Sci-Fi with NO ROMANCE -> Dystopian Musings

[[deleted user]]

economics and biological imperivatives...the economics of the problem is simple...we got too damn many people, too few resources....the answer there should be obvious (stop having so damn many little humans)...as for the biological imperivatives, we got brains to think with, time we start useing them for a change...but we won't...

[Sarah]

Mary wrote: "Sarah wrote: "What can we do about it? "

Write the YA you want to read!

That's how Tolkien and Lewis got started, once you drop the genre specification."

I have/ I am writing. But I was asking about the larger issues. There are some interesting issues brought up further down the posts.

The immediate choices vs. choices for the future. Social security is a good example, also the US's national debt. At what point do we take responsibility for our own actions and their (even distant) future consequences?

[[deleted user]]

Sarah, you make my point...social scurity? national debt? come on, who cares? i am talking about THE SURVIVAL OF HOMO SAP here...social security and national debt be damned...

[[deleted user]]

Sarah, not yelling at you, sorry if it came across that way

[Sarah]

Spooky1947 wrote: "Sarah, not yelling at you, sorry if it came across that way"

It's fine, you can feel strongly about big issues; you are allowed to yell. Of course the double post made it humorous...

Yes, I live in a first world country and it shows. It's hard to go deeper then the plane of living you are on. If you are worried about income, it's hard to remember that there are others who are worried about eating from day to day. And if you are worried about eating it's hard to remember there are others who are worried about surviving from minute to minute. Whatever our personal issue in front of us, that is what we see.

[Xdyj]

Spooky1947 wrote: "IMO, the hope of true space flight is dead. We went to the moon in 1969, quit going in the earily 1970s, and we have been playing tinker-toys in low-earth orbit ever since...i do not consider robot..."

I think a hypothesis that attempts to explain why we haven't heard of any aliens yet is that intelligent species always exterminate themselves soon after they develop the technology to do so :)

[[deleted user]]

my problem is i bought into all that crap about "humanity's destiny is to inherit the stars" in all that SF i read as a kid (and later)...i mean i really belived that. now im a oldphart and know the truth, that we will all die on this dirty stinking mudball while the stars look down on us and laugh. Authur and Isaac and Bob LIED!!! IT AIN'T FAIR, DAMN IT!! I WANT THE STARSHIP I WAS PROMISED!!!

(the robots in the white coats lead the blubbering oldphart off to the waiting van...)

[Sarah]

Spooky1947 wrote: "my problem is i bought into all that crap about "humanity's destiny is to inherit the stars" in all that SF i read as a kid (and later)...i mean i really belived that. "

lol. I understand your pain. I'm middle aged myself and I miss the optimism of that generation. Maybe if we earn enough money we can get a spaceflight before we go.

[[deleted user]]

on some level i still belive we could be universe beaters Bob and Isaac and the rest told us we COULD be...but i look around me and all i see is Homo Sap tossing it all away...it's like watching a Einstine take up smoking crack insted of physics....

[Sarah]

Spooky1947 wrote: "it's like watching a Einstine take up smoking crack insted of physics.... "

We see what we are looking for and it's never been average Joe Schmo who got us into space. It was competing with the Russians. Right political climate and money was poured into the space program. But I'm not sure what commercialization will do for the space race.

[E.D.]

Sarah wrote: "Spooky1947 wrote: "it's like watching a Einstine take up smoking crack insted of physics.... "

We see what we are looking for and it's never been average Joe Schmo who got us into space. It was co..."

Until we find another Earth-like planet, and the tech to get there quickly, we can look forward to mining towns similar to the Old West.

Now I'm wondering if Einstein ever tried magic mushrooms! Could explain a lot. :}

[Jim]

Sarah, your first world comment brings up an interesting conundrum. Will space travel ever be a solution to overpopulation? I don't think so. It could make sure that the race survives, but most people can't & won't go, at least not fast enough to relieve population pressure. Heinlein's example in Tunnel in the Sky is that with all the tunnel time they can get, the Pan-Asian alliance (or whatever the name was) couldn't march people through fast enough to keep up with the birth rate. That's true for many countries now. IRL, most of the US did change our habits & have almost hit ZPG after the big push for it in the 70's. We could afford to.

