his “cowboy” science. It is love that propels his evolution to transcend them. In Cooper, we see the constant tension between rationality of science and the “irrational” faith of love. Related to this, Cooper must continually choose between the personal and the whole in defining his humanity and ultimately his hard choices. First with his daughter and her “ghost”, then with Amelia Brand in their mission to another galaxy.
After a botched mission, Amelia appears to abandon the very tenets of hard science to ask the defining question: “Maybe we’ve spent too long trying to figure all this out with theory. Love is the one thing that transcends time and space.” She describes love as a cosmic force, a kind of empathic drive that provides the very basis for humanity’s survival: a link to our wholeness as living beings within a breathing multi-dimensional universe. When Cooper challenges Amelia’s unscientific notions, she responds with, “Love isn’t something we invented. It’s observable, powerful … Maybe it’s evidence, some artifact of higher dimensions that we can’t consciously perceive.” Repeating, almost word for word, what Cooper said to his father about choosing his interstellar mission, Amelia admits, “yes, the tiniest possibility [of seeing Wolf again] excites me. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.” To which Cooper answers just as his father did: “Honestly…it might.”
Amelia nails it when she, in turn, challenges Cooper: if the second choice turns out bad, they will have enough fuel to do only one of two things: go on to the third planet in hopes of distributing the seeds of humanity OR go back home to his children and the end of the world. Which will he choose? It’s interesting what he does end up choosing: he chooses love. Love drives him to do impossible feats, like dock his shuttle with a damaged and recklessly spinning Endeavor:
CASE: That’s impossible
COOPER: No, it’s necessary
Love for Murph drives Cooper into the black hole … and out of it. Love directs him to that precise quantum moment where his love for Murph transcends into love for all humanity: to save the world. This is the secret. The secret Mann in his intellectualized definition of what it means to be human could not touch. The window for connection to the whole is through a single tiny grasp of it. The glimpse into Eternity is through the lens of Love. I am reminded of a quote in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: “What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?” In Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Itzhak Stern quotes the Talmud: “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”
So what is love, then? Is it gravity? Does it communicate through the God particle in the fractal fabric of the Higgs field? What other phenomenon grows from nothing? What other phenomenon is not lessened but in fact grows by giving it away? What other phenomenon provides the very weight and structure—the meaning—of our existence? What other phenomenon is like a whisper in a crowded room, yet creates the most beautiful symphony? Is it that simple?
If gravity is a plane of existence, a fifth dimension that can exist across space-time, is a black hole simply a doorway? Like death? Is love the fuel of evolution, lifting us up into a higher state?
Catholic theologian Peter Kreeft shares: “…Gravity is love on a material level. In fact, [gravity] has two movements: one is towards union, back to the center, the big bang, the past by gravity. And the other is to give itself out to all other beings, out into the future, the expanding universe, by energy and by entropy, which is energy giving itself out to the empty places.”
What struck me the most about Interstellar was how it simultaneously evoked my breathless awe in the vast universe’s existentialist grandeur with a personal connection and incredible intimacy. Interstellar was soul-nourishing, dream-engaging; and its recursive themes called of “home”.
Definitions:
Wormhole: Officially known as an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, a wormhole is a hypothetical topological feature of spacetime that would fundamentally be a shortcut through spacetime.
God Particle: Also known as the Higgs boson or Higgs particle, the God particle is believed to be the subatomic particle that gives everything mass. Without it, nothing would have weight or even structure. The Higg boson is an elementary particle with no spin, electric charge or colour charge. It is considered the smallest possible quantum excitation of the Higgs field that unlike the more familiar electromagnetic field cannot be “turned off”; instead it takes a non-zero constant value almost everywhere.
Higgs Field: In two papers published in 1964, Peter Higgs posited that particles obtain mass by interacting with a mysterious invisible energy force field that permeates the universe: the Higgs field. It is the stuff of stars, planets, trees, buildings and animals. Without mass, electrons, protons and neutrons wouldn’t stick together to make atoms; atoms wouldn’t make molecules and molecules wouldn’t make us. The presence of the Higgs field explains why some fundamental particles have mass while the symmetries (laws of nature) controlling their interactions should require them to be massless, and why the weak force has a much shorter range than the electromagnetic force.
