Technology, world building

Ancient Batteries

What if an apocalypse wiped out modern infrastructure? What if hostile aliens dropped the mother of electromagnetic pulse bombs to wipe out all electronics? If so, could you charge your phone? Or could you build your own batteries with whatever is at hand?  If an ancient society could have constructed batteries, then in an apocalypse, we too could build our batteries. Sounds like a possible like a potential story set when modern infrastructure has broken down.

“Hey,” someone might say, “You mean Grog the cave dweller had built a flashlight?”

“Could have,” I would say, “but whether Grog would have, um, is debatable.”

What if a Paleolithic shaman hollowed out a tree trunk with stone tools and filled it fermented fruit to act as an electrolyte? She may have chipped some graphite from rocks, using, you guessed it, harder rocks, with which she could make the battery terminals. Alas our shaman wouldn’t have metal. Perhaps if an unusual flower had an electrically conductive stem, she could make a functional battery. For science fiction, a writer could ‘world build’ such a flower into existence. I’ll leave alternative possibilities to your imagination. Would this be plausible? Why not?  No rules of science are broken. Would this be likely? Okay, only if a writer puts more effort into the world building. We’ll set aside the Paleolithic scenario, and consider the era of ancient civilizations, such as the Parthian Empire which existed from 150 BC to 223 AD. Unlike the Paleolithic shaman, they were already using steel, for their armor and weaponry at least.

By Ironie – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2091669

https://archive.org/details/walfas-baghdad-battery

Interestingly, evidence points to ancient peoples coming close to making batteries. Granted, the evidence is controversial, whether the ancients used batteries. More interesting, for fantasy or science fiction writers, is whether they could have.  Or could you, in the event of an apocalypse?

An internet search of “Build your own battery” will reveal options. One can use household items such as a soda can and lemon.

Or, also as a kid’s activity, search “fruit battery experiment.” You could even use potatoes.

These, however, are only baby steps. As well, since soda cans and voltmeters wouldn’t be available to the ancients. Instead, could they have built equivalents and how far could they have conceivably proceeded with battery technology?

Maybe they could build clay jars and fill them with salt water, vinegar/wine or juice. If they had progressed past the Stone Age, metals would be available. Whether they would stumble upon how to put all these items together is another matter. Calls for creative world building. People may have stored juices in the jars, could have had ceremonies whereby acolytes place metal rods within and coincidentally connected wires to the rods.

And why would ancients have wires in the first place? For instance, ancient Egyptians made wires to use for jewelry. Perhaps a priestess placed two wires on her tongue and received a (hopefully mild) jolt. From there, the priestess caste could upscale the system for produce bigger jolts. Connecting the system to a ball of fine wire, such as steel wool, could act as a fire starter.

How could scaling up the technology have proceeded? Would they connect the jars in series to boost the voltage and in parallel to boost the current? How would they have come across this technique? We’ll assume no Däniken style aliens dropped in to tell them how.  Perhaps celebrants invented a ceremony to tell a hero’s journey by connecting the jars in series. This is plausible. Connecting batteries in series is easy peasy, even if each battery supplies a (preferably only slightly) different voltage. The voltages simply add up. In practice, it’s best to match voltages for other reasons. If the ancients built each jar battery similarly, the system could conceivably work.

Less plausible is the parallel part—which requires caution. Maybe the priest caste suggested that other characters could join in the journey by connecting ‘identical length’ jar chains in parallel. This is a big stretch. A mistake by using different-length jar chains would cause a short circuit. Besides, this assumes each jar generates exactly the same voltage. For the ancients to have quality control for their batteries would be problematic, unless they developed other technology.

What else would ancients use their batteries for? How about a light bulb? All they would require would be something to use as a filament, such as graphite akin to the type found in pencil, iron or something else similarly conductive to iron or graphite. Connect the filament to the batteries in series, and the filament should glow. There is a fine balance regarding the filament. If the filament is too conductive, it will burn out, if not sufficiently conductive the filament will not sufficiently glow. The ancients would be seeking the Goldilocks filament for their ceremonial lights.

The inventive world-builder would also need to conjure the back story as to how the ancients stumbled upon the filament technique, or ‘cheat’ with an all-wise wizard, shaman or vision-quest hallucination. Actually, in my opinion, the vision quest wouldn’t be a cheat but might be highly fortuitous. Can dreams inspire discoveries in real life? The most iconic example that I am aware of, is August Kekulé’s dream of a dancing snake swallowing its own tail. Lesson? Fear not to dream.

