OK, when I was a kid we used to take these plastic wand things with the soap solution and blow bubbles, and watch them float around a few seconds before they popped. Most kids have done this, in America, anyway. I don't know what they did in communist countries. They were probably too busy standing in line for bread and pressuring their kids to take up gymnastics. But that's neither here nor there at this point.

 

Anyway, I used to watch those bubbles and wonder what it would be like to live in one. I wasn't thinking about John Travolta in that immuno-deficiency movie, I was just kind of wondering what it would be like to float around in there. For some reason I used to think about the Incredible Hulk, but I think that was just because I liked the incongruity of the Hulk trying to bust out of a soap bubble.

 

Obviously, anyone living in a soap bubble would be small, I mean so small that you couldn't even see them. But they couldn't just float around in the air, so maybe they lived on little dust specks.. There used to be this book called The Little Prince or something like that, which I never read but must have seen on the desk of every hippy teacher I ever had in the 70's. I don't know what it was about but it was probably one of those hippy parable like The Giving Tree, where  the tree gives everything to the boy and then they both die. Or something.

 

Anyway, this is how I imagined the dust specks, on a slightly larger scale. Like little planets that could support like maybe 100 people or so floating around inside the soap bubbles.

 

And then something else occurred to me, and that was that soap bubbles only lasted like two seconds before they popped, so time had to be really compressed. You know, like in those two seconds, order arose from chaos and life formed from non-life, man or something like him rose from the dirt and became self-aware and forged alliances that grew into city-states and debated the nature of their existence while warring over resources and maybe even build spaceships to explore what was past their dust-speck until after generations of science and art and sacrifice and acheivement, the bubble popped.

 

Kind of depressing. And wow, who wants to blow bubbles after that?

 

OK, so what if each bubble had a single sun, and around that sun was a series of rings like you see around an atom, only each ring was made up of these little dust specks. And each dust-speck had earth-normal gravity and could support a population of, say, 100 to like 3 million people. They all orbit the sun and folks can travel between the dust specks, but they all orbit at different rates so it's almost impossible for any group of specks to form any kind of lasting political or economic alliance based on their proximity to one another. And anyway since the specks are so small, each one can only produce one or two of the goods or services that the speck-people deem essential to their lives and culture, and everything is so tightly interdependent on everything else that no one even thinks about trying to blow each other up. I mean, say one planet is a bunch of cowboys with a dude ranch and one planet is hippys growing vegetables and one is TV producers. Like that.

 

And then, on the inside surface of the bubble itself is a great big ocean and helephino farms (since the entire economy is based on the helephino) and a huge city and stuff like that. And my house, or course, where I rule the self-contained bubble universe.

 

They must be having an online geek festival somewhere because I hadn't posted this 5 hours ago and I've already gotten TWO FREAKIN' EMAILS from Trekkies who were kind enough to point out the similarities between my soap-bubble universe and the Dyson Sphere depicted in the Star Trek Next Generation episode "Relics" (the one where fat Scotty visits the Enterprise and gets on everyone's nerves).

 

I should point out, though, that while I'm describing a simple soap bubble, the Dyson sphere (or Dyson shell) was originally proposed in 1959 by the astronomer Freeman Dyson in "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation" in Science as a way for an advanced civilization to utilize all of the energy radiated by their sun. It is an artificial sphere the size of an planetary orbit. The sphere would consist of a shell of solar collectors or habitats around the star, so that all energy (or at least a significant amount) will hit a receiving surface where it can be used. This would create a huge living space and gather enormous amounts of energy.

A Dyson sphere in the solar system, with a radius of one AU would have a surface area of at least 2.72e17 km^2, around 600 million times the surface area of the Earth. The sun has a energy output of around 4e26 W, of which most would be available to do useful work.

Mine, on the other hand, is made of soap.

(Note: To those who think I am really that smart, I'm just screwing with the geeks. I lifted that entire text from Dyson Sphere FAQ at http://www.d.kth.se/~nv91-asa/dysonFAQ.html Please don't email me any further useless information about something that no one will ever build anyway.)

As usual, thank you for writing.

 

OK, so my wife was going out of town and told me to be sure to turn off the light in the aquarium at night so that the fish don't get confused. Those were her exact words.

 

I don't know that fish get confused, though. If t hey have what could be called a mind, I'm fairly certain it's not as highly-ordered as that. Maybe so, but even if they are I doubt that something like light could confuse them.

 

If fish were capable of that level of awareness, at some point word would have gotten around about fish-hooks.

 

 

 

 

Anyway, I kind of hope for their sake that fish don't have minds as such. Because if they do, they have to be the most bored creatures there are, even more bored than that little prince guy. They live underwater so they can't even talk about the weather.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Note: For those interested, I discussed this topic briefly in Aquaman's Really Wet Adventures on November 28, 2001)

 

When I was in like 7th grade I think, I was outside for recess and talking to this guy I knew, and there was t his teacher there who taught one of the other grades, so we didn't know her but we knew who she was. Anyway she was all dressed in black that day, I mean totally from head to toe.

 

So since I was so clever I said to my friend, "You know, it would be really funny if you went up and asked her who died." I was just making a stupid joke, I swear I never in a million years thought he would really do it.

 

But he goes up to her and he says real sarcastic "Nice outfit. Who died?" and she completely freaks out. I mean, she starts shaking and crying and has to leave. As you probably know, someone actually had died. I don't know who it was but judging from her reaction it was someone very close to her.

 

Now, none of this is funny at all. I mean, it's not funny that she freaks out and it's really not funny that someone died. But it is kind of funny that this doofus kid did that just because I told him to.

 

I mean, death is really never funny, Except unless someone does something really stupid like once I heard about these guys in Texas who set off fireworks while they were standing on top of a propane storage tank. That's kind of funny.

 

So this kid got major detention and tried to put it all off on me. But I put a little different spin on things when they asked me about it. I didn't get any trouble, I don't think.