The Washington Post reported on the recent 2009 Homeland Security Science & Technology Stakeholders Conference, where sci-fi authors like Greg Bear and Catherine Asaro discussed their ideas in front of security experts:

The cost to taxpayers is minimal. The writers call this "science fiction in the national interest," and they consult pro bono. They've been exploring the future, and "we owe it to mankind to come back and report what we've found," said writer Arlan Andrews, who also is an engineer with the Navy in Corpus Christi, Tex.

Andrews founded an organization of sci-fi writers to offer imaginative services in return for travel expenses only. Called Sigma, the group has about 40 writers. Over the years, members have addressed meetings organized by the Department of Energy, the Army, Air Force, NATO and other agencies they care not to name. At first, "to pass the Beltway giggle-factor test," Andrews recruited only sci-fi writers who had conventional science or engineering chops on their résumés. Now about a third of the writers have PhDs.

The benefit of talking to the SF authors, according to the attendees? Their fresh take on situations:

"We're stuck in a paradigm of databases," [Chief information officer for Homeland Security's Office of Operations Coordination & Planning, Harry] McDavid said later. "How do we jump out of our infrastructure and start conceptualizing those threats? That's very cool." ...The department can't point to a gadget on the drawing board that was inspired by one of the novelists. But Rolf Dietrich, Homeland Security's deputy director of research, says the writers help managers think more broadly about projects, especially about potential reactions and unintended consequences. "They have a different way of looking at things," Dietrich said.

I have to admit loving the idea of using SF authors to shape US government policy. Well, as long as they don't include Orson Scott Card in any future policy discussions, of course.

U.S. Mission for Sci-Fi Writers: Imagine That [Washington Post]

According to a press release from Tor Books:

The first novel in this new trilogy will be published in early 2010. An unabridged audiobook edition will publish simultaneously with the new novel.

A science fiction icon and winner of the field's highest awards, Greg Bear has signed on to write three "Halo" novels set in the time of the Forerunners, the creators and builders of the Halos. Almost nothing is known for sure about this ancient race. Worshipped by the Covenant as gods, their engineering relics pepper the galaxy, and their connection to humanity remains unanswered. Devoted fans of both the books and games will finally get to delve deep into the era of these enigmatic beings, and discover for themselves the epic story behind one of the great mysteries of the "Halo" universe: the complete disappearance of the Forerunners from existence. "Greg Bear is truly a living legend of science fiction. To have him at play in the Halo universe will be exciting not just to Halo fans but to science fiction fans on a whole," says Eric Raab, Tor editor.

7. When one person displays a new and bizarre ability, that's the work of evolution, because survival of the fittest is making only the strongest genes survive. Actually, if there's only one person in the entire world who can shoot cherry-colored death rays out of his eyes, that's not evolution — that's a mutation. It's evolution if the cherry-eyebeam guy has a easier time mating with Famke Janssen than anyone else, and thus makes tons of babies, all of whom can do the red-eyeblast thing. Mutations are only the building blocks of evolution, not the result of evolution. Go back to school, Mohinder.

6. Evolution is puberty. In the X-Men, for some reason, bizarre powers always manifest themselves whenever they first start getting hair in new and unusual places. And it's always treated as though the person's development as an individual is a form of, or a manifestation of, evolution. It's like puberty goes hand in hand with the sudden emergence of weird new genes, and your changes as an individual is confused with the transformation of your whole species. I also love the idea that there's one X-gene, which somehow activates a whole range of powers, from heat-vision to being a chicken-man.

5. Creatures with totally different ancestors will end up looking sorta the same, just because. Biologist and science fiction author Joan Slonczewski says a big problem with most science fiction is that it depicts convergent evolution as happening all the time — that's why aliens look sort of human, and aliens and humans can inter-breed. In fact, divergent evolution is way, way more common than convergent evolution. Divergent evolution is when creatures who share a single ancestor — like, say, mammals — evolve to be very different from each other over time. You're not likely to get just one unique creature in an ecosystem, like the great worm in Dune. Instead, you're likely to get a diversity of creatures from one ancestor. Convergent evolution, when creatures with different ancestors evolve to be similar because they're filling a similar evolutionary niche, is much rarer. (An example of convergent evolution, says Slonczewski: birds, bats and flying fish.)

4. Your children will inherit your body-mods. Maybe the earliest evolutionary theorist was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) who believed in the idea of "soft inheritance," where you pass on your acquired characteristics to your kids. If your body adapts to circumstances during your life — for example, if a particular organ gets smaller because you use it less — then your children will inherit it. (That organ will be smaller in your kids.) In fact, only genetic changes are passed on. But that doesn't stop science fiction from presenting changes to a creature's body, or non-genetic adaptations that you make in the course of your life, as being heritable. (Lamarck's ideas are sometimes mischaracterized as, "if you lose a leg, you'll have one-legged children," but he wasn't that silly.) In David Cronenberg's 1979 classic The Brood, a cutting-edge psychotherapy causes patients to manifest their darkest emotions in their own bodies — and one transformed woman gives birth to monster children that she can control telepathically.

3. Humans could evolve overnight into a new species in just one generation. In Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, humans' junk DNA suddenly starts expressing, and certain people are strongly sexually attracted to each other. These chosen people's children, the ones who survive, are a radically different species from homo sapiens. And Bear shows how this is just like when homo sapiens suddenly sprung up overnight, nearly 200,000 years ago. The new breed of humans are super-intelligent and mega-awesome. But it's pretty unlikely that super-rapid evolution would happen within only one generation.