What changed us? I think it was technology. My ability to go out & clean up after a storm or my neighbor's ability to produce crops on a 100 acre farm pretty much by ourselves depends on this. Tractors, trucks, & chainsaws can give one man the ability to do the work of a crew with older technology.

Perhaps the answer to over population is simply to raise the standard of living of everyone on the planet to our current level. Maybe that's what it takes to offset the reproductive habits/beliefs or biological imperative & leave it simply as the cheapest form of recreation. It certainly abrogates the need for the traditional large family needed to farm & undermines the old cultural mores against birth control. The question then becomes whether we can we develop the technology to get everyone to a high enough level of technology before we completely destroy our environment.

We seem to be able to turn most any material to most any use with enough energy. Food production has increased tremendously & is showing signs that it can explode if we ditch some prejudices - hopefully not going as far as "Soylent Green" (excellent SF without romance, based on Make Room! Make Room!) but getting over our dislike of vat-grown & genetically altered foods, which we certainly will if people get hungry. (Considering all the press about meat paste & McD's McNuggets, I'd say there isn't much worry. They're still selling fine.) We'd need a better system of distribution, possibly with a "Colossus" overseeing it, but we could probably double our current population without anyone starving even at our current level of technology.

The limiting factor is nonreplenishable energy resources like oil & rare-earth metals that help us deliver a lot of power where it is needed. Cheap, clean, portable, adaptable power sources are what we really need. We spend too much time & energy getting the energy right now. Then we can't deliver it evenly where it is needed. Something like the sun stones would solve that.

[Mary]

The effect of contraception on humanity is evolution in overdrive. It's selecting for people who have children, and preferably lots, despite material prosperity and contraception. (For whatever motive.)

My, this is an amazing piece of topic drift.

[[deleted user]]

Mary wrote: "My, this is an amazing piece of topic drift...."

I was thinking that, too.

If Goodreads provided Mods with the ability to move posts to other topics, like many online discussion boards have, I'd spin off a new topic with the last dozen posts. But Goodreads doesn't, so we can't, so we drift...

[Sarah]

G33z3r wrote: "Mary wrote: "My, this is an amazing piece of topic drift...."

I was thinking that, too.

If Goodreads provided Mods with the ability to move posts to other topics, like many online discussion boar..."

I'm thinking this is exactly on-topic. "Sci-fi with no romance" isn't that looking at the future with less children?

[Mary]

Sarah wrote: ""Sci-fi with no romance" isn't that looking at the future with less children? "

Nah, it's just the procurement procedure is off-stage. There's plenty of SF without agriculture, but that's not a world where they don't eat.

[Jim]

Mary wrote: "The effect of contraception on humanity is evolution in overdrive. It's selecting for people who have children, and preferably lots, despite material prosperity and contraception...."

I'm not sure that's true, Mary. More doesn't equate with survival over the long term.

I do agree it's topic drift, although I have tried to use examples that fit the topic. Sorry!

(No, actually I'm not. This is interesting.)

;-)

[[deleted user]]

Jim wrote: "More doesn't equate with survival over the long term...."

But doesn't Darwin say that whichever species reproduces the most wins?

On the other hand, humans might have sufficient intelligence to avoid testing Malthus's proposition.

[Mary]

Jim wrote: "
I'm not sure that's true, Mary. More doesn't equate with survival over the long term."

Differential fertility is driving force of evolution. More equals survival over the long term unless it also produces evolutionary pressures that ensure that the more children fail to reproduce like the few children.

[[deleted user]]

Darwin says you are a evolutionary success if you reproduce...however if we reproduce in such numbers that we out-strip our resources there will be a major die-back of our species at least, extinction at most...don't belive me? put some bacteria in a dish with a little food....they will reproduce until all the food is gone, then they die of starvation

[[deleted user]]

Darwinism...who has read The Marching Morions by Kornbluth?

