Goddamn it! Beat me to it.
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The primary reason so much SF seems right-wing is that a very substantial part of the market is American authors. Given that ‘left-wing’ in the US basically means ‘batshit insane right wing’ to most of the civilized world, you get a bit of a bias.
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We should work on this screenplay.
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If memory serves me correctly, if we continue on the relatively same energy:human path we’re on now the Earth’s system will have too much stored energy to be remotely habitable by then, so let’s keep our fingers crossed…
capitalism. an economic and political system in which a country’s [or galactic federation’s] trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
Please explain how a non-capitalist political economy implies no trade. You seem to be saying that they only get to ditch capitalism because there’s no scarcity, and the existence of trade implies that there is some scarcity, therefore they must be capitalist. I think it’s a failure of the imagination to reject the other option and say, “oh, their economy is controlled by the state. That can’t be a utopia!”
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Mutant Neutrinos.
Because those stories became trite and boring and in the late 70s/early 80s a generation of American SF authors like Bear, Stirling, and William somoeneoranother reacted to them.
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One of the post-scarcity ideas you sometimes see bandied about is that things would transform fundamentally once you had self-replicating machines–maybe something compact like a 3D printer with robot arms that can print and assemble all the parts to make a copy of itself, or maybe something larger like a network of factories staffed by robots and other machines that can collectively manufacture and assemble each and every type of machine that make them up (what nanotech pioneer Eric Drexler called a clanking replicator). If such a system included robotic miners and could run on solar power, in theory you’d only need to invest the resources to build a single one on some body with all the necessary resources like the moon or an asteroid, and then you wouldn’t have to spend another cent as they replicated themselves (under orders from home–you’d want to keep self-replicating systems on a tight leash, so they would stop if they weren’t continuing to receive some signal from you). See this abstract of an article from the Journal of Aerospace Engineering that discusses an outline for creating such a system on the Moon and estimates that it “can be achieved with as little as 12 t landed on the Moon during a period of about 20 years.” There would still be major dangers to trying to get large amounts of mined resources back to Earth (it’d be nice to have a space elevator, barring that I guess you’d want everything aimed at platforms on the ocean to minimize risk of them hitting a populated area), but this could at least allow you to have a huge collection of robots on any given body ready to build other things like large colonies or spacecraft in preparation for human space travelers.
Even if it wasn’t possible to get large amounts of resources from space to Earth, self-replicating machines would still have an interesting effect back here: they wouldn’t change the limits on raw materials, but they would tend to drive the prices of manufactured goods down to little more than the cost of the raw materials and energy that went into them, so the cost of something equivalent to a modern middle-class lifestyle in the U.S. might drop by a lot (making the case for a basic income even stronger). Suppose you had the self-replicating 3D printer I mentioned earlier, and say the cost of the materials and energy needed to self-replicate this was only, say, $100. If there are no laws preventing people from selling the copies at whatever price they ask for, market competition will tend to drive the cost of such a device to barely more than $100 since anything above that gives a profit. And let’s say the printer can also create some other generic good, a “widget” in economist-speak–then by the same logic, market competition should drive the price of widgets down to barely more than the price of raw materials and energy needed to make each one (plus a small premium to cover the cost of the 3D printer–for instance if a printer can make an average of 2000 widgets before breaking down and requiring replacement, you’d have to add the cost of the printer/2000 to the cost of each widget in order for sellers to break even).
What goes for a hypothetical self-contained 3D printer should also go for a much larger self-replicating collection of production machinery, like a self-replicating robot factory complex. If there are multiple companies with such self-replicating networks, and there is genuine competition between them rather than some sort of secret collusion, the price of any such network should be driven down to little more than materials and energy costs, and the price of any other goods it can create (say, a car) should also be driven down to materials, energy, and some probably small additional amount to cover replacement production machinery. And that could include things like solar panels and wind turbines, so as soon as self-replicating manufacture was achieved, there’s reason to hope that whatever amount of greenhouse gases our civilization is still emitting before that point, emissions would fairly quickly drop, and maybe even go significantly negative with cheap mass-produced carbon capture machines (I would hope we get it together to significantly reduce emissions without the need for self-replication but don’t have a lot of faith that the political will is there, so this is at least one last way we might avoid crashing civilization).
