I’m typing this from Beta Centauri on my ansible. Not only that, I am in your future. How in the Great Fuck, you ask? Well, it’s a long stor
16 Likes
Fucking TWITTER! I hate old tech. Screw you guys. You’ll just have to wait and see for yourselves. Peace, out.
20 Likes
Why didn’t you kill Hitler?
13 Likes
This isn’t a science journal. Give me a reason why I should waste my time going back and linking proof so that people like CT and others can just get into an endless loop of “uh uh”, “uh huh”.
I commented based on my knowledge, based on my research and my beliefs - which is what every other person here has done. I don’t see you or anyone else demanding proof from those saying the opposite of what I am. I practically wrote the damn google search in every subject I brought up. If someone reads it and wants to know if I’m full of crap or telling the truth then they can do what I did and look it up on my own.
And you’re claim that “people with a knowledge of that subject area do not believe” is a perfect example. You want proof from me that my claims about where we are technologically is BS? How about you provide your proof that people with knowledge in those areas don’t believe. Or does this only go one way?
1 Like
I did, like three or four times, but someone keeps putting him back.
11 Likes
Tell ya what though, go to futuretimeline.net. It’s not where I get all my information but it’s a good starting place for beginners. Everything I’ve said and a lot more are there and all of it is extremely well sourced and cited (from people that have knowledge in those areas in fact). I’m done.
1 Like
2 Likes
Is that a sarcastic way of saying you think mind uploading is a fantasy that will never happen, not even several centuries from now? I think most scientists who have a reductionist understanding of human intelligence–that our complex behavior emerges from the interactions of a large number of simpler components which behave in a lawlike way–would say it will probably be possible eventually given the assumption that technological civilization survives, even if they disagree with people like Kurzweil and think it will more likely take centuries rather than decades. I too am inclined to think it’ll more likely take a lot longer given that we can’t yet accurately simulate very simple brains whose neural connections are fully mapped, like the brain of the tiny worm C. elegans–but I am enough of a reductionist to think if we can ever get a good enough grasp on how individual neurons work to accurately simulate simple brains, then it will largely just be a matter of scaling up to simulate more complex brains including human ones, no additional high-level conceptual understanding of how these brains do the things they do should be needed.
But even if you are a vitalist or a believer in supernatural souls or some other type of non-reductionist, and hence think mind uploading will never be possible even in 1000 years, would you say the same about self-replicating robot factories, which would require only fairly “dumb” robots?
1 Like
But, surely, KSR is entitled to it if this is their opinion.
My issue with this is that neither optimism nor pessimism are scientific. They require (presumably shared) value judgements that certain outcomes should or should not happen. These tend to not be based upon anything objective. The most scientific reasoning, to my mind, is simply pure research - the furthering of our understanding of the universe. There is really nothing else to “get from” this.
I agree, but I was responding to this position as put forth by @corwin_zelazney, not accusing anybody of anything. Those were their own words I quoted.
You could always ask them, if you need to know. But if it is not apparent what the reasoning might be, I would suggest that there is no reason why it cannot be compartmentalized. Otherwise we would be working from social reputation instead of evidence.
Don’t we have that already?
11 Likes
I recently read this pedantic SF—full of speculation and philosophizing largely by an AI and its cronies. In many ways this book can be thought of as polemic against the idea and possibility of generational ships and solar system colonization. Robinson comes off as a neo-Luddite in this regard. It’s like he’s saying, “It the Gods wanted us to settle other planets, They’d have put the stars closer together.”
There’s no doubt the Earth needs stewarding and repair of the damage humans have done. But to get all of our eggs out of the single basket of Earth all possible solutions must be explored scientifically, but not via speculative fiction.
At best the book opens up the possibility of a dialogue about this issue. As fiction, I found it slow and a bit mawkish, especially the ending.
3 Likes
No doubt it can be thought of as such. But perhaps it serves to work against the bias of assuming that all such attempts would be successful. Why do SF novels predominantly cover the few success stories? People tend to learn far more from their mistakes than they do somehow getting things right on the first try. I don’t find it pessimistic to write about endeavors which simply didn’t work. And when they are as detailed as the KSR I have read (finishing 2312 today, as it happens) they can still provide food for thought.