[[deleted user]]

someone suggested bring down the population by raiseing the standard of living...true that as standard of living goes up, birthrates go down. PROBLEM: in order to raise the world's (7 billion people) standard of living to that of the USA's (350 million) we need more resources...about 2 more planet's worth.

[[deleted user]]

as for the topic...no romance here. :)

sorry for draging this off topic, sory for multiple posts, im on a mobile

[Jim]

Survival of the species is the final judge. I don't think old, natural methods are the best way to survive in our brave, new world. If anyone colonizes other worlds, I doubt it will be folks from countries that are struggling to keep the masses fed.

Spooky, I made the point of raising the standard of living in #64, but also pointed out that it would take energy like Heinlein's almost magical sun stones because that would take care of a lot of the resource issues. I didn't say we had to bring it up to the US's current standards, just to a higher level. Otherwise, I agree with you.

[[deleted user]]

Spooky1947 wrote: "Darwin says you are a evolutionary success if you reproduce...however if we reproduce in such numbers that we out-strip our resources there will be a major die-back of our species at least, extinction at most...don't believe me? put some bacteria in a dish with a little food....they will reproduce until all the food is gone, then they die of starvation..."

No, your petri dish example isn't valid. Your Petri dish has a fixed amount of food. Even if the bacteria maintained a fixed population, they would all die when the food was exhausted.

The earth is capable of producing a steady supply of food. Over the last hundred years we've dramatically increase the amount of food we can produce, but there is certainly an upper limit. (That limit might be higher than you think, if we can farm the seas and, as Jim remarked earlier, we get over our aversion to vat-grown food.)

Malthus theorized that population would increase until food and other resources became so scarce that essentially everyone lived at subsistence levels, at which point the effective birth rate would stabilize because new children simply couldn't be fed. It's not an attractive picture. The result isn't extinction, it's a stable population of very miserable people living in half-starved condition.

To correct your petri dish example, put some bacteria in a dish with a little food, and add a little more food each day. The bacteria will reproduce until they exhaust the food supply, at which point additional population will simply die for lack of sufficient food, and you'll have a stable population of starving bacteria waiting for you to come by each day with more food, singing, "Feed me, Seymour!"

It's also possible that human intelligence might alter the outcome Malthus predicted, in either of two ways:
(1) We might be smart enough to limit our own global population growth (the US has come very close to ZPG simply through social changes, and China has created a harsh, and not very productive, one-child policy as a matter of law.)
(2) Scarcity may lead to war, with powerful nations conquering poorer nations to annex their food supply and reduce the population of "the other guys". Nothing like a major war to cut back on population.

[[deleted user]]

still takes more resources Jim...atm we are taking all the Earth can give

[[deleted user]]

you have a problem GR...you ARE right, we can grow new food stocks each year...but that takes top soil to grow them in...when Lewis and Clark made there journy across the USA, they reported about 2 feet of top soil on the good land for farming...now the same land has less than 6 inches on average...

[[deleted user]]

also, you talk of resource wars...thats all well and good til someone starts poping nukes....grow in that

[E.D.]

On a thread in another group dealing specifically with population growth, I posted:

Viral mutations. Drug resistant bacterium. Nuclear proliferation. Fresh water shortage.

Life finds a way.

And before any of you smarty-noodles argue proliferation isn't a natural development, I'll point out fission and fusion existed long before we did.., and human nature makes it so. :}

[[deleted user]]

Spaceship Earth:

There will be no re-supply.

Relief will not be forthcoming.

[Jim]

Spooky1947 wrote: "still takes more resources Jim...atm we are taking all the Earth can give"

Actually, we're not even close & have stretched some things far beyond belief. It just comes down to what is economically viable & the current state of technology, another rapidly changing target that does provide constant relief. A good example would be the oil reserves. We have more now than we did during the crisis of the 70's.