If the ancients wished to make practical lighting to banish the darkness during the night, they would need to build more advanced bulbs. To replicate something akin to our older style incandescent bulbs they would need to make a transparent glass container, and make a vacuum.

The glass container is plausible depending on the level of a society’s technology. Ancient Egyptians made glass beads, among other contemporaries. Glass bottles were invented around 1500 BC.

So, how plausible is it for ancients to make a vacuum? Not likely. They would need to develop a vacuum pump primarily although you’ll need syringes. But could they create something close to a vacuum, maybe by connecting a blacksmith’s style bellows to an enclosed chamber? How much air could someone pump out? Furthermore, how to prevent air from flowing back in? I will leave this to your inventive imagination.

One question remains. Did any ancients actually build batteries? Maybe; but probably not. They did, however, come close.

During either the Parthian Empire of 150 BC – 223 AD or the Sasanian of 224-650 AD, someone conceivably used a ceramic pot, a tube of copper, and a rod iron as a galvanic cell for electroplating. A galvanic cell is a type of battery, as first demonstrated when an early scientist made frog legs twitch by touching metals to them. And electroplating is about coating one metal with another, such as your nickel cutlery being coated with silver. Or maybe our inventive Parthian or Sasanian used her/his pot(s) for electrotherapy to relax muscle spasms. Did the ancients use available liquids such as vinegar or various fruit juices as electrolytes with which to operate their batteries?

Truth be told, most archaeologists suggest the ancients used the ceramic pots to store sacred scrolls. The MythBusters TV program investigated whether the artifacts could function as batteries by building replicas of the Baghdad Battery. Their concluded probably not, but, by connecting the pots in series, they did generate enough electricity to electroplate a small token or deliver current sufficient for acupuncture. Hence, were the ancients on the verge of applying electricity?

In the event of our hypothetical apocalypse, you have choice. Electroplate your cutlery, relax your muscles or preserve your favorite sacred scroll. For world-building a ancient culture, fear not, your world is limited only by your imagination—and credibility. May the apocalypse never come and may your invented world shine.

Peter Spasov. Last updated Wednesday March 05, 2025

Uncategorized

Magic and Clarke’s Third Law

What if an extraterrestrial could turn you into a sentient tree? Imagine how you might stand fixed upon a grassy knoll unable to move, always looking at the same place day after day, rain or shine (assuming you could see). Birds could roost upon you. Wind could rustle your leaves. Would you sense the birds and wind? How would your mind react during the day? Would you sleep at night? And dream? If so, what?

 “Sure thing,” you may say to me, “what have you been smoking? Tell me another fairy tale.”

How would you consider such a scenario? You may conclude: Must be fantasy, bro. It ain’t got the science to be science fiction.

Maybe so. But just wait a minute. Let’s say, you’re part of a group Neanderthals who managed to escape detection over thousands of years. Granted, this is a big stretch. Okay, let’s switch this around. Say time travel became possible, and you visited Europe at, say, 150,000 years ago. You’ve brought your e-bike, one of those fancy electrically powered mountain bikes some game hunters use such those blogged about here. Okay, I don’t hunt for sport but you get the idea. In this scenario you go for a ride. Eventually you encounter some Neanderthals. How would they regard your ability to ride around? Your appearance, your clothing, you riding your bike, would be a major shock, completely foreign to their world view. To the Neanderthals, you are magical.

This brings us to Clarke’s Third Law. Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey. The law states: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you brought your mobile phone and played your favorite (downloaded) cat video, the Neanderthal might wonder at the technology and the content. She or he may think: what’s the deal with cozying up to these mini cats? Do these strange visitors need some trepanning with a sharp pointed stick?

For the sentient tree scenario, on the other hand, needs more thought. First, would a sentient tree be possible? Second, could a scientist transform a normal human into such a tree? Let’s tackle the first.

Some scientists claim that trees can communicate with others in the same species by sending certain chemicals from root to root. However, other scientists claim the evidence isn’t conclusive. This is how science works.  Test the evidence and if other ‘peers’ think the evidence isn’t strong enough, they remain skeptical. Regardless, such tree-to-tree communication wouldn’t be a sign of sentience. Similarly with the claims of plants being capable of feeling pain, the evidence remains dubious. So, for this post, I’ll suggest that in our real world, trees aren’t sentient. But could they become sentient?

