"Benford-LifeAtGalactic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

Great Sky River, a reference to the ancient Indian names for the Milky Way. I
focused on the inner ten light years, for dramatic effects, even though I knew
the sheer energy flux there made humans quite vulnerable. It seemed a good stage
to act out my main theme, the superiority of machines in much of the galaxy.

The huge energetics of the center would draw machines, I felt. The black hole
would intrigue any inquisitive life form. And the struggle between vastly
different forms would surge across such a virulent territory. Humans would be
part of it all, but certainly not the major players.

So I began envisioning what it might be like at stage center. Black holes draw
matter in. Energetic arguments suggest that a black hole at the center should
ingest about a thousandth of a star's mass in a year, already ground into dust
from the giant molecular clouds -- with occasional burps if a whole sun gets
swallowed. Indeed, the electrodynamic view I advanced suggested a mechanism to
fuel the black hole: the discharges we see are in fact energy shed by slowing
the clouds, a sort of electrodynamic brake.

The mass funnels into a disk, rotating about the hole. The disk gets hot from
friction, its rotation perhaps shaping the jets which may focus intermittently
above and below the disk. Here the diet of particles and photons is rich and
varied. Only hard, tough machines could survive for long there. In the fourth
novel, Tides of Light, I drew out these contrasts.

Machines which can reproduce themselves would, inevitably, fall under the laws
of natural selection. Earlier forms which arrived from elsewhere would
specialize to use local resources. The entire panoply of biology would
recapitulate: parasites, predators, prey. Adaptation would shape machines, who
would by their intelligence counter with their own clever moves, carrying out
their long term agenda.

How to think of this? I prepare for novels by writing descriptive passages of
places and characters. In spare moments I began working up snapshots of possible
life forms and their survival styles. I wrote them in present tense, for a sense
of immediacy, seeking the analogy to biology:

Above the disk nothing made of metal or ceramic can long survive.

The grinding down of stars goes on perpetually. Blobs of already incandescent
matter spiral in at speeds higher than found anywhere else in the galaxy. The
Eater holds eternally captive the gathered masses of a million dead suns. Its
pull whirls the. doomed matter in a final frenzied gyre.

The blobs rub against each other. Magnetic fields mediate the friction and in
turn grow. The fields twine and loop through the condemned kernels. In tight
collisions fields themselves annihilate against each other and more energy
releases.

Above such brutal furnaces skim the phase creatures. They had once been of the
mechanicals. Now they exist not in hard circuits or ceramic