Greg Benford, physicist and science fiction writer, suggested a few years ago that global warming could be stopped by means of putting a giant fresnel lens in orbit at the L1 point between the Earth and the Sun. This would lower the amount of sunlight hitting the earth, thus cooling the entire planet a fractional but crucial amount; essentially, a parasol for the planet.
It's occurred to me that maybe a similar system could be used to increase the amount of sunlight hitting the earth, thus causing the entire planet to warm. But why, you ask, would you want to do such a thing?
Well, if a new ice age were to start, could be mighty handy....
Beyond that, a giant sunlens (albeit on an even vaster scale) could be useful for terraforming Mars
Thursday, August 23, 2007
The Sunlens
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Economics is the Shadow Cast on Society by Technology
Jay mentioned a Dewey quote from the Democracy and Education lecture which, coincidentally enough, had been echoing through my head all day: "Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business."
For a long time I've felt much the same way myself, though I phrased it to myself rather less poetically, as: economics determines politics. That's not the full formulation, though, because if economics determines politics, then technology determines economics.
It's not cut and dry, of course. There's mutual feedback at all levels: politics can affect economics (to a degree), and technology (to a much weaker degree.) Similarly, economics can feedback to technology. But The ultimate direction of influence is technology -> economics -> politics.
A large part of Chomsky's lecture deals with the political changes that occurred between the founding of the US, and it's eventual emergence as an industrial superpower, and he's pretty unflinching in his judgment that those political changes were mostly for the worse. He places the blame for this primarily at the feet of the big corporations that have sought to neuter democracy in favor of establishing a technocratic state whose elites operate in total isolation from the humors of the masses.
But when the US was founded, the industrial revolution had yet to begin. With the exception of printing presses, gunpowder, and transoceanic sailing vessels technology was not terribly more advanced than it had been at any time in the past 2000 years. Most of the American population - or at least those who were allowed to vote - consisted of farmers (who owned their own land), and tradesmen (who sold things they made with their own hands.)
Advances in technology rendered that world almost obsolete within a hundred years: a single person simply can't build or operate a factory, or even design the products it turns out. Larger, semi-permanent organizations, in which people of their own free will agree to participate - corporations, in other words - have to be created out of sheer economic necessity. The development of corporations was a pretty huge thing in terms of the ability to organize human action over a large scale, probably one of the greatest social innovations of the past few hundred years.
Of course, corporations came with some societal costs that mirror the benefits. They reaped enormous economic benefit by harnessing division of labor on scales undreamt of before, but by doing that replaced a society of independent tradesman (whose work was interesting and challenging) with a society of factory workers, whose work was repetitive and often dangerous. As a natural result, the workers demanded greater compensation, and the owners (also quite naturally) resisted, leading to one of the great political tensions of the 20th century. At the same time, corporations thrive best under conditions of stable regulatory oversight; they can adjust to almost any ruleset, so long as those rules don't change very much. It was only natural that they would seek to subvert democracy as far as they could.
Chomsky says all this happened because of the mendaciousness of rich men and powerful corporations (generally the same thing, at least for the past hundred years or so.) I'd say the ultimate source was in technology. Steam engines, electrical power, mass production, these were things without which corporations would have been basically impossible, save in a few isolated fields.
Smith's goal of “creative work freely undertaken in association with others" is partly met by corporations, at least if you omit the 'creative' part. I think maybe this century, we'll be able to do better.
Once again, it comes down to technology. The pieces aren't all in place yet, but then the industrial revolution wasn't invented all at the same time either. The internet allows spontaneous networks to form around information that is instantly and universally available, a capability that was most certainly not part of the last century's experience. The maturation of the next two big technologies - solar power and home fabrication - are all that is required to complete the setup for the next massive social revolution.
