SF/F Fodder

I’m droolin’ over the possibilities and the story ideas sparking off in me ‘ead.

From Wired News:

Space Dust: It’s Alive and It’s … Us?
By Brandon Keim August 17, 2007 | 11:47:06 AM

That life should be carbon-based is a pretty dated assumption. These days, the zeitgeist is all about sustained organization and patterns of energy flow. Really, should aliens be organic just because we are?

So cast aside the blinders of earth-based life, and open your mind to this:

… an international team has discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organised into helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life itself.

The right conditions are found in a plasma — that “fourth state of matter beyond solid, liquid and gas, in which electrons are torn from atoms leaving behind a miasma of charged particles.”

They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma. […]

“These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,” says Tsytovich, “they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve.”

(link to article – check out their continuing links at the bottom of the article)

Plasma. As in plasma drives. As in plasma whatever, Scotty. Droolin’, abso-freakin’-lutely droolin’.

What if the plasma is alive and works for a living inside your ship’s engine? What if they were inorganic gerbils spinning the wheels to propel your ship through space? What would you feed them? What do they want for pay? Or are they slaves? Unwilling since we don’t realize they are sentient? How would they be contained? What would keep them from getting bored and moving on somewhere else?

Inorganic life.

Granted, the fact that they organized into “helical structures” is based on a computer model. Whether or not it would happen in reality, we don’t know. And do we want to find out? We can’t store enough of the sun’s energy, how do we think we could store energy from plasma? It would have to be one heck of a powerful Swiffer to control that kind of dust. Brings new meaning to the term “dust bunny”, don’t it?