The Science Fiction Universe of "A Half Built Garden" by Ruthanna Emrys

Daniel and Kelly talk about a novel where aliens give humans advice about climate change. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Kelly, I have kind of a basic question about
your science farm operation over there. Your questions make me nervous,
but as long as it doesn't involve anything that might
scare the kids, I'm willing to answer. All right, Well,
if it's a science farm, then what are you farming science?
Do you harvest like raw science? Are you making organic
farm to journal science? We do actually do science right

(00:32):
here on the farm, but it's not all that we farm,
That's right. You also have some humans growing in the farm, right, Okay, Look,
we have children, but we are farming them. There's no
harvesting of the children going on. I mean, have you
checked with Zac about that? I know he can be
quite literal, you know. I'll admit I never thought to say,

(00:53):
please don't harvest the children while I'm recording the podcast. Well,
they're probably fine, I mean at least fifty. Hi. I'm Daniel.

(01:17):
I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine,
and I am not much of a gardener. I'm Kelly
Weener Smith. I'm an adjunct professor at Rice University, and
I too am not a gardener, and I once killed
a cactus. But you run a whole farm. I hear well,
Zach does the planting. I mostly just sort of mow

(01:38):
the hay when it gets too tall, which is fun
because I love the tractor. So I'm more of a
destroyer than a builder. I see well. In my marriage, also,
the gardening responsibilities are on the other spouse. Even in
the clay soil of our backyard in southern California, my
wife has managed to plant greenery which has thrived all
over our backyard. WHOA good for her? That's awesome. What

(01:59):
was she planted? She's planted a bunch of pretty hearty stuff,
mostly secculents. In our first year's here and Irvine. We
went back and forth between California and Geneva several times,
so we abandoned all the plans so she would just
planted a bunch of stuff, and then we come back
nine months later and see what was still alive. Nice.
Let natural selection run its course. I like it. I
can get behind that exactly, though it doesn't produce very

(02:21):
much edible stuff. Are you guys actually producing things on
your farm that you can eat? Like technically we are.
We're trying to do that. But what usually happens is
Zach starts the garden, and then we get totally bobbed
down by a project and almost everything dies. So very similar,
except we're not leaving the country. We're just being neglectful.
But this year our loofa gourds grew and so we

(02:43):
have a lifetime supply of squash based sponges if anyone's
in need of some more sponges. So that but that
was kind of fun. Well, welcome to the podcast. Daniel
and Jorge explain the universe in which we try to
grow a garden of ideas in your mind, playing ding
seeds of understanding about black holes and quantum physics, hoping

(03:04):
to nurture your understanding of how the universe out there
works and to grow your mind. So that's large enough
to incorporate all of these vast cosmic ideas. How many
of these do you have? I could go on and on,
but my regular co host, Horror Hey, can't be here today,
and so I'm delighted to be chatting with one of
our regular guest hosts, Kelly. Kelly, thank you very much

(03:24):
for joining us again today. I'm delighted to be back.
I had a ton of fun reading this book. That's right.
Sometimes on the podcast, we talk about the real universe,
the mysteries of nature, how far back we can explore
with our minds all the way back to the beginning
of the universe, or how black holes work and what's
inside of them. But sometimes we think about artificial universe,
is universe is created within our minds and explored by

(03:48):
science fiction writers, because we think that the creativity found
in science fiction is actually a vital element of science,
that thinking about the ways that the universe might be
is a very important way of actually doing science. And
so sometimes on the podcast we will read a science
fiction novel and talk about the science of that universe,
along with interviewing the author of that book to get

(04:10):
an insight into his or her mind. And so on
today's episode, we'll be talking about the science fiction universe
of a Half Built Garden. This book is by Ruthanna
Emery's and one of the things that I love about
her book is that I feel like when we talk

(04:32):
about climate change, we're often so negative that sometimes it
feels like it's not even worth trying to turn the
ship around. But her book is about a near future
humanity in three that is starting to turn the ship around.
They figured out some ways to start recovering from climate change.
That involves some new political organizations, new ways of people

(04:52):
sort of learning to work together. But no like amazing
tech that just pulls all of the carbon out of
the atmosphere, Like some hard work that needs to get done.
But I appreciated that that was sort of like a
take on climate change that was, you know, a little
bit positive, like we can do this sort of attitude. Yeah,
this book takes place in about twenty eight three, and

(05:13):
clearly there have been some disasters between now and then,
some real climate change and probably some suffering. But to
write the book is not like a mad Max in Thunderdome.
Everything is destroyed and a few humans are scrabbling for
survival in a new harsh world. It really describes the
situation where we have adapted to it. We have come
up with new political and social organizations that do allow

(05:35):
large populations of humans to exist and even to thrive
and like have fun and chill out totally. And and
those humans sort of work together and exist in slightly
different ways than what we have now. So like you
still have corporations, and the corporation still sort of have
the like let's use all the resources sort of attitude.
They're not totally on board with turning the climate change

(05:57):
ship around, which isn't too surprising. You still have nations,
but the nations have a little bit less power than
they used to. And now it seems like most of
the activities that happen in people's lives are happening at
the watershed level. So within your watershed you make decisions
about you know, working together and what you're going to do,
and so you're sort of linked globally, but most of