2. It's possible to de-evolve people with rayguns or whatnot. Because evolution is a straight line and always happens in totally predictable ways, it's also a reversible process. You just need the right "de-evolution" device, like in the totally radical movie Mario Bros., where Dennis Hopper's King Koopa, who turns anyone who opposes him into a primordial sludge. Or, in the Next Generation episode "Genesis," a mutated T-virus from whiner-in-chief Reg Barclay causes everybody on the ship to start devolving — including Captain Picard, who starts turning into a lemur/pygmy/marmoset hybrid. Because Picard's too multi-faceted a guy to devolve into just one type of creature. Something similar also happens in the Doctor Who episode "Ghost Light," where an evolution-doubting clergyman is somehow de-evolved into an ape.

(Which reminds me: How exactly did "Ghost Light"'s interplanetary explorer/surveyor character travel all the way across the galaxy to survey Earth, but manage to be unaware of evolution? Is Earth the only planet where creatures don't just stay the same forever?)

1. We can predict evolution and accelerate it with technobabble. Random weird things, like going really really fast, or getting exposed to weird radiation, or just eating some weird fish, will cause you to evolve 1,000,000 years into the future, like in that Voyager clip above. And then there's the totally AWESOME Voyager episode where the crew meets the long-distant descendants of Earth's dinosaurs, who are spacefaring and intelligent. Janeway deduces they're the great-great-great-great-grandkids of the dinos by asking the computer to predict dinosaur evolution millions of years ahead. Because, of course, evolution is completely predictable in a vacuum, and you don't need to know anything about enviornmental factors.

It's in your toothpaste!! "Highly evolved nanostructures" such as Bucky balls are already being used in toothpaste and face cream, among other household products. What if your exfoliating, revitalizing beauty cream suddenly turned eeeevil? The possibilities are as infinite as the spaces between molecules. Maybe the nano-structures aren't just passive, but actually contain tiny nanites that start eating your face? You could have a rash (so to speak) of corpses with melty faces, and our heroes have to figure out why, before...

...the awful countdown. There has to be some horrendous clock ticking down to N-day, the day the rogue nanites bust out and consume everything. Maybe the melty-face people are just the first wave, or maybe some evil nanomachines got activated prematurely by mistake. (Or maybe it's just an excuse to have some smooshy faces, which who doesn't love?) But there's a monster computer that plans to release all of the nanites at the same time, which isn't just immediately for some reason. (Or the nanites just get released by accident — but an evil AI is more fun.) Our heroes have to rush to stop it, but... they're too late.

The gray goo is consuming everything. It expands exponentially, so the more it consumes, the faster it spreads. In Wil McCarthy's Bloom, it only takes a few hours for gray goo to swallow up Earth's ecosystem. Similarly, in Rudy Rucker's Postsingular, the "nants" manage to swallow up the entire Earth within about a day. So the gray goo starting to be released should probably be the "break" between the second and third acts of the movie or TV show. (At the same time, our heroes should have an important personal realization, and confront something or other about themselves, blah blah blah.)

The nano-ooze should have a catchphrase. Nobody is ever going to care about nano-gunk that doesn't have a swagger in its voice. Maybe the nan-ooze speaks through your computer speakers, or grows a giant mouth, which says something like, "You Are Our Raw Material." Or something catchier, like "Your Biosphere Will Be Disassembled." (We'll save the truly dumb catchphrase, like "The Goo Will Be You," for the movie poster.)

So there's a program that can deactivate the gray goo, or maybe a firewall that it can't pass for some reason. But in order to deploy this magic-bullet code, our main character has to face his/her greatest fear. Or confront a mistake he/she made long ago. Or maybe our heroes discover that another batch of nanomachines can neutralize the first batch by altering their function.

We see the face of god in the heart of the goo. Once our heroes come face to face with the wall of goo, there really ought to be some sort of 2001/Sunshine-y moment of confronting the vastness of the micro-world and maybe coming up against the divine in everything. Maybe the nano-machines teach us an important lesson about what it means to be human, or the soul, or something. Like the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, who always turn into spiritual guides when you least expect it. Everything gets all rhapsodic and we break out the wobbly lens so the gray goo can teach us some important lesson before it vanishes into a haze of mystification. That's your awesome gray goo movie right there. And they said it would never work.

In "Boom Town," which aired during the first season of the new Doctor Who series, our time traveling hero goes to Cardiff in Wales and discovers that a bunch of overweight city planners are building dangerous power plants. For some reason, these city planners are also prone to farting, which they follow up with polite English excuses ("oh dear happens to everyone! must have been the curry!") Turns out, however, that these farters are actually aliens called the Slitheens who because they're too big for the human body suits they're wearing and therefor are always having to let off a little, erm, gas. Though universally loathed by fans, the Slitheens showed up in other episodes, and later starred in a story from the Doctor Who spinoff series Sarah Jane.

Are farts sort of like a wacky gas version of the Danger Drool in Alien? Possibly, though as a counter-example there are Rygel's nervous helium farts in Farscape, which cause him and his human pal Crichton to speak in high voices when they're trapped in a fart-saturated capsule.

Maybe farts don't always equal death, but it's definitely a sign that creators are scraping the bottom of the barrel when conspiracies are unveiled by bad guys who cut the cheese.