But it is an incredibly complex system & it wouldn't take much to toss a wrench into the works. World Made by Hand is an interesting look at one way it could all fall apart through bureaucratic stupidity.

[[deleted user]]

please explain to me how the planet has more oil now than it did in the 70s....

[Xdyj]

Partly it's because in oil reserves we only include those oil sources that are considered economically viable. As oil price increases and new technology being developed a lot of oil sources formerly considered too expensive to work on (e.g. oil sands in Canada and Venezuela) are now economically viable.

[[deleted user]]

you miss my point...that oil was here in the 70s, it may have cost too much to pump, but it was still here.

this planet has a finite amount of resources. if we dont make it off planet before we use them all, its back to the stone age. Permanently.

Spaceship Earth:

There will be no re-supply.

Relief will not be forthcoming.

[Jim]

Spooky, I got your point, just don't think it is that simple. Technology allows us to get to more resources, find them where we didn't know they existed, & that makes me question just how finite they really are. If we could convert elements economically enough or mine them in space, we might never run out of anything.

Whether we'll be able to reach that level of tech & not destroy ourselves in the process is another question. We could knock ourselves back to the Stone Age through science (nuclear war, bio weapon, pollution, etc.) or even bureaucracy gone wild. I doubt we'll stay there if anyone survives, though. People are amazingly resilient as is the Earth.

I certainly agree that there are a lot of dangers to our environment & we should be paying more attention to them. I sometimes despair for environmental movements, though. Too often, they alienate those they should be cultivating & educating. Change has to make allowance for present needs & ways of life or it leads to fanatical, escalating resistance on both sides.

L.E. Modesitt Jr. often addresses low resource environments in both his fantasy & SF. His career as an economist in DC colors all his stories. Actions, even necessary ones, come with a cost & huge responsibility. Gravity Dreams might make his points the best on a ravaged, pretty much used up Earth.

[[deleted user]]

I have this marvelous book, The Limits to Growth, produced by the collection of scientists known as the "Club of Rome" in 1972. It was quite a sensation in colleges at the time. Lots of graphs on population growth, oil consumption and arable land and water usage. According to it, we ran out of oil a decade ago, we are dying of thirst, and will be starving by the end of the decade. (Despite the failure of many of its doomsaying predictions, it's still an interesting book for its methods of analysis. I think it's actually been updated and reissued, though I haven't read the more modern version.)

Suppose we run out of oil? So what? Well, we're probably not going to go back to whale oil, and it's bad news for stockholders in Exxon. But, there are other sources of energy just waiting to become economically viable. We currently consume approximately 15 terawatts. The earth continuously gets approx. 1000 terawatts from the sun. Expanding the collection area (mirrors or other transmission) offers even more. And direct nuclear fission/fusion, converting mass to energy, offers even more.

In 1964, a rather far-thinking chap named Kardashev proposed classifying civilizations by the scale of their energy use. He began with type I as harnessing all energy available on the earth. (His Type II harnesses all energy available from the sun throughout the solar system; and Type III harnesses the entire Milky Way.) Think big, folks!

[Mary]

Expanding collection area would result in a lot of dead zones where plants can get no light. For solar, what we need is to get into space. Remove the atmospheric subtraction AND the ecological effects.

Plus nuclear of course. Any environmentalist that doesn't support nuclear is not serious. (Solar energy is more dangerous -- has killed more people -- than nuclear.)

[Jim]

That sounds like a neat book, G33z3r. Wasn't global freezing the worry back then?

It's amazing how complicated our way of life is. Mary points that out well with the solar trade off. I also wonder a lot about where materials come from. We get a lot from China & they're not so environmentally friendly. Just saw a squib about a river they have that is blue from making half the jeans in the world. Worse, it's used for drinking water & contains a lot of heavy metals, but it's out of sight & mind, so most people don't care. Not even the Chinese gov't who say it's just fine.