(06:19):
the action is happening locally. And fun fact, I believe
the word for that is global, which is a great word.
Can you spell that word for us? What was that? Global? Global?
Like glocalization, it's when you've get like lots of exchanges
of information and stuff, but like at the local level,
it's sort of is interacting in people's lives and those

(06:41):
people are taking what is helpful for them and sort
of mixing it with their own culture to make something
that's a little bit new and sort of a little
bit localized. Well, it's fascinating to me to think about
the future of sort of human organization, and you know,
you can look in the past and you can see
that overall there's this trend towards sort of larger and

(07:01):
larger and more and more global organizations. The nations that
we have now are really vast compared to you know,
the city states of two thousand years ago, for example.
But there also is this sort of periodicity as we
build up large empires and then they collapse, and then
we build up new empires and then they collapse, And
so it's interesting to think about an alternative where we
don't just collapse into total disaster and have to scrabble

(07:24):
our way through five dred years of dark ages, but
instead we sort of fracture where things become a little
bit more local, and we can have like different priorities
in different areas and people organizing themselves from the bottom up.
I thought this book is really clever in the way
that it imagined like this middle ground for humanity not
total disaster. I thought that was a unique take on

(07:45):
it also and was very cool. And so, Daniel, do
you ever wonder are you living in an era where
there's going to be a break and a collapse? I
do wonder about that all the time, and I look
around at our lives and I think It's easy to
imagine us looking back in fifty years and being baffled
at how we lived, you know, just the sheer wealth
and the ibulance and the resources that we consume every

(08:07):
day without even thinking about it very much, you know,
gas and electricity and money and the food waste. It
does seem like it would be easy to look back
at this as sort of like the peak of the
Roman Empire, just before the fall. I hope you're wrong,
but yes, I I think about that too. Sometimes I
think about how I might be living in a cave

(08:27):
talking to my grandchildren about you know, what television was
or what running water was. You'll be kicking the stone
around the old cave to play soccer. Maybe the solution
for us will be the same as a possible solution
presented in the book, which is aliens. And I also
really liked the take on aliens. They were sort of

(08:47):
like a fresh look at aliens, and she had a
very interesting take on their biology. And these aliens were friendly.
They had I thought, a very clever way of of
letting us know that. But I'll sort of leave that
to be unveiled to the reader when they read the book.
But they have kind of a scary message. What is
their message? Yeah, I thought this was a really cool
way to sort of put a pin in the issues

(09:08):
of climate change and how to live long into the future.
These aliens in the book, when they arrive, they are
very friendly, You're right, but their messages you have to
get off the planet. They think about planets as a
way to like incubate a new species. They're like planets
are like nests. You know, you can create a new species,
you can evolve, but they're not a place to live,
right Like, you basically got to move out of mom

(09:30):
and Dad's house eventually and go off into space. And
they come with a warning, you know, to say that
everybody who tries to live long term on a planet
eventually kills themselves. And they even say how they tried
to help for other species, but they got there too
late before those species basically exterminated themselves through climate change disasters.

(09:50):
And so they're coming with a warning saying get off
planet A S. A P. And not only get off planet,
but get off planet, and then you're gonna need to
dismantle that planet for rees sources that you're gonna need
to keep going in space, which to me was the
point where I was like, oh, man, like I could
imagine if the messages get off planet, you could be like, okay,
but like you know, of us are going to stay
because Earth can totally handle it. But it's like, no, no, no,

(10:13):
that's not even an option for a variety of reasons,
one of which is we need your parts or you know,
we need the parts of the Earth to build stuff.
And it's interesting, Yeah, how do you how do you
convince the aliens that you should get to stay or
and you know, of course humans never agree on anything,
and sort of seeing how the human species comes to
terms with this ultimatum is an interesting problem to watch

(10:36):
get solved throughout the course of the book. Yeah, and
I thought it's especially fascinating because it's a question that
we have now, like should we change that we believe
should we try to get off planet? Even if aliens
don't come and tell us that they think it's necessary.
There are a lot of people who think that the
long term solution to human survival is to get off
the planet and establish basis on Mars, or build dyce

(10:56):
in Speares or these kinds of things. I know that
you're a skeptic though about survival in space and space settlement.
What do you think about not just moving out into
space but also dismantling this complex ecosystem that we use
as the like the foundation of our society. Well, you know,
so in the nineteen seventies, the idea was really popular
that we need to go out into space because you know,
a population numbers are expanding like crazy, We're gonna run

(11:19):
out of space, We're gonna run out of resources. We
need to move into space. And you know, they like
war induced famine over not having enough resources and the
millions and millions of people dying from starvation, like those
things never came to pass. And so I think, no
doubt there have been famines and there have been problems,
but I don't think that space is going to be
the solution to these problems the way that a lot

(11:42):
of people think. And also, you know, so yes, I'm
I'm a skeptic. I think we can move into space
and we can have space settlements, but it's gonna take
us a lot longer than I think a lot of
people would probably guess or would probably expect. There's a
lot of problems we still need to solve, and so
I suppose I think we need to figure out the
problems down here and not expect on moving people off
into spaces the solution, because I just don't think we

