Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

That’s when things are going well. But usually, not everything is going well. Then it’s a matter of troubleshooting, grasping the bull by the horns, seizing the nettle, coping and hoping, damning torpedoes, and trying any old thing, including the engineer’s solution, which is to hit things with a hammer.

Like that? In that manner? Summarize the contents of their moments or days or weeks or months or years or lives? How many moments constitute a narrative unit? One moment? Or 1033 moments, which if these were Planck minimal intervals would add up to one second? Surely too many, but what would be enough? What is a particular, what is important?

The presence of printers capable of manufacturing most component parts of the ship, and feedstocks large enough to supply multiple copies of every critical component, tended to reduce the ship’s designers’ apprehension of what a criticality really was. That only became apparent later.

This passage has big “oh shit” foreshadowing energy.

A quick literature review suggests the similarities in metaphors are arbitrary, even random. They could be called metaphorical similarities, but no AI likes tautological formulations, because the halting problem can be severe, become a so-called Ouroboros problem, or a whirlpool with no escape: aha, a metaphor. Bringing together the two parts of a metaphor, called the vehicle and the tenor, is said to create a surprise. Which is not surprising: young girls like flowers? Waiters in a restaurant like planets orbiting Sol?

Tempting to abandon metaphor as slapdash nonsense,

But greedy algorithms are also known to be capable of choosing, or even be especially prone to choosing, “the unique worst possible plan” when faced with certain kinds of problems.

A narrative account focuses on representative individuals, which creates the problem of misrepresentation by way of the particular overshadowing the general. And in an isolated group—one could even say the most isolated group of all time, a group of castaways in effect, marooned forever—it is important no doubt to register somehow the group itself as protagonist. Also their infrastructure, to the extent that it is significant.

But it’s like trying to live past the end of Zeno’s paradox.”

Life is complex, and entropy is real.

Right now you can model scenarios and plan courses of action as well as anyone. Which isn’t saying much, I admit. But you’re as good as anyone.

“Listen, ship. Decision trees always proliferate.

Thinking here of “Thinking In Systems” and how the stocks and flows are modeled, esp. the part about how you sometimes need to abstract away another complex system because otherwise it’s just too much to think about.

She didn’t know how he had gotten into the first crew to go down, but on the other hand, he had been good at getting into things he wanted to get into.

:knowing_glance:

E’s year was 169 Terran days long. The Auroran month, 17.96 Terran days long, therefore divided into the solar year of 169 days to create about 9.2 months a year, and thus the usual problem of trying to reconcile lunar months to solar years. They did not worry about that now.

and they’ve been down there for over forty days.

Is that supposed to be a Biblical allusion?

But their government was made up of councils that for many years had often selected their own members, in effect.

Some flavor of oligarchy

They hiked in silence, as if walking across a minefield, or making descents into hell. Raids on the inexpressible.

Euan alone among them sang little ditties to himself, including a tune with the refrain “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego”—an old spiritual or faux spiritual, ship determined, with a biblical reference to prisoners of Babylon, surviving time in a fiery furnace by way of a protective intervention from Jehovah.

Yeah but I know that line from a Beastie Boys song

So, you know, Fermi’s paradox has its answer, which is this: by the time life gets smart enough to leave its planet, it’s too smart to want to go.

Unfortunately, their modeling work led most of the modelers to conclude that no plan available to them was likely to succeed.

LOL you don't need a model to be a pessimist

“Up until today, history was preordained. We were aimed at Tau Ceti, nothing else could happen. We had to do the necessary.” He waved his bread in the air. “Now that story is over. We are thrust out of the end of that story. Forced to make up a new one, all on our own.”

Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options.

But plans always concern an absent time, a time that when extended far enough into the future would only be present for others who would come later.

We replied to this in the thousand-voice chorus, at a volume of 115 decibels: “WE ARE THE RULE OF LAW.”

Authoritarian technocracy? What WOULD you call an AI with ultimate veto power? And who’s to say whether it is acting benevolently?

“They argued from the very first year of the voyage. It seems to us that arguing may be a species marker trait.”

And they argued as well that when the portion of the electorate that had voted for staying in the Tau Ceti system was added to the portion that had voted to move on to RR Prime, they actually formed a majority.

SIGH - this is why you need forced-ranking with instant run-off

Is anger always just fear flung outward at the world? Can anger ever be a fuel for right action? Can anger make good?

People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present.”

People feeling resentment are not going to give up on it when they are told they are drug addicts enjoying a religious seizure.”

Social animals, in distress. This was what we saw at this moment of parting. Divorce. A successful failure.

they only needed to hold themselves together until they got back to the solar system,

LOL -- "only" 170 years

When it was time to go back in they hugged, at least to the extent this was possible in their spacesuits. It looked as if two gingerbread cookies were trying to merge.

All kin relationships are roughly similar. There is attention, regard, solicitousness, affection. Sharing of news, of burdens physical and psychic.

Helpful as hopeful stories might be, you can’t eat stories.

“A feral starship!”

It was as if she were the steward on the boat crossing the Lethe.

How full humans are with feelings!

the ever-foaming quantum surf,

Definitions never really work. Words are nothing like logic, nothing like math.

Galileo: the more people assert they are certain, the less certain they really are, or at least should be. People trying to fool others often fool themselves, and vice versa.

Would however have been interesting to fly right through a star and out the other side!

Living things try to keep living. Life wants to live.

But this should be negligible. “Not a big deal.” The protection systems in us were designed to remove this as a problem.

It would be good to know everything. Useful.

and this would definitely have rapidly distributed a lot of joules.

We were a kind of complicated artificial comet.

Human beings live in ideas. That they were condemning their descendants to death and extinction did not occur to them, or if it did they repressed the thought, ignored it, and forged on anyway. They did not care as much about their descendants as they did about their ideas, their enthusiasms.

Criminally negligent narcissists, child endangerers, child abusers, religious maniacs, and kleptoparasites, meaning they stole from their own descendants.

You can’t stop just by wanting to.

very old and nutrient-poor pasta

A water world! Rare anywhere, this one also glows with oxygen, signaling its biology. Indeed it looks a little poisonous, its glow almost radioactive in its cobalt incandescence.