COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS Potential effects of a tight orbit include volcanism caused by strong gravitational tides and fierce stellar winds, as imagined here for the exoplanet Gliese 876d. SCIENCE FICTION Curtains for space opera? Since July, astronomers have killed off one trope of science fiction and given fresh life to another. Leigh Phillips gets Mars Trilogy author Kim Stanley Robinson’s reaction. arnard’s star is a star indeed. A member an artefact of upgrade work at his observatory. the 1970s, Will Eisner sited humankind’s of the second closest star system to the Since van de Kamp’s time, the Barnard first contact with an extraterrestrial civi- Sun at 6 light years (1.84 parsecs) away, ‘system’ has been a staple of sci-fi, from lization on a planet in the system. And in Bit pops up all over twentieth-century science short stories and novels, to films and televi- the short-lived Battlestar Galactica spin-off INGA NIELSEN fiction, from classic comics to Asimov. sion series. In Douglas Adams’ The Hitch- series Galactica 1980, the dastardly Cylons Dutch-American astronomer Peter van de hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series and Arthur are believed to be hiding there. Kamp made the first modern claim to have C. Clarke’s The Garden of Rama (Bantam, Recently, the status of this sci-fi staple spotted an exoplanet there in 1963, having 1991), it is a way station for interstellar itself wobbled. In August, a survey by a team studied the star since 1938. He thought that travellers. Michael Moorcock uses an imag- of eight astronomers, led by Jieun Choi of he had discovered wobbles in the position of ined planet orbiting the star as the site of the University of California, Berkeley, and Barnard that indicated a Jupiter-class planet a refugee camp for humans fleeing social covering 25 years’ worth of measurements, in orbit around it. In 1969, van de Kamp breakdown on Earth. For Isaac Asimov, concluded that Barnard’s star does not have revised his findings, positing two planets a Barnard-system any planets — Earth-size or otherwise. — one slightly bigger than Jupiter and one planet is home to NATURE.COM Two months later, astronomers had better slightly smaller. But it wasn’t long before other invertebrate marine See Nature’s science news for the sci-fi cognoscenti. On 17 Octo- astronomers challenged the claims, suggest- animals. In a series of fiction special at: ber, Xavier Dumusque at the University of ing that van de Kamp’s ‘discovery’ was merely comic-book strips in go.nature.com/mqc2jd Geneva in Switzerland and his team reported 330 | NATURE | VOL 491 | 15 NOVEMBER 2012 © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT in Nature that Alpha Centauri B, a mem- COMPUTER SCIENCE ber of our closest star system, just 4.3 light years away, has an Earth-sized planet orbit- ing — albeit with a tight, sun-hugging ‘year’ of just 3.236 days, far from the pre- Virtually there sumed habitable zone (X. Dumusque et al. Nature 491, 207–211; 2012). John Gilbey applauds a call for the digital to join This was sure to resonate with read- the physical, biological and social in science. ers of Stansilaw Lem, Robert Silverberg, Philip K. Dick and, again, Asimov and Clarke, who all made use of the Alpha n On Computing, Paul Rosenbloom drones. These demon- Centauri system in their fiction. It also examines the case for computing to enter strate that traditional appeared in the television series Buck the pantheon of great scientific domains demarcations between Rogers in the 25th Century, Doctor Who Ialongside the physical, biological and social real and virtual envi- and Star Trek. Indeed, Zefram Cochrane, sciences. The centenary year of computing ronments will blur the Star Trek character who ‘invented’ the pioneer Alan Turing’s birth seems a fitting over the coming years warp drive, lived there. moment to put the idea to the test. as interfaces between So what do these two scientific devel- The study of computing, dated from human and machine opments mean for science fiction? Kim Turing’s work, is only about 80 years old. are integrated to the Stanley Robinson, author of the bestsell- It is variously claimed by engineering, point of invisibility. On Computing — ing Mars Trilogy, takes a radical view. physics, mathematics, linguistics and One example is the The Fourth Great Scientific Domain He suggests that we get over the idea of psychology — or seen merely as a support- rapidly expanding PAUL S. ROSENBLOOM interstellar travel altogether: a probe ing technology whose academic roots are field of augmented MIT Press: 2012. would take 28,000 years to get to Alpha irrelevant. Despite this, computing has reality systems, early 312 pp. $35, £24.95) Centauri. “We can’t go fast enough to get arguably made more, and deeper, inroads versions of which are to any of these places,” he says. into the daily life of humanity during the already embedded in smartphones and Barnard’s star was once “the place past 50 years than any other academic dis- tablets. for nearby space”, Robinson says, as his cipline, underlying a series of life-chang- Rosenbloom’s reasoned analysis should novel Icehenge (Ace, 1984) — in which ing products. Imagine life today without help academia and the wider technical characters build a starship headed for mobile-phone networks, the Internet or community to ensure that this transition is it — attests. Now that researchers have medical imaging. managed so as to deliver benefits to human- identified some 840 exoplanets, and Drawing on his background in artificial ity in general. Otherwise, that enormous NASA’s three-year-old Kepler space tel- intelligence, robotics and cognitive architec- and life-changing power will be unfairly escope has spotted 2,320 candidate plan- ture, Rosenbloom leads us through the past, subjugated by a small minority of interests ets, “there may never again be a single present and potential futures of computing — technical, economic or political. default destination”, Robinson continues. as an academic discipline and demonstrates The text is permeated with a sense In his recent book 2312, which ima- its linchpin position in a multidisciplinary of delight in the opportunities offered gines humanity environment. by advances in the computing sciences. three centuries A probe would He uses a novel ‘relational’ approach, Rosenbloom offers elegant examples of from now, spread take 28,000 unveiling the structures and connected- the innovative ways in which computing across terra- years to get to ness across the various subfields of comput- developments and mature research areas formed planets, Alpha Centauri. ing by looking at types of implementation can have hugely productive synergy — such asteroids and and interaction within and between the as in surgical robotics and sophisticated moons in our We have to get existing major domains of science. To help prosthetic systems. own Solar Sys- more realistic. clarify these relationships, Rosenbloom uses On Computing is an unu- tem, Robinson metascience expression language, a nota- sual, and welcome, mix of writes frankly about the galactic hinter- tion that facilitates the representation of the conventional academic land we inhabit. “The stars exist beyond multidisciplinary fields and topics within text and personal human time, beyond human reach,” says science. Metascience expression offers odyssey. Any work cit- E. SCHULZ/AP the narrator. “We live in the little pearl of both a technical context for Rosenbloom’s ing Jane Austen and warmth surrounding our star; outside it anecdotal material and a framework within Richard Feynman in lies a vastness beyond comprehension. which to debate the core tenets of the argu- the same chapter eas- The solar system is our one and only ment. Non-specialists who persevere with ily passes my test for home.” these sections of the book will benefit an interesting inter- Of the idea that we are destined to from a much more disciplinary read. Much go to the stars and inhabit, if not the structured under- more, this book offers whole Universe, maybe the whole gal- standing of the an innovative set of tools axy, Robinson cautions “it’s a fantasy, of make-up of the that could kick-start debate power, transcendence and a kind of spe- computing sciences. and research on the future cies immortality. We have to get more Rosenbloom fields structure of the sciences. ■ realistic.” ■ many examples of com- puting innovation — includ- John Gilbey teaches in the Leigh Phillips is an International ing immersive display technologies, Department of Computer Development Research Centre fellow at neurally controlled prosthetics, and Science at Aberystwyth Nature. quasi-autonomous military systems such University, UK. e-mail: [email protected] as advanced unmanned aerial vehicles, or e-mail: [email protected] © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.