Trees, being plants, are able to photosynthesize, meaning to convert sunlight into the chemical energy necessary to fuel their metabolism. As for food, trees must absorb water and other chemicals from the ground using their roots. The transport of nutrients means going uphill against gravity. Trees don’t have hearts like we do, to pump said nutrients throughout their body. Instead they depend on a transpiration process. Essentially, water evaporation at the leaves causes a negative pressure which can pull water up from all the way down to the roots. As an aside, how tall can trees grow on Earth? By the way, the tallest height appears to be about 140 meters.

Think of what this mean in terms of being sentient or not? Sentience requires brains as far as we know, and brains use lots of energy. The human brain uses about 20% percent of the body’s energy and animal bodies use more energy than for plants because they have higher metabolism requirements. From this, we can conclude that a sentient tree would need significantly more energy than the currently non-sentient versions, in addition to a brain equivalent.

According to my admittedly simplistic calculations, a human could employ an advanced solar panel on each arm of about 60 cm square. The human ‘tree’ could stand up to expose the panels like a tree would expose leaves on its branches. This could theoretically work provided the panel efficiency was seventy two percent or more. The hypothetical panels would act like artificial leaves in order to convert the sunlight into the human’s need for oxygen and food. This doesn’t yet exist, but I argue it could in the future.

As an aside, prototype artificial leaves already exist. In this case, the sole function of the ‘leaf’ is to take carbon dioxide out of the air in order to cut down on greenhouse gases—and produce fuel. This technology has promise and could potentially expand to increased efficiency and produce other organic molecules required by our hypothetical tree-human hybrid.

Therefore, it’s reasonable to suppose a sentient tree could theoretically exist provided it had a brain and a pump to feed the brain with energy nutrients. Perhaps the person could become a plant-like being akin to the Venus Fly Trap but in an expanded form. This obviously is highly speculative but I would argue clever biohackers could create such a tree equivalent from a human. Please note this is a thought experiment because of ethical considerations.

Whether such a tree could evolve via natural evolution is another matter, and probably not—unless animals were wiped out. Food for thought here for you speculative fiction writers who might be reading this. But I will leave this aside for now to move on to point two. Could an advanced extraterrestrial transform a normal human into such a tree?

Point two is a tall order. It is one thing to biohack someone in a lab over a period of time, it’s another to sprinkle pixie dust or whatever that over a few hours or days transforms a human into a tree without any other intervention. In the lab scenario, surgeons may need to operate on the human.

“Eh,” you may say. “What could be this pixie dust? Sounds like magic.”

“Aha,” I may reply, “remember Clarke’s third law. Use a technology so advanced that, today; our smartest scientists can’t even understand it.”  

“Cop-out,” you may say, “Pure handwavium. Sounds like unobtainium.”

“Well, er, um, you may be right.” I shrug my shoulders with embarrassment. Then the metaphorical bolt of lightning strikes, red hot, searing red hot. (Enough with the melodrama you exclaim.) “Hey. How about nanites?”

Oh yes, the nanite word. How many stories have I read which employed nanites? Many. Hence, let us examine the nanite. Click the preceding link. Alas, that’s all I’ll give you for now. Stay tuned for a possible follow-up post.

And for the diehards, who want to see my calculations, try the download button.

ViabilityOfSentientTree-1Download

Image Credits

This is a poster for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
The poster art copyright is believed to belong to the distributor of the film, Warner Bros., the publisher of the film or the graphic artist.

https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2018-08/22/16/asset/buzzfeed-prod-web-06/sub-buzz-24234-1534969658-5.jpg

Cover of I am Groot vol 1 issue 1, 2017.

https://www.marvel.com/comics/issue/62828/i_am_groot_2017_1 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/17/I_am_Groot_vol_1.jpeg

Peter Spasov. Last updated Tuesday February 25, 2025

Extraterrestrial

Being ET

What If One Could Experience Being ET?

Much science fiction is about intelligent extraterrestrials. Through these stories readers can experience the wonder of interacting with creatures thoroughly foreign to us. They could be creatures who may not be humanoid, animal or even share none of our biochemistry. But what would it be like to immerse oneself into the mindset of these alien creatures? Can we imagine being a water-breathing scientist who encounters the first humans in the ocean world of Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter? Long ago, as a youth, I had read such a story but cannot remember where. From what I recall, the story was written (mostly) in the point of view of an alien scientist living in an underwater world. My recollection is weak, alas. The story haunts me because this alien dissected some human visitors, considering the humans as specimens for scientific curiosity. I suspect that was the story’s point. To other beings, might we humans be to them like lab mice or bacterial specimens were to us?  Be aware that since the story was written, ethics and animal rights usually became a necessary requirement for research.