2 Likes
As a scientist and a fan of science fiction, I find Ken’s ideas absurd and borderline offensive.
Also, the book was not very good. It relied heavily on its character’s being dumb. The problems in the book were all spurred on by, it seemed to me, the naivete of the characters.
Also, while SF-set-in-the-future isn’t always about being a prediction of the future, I’m going to assume Ken is meaning this to be such a prediction because he’s here now stating how this book makes a case that certain possible future actions are impossible. Ken suffers from a lack of vision of the type most sci-fi authors struggle with. Mainly, he’s all gung-ho about physics and nano-tech. The ships have Orion-type drives with power-reactors which run for centuries. They have “printers” which can print anything, even other printers and bacteria (though no food for some reason). They also have quantum computers capable of strong AI.
The people in the book still rely on agriculture for food though, seriously. A large fraction of the livable space on Robinson’s ship is devoted to this. They also have no plant-pathologists on board as far as I can tell.
We have Soylent today. And today’s Soylent is made partially from ingredients made with synthetic biology. Synthetic biology is the (not so) new field of study where we’re actually starting to do some real genetic engineering. There have been synbio products on the market for decades. Recombinant insulin, HGH, those GMO crops, those are all just parlor tricks compared to what people are really starting to do. They’re already getting microbes to make all kinds of chemicals, from complex pharmeceuticals (like artemisinin and vinblastine) to industrial solvents (1,4-butane diol, glycerol, etc.) . The DOE’s “ARPA-E” program has money for labs which want to develop a microbe which can make any chemical we normally get from petroleum with synbio organisms. The idea being that instead of relying on crude-oil as a feedstock for chemical production, we rely on biomass (sugar, lignocellulose, effluent from paper-mills, wood chips, waste from beer-brewing, unused food, etc.).
We can use organisms to transmute matter. So far it looks like synbio with enable us (in principle) to turn any kind of organic feedstock into any kind of bio-product. If they’re is an organism which eats “A” it and another organism which makes “B”, we can engineer an organism which will make B from A. Future advances in designer proteins will allow us to do even more (and that problem is mostly computational, we know how that goes). There are also of course a lot of organisms which eat minerals and assemble minerals. Diatoms look like they’re pretty good at making nano-patterned silica, you think that might be useful?
There are about a dozen synbio food startups who want to make milk, meat, egg whites, cooking oil, etc. using bioreactors instead of dirt. The media likes to poke fun at this now, but in the future this food will not only be cheaper, healthier, and more available than agri-food, it will also taste better. Why will it taste better? Because it’s more readily engineer-able. Animal breeders work for years to develop a pig which makes a nicely marbled pork, synthetic pork would just need its genes edited, and running a test of 10,000 prototype strains of synbio meat is a lot easier than running a test using 10,000 pigs. Synbio is scalable and efficient in a way agriculture never will be.
(And if you want to say “People will never eat that gross stuff, its unnatural!” I’ll ask you, Can you name another class of product where the new, more efficient, cheaper, easier “unnatural” tech didn’t beat the old, wasteful, inefficient “natural” tech? I didn’t think so.)
But Robinson has no synbio in his world. The people there have no CRISPR, no gene-therapy. All they have are self-replicating printers which can print DNA, but somehow they never use them for anything but dumb-hard matter. Instead the people sit there and starve while their crops fail. This is all blamed on a lack of inputs, and “leaky” systems but they were in a solar system where they can always top-off their tanks, but they left it to go home because earth was “magic”.
So SF authors are terrible with biology, I suppose they just don’t know many biologists or weren’t that kind of nerd in HS. It’s to their detriment though.