Economics change pretty radically when you add home fabrication to the internet. Suddenly it's not just about downloading music and porn and looking at pictures of cats; now you can download blueprints and make your own technology, anything from a hammer to a cell phone to a house, including another copy of the home fabricator, dependent only on how much time you have. Decent solar power means that you can go out anywhere you want with a fabricator, a few solar panels, some raw materials (when the technology is mature, this will mean: dirt and sand), and build your own house from scratch.
The cost of manufactured goods trends very steeply down in this scenario, at least from the point of view of corporations; there's no point in building a global supply chain to mass-produce your widgets if everyone can just make their own at a cost of energy and raw materials. Essentially, companies that make things are fucked, unless they can find a way to force people to pay for the CAD/CAM files they download. The current IP struggles are deeply important because of this; if manufacturing companies succeed where media companies are failing so spectacularly, it'll do untold harm to the global economy by raising the cost of goods far above their logical price. I expect this to become one of the defining political battles of the 21st century: the fight between people who want to get paid for their creative work, and the vastly larger number who want it all for free.
Basically, it's a fight between corporations and networks, and in the long run I expect the networks to win, replacing corporations as the dominant form of social organization. Getting paid for your work will cease to lose all meaning, after a while: with the plans for everything freely available, and the ability to make as much of it as you'd like, the main incentive for inventing something new (ie, adding to the archive of blueprints) will be social recognition. This would seem to me to be pretty close to creative work freely undertaken in association with others, and long before this century is done I think we'll be moving very rapidly in that direction.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Not sure what ‘Civil War’ you’re referring to, but I’m sure it’s not the American one. Can you specify this?
Democracy and Education
Surprisingly, I found very little to disagree with in Chomsky's lecture. The man writes with power and insight, from a position of great knowledge. I have to admit, its made me question a lot of my assumptions. Something I'll have to chew on for a while.
Sphere: Related ContentWhat Kings and Presidents Have in Common
Jay sends in this 1994 essay from Chomsky, Democracy and Education. This paragraph really popped out at me:
Independently of Jefferson and Bakunin, others were coming to the same understanding in the nineteenth century. One of the leading American intellectuals was Charles Francis Adams, who in 1880 described the rise of what is now called the "post-industrial society" by Daniel Bell and Robert Reich and John Kenneth Galbraith and others. This is 1880, remember. A society in which, Adams says, "the future is in the hands of our universities, our schools, our specialists, our scientific men and our writers and those who do the actual work of management in the ideological and economic institutions." Nowadays they're called the "technocratic elite" and the "action intellectuals" or the new class or some other similar term. Adams, back in 1880, concluded that "the first object of thinking citizens, therefore, should be not to keep one or another political party in power, but to insist on order and submission to law." Meaning that the elites should be permitted to function in what's called "technocratic isolation," by the World Bank -- I'm being a little anachronistic here, that's modern lingo -- or, as the London Economist puts the idea today, "policy should be insulated from politics." That's the case in free Poland, they assure their readers, so they don't have to be concerned about the fact that people are calling for something quite different in free elections. They can do what they like in the elections, but since policy is insulated from politics and technocratic insulation proceeds, it really doesn't matter. That's democracy.
I have to admit, that's pretty much what I see as the main social utility of modern democracies. As a rule, elections are all about blowing off steam, great spectacles in which power is symbolically shifted from one group of people to another, often fought bitterly over points of trivial importance. Bleak, yes, but it is better than living under one strongman after another. Sure, you get longer periods of stable government, but at the expense of civil wars every thirty years or so. Hereditary monarchs are superior to warlords for the same reason; the primary aim of any political system is the maintenance of civil order over as long a period of time as possible, regardless of how ridiculous the system used to maintain that stability may appear.
Roman emperors achieved stability for a few decades by means of buying the loyalty of the largest fraction of the Roman army; the problem with that was, armies can be defeated in battle, or their loyalty bought by someone with a heavier treasure-chest (at which point order breaks down and you get a civil war). Monarchs kept stability it for lifetimes by giving ultimate power to hereditary lines; of course, you can't always be sure the king will have boys, or even children (at which point order breaks down, and you get a civil war). Democratic States place ultimate power in the hands of a leader whose chosen by the people; instead of trying to keep the same guy in place for life, he's rotated regularly, but in an orderly fashion, with no blood being spilled. The only problem is ...... (at which point order breaks down, and you get a civil war?).