In my experimental writing, I riffed on something akin to that story. I tried to put myself in the mindset of a hypothetical plant-like creature which lived on Proxima Centauri b, a true-life potentially Earth-like planet in orbit around Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star, is Earth’s second-closest star at about 4.2 light years away. Need I say the Sun is Earth’s closest star? Currently our knowledge of the planet is limited. According to one artist the planet’s surface could be this:

An artist’s representation of the surface of Proxima Centauri b (as seen by a human!)
Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser (https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1629a/)

In my imagination, the native inhabitant was similar to terrestrial mosses but with additional organic systems for optical sensing and had a brain plus nervous system equivalent. The point is how would the being narrate its world view to us human readers? This being would have no prior knowledge of Earth and its humans. In my case, I wrote in English but by restricting the words to mostly botanical terms. Sometimes, I employed some generic terms in addition to the botanical. And I experimented too with varying subject-verb-object ordering for its version of dialogue. All said, I can’t claim my method worked well enough for publication. Could a typical human understand and enjoy the work? As an aside, the story concept originated from combining two prompts: I have a pulse – and – root bound. These prompts led me to consider: What if a botanical creature could have a pulse?

You might ask, how do established and published writers write in the point of view of aliens? To me, it seems, they stick to settings closer to human than I attempted.

One example is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest.

Unfortunately I hadn’t read this one, but would like to one day. Hence I’ll depend on the Wikipedia description. The story takes place on a fictional planet colonized by humans. Two of the main characters are human. The third however, is a native of the alien planet. Le Guin wrote part of the novel in the point of view of Selver, the native from the planet. From the plot synopsis I surmise Selver had already assimilated some human culture, hence he can narrate in terms for humans to follow. Wikipedia itself states, Le Guin wrote from an omniscient point of view for her Selver chapters. The novel explores themes of language, communication, dreaming, consciousness, colonialism and ecology, among others. For instance, for Selver, “forest” and “world” are synonyms. So too, is “dream” and “root”. Selver and the natives generally view humans as an insane people.

All in all, sounds like a great novel with effective world building, but for getting into an alien’s head, I’m not sure.  There is another example; Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, a novel I had read about a year prior to writing this post.

This story too is set on a fictitious exoplanet similar to Earth, one which humans populated with terrestrial animals long ago. In the story, a species of spiders had since evolved into having human-like intelligence, and initially being unaware of the prior existence of humans on Earth. However, initially unknown to the spiders, descendants of humans orbit the planet in a space station. The story also spans thousands of years, primarily for covering the evolution of the spiders, and featuring several spider characters. During the chapters about the spiders, Tchaikovsky writes in the third person point of view. After meeting the humans, the spiders refer to them as star creatures. There is an AI which has directed their evolution, which the spiders refer to as the Messenger. Being more intelligent variants of terrestrial spiders, the reader has sufficient context to understand the spider behavior. Generally the spiders think similarly to humans but due to their evolutionary origin have a more female dominant society. Over time, the relationships veer closer to equality.

Did Tchaikovsky cheat on his portrayal of the spiders? Were they too human in mindset? Look, I don’t blame him for this. Can anybody, by definition, sufficiently portray the alien? Furthermore, can such person do it in a manner for the rest of us to understand? Is this a stretch too far for writers?  I don’t believe so. If and until actual extraterrestrials are encountered, we can be imaginative, to immerse ourselves into very foreign worlds. Creative speculation about evolution under unusual conditions can guide us.

Finally, for a more philosophical examination, I will refer to an academic paper that has gained some fame, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” written by Thomas Nagel. A bit of a heavy read, I’ll attempt to summarize it as plainly as I can.  Philosophers have struggled with something called the Mind-Body problem, generally meaning whether they are separate or one controls the other. Confused? If one is sad, they cry. Does sadness occur because we cry? Or do we cry because we are sad? Aliens likely would evolve eyes or some equivalent. Such an organ would probably need to secrete liquid due to dust in the air. The current thinking is that evolution employed crying as a means to signal sadness. I’m simplifying. For some background on how emotions may have evolved check out Evolution of Emotion . Depending on how deep one may want to dive into this, this could inspire some thoughts for world building. Here is a link to Nagel’s paper in full.

