Thursday, July 26, 2018

One look at Scientific American and I want to write something else


"How do you get your ideas?" is a stock question writers often get.

"Whatever creates exigency," the composition theorist in me responds, and I admit it's unflattering of me and pedantic.

So to give answer by example to the question, you are about to witness the kind of chain reaction that oft occurs in this writer's mind.

I read an article in Scientific American called, "World Needs to Set Rules for Geoengineering Experiments."  Geoengineering is the act of purposefully and intentionally altering the world's climate. For the better, of course. In fact there are those who have argued that climate change has already progressed past the tipping point and that the most prudent and practical course of action is not to enact policies that attempt to prevent the change, but rather to re-engineer the world's atmosphere and attack and counteract the effects of climate change.These proposed methods may include but are not limited to spraying aerosols in the atmosphere to cool the planet, space-based mirrors to deflect sunlight and (hopefully) reducing temperatures, and various mechanisms to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The problem, as the Scientific American article argues, is that placing these strategies into practice carries risk. While potential problems can be foreseen and tested for, it's not like we have another Earth where we can test the technology and see what happens before we try it on us. Reading all of this reminded me of a book I was going to write. That is until my college closed and all of my literary energies went solidly towards telling that story and ferreting out the truth (as best as I can, anyway). No, I don't mean my book on Dulce, either. Which I really will get back to one of these days. Sheesh. Just when I thought my "to-read" pile was inordinate, I'm starting to think the same of my "to-write" queue.

No, the theoretical book I have in mind came to me when I looked at a jet plane.

There is a municipal airport not far from where I live. It mainly caters to the exceptionally wealthy and the sight of private business jets soaring overhead is not uncommon. As I walked my dogs one day, I happened to look up at one of these clean, white birds with the swept-back wings, hearing its high-pitched whistle of engine noise. I then looked around at my neighborhood. It occurred to me in that moment that those people in that plane had no more concept of what it is like to be me than I do of what it's like to be them. We might as well be two different species. They cannot see me or anyone else from so high above, and I suspect the same level of visibility would occur at ground level. Just before these thoughts came to me, I had been mulling an article on geoengineering and fighting climate change. My jumbled mind was also replaying a faux-documentary from the UK called "Alternative 3."

A story with heavy debt to all of these factors (especially "Alternative 3") began percolating in my psyche.

I imagined, as I often do, a future where climate change has continued unabated. We've attempted geoengineering such as biochar in the soil and other methods, but they have not been enough to stem the tide. The world is ecologically inhospitable, with threats such as viral plagues released from melted permafrost and a sentient super-hurricane named Larry. Nations with any amount of wealth decide that their populations must move underground in order to survive. Thus, vast, densely-populated subterranean arcologies come to be.

It's far from heaven. Those who can afford them wear "coolsuits," trying to regulate their temperatures as population density creates a heat of its own underground. Our social problems still exist, only they're magnified now. Racial and economic inequality keep everyone teetering on a razor's edge, wondering as they carry their pennets of ill-afforded rations if they can make it home before another riot or police shooting. Mass suicides happen from time to time. One really creative one occurs when a group of self-determined individuals all sit in an old, grounded airplane, drug themselves to the point of utter numbness, and then light the plane ablaze. That way, sitting in the airliner's rows of seats, they at least have the sensation that they're going somewhere, far above the world.

But we also benefit from cool technology, such as artificial intelligence and androids. So we got that going for us. Which is nice...

Okay, another open admission. this milieu I envisioned was also inspired by an awful movie called Circuitry Man that I watched with Brad back in the early 1990s. People lived underground and when pressed for whatever reason to go to the world's surface, they called it "going topside." Maybe I'll have to hunt down that flick, watch it again, and review it. After all, that's what I do for my loyal ESE readers. I watch b-movies so that you don't have to. But I digress...

How do the wealthiest 1% handle this change in living? They don't seem to be doing anything differently, but there does seem to be an odd uptick in deaths among celebrities and wealthy businessmen (think 2016)...

Amid all this mess, a plucky professor of English and journalism has a friend of hers up and disappear. This friend is a STEM academic of one sort or another, possibly physics. Worried for her friend and unable to resist a mystery, the writer tries to track her friend down. In doing so, she discovers just how the wealthy are handling the world's problems.