Seriously, I'm not sure about what's necessary to bring out actual civil war conditions in a democracy. The failure states of warlord autocracies or monarchies are fairly obvious, and while democracy is obviously much more stable on the long term than either previous form of government, it too is imperfect, and bound to have a failure state.
I'm thinking an obvious candidate would be something like an election so closely contested that there was no clear winner. The sheer venom of the Bush years certainly points in favor of this. Still, no actual civil war broke out, and there are plenty of cases of close elections in which violence failed to materialize. Perhaps if too-close-to-call elections became a common occurrence, though - especially in a context of technocratic isolation, as Chomsky puts it - elections would cease to let off pressure, and social tensions might, after stewing for a decade or two, blow up into a civil war of dire proportions.
Then there's historical Civil War, which I'm not a historian of, and thus can't really say what touched it off. Anyone?
Fuzoku!
The Great Happiness Space is a fascinating romp through the world of Tokyo's hostess bars.
The really weird thing? It's about male hosts, whose main clients are female hostesses.
Ah, Japan.
Monday, August 20, 2007
American Foreign Policy subordinated to a third party???
Matt, (or sorry, am I not supposed to use your real name?), you said:
"Next time the US gets the itch to invade a country that will require a decade of occupation, the logical thing for it to do will be to go in without consulting a single other country. Just like in Iraq. Oh, wait, they spent a year trying to get UN approval for the invasion (or, more accurately, get that approval for the 17th time, as they already essentially had it from 16 previous resolutions passed by the general assembly over the preceding decade.)
I don't think it's too hard to see the US subordinating its foreign policy to a third party."
I was wondering why you don't think this is so hard? Especially in light of the occassions the US has overridden the UN's decisions. Can you link me to where I can see the historical record of the UN backing or denying support of American-initiated invasions? I'm sure this is a two-way street.
Or did you mean that the US could hand over it's foreign policy so it could pursue a neo-isolationist policy?
Just wanted you to expand on those ideas.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
The Demosphere and Space Colonization
Ever since the golden age of SF, a staple of the genre has been the colonization of space by humankind. Well before Yuri Gagarin became the first man to get flung around low earth orbit in a steel can, writers were dreaming of using rockets to visit the planets, and hyperdrives with which to build vast empires amidst the stars. It is a theme that has been returned to again and again. When men first set foot on the moon, it was to many a dream that tasted almost real; not yet a reality, but surely an inevitability. Humans would follow the ancient imperative of the species, and boldly colonize the farthest frontiers of the universe.
Has it all been a fantasy? Many are beginning to think so. Charlie Stross, one of the brighter lights of modern SF, wrote a lengthy essay, High Frontier Redux, which concludes:
Colonize the Gobi desert, colonise the North Atlantic in winter — then get back to me about the rest of the solar system!
Space, as Stross points out at great and detailed length, is a great deal more inhospitable than the most forbidding environments on Earth's surface. Even those places have oxygen, temperatures that are not fatally extreme (at least not immediately), and do not generally experience massive radiation fluxes. Added to this, of course, is the steep cost in time and energy of establishing colonies.
Of course, the resources of space in terms of energy and material are vast. The great expense of building colonies would be justified if those colonies could build and maintain solar power collectors, or mine out asteroids for their metals. Or rather, the expense would be justified, were it not that it would likely be much more cost-effective to do all that industrial work with robots. They require no shielding from the radiation, are quite comfortable in hard vacuum, and require no complicated life-support machinery. They don't get bored or tired, and best of all, there's very little danger of them getting any funny ideas about independence.
