NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE launch manifesto

                               The NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE launch manifesto
                                 
                                         
                                                and a complete free story

                                               WATER WORLDS 

As the open says, I'm done many things, have many interests, and this relaunch of what amounts as to a new iteration was once  a blog into a full website entirely created and managed by me is something new and indeed an experiment.  NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE is a website, but my Facebook posts will be a kind of part of it too.
       
Facebook can and is being used as a kind of blog.  I can post something on it like this on the so-called Facebook "News," which of course is not really news per se, and anyone on Facebook at the time can read it, like it or dislike it with a click these days and with emojis, can comment or not, and I can comment ot not, and a string of conversation with people who I know or not may or may not arise.

But no matter what the original "news post" may be, it will swiftly drop down the news line and end up in one's Timeline and drop down through it timewise too.  But on the other hand, whatever is posted can potentially be viralized and reach thousands of people very quickly.  For good or for bad, for better or for worse.  The good is that it can serve as a virtual soapbox, but the bad is that it tends to ends up as shouting in your own peanut gallery and or worse trolling someone else's. I've therefore come to find it quite frustrating

Of  course I'd to reach as many people as possible with NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE and so when appropriate I'll continue to use it as a tool, and thus NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE will be a melding of my Facebook account and my website.

Comments and strings of them relevant to the topics of individual posts will be encouraged on the website but will be limited to comments on individual posts, or rather liberated from the chaotic noise.   And the app I'm using has a sidebar on the right where you can easily search any post by its date and what it's about, so nothing gets lost with Facebook's "News" and Timelines.  It also has a one-click link directly to book I've got for sale on Amazon, which these days amounts to any book I've ever published more or less.

As to content, I'm a novelist, film and literary critic, a political commentator, a song writer, a performer, a science journalist a DJ, a cook, and I've created something like 40 videos on YouTube all by myself.  And all this has put me in contact with many sorts of people who I've never stop learning from.  And I'm open to things created by them, somewhat an edited magazine.

There's a lot more to say about this experiment and what I'm trying to do on the website. But  what's already there--essays, interviews, video, song, and more, will give you an idea.   
 
And as a tease, you will find free, no strings attached, a published short story of mine now hard to find anywhere else, WATER WORLDS  first published in Nature and currently nowhere else.  Only the first, if this works out, I plan to make this kind of thing a feature. There are not so many reprint books published these days, I've got the rights to just about every story I've ever published, and I've ready been paid for all of them, so why not give out non-exclusive one-time rights on NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE as freebies.

Doing well by doing good.




                                                            WATER WORLDS
                                                      by Norman Spinrad


   The King of Sweden was not a ruling monarch, but he did  appoint the Nobel Prize committees, and had long been obsessed by the Fermi Paradox.  In this Golden Age  of Astronomical Xenoecology, there was nothing unusual about that,  it had become general cultural obsession as better and better instrumentation discovered more and more solar systems with planets in the liquid water Goldilocks zone, currently an estimated 20 billion.

Even in  the mid-twentieth century before even a single extrasolar planet had been discovered, Enrico Fermi, cavalierly assuming that they were there and that life on Earth was nothing unusual, that given the age of the universe,  there should be thousands of civilizations far more advanced than ours, and they should have filled the galaxy by now.

So where are they? Why haven’t they visited us?  Or at least announced their presence?
For the better part of the next century the Fermi Paradox remained just a puzzle for astronomers and science fiction fans.  But as the Golden Age of Astronomy unfolded, it passed stepwise into a central cultural question, an unanswered riddle with deeper and wider public obsession.

The numbers said there should be at least a million biosphere planets.  But not a single advanced technological civilization?  A galaxy teeming with life but bereft of sentient beings other than ourselves?  How could this be possible? What did it mean?

Religious fundamentalists declared that it meant we were the only sentient beings in this universe and would be forever, that it was created by God for humanity alone. Masses of people believed it, since no one had been able to come up with another answer.

Until now.

No wonder that the solving of the Fermi Paradox justified not merely a Nobel Prize but a new category in which to award it. No wonder it was greeted with  less than unanimous  hosannas! And if the King of Sweden hadn’t been an ardent supporter of the CLF,  the Nobel Prize for Xenoecology might never have come into being and certainly not awarded for this controversial and depressing solution to the Fermi Paradox.

By the middle of the 21st Century it was clear that while more planets than stars, the majority of them were gas giants, and that the majority of H2O got centrifuged into the outer reaches with them.  That was the bad news for xenoecology.  But there were more moons than planets, and  most of them revolved around gas giants, which was the modest good news.

Many of these moons would be either balls of water ice with or without  small rocky cores, and the some of their orbits through the gas giant gravity could generate enough internal heat for deep liquid water oceans to exist beneath the ice. And had not life on Earth  began  in the ocean?  Did not the evolution of organic chemistry from the inorganic have to happen in water?

So when such an ocean was discovered beneath the ice on Saturn's moon Enceladus, a submarine probe was excitedly launched, and when aquatic creatures of some complexity were seen, more sophisticated drones were sent,  revealing  a biosphere not much less evolved than that of terrestrial oceans, and  creatures something like octopuses who to congregated in organized teams to hunt and seemed to use prey bones as weapons.

Sentient? Intelligent?

Perhaps like dolphins and whales, more or less acknowledged  as sentient thanks to the lobbying of the Cetacean Liberation Front once it was understood that their “languages” were really sonar video by which they not only communicated but told stories.

Eventually the CLF succeeded in getting a dolphin breathing oxygen  via modified scuba gear sent to Enceladus who was able to confirm that the “Enceladuns”  did communicate with each other in the manner of terrestrial cetaceans..

Sentient aliens at last!

Or were they?

This turned out to be an uncouth debate between science and religion which was only won by rationality when  the CLF presented  the Enceladuns and their water brothers of the Earth as the resolution of the Fermi Paradox.

Chemistry required that life had to evolve in  liquid water. And  the astrophysics of solar system creation produced  many more water moons for it to evolve in than wet rocks like the Earth.  Therefore there would be many more sentient species like cetaceans and enceladuns that like humans.
Sentient cultures as the CLF insisted.  But if they had manipulative capacity like the Enceladuns, they could never evolve  technological civilizations because they could never create fire and therefore never technology itself. Nor could they even imagine that there might be other worlds like theirs because from under those miles of ice and water they could never even see the stars.

Yes,the galaxy teemed with worlds with biospheres and  sentient civilizations.

But water worlds where technological civilizations capable of space travel or communication were impossible.

Like it or not, that was the solution to the Fermi Paradox.

And like it or not, the expense of making  a life-support tank to wheel into the assembly where the

King of Sweden would present the first Nobel Prize for Xenoecology to  he who had solved it had to be paid.

Because the first Nobel Prize for Xenoecology was won by a dolphin.
     end