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
I just finished reading Ben Rawlence’s 2022 book The Treeline. It is a book that made me think. It made me cry. It made me despair. It also gave me hope.
I was gripped by this honest and unflinching exploration on the moving treeline with climate change and what it will mean for humanity. Beautifully written and rigorously reported, Rawlence invited me on a journey of all major treelines over the globe from Scotland, Norway and Russia, to Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Throughout his description of a warming world and a vanishing way of life, Rawlence meditates on the many repercussions on how humans live.
He aptly describes the forests of the world as the ‘heartbeat of the planet,’ the cycles of breathing and the pulses of life from the spike of oxygen in the spring when trees put out their leaves to the peaks and troughs over day and night that regulate plant photosynthesis and respiration. The peaks and troughs are getting shallower, he writes. With more carbon dioxide in the air the trees work less; they inhale less and exhale less oxygen.
“The planet is a finely tuned system. A few degrees of change in its orbit can usher in an ice age; a few degrees of temperature change can transform the distribution of species, can melt glaciers and create oceans. In the future, when the ice is gone, there may be no such thing as a treeline at all. As the stable currents of air and water associated with the Gulf Stream, the polar front, polar vortex and Beaufort Gyre dissipate or fluctuate, the Arctic Ocean melts completely, and the Rossby waves in the upper atmosphere go haywire, the fine gradations of temperature, altitude and latitude first observed by Alexander von Humboldt will become decoupled and ecological transition zones scrambled. Instead of a majestic sweeping zone of forest around the planet, we might find discontinuous pockets of trees in odd places, refugees from soil and temperatures long gone, and crocodiles once again at the North Pole.”
Ben Rawlence, The Treeline
Rawlence brings this all into perspective to our present situation and the role science has played in our hubristic illusion of control:
What Rawlence does acknowledge is a way out of our self-created doom and accompanying solastalgia:
“Our present emergency is forcing us to remember what, until recently, we have always known: that there is a web of communication, meaning and significance beyond us, a world of life forms constantly chattering, shouting and flirting and hunting each other, indifferent to human affairs. And there is solace in such a vision. The way out of the depression and grief and guilt of the carbon cul-de-sac we have driven down is to contemplate the world without us. To know the earth, that life, will continue its evolutionary journey in all its mystery and wonder. To widen our idea of time, and of ourselves. If we see ourselves as part of a larger whole, then it is the complete picture that is beautiful, worthy of meaning and respect, worth perhaps dying for, safe in the knowledge that life is not the opposite of death but a circle, as the forest teaches us, a continuum.”
Ben Rawlence, The Treeline
The planet will be alright. Species will go and others will come. Earth has experienced five extinction events (we are currently experiencing the sixth extinction event now) and after each, life flourished again, albeit different life.
Rawlence devotes his epilogue called “Thinking Like a Forest” to the wisdom of the indigenous people who have for millennia co-existed sustainably with the natural ecosystems of the Earth. “The Koyukon, the Sámi, the Nganasan, the Anishinaabe are just a few of the countless indigenous peoples whose world view attests to our foundational reliance on the forest.”
Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s recent book is the bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” (Mincione Edizioni, Rome). Her latest “Water Is…” is currently an Amazon Bestseller and NY Times ‘year in reading’ choice of Margaret Atwood.
In my upcoming novel “Gaia’s Revolution,” one of the protagonists, Damien Vogel, contemplates in 2022 a key event from 2020 that only a few seem to take seriously:
In Siberia in June 2020, record heat of thirty degrees Centigrade, over the average of 11 degrees, collapsed permafrost and caused oil tanks in Norilsk to rupture. Over twenty thousand tonnes of diesel spilled into the Pyasina lake and river system. Damien remembers looking at the veins of red on satellite images from space. That disaster is just the beginning of what the ‘sleeping bear’ of methane hydrates promise to unleash when the permafrost reaches a critical thaw and those hydrates awaken. Melting permafrost is a quiet sleeper in the climate change procession, he considers. At a microscopic level, in the chemistry of the water and in the change in the atmosphere, a time bomb is ticking.