It's easy to foresee a future where human bodies never get much further than geosynchronous orbit. That's been the case ever since the Apollo program. All of the exploration has been done by automated probes; humans have done little more than whirl around in Earth orbit, doing experiments, repairs, and PR spots. Even the Apollo program was little more than a stunt; the manned Mars mission, if it actually happens, will amount to the same stunt on a vastly larger scale. For the foreseeable future, the only way in which most people will go to space will be as tourists (a tiny market for now, but this study at Space Future, Meeting the Needs of the New Millenium: Passenger Space Travel and World Economic Growth, predicts a vast increase in the size of that market.)
With robotics technology advanced enough to automate space industry - self-guiding, self-replicating, self-maintaining - the resources of the solar system could be harnessed without anyone ever having to leave the surface of the Earth. A population ten times larger than the current six and a half billion could be thousands of times wealthier, on a per capita basis. Humanity would sit at the center of a network of machinery that spanned the solar system, the resources of the solar system being sent back to them.
For anyone (like me) raised on a steady diet of martian colonies and galactic empires, there's a distinct lack of romance to this sterile, industrial cosmos. Yet it's very difficult to refute.
Charlie Stross isn't the serious intellect to examine space travel and find it wanting. Michael Anissimov, over at Accelerating Future, writes in Space Travel: Not For A Billion Years, that the Singularity will make space travel obsolete. With the computing power a post-human civilization will have at it's disposal, it'll be able to simulate so many more interesting, life-filled worlds than the universe could possibly provide, that exploring the universe becomes pointless (at least, if one is after novelty.) Not only that, but the internal clock-speed of a post-human civilization would make the moon, he says, 2/3 of a light year away.
My own recent speculations on the demosphere got me thinking about what effect a global polity would have on space migration. There's some reason for optimism. A global polity would likely spend a much smaller fraction of it's GDP (a figure likely to be significantly higher than current global GDP) on military hardware. If even a small part of the difference was to be diverted to space colonization, the high frontier could truly be opened.
Then again, a global polity would be just as capable of stifling any attempt of humans to move off the earth. In fact, I imagine it would have every incentive to do so. It's existence, after all, would guarantee peace and prosperity for a very long period of time, so long as it is able to stave off the pitfalls of civil war and outside invasion. The first cannot be ruled out entirely, but the second is impossible. Unless aliens invade ... or, say, those in control foolishly allow independent communities to establish themselves on other worlds. It might take centuries for those colonies to become large enough and independent enough to constitute a threat, but any global polity worthy of the name would have a perspective of millenia. Like Mandarin China banning the exploration of the oceans, the demosphere would prevent human migration into space for as far as the eye can see.
As if all this wasn't bad enough, there's always the Fermi Paradox. Lacking any reason to think that our planet is particularly special, there doesn't seem to be any reason life shouldn't be relatively common. Even one in a billion would mean the universe had trillions of living worlds. There's no reason to suppose our species was the first in the history of the universe or even the galaxy, and even with craft much slower than light there's been plenty of time for the galaxy to have been colonized. So why isn't it? Maybe they all just stayed home, for reasons similar to the ones above.
Space colonization might not be a dead idea, but it's been wounded pretty bad, and when you ask they doctor if the patient's gonna make it he gets that look on his face....
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Monday, August 13, 2007
Another Response to a Response
Another response, forwarded by my friend from one of his:
well (standard disclaimer), i ain't no expert on international politics, but...
Relax, you seem to know plenty from what I can tell.
first, i'm not sure if that whole bit about the british empire still being in tact if the king had allowed parliamentary representation for colonies is serious.
Admittedly, that's pretty speculative. Then again alternate history always is.
it seems a huge stretch in any case. after all, britain just gave independence to all of those colonies (with the exception of the US).
