Narrative Based Science

Science is evidence based, that's what it's all about, right? Evidence, data, hypothesis, theory, model and all that stuff. But do these ingredients alone make for science? As a data geek, engineer, and a speculative fiction writer, I will argue it does not. When writing speculative fiction, the ingredients that I feel are needed for a story like Ragnarok Conspiracy look something like this.

We start at the bottom, exactly at the place where science starts. Evidence and Data. We create a hypothesis or an elaborate theory, and we use models to make predictions. Unlike science though, we aren't interested in falsification, we select theories and hypotheses purely based on what they can bring for the narrative that we intend to build on top of it. We cut important corners going from hypothesis to theory, after all we don't want falsification to get in the way of a good narrative, and we ignore obvious flaws in our models when we trust that our readers, apart from the rare savant, won't notice them.

At the next layer, World Building we take the theories from the lowest rung and we weave them into a semi-coherent overall system. we add things like geo-politics to the mix and add probably some major events to our worlds (recent) past and/or some anticipated events in our worlds (near) future. A big cateclismic event either in the recent past or looming in our near future usualy does wonders. We combine our theories and models with whatever components are needed to create a believable world for our story.

Closely related to World Building is the creation of The Lore. Some would say the two are one and the same, but for the purpose of this blog, I would like to leave that discussion for an other day and consider them separate for now. The same way that Plot is separate from Character Development, Lore for the purpose of this blog is separate from World Building. And as characters and plot mutually make each other more credible, when done right, so do lore and world-building.

At the next two layer, we place characters in our world and align their existence to the lore and world-building. We do what we need to do to build up the credibility of our characters, and we let our characters play their parts in the plot of the story.

Finally, at least for the purpose of this post, we use elements of eloquence to polish the whole thing into an enticing and sufficiently credible whole where the reader will forgive us for the sometimes outrageously weird and unbelievable aspects of our story, lore and world because everything from top to bottom is internaly consistent and lets face it a well woven narrative that is posished up with powerfull elements of eloquence can create a world that feels almost as real as the one we live in for the duration of the book.

Science should work differently. Data should incept a hypothesis, other data should be used to try like a mad man to falsify the hypothesis. Alternative hypotheses should be thought of to explain the data. Only when persistent and serious attempts at falsification keep failing will the hypothesis get promoted to a theory. A theory that still isn't beyond falsification. When a theory becomes the most viable theory for a given field, something important should happen: The null should get swapped. That is: the new theory becomes the null hypothesis, and all new research should use the new theory to test alternate hypotheses against. This should further increase the falsification pressure on the theory, adding to the robustness of our trust in the theory to be close enough to being valid for us to use it as a working model.

And then there is the science of doing science. A science that is mostly mathematics. What scientific processes are in line with developments in statistics? Which processes are in coherence with recent developments in the science of causal inference? And this goes two ways too. Does statistics or causal inference miss out on lessons learned from specific fields of science or even engineering? Asking these questions on a day to day basis is what should be the fuel that science runs on.

Unfortunately though, the model I just described for writing speculative fiction pretty much applies to whole fields of science, and neither basic statistical discipline, modern causal inference, or even the foundational scientific process seem to have the position they ideally should have.

And make no mistake, narrative can be as true a persuader in science as it can be in fiction. The closer a field of science comes to embracing the entire speculative fiction pyramid, themore powerfull and persuading the 'scientific' narrative can become. But that is not actually a good thing. The pyramid is a speculative fiction pyramid, not a science pyramid. In fact, as a rule of thumb, when you see science using any kind of pyramid, it is usually a red flag that something might be broken in the scientific process. Two examples:

Fortunately most fields of science, while many seem to be moving towards increasingly more narrative based approaches to science, don't (yet) embrace the whole speculative fiction pyramid.

Some fields of science will put undue focus on one level of the speculative fiction pyramid, while others put undue focus on an other one, but in the end, multiple fields of science have fallen prey to regression into what I refer to as Narrative-Based Science.