A decade later, Damien’s twin brother, Eric, notes that:
“Back in the ‘20s scientists started noticing major permafrost melt on the Siberian Shelf,” Eric goes on. “The melting released hydrates, which set the oil and gas companies frothing at the mouth with joy and the climate scientists spinning in a panic because of what they knew it meant for the planet. It was the harbinger of the largest methane ‘burp’ ever.”
Eric then adds:
“Permafrost thaw kicked us into this devastating global warming, Dame, and everyone—even the climate modellers—ignored it, because they didn’t have enough data. Gottverdammt! They’re all still asleep, Dame!”
In his book The Treeline, Ben Rawlence writes about the ongoing extinction of indigenous peoples in the north as the treeline migrates northward into tundra and the permafrost and sea ice change and go extinct themselves.
Because methane is present in much smaller concentrations many scientists have mistakenly deemed it as important as carbon dioxide in the climate change equation; however, it is becoming obvious that methane poses a real and largely unacknowledged danger. Methane is twenty times more efficient in trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Permafrost—which is currently melting rapidly in the north—contains almost twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere. In the rapidly warming Arctic (warming twice as fast as the globe as a whole), the upper layers of this frozen soil are thawing, allowing deposited organic material to decompose and release methane.
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The clathrate gun hypothesis is the notion that sea temperature rises (and/or drops in sea levels) may trigger a catastrophic positive feedback on climate: warming would cause a sudden release of methane from methane clathrate (hydrate) compounds buried in seabeds, in the permafrost, and under ice sheets.
Something of this nature has already occurred in Siberia in 2020. In his book The Treeline Ben Rawlence reports the following warning by Dutch scientist Dr. Ko van Huissteden, a leading authority on permafrost:
“It is hard to measure methane release … [but] some studies have suggested that an unstable seabed could release a methane ‘burp’ of 500-5000 gigatonnes, equivalent to decades of greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to an abrupt jump in temperature that humans will be powerless to arrest.” (Wadhams, 2015)
Creation of gas hydrates requires high pressure; water; gas—mainly methane—and low temperatures. Three environments considered suitable for this process to occur include: sub-seabed along the world’s continental margins; permafrost areas on land and off shore; and a process for storing methane hydrates: ice sheets. As long as the climate is cold and the ice sheet stable, the gas hydrate zone remains stable. As the ice sheets melt, the pressure on the ground decreases; hydrates destabilize and release methane into rising seawater and finally into the atmosphere.
A recent study in Science revealed that hundreds of massive, kilometer-wide craters on the ocean floor in the Arctic were formed by substantial methane expulsions. Because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, temperatures would rise exponentially. Once started, this runaway process could be as irreversible as the firing of a gun—and on a time scale less than a human lifetime.
The sudden release of large amounts of natural warming gas from methane clathrate deposits in runaway climate change could be a cause of past, future, and present climate changes.
Latest research on the Greenland ice sheet and elsewhere throughout the Arctic has revealed major methane discharges in Arctic lakes in areas of permafrost thaw. Scientists are exploring areas where methane is bubbling to the surface and releasing to the atmosphere.
If human emissions continue at their current rate, rapidly changing ocean currents and retreating ice sheets may uncork methane from under ice caps, ocean sediments and Arctic permafrost, causing a jump in radiative forcing. Even if rapid ice sheet disintegration were to scatter large amounts of ice into the oceans, the net cooling effect would be strongly countered and likely overwhelmed. The areas that did cool would likely trigger severe weather outbreaks.
As I write, we are pumping out CO2 into the atmosphere at a rate 10 times faster than at any point in the past 66 m years, with the resulting sea level rises, extreme weather events, heat waves, droughts, unseasonal storms, and stress on biodiversity around the globe. Research published in the journal Nature Geoscience demonstrates that “the world has entered ‘uncharted territory’ and that the consequences for life on land and in the oceans may be more severe than at any time since the extinction of the dinosaurs,” writes Damian Carrington of The Guardian.
In an interview with Guardian reporter John Abraham, Woods Hole expert Robert Max Holmes, exhorted:
It’s essential that policymakers begin to seriously consider the possibility of a substantial permafrost carbon feedback to global warming. If they don’t, I suspect that down the road we’ll all be looking at the 2°C threshold in our rear-view mirror.
Wadhams, Peter. 2015. “A Farewell to Ice.” Penguin.
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.