They're secretly leaving.

I mean, heading into space.

Keeping in mind the supposed "secret space program" alleged by the likes of Gary McKinnon, I envisioned spacecraft taking away arks of elites while leaving the rest of us to stumble around in the muck and the sweat of a worsening world. Yes, I'm taking many social cues from Neill Blomkamp's wonderful, Elysium.

Anyway, after voyaging through space, the most likely place for them to land and start over would be a terraformed Mars. Great. Except for one thing. They're not alone on Mars and someone...or something...is about to show them how insignificant they and all the rest of us really are.

Maybe one day I'll get to this story. Emotionally, it will be a welcome change from writing about the College.

Then again, I thought of this story before February 3rd, 2017. The book was going to be partially set on the campus after it had moved underground. We even moved the Chapel brick by brick and reassembled it in our end of the "Greater Chicago Arcology."

I wonder if there will be any Chapel bricks left by the time I finally write this book?


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Tuesday, July 24, 2018

There are, indeed, "spiders" on Mars




Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech


"Ziggy played guitar,
jamming good with Weird and Gilly,
And The Spiders from Mars."

--David Bowie, "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars"

I think Bowie would be pleased.

A series of black, spider-like structures have been found in the soil of Mars. They are known as "araneiform terrain," geological features created when frozen carbon dioxide heats beneath the surface of Mars. Once turned to gas, the CO2 radiates outward, cutting spindly, spider-like channels into the Martian soil.

This tidbit comes on heels of a June announcement from NASA, stating the Curiosity rover has found "evidence preserved in rocks" that Mars might well have once supported life. There are "tough" organic molecules in the sedimentary rock of Mars and there are seasonal releases of methane into the planet's atmosphere. That latter point is pertinent to any search for current life on Mars.

You can read the whole release here, but it's slightly disappointing. I say that partly due to the build up that always seems to come from these NASA announcements. Usually there's blurb days ahead of time with a headline along the lines of "NASA plans major announcement regarding findings by the Curiosity rover on Mars." I understand PR and I understand the need for hype, but these announcements seldom amount to "major announcements." No, I do not dispute that each of these discoveries is scientifically relevant and do indeed further build towards a case for life on Mars, past or tantalizingly present. I guess it's the kid in me that always feels let down when I hear the inevitable nature of the news, leaving me uttering an admittedly blinkered. "Oh. That's all it is?"

That and if you read the linked release, there's a rhetorical sense in the writing that NASA is pleading, "We're really close. Just keep the program funded. Please?" The "spider" images also seem to serve the same purpose. "Look at the cool things we can find. See? Spiders!"

I'll still follow the updates, wishing for the best but accepting the nature of any findings. As a writer, I'll keep hoping, hoping that I may at last write that blog post of my reaction to news that life...even if just microbial...unquestionably and definitively exists elsewhere in the universe. Or even, perhaps, evidence life far more evolved once existed on Mars.

I won't be betting much on that latter prospect, though.




An image from the Curiosity rover.


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Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Tourist spaceflights to begin next year





Well, sign me up.

Virgin Galactic, baby of Richard Branson, and Blue Origin, baby of Jeff Bezos, have both asserted that they will begin tourist spaceflights next year.  No firm date has been set. Make of that what you will.

If you want a ride on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity, you'll plunk down $260,000 and take the spaceplane past the boundary into space, have a few moments of weightlessness, then land at the spaceport in New Mexico. Blue Origin's craft, New Shepherd, is interesting because it's more the traditional, rocket-and-capsule launch system. There is no capsule splashdown from space with this ride. Instead, parachutes and retrorockets guide it to a landing somewhere in Texas. Neither ride takes you into orbit.

Still, I should not treat this news with such disappointment. Were I able to somehow afford that enormous six-figure ride, I could return and say, "Space? Yeah. I've been there."

Plus, it's also a beginning. Even though the price tag is outside the household budget of most people I know, it may still generate more interest for space travel among the private sector and the public at large. Who knows what it may lead to? I keep thinking of that scene in 2001 where the PanAm (yes, I know they're defunct) spaceship takes travelers to a space hotel. Writers often muse of leaving town, checking into a hotel, and then without distraction they may power through their current work in progress. I can think of fewer locales more isolated and without temptations than space.