Climate Science and animal-rights narratives

I was going to do this blog about Covid19, the number one crisis the world is facing right now, and the crisis where narrative based science might still be the most obvious, as it is a crisis that is less than two years old and many people haven't completely internalized the dominant narrative yet. In fact, we haven't reached the point yet where there actually is a single dominant narrative. While Covid narrative based science might be the easiest to discuss, it is also today one where tribalism is at the highest, so the risk of people missing the point because they believe me to be in the opposing tribe would be quite high if I picked that subject.

Instead, I want to look into a different field of science and politics, a field, while plagued by some tribalism too, except maybe for small groups of devoted activists, most people can still read and reason about with a reasonable clear head without falling into primitive tribal responses. The field I want to look into is climate science. It is I think also an interesting field to look at as I actually explored it for my novel Ragnarok Conspiracy and made a narrative around it in my story.

Let's forgo on the question if the climate crisis is real or if it is man made. Let's assume for now it is, as those things, from a scientific process view should be the least controversial. We, for the purpose of this blog, accept climate change is real, man made, and caused by greenhouse gasses. But what we won't accept as-is is the narrative based science surrounding solutions.

One increasingly dominant narrative surrounding climate change evolves around animal agriculture. There are multiple issues with current day animal agriculture. Animal rights groups justifiably point to chicken and pork farms where animals live in horrible circumstances. But what does animal agriculture have to do with things like global warming, pandemics, heart disease and diabetes, longevity, feminism, socialism and other subjects animal rights advocates like to bring in to the debate of consumer's choice to buy animal agricultural products?

Well for that we need to get back to our speculative fiction pyramid. We can find data in support of each of these links from what we can create a hypothesis and with the needed shortcuts a theory complete with models. We can do world-building and lore creation to weave ourselves a consistent animal friendly reality and a story of our world where animal agriculture is the root cause of most of this planet's problems.

Do some varied character building on actual people, preferably people who have mastered the craft of eloquence, and we arrive at almost our full pyramid. Find some interesting people with a story to tell that fits within the world, and the pyramid is complete. For animal rights activists, people like Campbell and Greta Thunberg perfectly fill these gaps. There isn not that much difference between character development for speculative fiction, and building up individuals into icons representing the narrative.

Part of the bigger animal-right narrative is about climate change. That part focusses mostly around ruminants. These animals, including cows, sheep, goats, buffalo, deer, elk, giraffes and camels, release methane gas from their digestive system. Cow burps and camel farts. Methane is a short lived but very potent green-house gas, so the hypothesis that ruminants contribute to global warming makes for an interesting hypothesis.

Taking a system view of ruminant methane though, the hypothesis can be quickly falsified. Ruminant gas emissions from a system perspective contribute zero to global warming as long as the herd size is stable. The emissions contribute to the global temperature, but there are other factors that counter this. In fact, as we will later see in our alternative narrative, grazing ruminants can under specific circumstances actually contribute to an attenuation of global temperature that potentially could be much larger. It is important to realize the difference between contributing to global temperature and contributing to global warming, not just because of cows and sheep, but also because of biofuels.

One problem with the cows cause global warming narrative is that it basically can't exist unless we accept a biological GHG emissions cause global warming narrative. This would include methane emissions from rice fields that feed half the world, but also the burning of biofuels that can replace fossil fuels in for example shipping and air travel, areas where electrical and solar isn't really an option, and our current global economy isn't likely to go back to using large sailing vessels for transporting our goods across oceans.

In short, the animal-right narrative based science aspects of climate science (and yes, this stuff actually is in many scientific papers) is doing more harm for the climate than it could do good. People are eating less meat or are going vegetarian because they believe they are contributing in the fight against global warming when in fact they are contributing to a narative that is counterproductive to this fight. All the more because the very foods they move to when reducing their meat intake tend to get shipped in on the very ships the narrative they buy into prevents from switching to bio fuels.