A lot of our issues are sheer waste - poor distribution systems. I was reading about ship cargo containers a while back in the John Deere magazine. Trains won't stop to pick them up either empty or refilled & it drives shipping costs in the US way up since they have to be handled so many more times. The difference in energy consumed was incredible. The story didn't go into the railroads side of the story, but I've long wondered that they have languished.

That is one of the fun things about SF, reading about what the problems were or were thought to be at the time the story was written. It's even neater (or more irritating, depending) to see things that have happened that they didn't dream of - the lack of email, cordless phones, or 'streamlined' items that are considered bulky today.

[[deleted user]]

Jim wrote: "Wasn't global freezing the worry back then?..."

You mean Nuclear Winter? The theory that if any substantial number of atom bombs were detonated they would throw enough dust into the atmosphere to create a new Ice Age and freeze us all.

It's a good thing they warned us. Before then, none of us had any idea that nuclear war would be a bad thing. But it's good to know we can always fix global warming....

[Mary]

No, scientists were seriously stating that we were going into an Ice Age and Needed to Prepare Now -- no nuclear war required.

[Sarah]

G33z3r wrote: "Jim wrote: "Wasn't global freezing the worry back then?..."

You mean Nuclear Winter? The theory that if any substantial number of atom bombs were detonated they would throw enough dust into the at..."

We've already detonated lots of atom bombs. Any guesses as to how many and which country takes the cake for having the most?

[E.D.]

Blame the French! :}

[[deleted user]]

Jim, of course our resources are finite...the volume of our planet is finite, therefore a finite amount of resources will fit into that volume...as for mineing the asteroids, thats how this whole conversation started...we gotta get off this mudball before we use all our resources.

as for solar power...we better make the switch before we run out of oil...you need plastics to make solar panels out of we make plastics from oil...in fact, plastics are so important to our civilization (think of healthcare apps alone) that burning oil makes us first class idiots...we have more important things to do with it...

[[deleted user]]

as for nuke power...as Albert E. said "its a hell of a way to boil water"...but it can be done IF your smart about it. the Russians screwed it up, as did the Japanese, and we has Three Mile Island...all due to someone screwing up. The French have some of the best nuke power plants (as far as saftey goes) from what i hear...a big problem here in the USA is all that hot waste we have laying around. That problem could be solved in large part by reprocessing it back into fuel rods, but thats a no-no because of a non-proliferation treaty we signed....and so it goes...

[[deleted user]]

as long as we are on the subject of the power of the atom, back in the 1950s the USA developed a nuclear-powered rocket...test fired it, it ran continuously for two hours. they then shut it down and put it on the shelf (i think GE had the contract if you want to look it up). The story i got was it could run for months, even years, without having to be shut down...THAT could get us off-planet, just need the ship to put it in. Why we aren't useing it, i have no idea...

[Jim]

G33z3r, Mary remembers. No nuclear bombs were needed. Science at the time concluded pollution was stopping too much sunlight & we were going to freeze.


Spooky1947 wrote: "Jim, of course our resources are finite...the volume of our planet is finite, therefore a finite amount of resources will fit into that volume..."

Depends on what we can convert to what & the time Earth has isn't infinite, either. I think we have plenty of mass to go around for the few billion years it has left, though.
;-)

Yes, I agree, the Earth is too small a basket for humanity to keep all its eggs in it. (Who said that? Heinlein? Clarke?) I'm all for going out into space, as a species. I just don't think most will have the opportunity or the desire to leave home.

Plastics aren't just made of petroleum products any more. Yes, it is cheaper to use that for a lot of them right now, but a lot of different organics can be used depending on the application & type required.

[Mary]

Spooky1947 wrote: "Jim, of course our resources are finite...the volume of our planet is finite, therefore a finite amount of resources will fit into that volume..."

Matter is conserved. It just get rearranged. It is indeed finite because the life of the sun as an energy source is finite, but that ain't gonna be soon.

[[deleted user]]

sooner than you think...

[Jim]

Spooky, you're a pessimist! You all might be right more often, but optimists have more fun.
:-P

[[deleted user]]

yes i am, Jim, yes i am

:p