Think there could be funding for a Writer in Space program? I'm sure there are many who would like to send me there.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Sunday, July 15, 2018

Marshmallow fluff is nanotech





There is a food in my kitchen that I haven't had in years. I'm convinced it contains nanotechnology.

Let me back that up a bit.

My dogs take several medications. In order to get a dog to take pills, one must first mask it in a food. Liver sausage, cream cheese, maybe a beer (I kid, but there is a non-alcoholic beer available for dogs). At our house, we use peanut butter. That is until our vet told us that it would be a good idea if Butterscotch ate as little fat as possible from now on. Peanut butter, or the brands I've looked at anyway, averages at around 19 grams of fat per serving. I asked the vet what else we might use.

"Marshmallow fluff," she said. "It has zero fat."

So I got the fluff and sure enough the dogs like it just fine. It's been a treat for me too, as I haven't had it probably since I was a teen. Now I'm indulging in plenty of fluffernutters. And yet I've noticed something that has me curious. Here is a photo I took recently of the fluff:




You can see where I spooned out part of the mass. Those are the kind of scoop marks one expects when you use jars of peanut butter, mayonnaise, ice cream, sour cream, yogurt, and you get the idea. Now, here is a pic of the same fluff one hour later:




No scoops. No crevices. No scrapes. Nothing. It's like it had never been opened.

I scooped out more, then checked a half hour later. A smooth surface of fluff greeted my eyes.

I haven't actually sat down and observed the fluff in an uninterrupted fashion, but it appears that if you pierce or skewer the fluff, it eventually repairs itself and returns to its initial form. There is only one reason I can think of for a material to have these kinds of characteristics.

Nanotechnology.

Engines of Creation is a 1986 book by K. Eric Drexler. I was planning on assigning excerpts from it for my class on ethics and transhumanism, but, well...we all know what happened. But I digress...

Drexler imagined nano-sized devices, meaning invisible to the naked eye. These "universal assemblers" could build or even rearrange objects atom by atom. There are, obviously, all manner of applications for nanotech, from precision delivery of medicine or surgeries in the human body (not to mention completely erasing the need for dialysis) or removing pollutants from air and water. It could also, as Drexler warns, lead to perils such as the "gray goo" scenario, wherein self-replication of nanobots leads to them consuming all organic matter in their path, leaving behind, you guessed it, gray goo.

Could marshmallow fluff be "white goo"? One handy-dandy feature of nanotechnology would, after all, be self-repairing materials. Tears in clothes sew back up on their own, tires on cars never puncture, and fingers grow back even after nasty lawn mower accidents. I'm kidding on that last point, but only sort of. My point being, these attributes are, as I stated at the outset, seen in marshmallow fluff.

I found K. Eric Drexler's website. I've sent him an email asking about the fluff, but so far he hasn't gotten back to me. Looks like his last blog post was in 2014, so I don't know how much he's online these days. I'll let you know what he says.

Man. You'd think the makers of marshmallow fluff would really play up the nanotech angle in their marketing.

And before I get any mail telling me what a dope I am, I'll let you know that I can be quite the satirical blogger.


Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Music for a collapsing world



Go ahead and admit it.

Things don't feel right. They haven't for a while. A new Supreme Court nomination has sparked talk, whether grounded in reality or not, of the repealing of people's rights. The NATO alliance might actually fracture. Policies have been enacted that threaten the economic equivalent of a Mad Max future and people of all social strata are just reveling in it. Conflict and polarization are omnipresent in nearly every form of media, leading one to believe that soon, very soon, daily encounters with others will begin with the question, "You red or blue?"

Believe me. In the past year and a half, I've learned a little something about how things fall apart.

These are the times of the writer. This is when writers, often sitting back in a corner, just watching the game unfold and analyzing it in quiet, offer texts of penetrating insight and chilling warnings. They act as the great mirrors, holding themselves up to society and showing us the good, the bad, and the ugly...challenging us to see if our perceptions stack up to the reality. Often, the casual reader recoils and scoffs, "That's so depressing!" Then as the first crumbles of social concrete sprinkle to the ground, the writers, once shunned as cynics unproductive to the conversation, shrug and smirk, "told ya." It's times like these that have brought us George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

They also bring us great music as musicians offer similar observations. So if the world is collapsing, I say why not give it a great soundtrack. I now tender a list of what to listen to while it all comes apart:

Last September, Gary Numan (pictured above) released his album, Savage (Songs from a Broken World). He's best known for his early work with Tubeway Army and his single, "Cars," but Numan has a long legacy of sophisticated song writing and compelling, marvelously discordant melodies. Savage is a concept album, telling the story of a desert world ravaged by climate change. As Numan said:

"It's about a desperate need to survive and they do awful things in order to do so, and some are haunted by what they've done. That desire to be forgiven, along with some discovered remnants of an old religious book, ultimately encourages religion to resurface, and it really goes downhill from there."