An that's not all. There are many cracks in the rest of the plant based narrative as well. For one, the prime driving factor, animal rights, has quite a different scope when looking at ruminants like sheep and cows than it has for the chickens and piggs that aren't really part of the climate narrative. Not to start about the health claims flowing from the animal-rights narrative on longevity and diabetes.

Now however much of a disservice the animal-rights narrative of climate change is doing to the field, there is an other narrative, less a scientific one and (even) more a political one that is even more damaging to efforts to fight climate change, and that is the environmentalist anti-nuclear narrative.

In the next section we will look into that narrative. For now I will leave with the statment that if we successfully could suppress the anti-nuclear narrative, the neggative impact of the animal-rights narrative would be mostly reduced to the long overdue discussion of the soil, a subject we will look into when we discuss an alternate narrative. An alternate narrative that still bing narrative based science, or speculative fiction in fact, doesn't rely on filtering out non-supporting data and mechanisms for its credability. Note though, that lacking real science, the alternative narrative for now will be just a narrative too.

Climate science and anti-nuclear narratives

An anti-nuclear sentiment in the general public started during the cold war and at first was directed mostly at nuclear weapons. Nuclear power was dangerous, because the technology used for energy could create materials needed for creating nuclear bombs. And then there was the problem of nuclear waste.

Later, the anti-nuclear sentiment got a boost because of Chernobyl and Fukushima, to the extent that some countries that were on track to replacing fossil fuels with nuclear, not only abandoned their efforts, they actualy decided to dismantle existing nuclear power plants prematurely.

The narrative is that nuclear power comes with major nuclear profileration issues, massive waste disposal problems, huge cost problems and last but not least, unacceptable risk of nuclear accidents. An other part of the anti-nuclear narrative is that other forms of clean energy can scale up to the point where we won't need nuclear energy in order to become able to stop using fossil fuels, that, other than nuclear, bio fuels, and steak and eggs are the real cause of global warming.

So what is the dangerously speculative part of the anti-nuclear narrative? The problem is the alternatives it puts inflated expectations uppon.
The sun doesn't shine 24/7 anywhere on the planet. In some places days in winter are only hours long. Wind doesn't reliably blow 24/7, 52 weeks a year either. Waste issues with batteries needed to compensate for fluctuating power production, as far as the technology exists or is close, are many times hihger than for example that of molten salt reactors would be. The alternative of a grid that would allow Europe to use Indian electricity part of the day, switch to European energy later on the day, and then switch over to Brazilian energy at days end is a nice bit of scifi world building, not much more really. We really need energry that is produced relatively clode to where it is used. The cost and fragility of a global grid that can fully keep up with fluictuating output sources like wind and solar if these sources are supposed to produce 100% of the world's energy consumption are simply beyond comprehension.

For solar and wind to even be a notable part of the solution, the grid needs to be smart (and expensive) and without nuclear we will continue to rely on fossil fuel to, roughtly, 'get us though the night'.

All and all the anti-nuclear narrative is fueling our continued dependence on fossil fuels, and combined with the animal-rights narrative is keeping our fossil fuel consumption close to a maximum for the forseeable future. The next section will just be a bit of fun to demonstrate how off-base a narrative-based approach can go. Then after that, we'll try to arive a bit closer to base by creating an unfiltered narrative.

The speculative fiction narrative from Ragnarok Conspiracy

In my novel, the climate plays a role too. Lets walk through it to see how we end up with it in out pyramid. We start off with actual data end evidence.

• There is evidence that human GHG emissions cause global warming
• There is strong evidence that we are currently living in what is refered to as a inter-glacial, a time between two ice ages. The time period we live in now, the Holocene, is broadly accepted as being an interglacial.
• Looking at the time between previous glacial periods, the current interglacial is already a quite long one today.