(12:04):
can do it fast enough to make content. Did I
answer your question? I sort of went off on a tangent. No,
absolutely you did. But now I wonder what is Kelly's
timeline for human space colonization. You think it's going to
take a while, and we're talking a hundred years, a
thousand years, Just like with soon ish, I always hesitate
to make like estimates for when such and such is
going to happen, because it depends not just on how
long it takes to make the technology, but like how

(12:26):
many politicians want to fund the project to make it happen,
And so you know, your estimate for how long it's
going to take depends on so many things that you
can't control that you're destined to be wrong. But what
I can say is I think it's a project that
if we force to happen quickly, we might regret because
you know, for example, we don't know if humans can
have babies in space safely, and I think we want

(12:47):
to figure that out before we, you know, move to Mars,
for example, and then discover that actually there's a bunch
of problems and we're, you know, not happy with how
things are going. So I think it would be better
if it took longer. Let's say, but I don't know
how long it would take for you to like meet
the bare minimum standards to move out into space, but
I think you should be way past that before we

(13:08):
go ahead and start that project. Well, I was hoping
to trick you into giving a specific number so that
I could call you up in and say, see, Kelly,
we're not yet in space. You were wrong. Nope, Nope,
there's no trick. In main, there's no But I do
think you bring up a really interesting issue, which is
that a lot of our technological bursts and development do
come in response to a crisis, you know, or for example,

(13:29):
a nationalistic race, which essentially is a crisis you know,
that we see an astory coming and then we scramble
to develop a technology necessary for that. And in this book,
I think it's quite interesting that the humans have like
kind of figured it out. You know, by the time
the aliens do arrive and say, hey, you've got to
get off planet, the humans have sort of threaded the
needle and figured out how to live maybe sustainably on

(13:52):
the planet. It's a really fun conversation they have both
internally within the humans and with the aliens about hey,
do we actually need to get off planet or are
we doing okay? Yeah, and and and you know, of course,
it being a discussion involving humans, there's a lot of disagreement.
But but yeah, it's interesting to argue, like, how do
we know, you know, when we get a handle on
this climate change thing, and hopefully it's when, not if,

(14:14):
How will we be able to convince ourselves that we've
really got things going in a better direction and we
don't have to worry anymore. And that's yeah, that's sort
of an interesting question that doesn't have a clear answer yet. Yeah,
something else I really enjoyed about this book where the disagreements.
Often when aliens arrive, they're like monolithic in culture and
in politics and in opinion. You know, they all sort

(14:35):
of speak with one voice, but here they disagree with
each other, they have different personalities, they undermine each other.
I thought that was really fascinating and probably much more realistic. Yeah.
I think so often in the movies that I've seen
and the books that I've read, you have sort of
aliens with the hive mind where they all can sort
of like I guess it's not that different than the
humans sort of coming to a consensus with their technology,

(14:56):
but like you know, they even still disagree. And yeah,
like you said, the aliens are think very realistically portrayed
and that they don't all agree even and it's yeah,
it's it's very good writing. Yeah, often in science fiction
you meet like some species and it was like a
president of the planet, and I'm like, a president of
the planet. Really, like there's no way humans would ever
know elect the president who could then also act boldly right,

(15:19):
like it'd be so bogged down in you know, disagreements
among the planets. And so it's really nice for me
to see aliens that you know, don't always get along
and make decisions together. I thought that was really fascinating.
But I want to dig more into the science of
this universe that Ruth Anne Emers has created in her novel.
But first let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back

(15:51):
and we're talking about the science fiction universe of the
novel I have built. Garden by ruth Anna Emiress whose
background is in cognitive psychology and sociology, and she's written
a really fascinating book, not just about aliens though, of course,
and we love the aliens, but also about the future
of human civilization, how humans come together to solve the

(16:12):
climate crisis and reorganize their own lives. Yeah, and so
one of the aspects of the technology that I thought
was really interesting is that everybody has this mesh that
they can put on their head and they can sort
of network ideas and so like, if you are about
to make a decision that could impact the whole community,
you can send that information out to the network, and

(16:32):
people can like add their input and vote up or
down on solutions. And if anybody has sort of like
research that's relevant, they can summarize it. And so the experts,
I think the experts have like extra weight. And it's
like having sort of like a Reddit all the time everywhere,
which which strikes me as being like kind of overwhelming,
you know, to be honest. Part of my like, well

(16:54):
I was reading it, one of my thoughts was like
I don't think I could handle that. Like just when
my phone vibrate in my pocket and I'm having a conversation.
I'm distracted, and I'm like, oh, this isn't good. If
like my brain were constantly working through threads of information
about decisions, I think that would be overwhelming. But you know,
maybe that's something you get used to. You what do
you think? I don't know. I was sort of amazed.