Check this track, "My Name is Ruin":





"My name is ruin, my name is vengeance
My name is no one, no one is calling
My name is ruin, my name is heartbreak
My name is loving, but sorrows and darkness"

Another magnificently menacing track is "Mercy." I've listened to it on repeat as I write my book about the College.




"You all remember my pain
Your politics are screaming
You won't know my name or my forgiveness
Mercy's overrated

No Mercy
No Mercy"




In 2007, Nine Inch Nails released Year Zero. By then, Trent Reznor had been well known for deep, moody, and contemplative songs about depression, heartbreak, rage, and the desire to end it all. This time around, he turned his gaze outward and looked at both the political landscape and the world writ large. Year Zero is a concept album beamed from the future as a warning, telling of a United States ruled by a Christian theocracy where it is a citizen's duty to report "immorality." There are obvious themes of the War on Terror and the surveillance powers of the Patriot Act at play in the record. There is also a summation to the album that intimates...but never blatantly states...an all-powerful being bringing an end to the world. There are no survivors...save for perhaps the machines that will carry on to create the same kinds of soundscapes that Trent did.





"In the hour of our twilight...
It will all be said and done...

Shame on us, doomed from the start
May God have mercy on our dirty little hearts
Shame on us, for all we have done
For all we ever were, just zeroes and ones"


Moral of the song? Actions have consequences. Sometimes, global consequences.


I've been listening to Heligoland  from 2010 by Massive Attack.




Fans of the series House no doubt recognize Massive Attack from the song "Teardrop", the show's theme. Massive Attack is an electronica, trip hop duo that often works with several other singers and musicians for MA albums. For example, Hope Sandoval from Mazzy Star contributes vocals on Heligoland and there's guitar playing by Adrian Utley from Portishead. Anything involving Portishead is just fine by me. In fact, it's his guitar work that really makes the song, "Saturday Come Slow."





"In the limestone caves
In the south west lands
One time in the kingdom
Believe is on the sand
Saturday comes slow
Do you love me?
Do you love me?
Or is there nothing there?"

Whether they intended it or not, I listen to this record and imagine myself staring out the window as reality changes into something else I can no longer recognize, yet no one else seems to notice it besides me. Perhaps more accurately, others are too afraid to talk about it.

Observe the video for "Atlas Air."




Look at the fear, the paranoia, the suspicion, the switching to gun camera footage. It speaks volumes.

I asked my friend Jason for his take on what would make for fitting additions to this soundtrack. He correctly pointed out that most of Killing Joke's catalog qualifies.




Continuing with the "Mad Max economy" theme, Jason also recommended The Pop Group with "We Are All Prostitutes."




"Capitalism is the most barbaric of all religions." Let the debate ensue...


Even my beloved Duran Duran can dwell on the disintegration of the social fabric, albeit most of those ruminations were confined to their Cold War, punk-influenced debut eponymous album.







"Look now, look all around
There's no sign of life
Voices, another sound..."




"Is There Anyone Out There?" Ahhhh that one brings back "careless memories" of late night teen angst. Not sure it fits the motif, but...no, yeah, I think it does.

"Outside is there anyone out there, anyone else outside
Oh outside love is there anyone out there, anyone else outside
Look out of the window maybe you can call by my name
Another night over babe another light comes on in vain"

Maybe it speaks to the isolation of the human condition. No matter what we're going through, the philosophy of existentialism states that we face it alone for no one else can know your own experience. Despite all our technology, despite "the Internet of all things," we remain utterly disconnected.

And Duran wrote this song in 1980...


David Bowie. Blackstar.




