Night Vision and the Pan

When I wrote Manx Prize, which is about a race to de-orbit space debris, I relied heavily on what I’d learned from my day job as a space lawyer at the FAA.  Also, because I was terrified of getting things wrong, I researched like crazy.  I saved clippings from Space News with the inclinations, perigees and other parameters of defunct satellites, and used them for my imaginary zombiesats.  I got the dimensions– if not the makeup –of a certain dead European environmental satellite and put that material to good use in the book.  I used real ground station locations.  The makeup turned out to be confidential information, but I could tell from the risk numbers published in Space News that pieces of it would survive reentry (philosophy majors can learn some rocket science) so assigned it titanium or molybdenum, which were the two survivable materials I was sure of.  It seemed a reasonable deviation from my otherwise slavish devotion to using only what I was sure of.

Things were different with my Waking Late trilogy, my colonization space opera.  It’s set far in the future on a lost planet.  I did not research communications technology, cryogenic sleep, blasters, genetic engineering or augmentation, or any other futuristic tech I mentioned in passing.  The story is set on a low tech world.  Instead, I watched YouTube videos about water wheels, pig hunts, muskets, and Spencer rifles.  Again, I researched things that readers would actually know.

But it’s still cool when you find something that suggests the wacky ideas you’ve used (I’m sure not going to say I made them up — these tropes go way back in science fiction) might have some basis in reality.  I liked it when the little water bears showed radiation resistance because I had added that for a certain type of person in my first book.  More recently, the sleeping soldiers of Waking Late have had night vision assigned to their eyeballs.  The Pan on the same world are born with it because of the genetic engineering their ancestors received.  For my work in progress I’ve had fun quizzing former military people about the “thermals” their night observation devices would show them.

Now there’s this.  Scientists have injected mice with nanoparticles that temporarily gives them infrared night vision:

The nanotechnology works by binding with the retinal cells in the eye that convert light into electric signals.  Like humans, mice cannot perceive light with a wavelength longer than 700 nanometres, which is at the red end of the visible spectrum. But the nanoparticles absorb light with longer – infrared – wavelengths and convert it into shorter wave light that retinal cells can detect. This converted light peaks at a wavelength of 535 nanometres, so the mice see infrared light as green.

How cool is that?  If they can do that with mice now, imagine what they’ll be able to do in a thousand years or more with our genes.

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