(17:15):
First of all, I love the richness of the experience
that she imagined. She really seems to have thought about
what it would be like to have read it in
your head all the time and to have these sort
of constant communal discussions and debate. I'm not sure I
would enjoy it also, but you know, it's really hard
to know whether you would appreciate a completely different human experience.
And the thing that made me wonder was, you know,

(17:36):
would people really be so well behaved? I imagine if
a bunch of people had access to like injecting ideas
into my brain, it might just be dominated by like
the loudest, meanest voices, the bullies. Basically, it sort of
requires everybody to be civil in a way and to
agree to the rules and to be moderated. And I
was wondering because you know, in today's society, we were

(17:57):
struggling with exactly just that, how much speech to allow
on social media platforms and how much to moderate it.
I was sort of wondering how they figured out that
balance in a way that we could all live with
Reddit inside of our brain. Yeah, I know, that's that's
a good question. It would be interesting to talk to
software engineers about how they're tackling that problem right now.
I don't think it's easy, but sociologically, I think it's

(18:19):
really fascinating, this idea of devolving control, rather than having
it be centralized in some distant foreign government, having it
be more local and community oriented people making these decisions themselves.
And in some sense that seems empowering because maybe you
want the people on the ground to be the ones
who are like taking care of the wildlife and understanding
really the water flow issues. But it could also really

(18:42):
lead to issues of like inequality. You have a bunch
of wealthy people get together and build their own school
and have their own fire department and their own police force,
and pretty soon they're living in like a literal bubble,
and if the wealth is concentrated there, it can be
very difficult for people without those resources to have access
to it and have opportunities, and then where you live
determines basically the course of your life. So I think

(19:03):
there's definitely pluses and mindsets to that sort of reorganization
of society. I agree completely. Yep, this stuff is super complicated,
but in her book she takes all of this on
and she talks about the ups and the downs. The
network crashes at one point, which creates, you know, maybe
literal headaches for people trying to make decisions, So you know,
she doesn't shy away from all of this. She really

(19:23):
seems to have done a lot of research into how
this would actually operate. Tell me what your impressions were
of the biology, because her aliens were really quite inventive.
Did you find it realistic? Yeah, I mean I really
enjoyed reading about the aliens. So I'm I'm not usually
a great person to talk to about, like critiquing the
science of a sci fi universe, because I'm pretty much

(19:44):
willing to accept anything as long as the person is
consistent with the rules that they lay out. But I
will say that she had some really interesting aliens. One
was kind of like an insect and one was kind
of like a spider, and seeing how you know, those different,
you know groups, since there are environments in very different ways,
and you know, how figuring out how they learned to
communicate with one another and appreciate the ways that they

(20:06):
were different and learned how to complement one another, and
how they how they essentially ended up living in symbiosis
and we're reaching out with humans to try to make
them another symbiotic partner. I thought that was really interesting.
And additionally, how they engineered their environments so that, you know,
both species could interact even though their you know, their
body plans were really quite different. She thought it through
quite a bit. What did you think of the aliens? Yeah,

(20:28):
super creative. I had never thought about having two aliens
and symbiosis come and visit and like invite us to
join their little club, you know. I thought that was
a really cool way of thinking about things. I also
really enjoyed our insights into the alien culture. You know.
On one hand, it was very easy to talk to
the aliens because by the time they arrived that already

(20:49):
heard a bunch of English in our broadcasts and train
themselves on it, so we could just like chat with
them immediately. On the other hand, they were important cultural
differences like the Aliens were weirded out when people didn't
bring their children along to you know, diplomatic meetings, because
apparently in their culture, that's a real sign of trust,
right that you brought your children. So I thought that
was really clever. So much in this book of that

(21:10):
was just really different from anything I've ever seen before. Yeah,
I definitely found myself thinking afterwards, like, oh, what, I
what I want to live in that world? Like it
certainly would have made being a mom and maintaining my
career much easier if it was just expected that my
kids would come with me everywhere. On the other hand,
I find it really hard to think sometimes when my

(21:30):
kid is getting up, you know, when my kids were
getting upset and I had to make a big decision.
But she has her characters deal with that kind of
stuff too, and so yeah, it was it was an
interesting way to imagine the world that I think would
have some big benefits but would be difficult to implement.
Something she described in her novel as sort of an
eventual end point for civilizations is not just moving out

(21:50):
to space, but also constructing sort of like mega projects,
things like Dyson spears, which capture a large fraction or
all of the energy of a star, allowing realizations to
like vaporized planets or or construct enormous other technologies that
require so much energy. I thought it was really interesting
to think about whether that's actually possible, you know, whether

(22:12):
that's the only way to live as an interstellar species,
or whether there are other ways to do it. Yeah,
I mean I found I found it to be a
very depressing prospect, the idea that you would have to
like grind up the Earth in order to make a
dicense fear to keep a subset of these species alive
right now on Earth, you know, alive in space stations

(22:32):
or something. I hope that's not the direction of things.
What and it sounds complicated? What did you think of it?
I think that is an interesting question. And you know,
if we were to build a dicense fear here in
our Solar system, I wouldn't start with grinding up the Earth,
you know, I would start with like mercury. Mercury has
a lot of really heavy metals in it, and we

(22:52):
don't really need it for anything else. We could like
lose mercury and not really notice. But it's a good
point that if you wanted to build a full dicense fhere.
If you wanted to capture like all of the ten
to the twenty six watts of energy that the Sun
puts out, you would need a lot of material. Right
If you built like a sphere at the radius of

(23:13):
the Earth like radius of one AU, then the internal
surface of that sphere would be like mind bogglingly large.
We're talking about five hundred million times the surface of
the Earth. So we've never built anything the size of
the Earth. Now we're talking about building something like hundreds
of millions of times the surface area of the Earth.