Returning back to Nagel’s paper, he claims: An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism. Okay, re-read the statement and try to unpack it. I believe it means an organism needs something to experience in order to be conscious. Nagel argues we can’t figure out the subjective experience of another being, such as a bat. We could imagine hanging upside down; we could imagine eating insects, and even echolocation to navigate around obstacles. But, Nagel’s point is that the bat’s internal experience may not be the same as how we imagine it. We can even extrapolate this to ourselves. When you experience anything, I can only assume how you actually experienced it. Similarly, you can only presume how I experience anything. This said, many philosophers challenge Nagel’s assertion.

Alright, how does this relate to experiencing being ET? I would say set your creativity free. Imagine possibilities. Regarding your imagined setting, ask yourself questions. If Grog the blob from planet Splot encounters your protagonist, would the she-he-combo (perhaps the being reproduces asexually) sense your protagonist’s presence from tiny variations of the electromagnetic field? Our bodies do generate bioelectromagnetic fields, albeit extremely tiny. Would Grog go into a mental breakdown due to the strange signal, never encountered before? Or would Grog have no consciousness at all? Perhaps the signal triggers an olfactory hallucination? There are many possibilities.

Peter Spasov. Last updated Monday February 24, 2025

General

Why Science Fiction

Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/d5000-16677078/
Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/alexantropov86-2691829/
Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/alexantropov86-2691829/

What if nobody wrote science fiction? Imagine a world without it. Our only stories would be set in the world of our everyday experience or some fantasy world involving fairy-tale beings, supernatural beings, or superheroes.  Any of these stories can be profound and/or entertaining if written competently. And any could explore the human condition, offer lessons in the consequences of behavior or evoke a deep emotion.

Perhaps such storys have existed since the days of Lucy, the early australopithecine who lived about 3.2 million years ago? Maybe such stories are a key element of who we are as a thinking species. Alas, we have no records of what our far-distant ancestors might have spoken about while sitting around their campfires. We can reasonably infer that they must have.

And what about science fiction? Science fiction is a recent literary genre. Most people credit Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as the first science fiction novel. Shelley’s story is a cautionary tale: it raises profound questions about who should have the right to create living things, and what responsibility the creators should have to their creations and to society.

Arguably, hers had precedents. For instance, Lucian of Samosata, born around 125 AD, wrote about travelling to the Moon.

Science fiction established itself as a genre (relatively) recently, when science and technology became prominent part of human culture starting with the Industrial Revolution. Regarding the importance of science fiction, historian Yuval Noah Harari believes it has the power to shape public opinion. Yuval has authored bestsellers such as, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011),  Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018). In the latter, he wrote: Art plays a key role in shaping people’s view of the world, and in the twenty-first century ‘science fiction’ is arguably the most ‘important genre’ of all, for it shapes how most people understand things like ‘AI’, ‘bioengineering’ and ‘climate change’.

Let’s examine further why science fiction must be taken seriously. In my opinion, multiple-award winning author Robert J. Sawyer best captures the essence of science fiction (SF) as being the literature of intriguing juxtapositions, as well as its role for engaging readers with the burning issues of the present day.

In his blog What is Science Fiction?, he defined it as the mainstream literature of a plausible alternative reality . In his essay The Purpose of Science Fiction, he posited the genre as the literature of plausible change, to explore the implications of the plausible changes, with the italics being mine. For instance, how can humanity survive to beyond a billion years, by which time the Sun has already cooked the Earth to an uninhabitable state?

What’s valuable about this for societies is that science-fiction writers explore these issues in ways that working scientists simply can’t.

At the core of science fiction is the notion of extrapolation, of asking, “if this goes on, where will it lead?” Can we use the power of storytelling about the future as a toolkit to create experiences of the future? And can SF reflect the realities of one’s own culture? That said the SF writer’s job is not to predict the future. Rather, it’s to suggest all the possible futures–so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go. In my opinion, SF should conjure the magic of awe. To me, this ability to evoke wonder is the key. Ideally, after reading, a reader should say out loud, “Wow!” For a deeper dive into SF and wonder, click the link in this sentence.

Peter Spasov. Last updated Monday February 24, 2025

On world building for science fiction