3 Likes
He is entitled to his opinion, absolutely, I was just commenting on my impressions of what his goals were in making such stark statements about humanities future considering all the books I’ve read from him were mostly positive in terms of our future. It was really puzzling because it seems to contradict the tone of not only the books he’s written but frankly the speeches I’ve heard him give and even a couple of published science papers I read (I don’t have the math background to understand most of it but you can get the gist by reading the abstract). I believe everyone is entitled to their beliefs but I do think there’s an added responsibility to be careful when you’re an influential public figure. I don’t think you need to censor yourself, I just think you need to be careful. When I considered that I had to conclude that he used the words he did on purpose and he does plainly rule out any chance of either terraforming or solving fast travel for interstellar distances (I don’t say FTL because the laws of physics as we know them make that impossible - warping spacetime either like Alcubierre has published or wormholes do not violate the lightspeed limit so they aren’t FTL).
Anyway, I do agree that neither pessimism or optimism are scientific and in a setting such as a science journal or a lab the science should be the only metric for truth. In the setting of BB or any other blog or comment section though, it’s unrealistic to expect human perspectives - both negative and positive - to be present. I have an optimistic view on the future of humanity and that’s my emotional perspective but it isn’t based on wishful thinking or magical solutions - it’s based on pure science that I do read. For every reputable scientific breakthrough there’s ten more papers that refute the findings. Science has a method and in the end we have consensus that either the scientific breakthrough was valid or not. I try and base my optimism on the ones that have reached consensus. The Alcubierre drive I mentioned before started out with a hypothesis that is now being tested in the real world. There are hundreds of papers that have been published that claim its either not possible or has insurmountable obstacles that may never be overcome. One is the existence or exotic material which may or may not exist but no one contends that its existence is in violation of physics. Another obstacle was that it would require an energy equivalent to the size of Jupiter then a year later Harold White made some tweaks to Alcubierre’s equations on the shape of the exotic material and got that energy requirement down to the size of a minivan but again, no one contends that the calculations defy physics. Finally there’s been a recent paper that says nothing living could survive in the warp bubble created due to the radiation that would be created and again that paper was based on a math error and has since been disproved. I went into all that just to make the point that on the issue of that one example I have optimism because I see an idea that would advance humanity to the stars (potentially) and after 21 years it is still a viable theory. One that continues to be refined into greater and greater feasibility rather than one by one being disproved or knocked down. That progression gives me optimism. It’s not starry eyed and there’s no unicorns or rainbows. I understand that it could be past my lifetime before all the obstacles are overcome and even then there could be a fatal obstacle that cannot be overcome. But it’s not there yet so I’m hopeful. I could give examples of things I was hopeful about but that turned out to be either wrong or impossible and I adjusted and moved on.
Sorry about being so long-winded. I just got on here today and created an account because this really caught my attention. The truth is I do feel defensive when it comes to being optimistic. On the internet trying to maintain hope seems to be like standing under a waterfall with everyone wanting to knock you down. It’s like people don’t understand you can be optimistic without being a naive idiot that needs educating or something.
And after saying all that I do agree with your points. I just wanted to explain mine.
5 Likes
Well, if nothing else, this thread is proving the psychological and sociological portions of Robinson’s thesis.
3 Likes
I saw the wall of text and thought
And now I’m going to read your comment 
4 Likes
There are asteroids close to home, of course, to practice on. 
And having used up so much energy escaping from the Gravity Well, there is little point in going back down.
4 Likes
I think KSR enabled some tech in his book and not others so that he could make a story which ended up where he wanted. Which is fine, though very lame.
2 Likes
Traveling at one-tenth light-speed, a voyage there would take 120 years plus the time needed for acceleration and deceleration, so that people speak of approximately two hundred years transit time.
Processes identified by island biogeography would apply inside a starship, and many of these processes would be accentuated by the radical isolation. As generations of people, plants and animals passed, reproductive and evolutionary success would be harmed by genetic bottlenecks, also disease, limits on resources, and so on. The super-islanding effect might cause more species than usual to become smaller, and to mutate in other ways, as one sees on ordinary islands.
Island biogeography is an absolutely fascinating field, but utterly irrelevant over a span of two hundred years.
2 Likes
Low threshold for speed of light achievement noted.
Time dilation effect argument pre-empted.
Error.
Error.
2 Likes