Now a little nippet of world building using this evidence. To make it interesting, we add a little of matchin mythology first.

• Norse mythology talks about giants, the Jǫtnar (or Jǫtunn). One type of Jǫtnar being ice giants.

Now for our world building, we take the actual facts that we know, and we combine them with the mythology, and possibly other world attributes to create a new reality for our world.

• The Jǫtnar ruled our world during the last glacial period.
• Today is the age that our interglacial is ending.
• There is a secret society trying to delay the end of the Holocene (by promoting global warming).

Now when we get hihger up on the pyramid, the lore will tell us something about the world history with the Jǫtnar and about the secret society that is trying to protect the world from the Jǫtnar returning by means of global warming efforts.

Then we get at the character building part of things. We need to give a face and a voice to the secret society. In our case Bjarne, here brought to life in an illustration by @marylucy.

Then to top it off we have the plot and the elements of eloquence that weave the whole into an entising story.

If you pay good attention to fields like climate science, nutrition, and even to an extent medicine and to an lesser extend even fileds like particle physics, keep your eyes open for signs that you might be looking at this pyramid. I feel strongly everyone interested in science should learn about fiction writing, learn about the tricks of the trade, and learn to recognize the pyramid of speculative fiction. When science starts to exibit signs of the use of this pyramid, it will usually be a red flag for narrative-based science. Narrative based science can seem quite convincing, especialy if there are many peer reviewed papers underlining and supporting the narrative, but in the end it is just speculative fiction posing as science.

The animal-rights narrative on climate change and the anti-nuclear narrative on climate change combine into a pretty strong piece of speculative fiction. The fact that there are peer reviewed papers supporting the narrative means absolutely nothing if the science is done, in practice, on top of the lore and world building, instead, as the scientific process dictates, confined within the bottom layer of our pyramid. Real science only happens in the bottom layer of our pyramid and doesn't require any of the other layers. Every sign you see that alerts you to the use of any of the other layers as part of or as foundation for the science should be a powerfull sign to be very wary about what comes next.

A speculative-fiction alternative narrative to the climate crisis to fit much more of the data

The climate stuff in my novel went from being realistic to being obvious fictional the moment I introduced the Jǫtnar. I also really picked those pieces of evidence that were convenient for further world building while filtering out a lot of inconvenient evidence that would have ruined the foundations for my fiction. Now what if we don't do that? What if we forget all about the desire to serve the purpose of supporting any characters or a plot for creating an enticing story. What if we also make sure we don't let any politics bleed in? We just attempt to pick enough of the data and evidence to do some broad world building with a tiny bit of lore.

We won't get political pseudo-science and we won't get speculative fiction, and importantly we won't get science either, just a bit of world building based purely on inductive reasoning and creative thinking. The result is going to be non-scientific, but as close to usefull non-scientific induction as we can get without doing the actual science (that would and should have been done if the field hadn't been so distracted by narrative based science in the first place).

Oh, and for those of you who would like to make a shitload of money, please feel free to use any of the world building exercise below in your attempts to secure $100,000,000 from Elon Musk. Just remember to visit my tipping jar page when you hit the motherload.

Again, let us start of with the lowest rung, evidence, facts and data:

• There are serious security consideration with conventional nuclear power.
• There are serious cost consideration with conventional nuclear power.
• There are serious waste consideration with conventional nuclear power.
• There are serious proliferation consideration with conventional nuclear power.
• The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment has demonstrated the viability of alternative nuclear technology that, baring technical chalanges are solved, has none of the above problems.
• Thorium is much more abundant than Uranium and on top of that has a many times more efficient fuel cycle.
• Large nuclear reactors take extremely long to build and come with high financial risks in terms of going over budget and fluctuating energy prices.
• Solar and wind as power source are extremely fluctuating in output capacity and require both advanced battery technology (with its own environmental, safety and waste problems) and highly advanced and expensive grids that get harder the closer we would get to 100% of energy production.
• Electrical cars require advanced battery technology too.
• Electrical cars charge at night, mostly, unfortunately.
• A huge part of the world population currently has so little access to energy that they still wash their laundry on a washing board, this is a humanitary problem of inequality showing the world needs to increase it's power production if it wants to counter inequality.
• In essence, biological GHG emissions only contribute to global temperature, not global warming.
• Not just forests, but savanahs and stepps too store large amounts of CO2 for long periods of time. Not so much above ground, but in the soil.
• Modern, often mono-cropping agriculture tends to deplete the soil, both in terms of soil quality as in terms of CO2 holding capacity.
• Grazing ruminants are an important part of health grassland and open forest, and important for maximizing the CO2 holding capacity of the land.
• Lack of access to a whole food omnivore diet is a public health problem for both the rich and the poor.
• Access to sufficient animal sourced foods for people in poorer countries is a huge inequality and human rights issue.
• Concentrated animal feeding operations are the number one most problematic part of animal agriculture, bot in terms of animal rights and in terms of he potential for pathogen development.
• Shipping is the number one source of fossil GHG emissions and of environmental load os all transportation.

Now let's see what we can do with this in terms of world building. First we should get our priorities right. What are our top priorities, and what are our level two priorities after that?

1. End global warming by phasing out fosil fuels
2. Reduce inequality by increasing global energy production and making access to sufficient energy a human right.
3. Reduce inequality by giving everyone access to sufficient animal-sourced foods

Then the level two priorities:

1. Reduce the global temperature
2. Secure access to whole-food for everyone, rich and poor
3. Decrease environmental damage from energy and food production in general.

So where do we start? Well, rethinking energy ofcause, and given the data, where else to start but nuclear. We are thinking big, but we are also thinking local, so as far as the grid is concerned, small modular molten salt reactors on a thorium cycle as soon as that is possible. There is still some science to be done in the MSR space and on the thorium cycle, but if we put the political will behind it, going back to a dumb grid with an abundance of small modular local thorium cycle molten salt reactors close to where the power is actually consumed, that should be a great place to start as far as the grid is concerned. This should also be great for adressing problem number two, inequality in access to energy. We need economy of scale to cheaply produce small modular MSRs, and providing poorer countries with the same reactors should bring the price per reactor down quite a bit if we trust basic ecconomics.

But that's the grid. How about transport? For cars it's obvious. Many cars if not most can go electrical. For airplanes and shipping though we need something else. Well, as we have established that bio-fuels only contribute to global temperature, not global warming, we switch to bio fuels for shipping, for now, while planning for an even better future, making new tankers nuclear powered as well. Remember we have plenty of experience with the safety of marine vessels running on nuclear already, even without using MSRs. Existing ships tend to stick around for a long time though, so bio fuel will be there for quite a while probably fueling our tankers. Or is it? We get back to that in a moment. Then how about airplanes? Neither electrical nor nuclear really is an option there. Airplanes need liquid fuels. Again bio-fuels for the time being, at least untill we crank up power production an extra few levels.

Now we get to the connecting issue, that by solving it brings about synergy. At this moment in time, animal sourced food production is at a level where everyone on the planet could have access to a few hundred grams of meat, fish and eggs per week. Many in richer countries eat a whole lot more than that, and while some will want to make you believe they shouldn't because it is bad for them, the only real reason why it is bad is actually the fact that eating a few kg of meat, fish and eggs will deprive those less fortunate from access to what should be considered a bare minimum for a species that in essence is omnivore. So unlike what many animal right inspired papers tell us, the world food system shouldn't strive to reduce it's output of animal food, it should aim to increase it and increase it by quite a bit, is possible while helping adress the climate crisis, if even just a little bit, in the process.