I've made no secret how much I love David Bowie. Likewise, it's obvious to most everyone by now that his final record, Blackstar, was all about him facing his impending death. As Bowie was so often able to do in his legendary career, the work is at once clear and cryptic, all while stirring emotions that the listener might not at first know how to process.





"Look up here, I'm in heaven
I've got scars that can't be seen"

This is a deeply personal work, arguably his most personal. Therefore, I would doubt he was contemplating things on a global scale, and yet...and yet...I believe we can apply this same schema to not simply coming to grips with one's own mortality, but in viewing the ephemeral nature of all that surrounds us. The impermanence of things...

Within this bleak, existential reality, however, Bowie did not neglect the light of hope.





"Something happened on the day he died
Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside
Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried,
"I'm a blackstar, I'm a blackstar."


That's what we all want in the wake of disaster, isn't it? Something new coming from the ashes.


Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Thursday, July 5, 2018

Mars engulfed in dust storm





Image is from Space.com


A planet-wide dust storm.

That's a concept difficult to get your head around, but it's exactly what's happening right now on Mars.  For those of us with an interest in space science, it's quite a sight...so you can imagine what people who do it for a living are thinking.You can see an animation of the storm at the previous link. The picture above is a still from it, showing the otherwise clear, red features of Mars muted by a cloud of dust.

The storm began as a localized disturbance in May and gradually grew to engulf the entire planet. To render an idea of scale, Earth is slightly larger than Mars. Such a storm here would encapsulate most of the world. And yet it's not an unheard of occurrence on Mars. In fact it happens every few years, albeit this one seems set to be a record-breaker.

While it's not fully understood what causes the storms to grow to planet-size, it's thought that the smaller ones...even though they're still continent-sized at times...begin when sunlight warms the surface of Mars. This causes the heated air to rise into the thin atmosphere where the air is cooler. This creates an updraft which draws the fine Martian soil upward. The wider the temperature variations, the more dust in the air. Sometimes multiple storms can arise and in time, merge into larger ones.

That actually reminds me a little of my "merged hurricane," "sentient superstorm" story idea that I assure you will one day find its way into print.

Just as storms have a habit of doing here on Earth, this one is messing up a lot of people's plans. Mars is about to make its closest approach to Earth in 16 years. Unfortunately, astronomers both amateur and professional may not get a full view of the planet's features through their telescopes due to the heavily clouded atmosphere. Officials at NASA are also concerned for the Opportunity rover. As it is solar-powered, there has been no contact with the rover in weeks. Its solar panels are likely covered in a layer of dust but even if they weren't, the dust cloud blotting out the sunlight would be more than problematic. It is hoped that Opportunity has simply gone into hibernation mode and will re-establish contact once the dust storm subsides.

What does this Martian occurrence mean to writers? Well, I don't recall super dust storms making their way into the John Carter books of Edgar Rice Burroughs (I could be wrong as I haven't read all of them.) This may be due to the fact that telescope technology of the 19th century might have had difficulty observing such storms in detail. The storms are, however, integral to The Martian. I have yet to either read the book or see the film, but I am told a dust storm is what maroons the titular astronaut on Mars. I will say that including these storms in fiction about the Red Planet sounds necessary in order to lend any tale of colonization or extra-planetary campcraft authenticity.

Maybe colonizing Mars wouldn't be as much fun as I'd originally thought.

Oh who am I kidding? I'd still go. A planet-wide dust storm still beats perpetual political conflict.

Follow me on Twitter: @Jntweets

Sunday, July 1, 2018

Would YOU kill Bigfoot?



Image found here.

If you hang on to the end, I will have a special announcement.

Well, I'm back.

Hope you will pardon the absence. I've been taking time off to handle a few other things and to relax. Pursuing the latter, a mind-pop prompted me to find and watch an old movie from my childhood, The Curse of Bigfoot. You can find that movie here, but the less said about it the better. I also found old episodes of In Search Of on YouTube. As I've said before, that show, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, exerted a profound effect on me. With but interviews, Nimoy's narration, location footage, and really creepy music, In Search Of helped jump start my lifelong interest in strange mysteries and the paranormal, first as a childhood believer and now as a writer who is fascinated by the generation of these narratives, for they are indeed a form of writing, just as I am doing now with this post. I found a cheap set of In Search Of on Amazon and might have to indulge myself. But I digress...