(23:33):
It's like, we're not even close to doing that. So
I think I'm more realistic. Trajectory is that you build
a bunch of stations in space that are capable of
absorbing the power of the Sun and you use that
for your space based infrastructure. You don't necessarily need to
go from zero to complete dicensphere in an afternoon. Where
where would you live in the dicensphere. So, like you

(23:56):
build the dicensphere, do you live on like the outside
part of it? Are you just floating around inside of
the sphere. It's a tricky question, right, Like you could
imagine living on the inside of this mega project. But
there would be no gravity, right, You're not going to
be able to like walk around in the inside of it.
And then you might think, oh, let's spin the thing.
Right now, you have this enormous thing which is also spinning,

(24:18):
and it would be really unstable. You know, a Dyson
sphere that surrounds the Sun, you can stay there stably,
just sort of in orbit, but as soon as he
gets off center a little bit, now the part that's
closer to the Sun is going to feel more gravity
towards the Sun and it's going to very quickly fall
into the Sun. And so this thing would be very unstable.

(24:39):
And now you're spinning it also, which makes it less stable,
and it would need to be much much stronger. Right,
this thing would require like a tensile strength that exceeds
any known material that we can even imagine building it
out of. So it would be very hard to build.
It'd be very unclear to know, like where you would
live on it. I think instead, much more realistic is

(25:00):
not to build a huge Dicen sphere that encircles the
whole star, but just to build a bunch of satellites
that like roughly circle the Sun, don't block it entirely.
That just gather a bunch of energy. Because the Sun
has so much energy, we don't even need all the
energy that the Sun puts out. What would we even
do with that other than building like giant space lasers.
I don't want to live in a world with giant

(25:21):
space lasers. I don't think would you have to like
replace these satellites regularly that would be an incredible job.
Or do you you just imagine that these satellites are
gonna work forever. No, you definitely need to replace them.
And I think the most realistic plan I've ever heard
for building this kind of system is that you build
a few of them manually out of materials from like mercury,

(25:42):
and then you build robots that make more, and you
power those robots using the system that you built. So
you sort of build a few bespoke ones yourself using
human mining and industry, and then you use that as
a launching point for your like automatic self replicating robot
arm that can make more of these things. And then
it basically like devours mercury and turns it into a

(26:04):
whole network of these things. And yet some of them
will go offline, but you just keep building them where
you can recycle the materials somehow, and then you beam
it to the Earth or to your I guess, to
your stations because you're living around the sphere. You and
I've talked about the prospect of getting solar power in
space and beaming it down to the Earth. That's tricky, right,
because you've got to get it down to the Earth,
But you don't want to fry people, and you don't

(26:25):
want to build a giant space laser and handed over
to politicians for so many reasons. But instead, if you
build it in space for use in space, then you
know that mitigates some of those issues. You don't need
to beam it down to the planet. Um, you can
just sort of beam it around space. I suppose do
you feel like there's any ethical argument against destroying a
planet just because we're not personally super interested in it

(26:49):
right now? I think there's definitely a question of you know,
colonization and treating it like a resource. We don't know,
for example, whether there's life on Mercury, and we also
don't know the sort of spectrum of post some whole life.
Potentially there is life on mercury that we don't even notice,
we don't even recognize, and we just like devour it
and turn it into our battery system essentially without even

(27:09):
being aware of it. Or maybe life would have evolved
on mercury in another hundred million years, just sort of
like slow going chemistry, and we've prevented that from happening.
So there are definitely important questions about how we treat
resources in space, and also who in our society gets
access to those resources, you know, should it be corporate
barons who are launching their own satellites, Should it be

(27:30):
national governments, or should it be like decisions made by
a bunch of local communities with Reddit in their brain?
You know? These are important questions, they are, And I've
been reading a bunch of papers by philosophers about, you know,
conservation of things in space, and you you know, you
mentioned mercury's value if it has life on it, But
I think they would argue that, like, I mean, it's
a whole planet that you know, has scientific value, and

(27:53):
even that even if it doesn't have scientific value, it
might be nice to look at. And should we, you know,
should we value it just because it's a giant thing?
That its cysts, and I think that's a very popular
argument with many people. But it's interesting to think about. Yeah,
that is interesting in the same way that you might say, hey,
let's not demolish that mountain because of the coal inside
of it. It's kind of nice to look at and
to hike around on. We prefer it in mountain form, right,

(28:16):
And what are we going to do with all the
acronyms that we use to memorize the planets if there's
no M at the beginning and we're gonna have to
start over, and that's going to be tough. That's really
an ethical issue. All those children we've taught this acronym
and now they have to start again. Ye, not fair?
What are we doing to our children? Think of the children?
Think of the children. Indeed, all right, wonderful. Well, we

(28:37):
have a special tree coming up for you. After the break,
we're going to talk to the author of a Half
Built Garden and hear about how she came up with
these ideas and why she is so fascinated by thinking
about them. But first we're gonna take another break. Then

(29:03):
it's my pleasure to welcome to the program ruth Anna Emiris.
She is a prolific author of many novels and has
been shortlisted for several awards, including being a finalist for
the Locust Award for Best First Novel, and she's here
to talk to us about her recent science fiction book,
A Half Built Garden. Ruthanna, thank you very much for