Well to do this, you might have guessed it, we need even more energy. Crank up the thorium and don't worry, there is plenty to go around. And there might even be a place for solar here. As we discussed, savannahs are great stores of CO2. Desserts however are not. Can we turn desserts into savannah? With irrigation, long howl regenerative agriculture, and importantly, ruminants, lots of ruminants, we most likely can. If we can use an abundance of thorium energy, or in some places, solar energy to provide irrigation and possibly mechanical aid in soil improvement, then lessons learned from regenerative agriculture could turn the saharah into a savannah, a savanah even much richer and greener and most of all with a higher CO2 storage capacity than a regular savanah. A savanah also that lacking natural predators could supply the world with an extra supply of ruminant meat. And this doesn't just go for desserts. Other low quality and degraded land could be energized with irrigation, mechanical help in soil improvement and ruminants. This was the last one in our top priorities list and at the same time the first in our level two priorities. It is likely that the net effect on global temperature by the increase in ruminant populations will be much smaller than the net effect of the captured carboin in the soil.
If we can repeat the trick in our current monocrop land as well, the effect would be even greater. Well, with yet more energy, we could abandon the use of large amounts of land for monocrop production by going vertical. Instead of having Concentraded Animal Feeding Operations, we could move to Concentrated Plant Feeding Operations, while repurposing the monocrop land to regenerative animal agriculture, further reducing the need for animal cruelty inanimal-sourced food production. Doing this, we could increase the production of whole foods and decrease the environmental footprint by eliminating the need for pesticides. If production of animal sourced foods is still too low, we could use the same vertical farming for farming insects, a hugely neglected source of nutrition in much of the west. And remember, even indoor farming takes up carbon.

Oh, we forgot about our solar and wind energy, the stuff that is already there. If we don't have a smart grid, should we just throw wind turbines and solar pannels away? No, that would be a waste. There are two things eating up energy that don't really care where on the planet the energy is generated. Cloud computing and crypto currency. So why not let these two run on solar and wind. Your VPS could move around the world wherever there is sun to power the data centers. Wind turbines could be directly fitted with crypto mining riggs. The grid won't need those turbines anymore, so its cheap energy and thus compatitive for crypto mining purposes. They would ofcause be mining $QRL for the reason that my novel Ragnarok Conspiracy starts of with a quantum blockchain heist, and we can't have any of those in our utopian fantasy, as you probably understand.

Now let us revisit bio fuels. As said, bio fuels arent ideal, but they are a major step up from fossil fuels. I'm not a chemist, but I know enough of chemistry and aircrafts (ancient degree in avionic engineering), to know hydrogen would be a crappy fuel for aircrafts and shipping. We need more complex molecules in a liquid fuel, just molecules without carbons, and molecules that we can use energy for to produce so we can replace bio fuels and furter reduce global temperature. This is a bit of a gap in my knowledge here. If I was writing a book, this is where I would start doing lots of research to find the coolest and most exotic potential aircraft fuel molecules, but as this is just an exercise in world building, this today is where we stop.

Notice how in this narrative we adress animal rights by abandoning CAFOs and yet we arive in a fictional work that does almost the complete opposite to what is proposed to be the solution by following the animal rights incepted narrative? Would this narrative be better than the existing one? Probably. Is it actually scientifix? Hell no! It is speculative fiction all the same, just without an agenda to either reduce the consumption of meat for animal rights purposes, or to write an interesting backdrop for a work of fiction.

We should do the actual science

Now before we end this blog post, I must stress the above section is just as much speculative fiction as the anti-nuclear anti-animal-agriculture narrative is. It is purely evidence based induction and narrative and evidence based induction and narrative will never be science no matter how many peer reviews papers you throw at it. We need to do the actual leg work. Do the science, try to falsify each and every hypothesis, Question everything, run the models, run the alternative models, think up alternative alternative models and run them too. All the while we must keep on trying hard to falsify. That is what science is about. Not world building, lore creation, character development, plot and posession of the eloquence needed to make people believe it is actual science.