One episode has kept me thinking for weeks because of the questions it posed. It had to do with Bigfoot. Also known as "sasquatch", this is of course the legendary bipedal creature of the North American wilds, said to be a cross between human and ape. I am about 90% convinced no such thing exists. I leave that 10% open because a) I don't know everything and b) my Grandpa once told me of friends of his who saw Bigfoot during a wave of sightings in Ohio and my Grandpa was among the most trustworthy people I've ever known. If you check the database on the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization's website, you'll see that Ohio remains something of a hotbed of sightings.

But that's mostly the extent of the evidence for Bigfoot's existence: sightings, albeit hundreds of them. There are also casts of footprints, photographs and videos of varying veracity, and stories from Native American lore. Apart from all of that, there is no tangible evidence upon which to rest a case for the mysterious creature. So if indeed Bigfoot exists, how do you get conclusive evidence?

Simple. You get a specimen for examination. Alive, preferably. Dead, just as good.

Dr. Grover Krantz was a biological anthropologist.





He was something of an anomaly in academics as he openly professed his belief that Bigfoot exists. At the same time however, he knew that pictures, particularly in the digital age, will never be enough to form conclusive evidence. Only a body or a piece of a body will be accepted.

Peter Byrne takes an opposing view.

 

Byrne was a big game hunter who converted to conservationism. He became fascinated with the idea of Bigfoot after encountering tales and footprints of its cousin, the Yeti, while in Nepal. Byrne believes that shooting a Bigfoot, even if the action at last proves its existence, is unethical. An aspect of his reasoning is that the animals, if indeed they exist, are quite rare and what if we shoot one and it is the last one left?

Krantz shrugged off that philosophy with a sort of Libertarian, "that's the free market" reasoning.
"Species go extinct all the time and there's nothing we can do about it. If it's the last one left, then so what? It makes no difference if they aren't proven."

Another counterpoint is that Bigfoot, if it exists, would perhaps be a close relative to humans. Might killing one constitute murder? How can murder be committed in the name of scientific pursuit? A Native American woman interviewed for the In Search Of episode, expressed disdain for those who call Bigfoot an "animal." She, and according to her, her tribe, view Bigfoot and a fellow human, basically 'living his best life" out in the woods and the mountains. It is not up to us to determine whether or not he exists, therefore we have no moral grounds upon which to act.



So what's the answer? Is killing a living thing in order to prove its existence right or wrong?

Yes, I sense the philosophical absurdity in the question, but I still find it intellectually stimulating.

Immanuel Kant formulated a philosophical concept called "the categorical imperative." This is meant as a tool by which people may decide their actions. In a categorical imperative, there is an action which must be undertaken and it is justified by the end itself. It would seem the highest imperative of all would be the preservation of life. Obviously humans have all matter of exceptions to this, not the least of which is killing to eat, but it would seem in this case that taking a life in order to prove a point is not ethical. Kant himself opposed cruelty to animals. He believed that such actions ultimately lead to a deadening of one's sense of compassion and that cannot help but find its way into interactions with fellow human beings. Thus, kindness to animals is an imperative.

There is another way to look at this however. Say a Bigfoot is killed, the body analyzed and found to indeed be a close relative of humanity, and thus proven to science. If that happens, we could take legislative action (presuming it would not fall victim to the current hack and slash of environmental deregulation) to protect and preserve the remaining members of the species. This might be, from a utilitarian standpoint, a case of "doing the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people." Or sasquatches. As the aforementioned Leonard Nimoy once said, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one."

What's the solution? I don't know. I lean towards a "no kill" approach as that tends to be my nature these days. The writer in me also feels ambivalence towards proving Bigfoot's existence. For if the creature would be dragged from the shadows, it would lose its mystery and then ultimately its narrative appeal for me.

Let me repeat that this is essentially an academic discussion. I don't believe there is such a creature so it's a waste of time to try to go kill something that doesn't exist.

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT:

I am very happy to report that I am working once more with my old writing partner, George DeRosa. We will soon be releasing a brief novelette about a reality TV show that is hunting Bigfoot. Drama, suspense, action, hilarity, and stupidity will ensue. It will be called The Randy Bigfoot and more details to come.

As an addendum, writer Margaret Atwood once wrote a poem about Bigfoot. 

As another addendum, here is the full In Search Of episode I referenced:




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