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this seems unlikely, the World Gold Council claims that the gold demand in 2016 was some 4300 tonnes.
the sector is - as a back-of-the-envelope guesstimate - worth 170 billion dollar or so (about 140 millionen onces are bought yearly for 1200 dollar each). for sure disruptive for many companies and probably countries with a mining-based economy, but a very small fraction of the world-wide economy.
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“When we got to the colony planet it was gone. All that remained of LZ404 was a steadily depleting cloud of 3D printers, ripping each other apart for raw materials.”
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Oh please. Talk about Strawman argument. Musk would be just as happy (happier, I’d wager) if governments funded a skills-based colony (because they need to go first!) followed by, say, a lottery-based system. But they won’t, so the rich need to do it. You know, the way he’s working to bring the cost of spaceflight down for everyone and the way he’s trying to bring mass-produced, affordable electric vehicles to everyone?
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Holy carp, we have an elevator pitch. So, who do you think: Blomkamp? Kevin Smith? Sofia Coppola? (That could be soo subversively cool)
Even though I love J.J. to bits, he wouldn’t even be on my top ten choices.
Eta
I am leaning towards Sofia, for two reasons.
- Her movies are story driven, but subtle
- Her movies humanize. And similar to John lasseters style, humanizing something inhuman (a replicator) has the potential to shine a mirror back on us.
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I’m fine shipping them all off to a space colony and leaving Earth to the rest of us.
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Oh man I’d love to see Kevin Smith take on SF!!!
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Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy basically spends half a book setting up an entirely new world constitution setting up more of a left wing utopia.
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I am so getting off topic, I apologise. But here is the setup.
One of the absolute best parts of the original Alien is the cast and crews banter at the start. Ridley can occasionally craft the most convincing, “lived in” scenes I have ever seen. With that in mind…
Kevin Smith, who has a similar (some might say better) version of that type of narrative would kill with long space flight scenes. Or machine to machine scenes. He doesn’t do action or rom com well, but his dialogue is second to none. (And his framing is damn good as well, redstate with all its issues, delivered visually)
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I was put in mind of Bova’s story Coda, where a billion years in the future self replicating mining barges have evolved into a full ecosystem of mechanical life.
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Clerks 2 was rom com done right!
But about good dialogue yeah, thats something really from most SF movies.
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The book Trekonomics, which discusses the post-scarcity idea through the lens of Star Trek, talks about what hints the shows have presented about how the Federation economy works. It quotes lines about Starfleet paying people’s salaries in the original series, but then quotes some lines indicating that it was Rodenberry’s idea that by the time of TNG they had eliminated money, at least internally (I guess you could imagine that they had a latinum supply to trade with civilizations that used it for currency like the Ferengi, or that they just made more barter-like trades for specific useful goods). For example, in the first season TNG episode “The Neutral Zone”, Picard talks to an unfrozen 20th century businessman named Ralph Offenhouse:
RALPH: Then what will happen to us? There’s no trace of my money. My office is gone. What will I do? How will I live?
PICARD: This is the twenty fourth century. Material needs no longer exist.
RALPH: Then what’s the challenge?
PICARD: The challenge, Mister Offenhouse, is to improve yourself. To enrich yourself. Enjoy it.
And in the TNG movie “First Contact”, Picard talks to a character named Lily from the 21st century who’s been taken aboard the Enterprise:
LILY: It took me six months to scrounge up enough titanium just to build a four-metre cockpit. …How much did this thing cost?
PICARD: The economics of the future are somewhat different. …You see, money doesn’t exist in the twenty-fourth century.
LILY: No money! That means you don’t get paid.
PICARD: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. …We work to better ourselves …and the rest of humanity.
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IIRC that was the premise of The Dispossessed, that Anarres was comparatively barren. (Granted, they were restricted to that planet, so we don’t see how their system might have played out [or not] among a more verdant or otherwise resource-rich place.)
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