If you’re questioning Stan Robinson’s knowledge of science in order to dismiss him, you’re going to have to do better than that, given his enormous body of work which is, overall, rather well educated and informed.
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Of course, one can only imagine whether or not they truly share an identity even now.
Some us might suppose that what it means to be human is in fact to create a diversity of histories, physiologies, and ecosystems. And that we will continue to do so whether on this planet or elsewhere.
You speak for a whole species? And the crux of your identity is the joy of wasting resources? What counts as waste or surplus depends upon knowing what one’s goals or values are, as much as it does accurate auditing of real-world resources.
Why do you suppose that someone else can or should decide this for you? It depends upon what kinds of descendants, societies, and ships you realize. The fact that we are %99.999 the exact same person, and yet differences in subjective values between us can yield entirely different trajectories of civilization is what I think makes the post-human diaspora so rich and compelling.
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Maybe I’m mistaken. I was referring not to Robinson but to the writer of this article, Kameron Hurley.
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Mileage varies heavily on that.
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Sure but then I think of his Capitol trilogy…
I’m not a humanist per se, but I do think that we as homo sapiens are alike enough that we can communicate with one another & intermingle. If we encountered a different species of intelligent beings, that might not be the case. I think you are mapping present-day pluralism onto future speciation events. And that’s part of the whole problem of posthumanism – it presupposes that something like us is going to be around in the future to enjoy or affirm whatever strange, technologically produced creatures come after us. More likely, all of our value systems – regardless of what culture you’re in – are going to be overcome or obliterated. I think Peter Watts is closer than anyone else to describing the future than any other science fiction author – it seems more probable to me that the beings that travel the stars will have no consciousness or sense of self. Seeing those beings as our children or our legacy is just anthropomorphism. I’d much rather work to preserve our little fishbowl of earthly humanity. As far as the point about wasting resources – I don’t mean that as a value judgment. I just mean that if you spend 100% of your time desperately trying to maintain a colony or a generation ship because no resources can be spent on things like sleep or leisure, then you can have no culture. As Bataille suggested, everything that is beautiful or sublime comes from joyfully squandering free energy from the sun.
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Makes sense. One could argue that a colonist is one who intends to start a colony; someone who sets out intending to sit alone in a desert until they die is more of a hermit, even if they do break new ground in the process.
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As I was with the original article this one refers to, I’m a bit puzzled as to why there’s debate about a space travel concept that seemed to have gone obsolete quite some time ago among most space futurists. The level of technology ultimately needed to make the generation ship work probably obviates the need for the generation ship to begin with. The generation ship is a relic of Big Machine Futurism. The trends in technology point to a more-likely transhumanist future in space. A future where the typical means of space travel is wireless telecommunication with light, fast, simple automated ships or even light-propelled nanoswarms used chiefly to seed destinations in space with the self-constructing infrastructure for that. The galactic civilization as mesh network.
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Some people are attached to having a body.
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And there’s also the point that, although limited AI appears to be a lot easier to achieve than anyone expected, we’re at best still many centuries away from understanding human brains well enough to artificially replicate them.
On the current outlook, we don’t have several centuries.
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@EricHunting The point is that then, as well as now, the real issue is financing space travel. We can make it work by brute force at the moment, but the technology to do it elegantly is only just ahead of us.
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