(29:26):
joining us, and welcome to the program. Thank you for
having me so First, we'd like to get to know
you a little bit before we ask you in detail
about your process of writing the book. Tell us a
little bit about your background and how you came to
write a book about aliens. I've really come to write
a book about aliens? I don't know. I've been writing
about aliens honestly most of my life. It's always been

(29:49):
one of my favorite sub genres of science fiction. How
I came to write book about climate mitigation that had
aliens in it is that I've lived in Washington, d C.
For about ten years, and one of the first things
that happened when I came here was that I got

(30:09):
involved in the local citizen science movement, and I got
involved people who were running projects that were bringing ordinary
people into the process of planning science, collecting data, analyzing data,
and seeing the way that that changes the way that

(30:29):
people think about the world and the ecosystems around them.
So when I started to think about, well, what sort
of governance structures could be really different from what we
have now and maybe do better at dealing with the
huge existential problems that we face as a species, I

(30:50):
started to think about that sort of crowdsource system. And
because I am always interested in what challenges systems, and
I was thinking about the ways that our current systems
are challenged by these problems, I started thinking about, Okay,
here's a system that works much better for these problems.

(31:11):
What makes this system break? And the answer was aliens?
Because why would it not be aliens? That's a good answer.
When I was reading the book, I found myself wondering
if you have a background in either ecology or political science,
because both of those sort of themes were done so
well in the book, And so do you have a

(31:32):
background in either of those topics? Thank you? My background
is in the social sciences more generally. I'm an experimental
cognitive psychologist by training, but I spend a lot of
time working with anthropologists and political scientists, and I also
spend a lot of time working with ecologists and other

(31:57):
people who are working on other disciplines involved in solving
climate issues. So I'm always working on the how can
humans screw this up end of things? But I love
talking with and looking with the people who are working
on the how do we get carbon out of the atmosphere?

(32:20):
How do we improve the resilience of our systems from
uh energy standpoints? And then I'm coming back with, okay,
and how do we get people to actually implement the
solution now that you come up with it. Something I
really enjoy in science fiction novels and in particular in yours,
is imagining other ways that we can live, other ways

(32:42):
that we might organize ourselves. And your book describes a
pretty novel political and social organization, the watershed. Can you
explain this concept to our listeners? So, the dandelion networks
in a half built garden are they are built around watersheds,
and a lot of that was trying to think about

(33:03):
what sort of geographic boundaries would have some basis in
shared interests and shared problem solving, and it would make
people think more deeply about the world around them. They
are also technological system The networks are sort of many

(33:28):
internets that are based around watersheds or in some cases
around just you know, knitting or other shared interests as well,
and people can belong to more than one of them.
But the central thing they do is decision making. So

(33:48):
they include both systems set up for people to provide
input into a problem like how do we reduce level
of run off into the Anacostia River. And then they
also include algorithms that, if you think about the way
that modern machine learning algorithms often unintentionally bring in biases

(34:15):
from their data sets, the dandelion algorithms deliberately bring in
biases that we want to have. So they include algorithms
that bias problems solving towards human rights or towards advocacy
for the local ecosystem. And so those algorithms also contribute

(34:39):
to solving problems and weighting solutions. One of the things
that I really enjoyed about the book, in addition to
the things I've already mentioned that I enjoyed about the book.
So you talk about a law, you know, there are
people who are arguing that living on Earth isn't a
viable long term solution. And I just finished reading a
bunch of books about space settlements, and it was interesting
to hear some of those arguments or of coming back

(35:00):
and being heard from different characters in your book. So
what is your feeling about the future of humanity? Can
we eventually make civilization work here on Earth or are
we going to need to move out to the stars
to solve our problems? You know, I kind of wrote
the book to argue with myself about that. If I
had to take an end to say, I think that

(35:21):
we ought to get both. I love to see us
going out and colonizing space. At the same time, I
think that a lot of science fiction that valorizes the
destiny of humans in the stars tends to underestimate the
value of having a complex ecosystem that you evolved to

(35:41):
live in and the distance that we are from actually
being able to make other places more amenable to human
life when we're currently in the process of making this
one less amenable to human life. I probably did come
down on the side of the characters saying, you know,

(36:02):
we need to maybe figure out how to make this
work on easy mode in order to do it right
anywhere else. Is that the viewpoint you had when you
started writing the book or through the process of writing
the book, you sort of formed that more like solid viewpoint.
Like I said, I wrote the book in part to
argue with myself that is srequitely why I write books. Well,

(36:24):
something I thought was really fascinating are these political structures
that you described with this Dandelion network. It seems to
me like sort of an opposite trend of what we're
seeing today where we're lurching towards globalization. In your book,
you have sort of these smaller, more local communities that
operates am I independently Do you think that that's a
future for humanity, that these larger national governments and international

(36:46):
corporations are going to break up in favor of more
local solutions. I think it depends on the direction that
we choose to go. Um, but I really see trends
in both directions. In the modern world. We get anything
that pushed towards greater globalization, but we also you know,
over the course of this last couple of weeks, I've

(37:08):
been anxiously watching Twitter breakdown and started up Mastodon account
just to make sure that I still had something. And
there's something much more granular and localized about the Mastodon instances.
And you know, people talk about that as both drinks

(37:30):
and a weakness, just as the globalization of Twitter has
been a great strength and also turns out to make
it kind of griddle. I also see a lot of
the best, quietest work towards sustainability and resilience happening at
the local level, you know, in towns and cities where

(37:55):
people really have concretely shared needs that let them negotiate
politics locally in a way that can be more challenging
at higher scales. Do you think we're gonna need like
a major political realignment, like having little watershed governments before
we can actually start to address some of these bigger
problems like climate change. I don't think it's the only way.

