The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
For other worlds, and other seas.
—ANDREW MARVELL, “The Garden”
A dialogue has been going on for centuries now. It may have started with Dante’s Divine Comedy, and continued with Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. Freeman Dyson, inspired by Stapledon, calculated limits on a structure’s size in outer space, set by the strength of materials. Niven’s Ringworld was part of these explorations, and Bob Shaw’s Orbitsville. It’s a conversation about advanced societies building outrageously big habitats, using plausible science. Such were called Big Dumb Objects by Peter Nicholls as a joke in 1993. He quoted British writer Roz Kaveney in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. There is now a Wikipedia entry on the many such fictions. The Bowl of Heaven trilogy is a part of that, though we prefer to call the Bowl and the Glorian double planet Big Smart Objects, since they must be continuously managed to be stable. Our trilogy is undoubtedly not the last word. As a reader said, we aimed for “Amazing vistas, shocks, sensawunda.” Just so!
A great problem with world creation is when it becomes an end in itself. When this happens, it can become a rather neurotic attempt to contain a world and to nail down a world totally—which is, of course, impossible. You end up with clunky fiction, walking your characters through all the places you’ve created, simply because you have created them. This is akin to the age-old heritage of the infodump—By God, I suffered through all this research and now it’s your turn. It’s best not to fill in everything on a map. It’s meaningless. Leave things unknown—because there’s so damn much of it.
The best reason to do such work is simple: It’s fun! We take each other’s notions and send them zipping off on different vectors. We worked best when we could sit, talk, think, build in stacks the ideas that started with the first idea: a vast bowl built to capture and refocus a star’s own radiation. Why? To manage the star. Why? So the whole system, Bowl plus star, can move in cohort … to explore the galaxy. How? The sunlight reflected back on the star fires off a jet, which pushes the star … and the Bowl of Heaven follows like a tethered animal.
Tricky, yes—and managed by beings who would think of this and make it happen. That got us going, for sure. We started on Bowl of Heaven and realized about half a year later we couldn’t do the story in a single volume. So we wrote Bowl of Heaven and then Shipstar to work out the whole Bowl society. But we hadn’t gotten to the Bowl’s destination, which our human characters were headed for, too. So to follow the theme of Big Smart Objects, we followed the logic and designed a wholly new system. The Glorian double planet echoes the flyby of Pluto and Charon that is indeed a natural, mutually tide-locked system (though we had the idea before that). If our system has one such, there must be more among the stars.
At each stage, we try out ideas on each other, write scenes, bounce them between us in the ping-pong of creation. Writing is a solitary craft, but!—uniquely, science fiction encourages collaboration, echoing its core culture: science itself, in which single-author papers are a decided minority. So our novels come from this ping-pong, making writing fun for and of itself. Larry likes doing aliens and their odd thoughts, as in his Known Space stories. Gregory likes the designer aspects—how does the Bowl work?
And this new place, Glory? We had only vaguely imagined it when we started on the first novel. More mega-engineering! Plus room for ingenious physics. We don’t think any other kind of writing can do this. Which means SF is more fun than, say, mysteries, for the writer(s)—and that plural is key.
In the end, we realized that these novels are a way to think about what truly long-lived societies may be like. We humans have a built-in inclination to go over the horizon, expand, occupy. No other species has occupied every continent and co-opted so much of its energy and land. So might alien societies. To get more living room, they might build Big Smart Objects and then move on to other interesting pursuits. The Bowl goes touring the galaxy. The Glorian system ponders deep issues like the stability of the universe itself, and how to avoid disasters that come from mega-engineering hubris. Could this be how the long-lived civilizations think, that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence might find? If so, it’s worth thinking now about how to talk to them.
You might want to pursue some of our ideas further:
These have a Wikipedia entry, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_planet.
How common might they be? Well, we have Pluto and Charon, so maybe such worlds in a star’s habitable zone are common. Imagine evolving intelligence with such a tempting bauble in your sky.
Such a notion occurred in the early 1960s in the novel by Brian W. Aldiss, Hothouse (London: Faber & Faber, 1962). A line from it: “The multitudinous strands of cable floated across the gap between them, uniting the worlds. Back and forth the traversers could shuttle at will, vegetable astronauts huge and insensible, with Earth and Luna both enmeshed in their indifferent net.”
The emerging new family tree of dinosaurs makes an interesting case about dino intelligence:
“A new hypothesis of dinosaur relationships and early dinosaur evolution” by Matthew G. Baron, David B. Norman, and Paul M. Barrett, published in Nature 543 (March 23, 2017). It says in part, “The results of this study challenge more than a century of dogma and recover an unexpected tree topology that necessitates fundamental reassessment of early dinosaur evolution.”
More than one thousand species have already been identified, most of them dating from between two hundred million and sixty-six million years ago. Dinosaurs became the dominant terrestrial species after the first date, and perished, all save the lineage leading to birds, at the second. The authors comment, “In the very harsh climates of the late Triassic, being a generalist is probably a clever strategy. The ability to run fast and eat anything and grasp with the hands is what gave dinosaurs their advantage.”
These advantages also aided humans, and the Folk of the Bowl. A critical stage in human evolution was walking upright, which freed the hands for grasping tools and weapons. “The parallels with human evolution are very noticeable and make you wonder what they could have achieved,” the scientists said. “Toward the end, certain groups like the velociraptors were starting to get intelligent.”
The new tree implies that dinosaurs emerged some 247 million years ago, a little earlier than previous estimates, and that their origin may not have been in South America, where several very early dinosaurs have been found. This fits with the background we used in Bowl of Heaven. It’s worth noting that all traces of a dinosaur civilization would have been ground up by tectonic plate movement. We don’t actually propose that the Bowl was built by dinosaurs, but it is a fun idea, and brings forth our underlying theme of how long-lasting societies might evolve to build big structures.
This advanced idea from quantum cosmology first came to Benford through a paper by his old friend Sidney Coleman, of Harvard. Sidney’s papers were not like anyone else’s—clear, deceptively simple, yet profound. One of his classic quotes, from that paper with de Luccia on “Gravitational Effects on and of Vacuum Decay” (Physical Review D, June 1980) is:
The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.
Plenty of people aspire to be profound and playful at the same time; Sidney could pull it off, and had the technical chops to back it up. It’s plausible that advanced societies might study such issues, at mortal danger to the entire universe. Certainly worth worrying about!
Once a shift to a lower energy state occurs, a bubble will expand throughout at the speed of light, making the universe as it was in the beginning: reheating, creating a hot plasma of elementary particles. Our beginning plasma expanded, cooled, and emitted the cosmic background radiation. Then gravity made the plasma clump, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, whatever that means. All that came before is gone. For further ideas see https://physics.aps.org/articles/v8/108.