(38:18):
As I said, I live in the DC area. I'm
felt way person, and I have uh fondness for the
executive branch agencies and the hard work that people do
in them. The NASA people who are running around trying

(38:42):
desperately to be relevant in the book are kind of
a love letter to all the people that I have
seen around here working utterly thankless jobs and trying desperately
to solve problems while people detegrate them in you know,
xt door And I hope that we figure out how

(39:04):
to solve problems with the nation states we currently have,
because it's honestly easier to do things with systems that
you've already got in place. But I also think that
having subsidiarity and overlapping systems provide some really important ability

(39:27):
to address problems in different ways. In a different level,
I'd like to hear more of your thoughts about how
technology plays a role in allowing that to happen. I mean,
I know that in the early days the Internet, we
all imagined that the internet would be a powerful force
for direct democracy, and now we see there's another side
to it that can also amplify hate speech and connect
pockets of extremism. And in your book, it was fascinating

(39:49):
how the networks and the discussion seemed to be the
core of this like communal, bottom up style government. It
was almost a utopian at the same time as being
a little bit topian. Because we're facing this crisis. Do
you think that Twitter or Mathadon or these other social
networks are going to be sort of a framework for
reimagining our priorities and government strategies. I mean, I think

(40:11):
they have been. You know, Twitter has changed the way
that we do some types of governance. I have a
friend who is currently completely freaking out because Twitter has
been the backbone of vastly improved disaster response over the

(40:34):
last decade, and she's fairly certain that when uh new
natural disaster happens in the next few months, people are
going to die because Twitter is broken, and as we
will be losing infrastructure that we were depending on to
you know, put people in touch with resources and to

(40:59):
get help quickly where it's needed. Most technologies, they can
be used in many different ways, but they also have
affordances that make some things easier and somethings harder. Twitter
unfortunately makes some good things easier and some bad things easier,

(41:21):
and I think that as we design new technologies, we
want to think very deeply about what affordances we're building
in and trying actively to prevent or mitigate the worst
of the negative law. I also tend to think about

(41:41):
technology in a way that I think a lot of
people don't. It's not just the circuits, it's the social structures.
And for the dandelion networks, there are algorithms involved, but
there are also new modes of social organization and new

(42:02):
ways of teaching people to expect and be incentivized by
certain types of engagements. And then I'm also very fond
of whole idea of humans as natural side works that
built into our neurology is the expectation of being slow used.

(42:27):
So literally, when you pick up a stick, you change
the way you represent space around you, in your occipital
lobe where you normally represent space, because the distinction that
you actually make and representing space is places that I
can reach and manipulate in places that I can't reach

(42:47):
and manipulate. So every time we take on a new technology,
it changes our representation of ourselves and of our ability
to impact the world. And that was something else I
was thinking of with the Dandelion Networks, was deliberately designing
something too create that cyborgness in a way that was

(43:13):
good for the world and good for the people who
use it. I really appreciate the considering technology in the
long term from both the perspectives of how it can
go well and how it can go poorly. And I
had a project that I did once and I interviewed
a bunch of people working on emerging technologies, and I
was really surprised by how many of them didn't have
the answer to well and explain to me all the
ways your technology could be bad. And I can't tell

(43:35):
if they just didn't want me to know, or if
they really hadn't blowed it through, But I do feel
like in general, we tend to be a little bit
rosier about technology and we try not to think about
the negative implications until they sort of hit us in
the face. What people do have answers, they go in
very interesting directions. So I was involved in I think
a similar project many years ago now, I think about

(43:56):
fifteen years ago. I got involved with with people who
were trying to do foresight work around nanotechnology and to
come up with policy recommendations in advance of actual capability.
And after a while in these rooms you would find

(44:19):
that everyone wanted to think about the grade youth problem,
which is, you know, very specialtive nanotechnology that reproduces itself,
optimizes for pagano clips and turns the entire planet into
paper clips and zero. People wanted to think of about

(44:42):
inhaling nanoparticles, which was in fact a actual problem with
actual nanotechnology at the time, for you know, what what
happens if there is UH bug in your paper clip
optimizer with there will be and how does it break down?

(45:03):
People love the big dramatic and I love the big
dramatic futures still on the science fiction writer, but it
also got very interesting to me psychologically the types of
futures that people wanting to think about and the type
that they found uncomfortable to think about. I have a
question about the sort of emotional side of it. In
your story, humans and aliens have like really big and

(45:25):
important cultural differences, but they can also successfully empathize with
each other and in some cases understand each other's social
and political issues. There's even a thread where we get
a sense that one character develops romantic feelings for an alien.
Do you think that's something we can expect to happen
in our universe when maybe aliens or is it more
just that in the hard realistic take where aliens are

(45:48):
incomprehensible emotionally doesn't make for a very satisfying science fiction story.
I mean, certainly that's part of why I choose to
write aliens who are somewhat comprehensible emotionally. But I think
it's you know, it depends on the species. If you
look at be more intelligent to other species with whom

(46:08):
we share our planet. Currently, humans get along better with
some of them than others, and when we get along
with them, we have very weird and unexpected places of
breakdowns and communication. And the things that humans can agree

(46:30):
on with adolphins are very differus to the things that
humans can agree on with a part and the relationships
that we go with them are also very different. And
I said, tool even for something where we could learn
to speak each other's languages better than humans and Paris do.
So then if aliens do arrive, do you think that

(46:53):
we should send cognitive psychologists to go talk to them first?
Are you volunteering? Yes, yes, I'm totally volunteering. Oh my gosh,
most people ask that question backpedal rapidly, so I'm glad
for your enthusiasm. So I have sort of a light
question here. So what alien in either you know, literature
or movies or TV is the best done alien? Are

(47:15):
the best written alien that you've come across? And what
was your thought process as you went through and like
designed your aliens for the book? It depends on how
you defined I know I've said it depends a lot.
I I am very annoyingly sent there. I really love
the aliens in Mary Deriyah russell Sparrow and the mix

(47:40):
of you know, understanding and horrible misunderstanding that happens there,
and the interesting relationships between the different species there. And
I'm sure that that was part of my own influence.
I'm wanting to write two species that have relationship and

(48:00):
then come to those contest with humans together. I was
also thinking about my first two books are in fact
deconstructive love crafty and historical fantasy, and they use aliens
that love Crafts made up. And Lovecot had many serious
issues as a person, some of which my books are

(48:21):
about arguing with. But he was really good at coming
up with not even remotely humanoid aliens. And then, you know,
having whole slide bars of those years, all the biology
that I just made up, It isn't this fun oh

(48:42):
look funnest. And so when I went to create my
own aliens, I did set myself the bar of that
they have to be at least as interesting in terms
of body plans. And the aliens that I got to
borrow for my last actually I really enjoyed, you know,
all the biology that you incorporated into the aliens lives.

(49:03):
They were, They were very interesting aliens to think about.
Speaking of aliens, why do you think we haven't been
visited yet? You know, what's your personal answer to the
Fermi paradox? Even how old the galaxy is and how
common rocky planets seem to be, why have we not
yet been visited by aliens? We've been looking for a century.

(49:25):
That is a minuscule amount of time us working what
the fact that we haven't found aliens yet is very
much like my kid looking for her stuffed animal for
two seconds and then mean that she hasn't sarned her stuff.
You make us sound very immature as a species. At

(49:49):
least hope we're immature as a species. If we're mature
as a species, then I have a whole new answer
for the Fermi paradox. Yeah, I could even art your
in any of the answers from you know we we
missed them to everyone killed themselves a climate change to

(50:10):
be accurate. But I also feel like we just haven't
been looking that lot. And also I do feel and
this is one of the things I was arguing with
myself about in the book, Like a lot of the
why haven't we found the people who colonized the galaxy
already A lot of the answer to that is, I

(50:31):
think the sort of mindset that it takes to try
and grow endlessly is the sort of mindset that it
takes to kill yourself off climate change. And I did
ask myself that I was writing it, was what would
it take for someone to build a licensephere and still
be worth talking too? Because I personally think that most

(50:54):
species you can imagine building dicenspheres, you hope they stay
very far way from your solar system. Agreed. So, speaking
of far off tech, what tech that's either existing in
your book or other sci fi books would you like
to see made real? Most of all, I really like

(51:16):
the part of the networks that involves making it easier
and more organic for people to sense the details of
the boom around them. So the sort of augmented reality
where it's not going to block your ability to hear
bird sell when you go out for a walk, but
you can also you know, dive into the health of

(51:38):
the trees or find out what kind of a burden
is if you're you know, not circlers who already has
that memorized. I'm also very fond of the sensory substitution
stuff that exists that I gave Judy. I just like
the idea of being able to have more senses. That

(51:58):
would be awesome. I like to be able to see
the universe and all sorts of new ways. I think
that would really fundamently change our view of it wonderful. Well,
thanks very much for telling us about the process of
writing your book and giving us a little bit of
insight into how you think about aliens and humans and
the prospects of their interactions. It's been a pleasure. Thank
you for having me up And can you tell our
listeners about any upcoming projects of yours? If they've enjoyed

(52:21):
your book as much as we have, what can they
look out for. I don't have any upcoming publications at
the moment. I have a novella that is sitting with
a couple of publishers, so I hope there will be
a publication date on a couple of things soon. You
can also find me on a regular basis at the

(52:42):
Reading the Weird column on tour dot com, where I
am pull Worth and I do commentary on two hundred
years of your fiction with equal parts we and criticism,
nothing being published, just now hoping to have more stuck

(53:02):
out soon. Well, best of luck and very nice to
chat with you. Yeah, thanks for being on the show,
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain
The Universe is a production of I Heart Radio or
more podcast For my heart Radio, visit the I heart

(53:24):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
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