Right, and that was the first exception, which set the precedent to follow (just with less bloodshed.) The idea of letting the colonies mature into independent nation-states - the whole white-man's burden thing of civilizing the natives - didn't really come along until after Britain conceded the War of Independence. Acceding to the colonists' request for representation would have set a completely different precedent.
in canada's case, it wasn't exactly a hard fought independence either. is it really plausible to think that Canadians, for example, would accept a central gov't from across the atlantic so long as they were able to send a few MPs to represent their interests?
As a Canadian, I can say: yes, that's pretty plausible. Canadians fought in a number of wars in which they had absolutely no direct interest (Boer, WWI, WWII) out of nothing more than a feeling of loyalty towards Great Britain. Accepting a distant central government was never much of an issue anywhere in the colonies; the British loosely administered a very large part of the planet for quite a long time, and there is no reason that loose administration could not have continued. With the precedent set by American representatives sitting in the House of Commons, there's every reason to believe the British - being relatively fair-minded - would have extended the same privileges to the Canadian and Australian colonies, and every reason (given those colonies' behaviour for decades following independence) would have accepted the deal.
anyway, i'm not sure if that was serious.
Presented, as I said, in speculation.
Anyhow, on to the meat of it:
he said "The US doesn't go in for direct control, but nevertheless it's been doing its best to draw up an international parliament for a hundred years now." I could be wrong, but I don't recall the US being the biggest backers of the League of Nations. I think they were reluctant to be a part of it and only agreed to membership on their own conditions (Wilson's 14 points).
I might have been wrong about that. I always thought Wilson was one of the LN's architects. It's certainly correct that the LN was a primarily European project, much more limited in scope than the UN.
Following ww1 the US became extremely insular. Clearly, their objective was not to govern the world or contribute to any such body. instead, they wanted europe to recover, but to deal with it's own problems. i thought the primary purpose of the League was to avoid having another devastating war in europe (which it obviously failed to do)...partly b/c of the terms of the War's peace.
Granted.
This guy doesn't seem to think the EU is terribly effective (at whatever he thinks it ought to be achieving). but economic (and to some degree political) integration was the intention: the end was to avoid future wars in europe. If it's not in any country's interests--defined in whatever way you'd like to define interests-- to go to war, they won't. in this sense, the eu has been effective. this is admittedly a realist way of looking at international politics. i don't think this guy is taking a realist view, thus his idea to create the udse (which, in my opinion, is fancifully idealistic and completely ignores any reference to reality).
Er, no, I don't think the EU is ineffective. I'd say the EU is brilliant but flawed. It's the closest existing thing to the UDSE, the sole difference being that the decision-making power is mostly unelected. That guy seems to think that political integration without democracy is somehow a good thing; this guy thinks that not having an elected congress stunts the EUs potential.
why doesn't the un work? b/c it's not a government, it's just a forum for countries to meet. the international political scene is anarchic (i.e. there is no governing authority). he seems to suggest that this is because one doesn't YET exist. I would argue that this is b/c it's not in the interests of the power holders for it to exist (ie, the US). Why would the US ever subordinate its ability to make foreign policy to a third party?
Good point. Next time the US gets the itch to invade a country that will require a decade of occupation, the logical thing for it to do will be to go in without consulting a single other country. Just like in Iraq. Oh, wait, they spent a year trying to get UN approval for the invasion (or, more accurately, get that approval for the 17th time, as they already essentially had it from 16 previous resolutions passed by the general assembly over the preceding decade.)
I don't think it's too hard to see the US subordinating its foreign policy to a third party.
foreign policy is about national interests. the iraq war was a great example. the us decided that it was in its national interests to invade iraq. it went to the UN where france, russia, and china told it that it was not in their interests to invade iraq.
Russia and China are advanced thug-states that would not have been voting members in a UDSE. Remember, to get in you need two things: democracy and decent human rights. Narrow it to those sort of countries, and you've got a very different dynamic.
so, the US invaded iraq. i don't understand why the US would submit to any scheme which would undermine its ability to make these foreign policy decisions. Let's say that the US was actually under threat from Iraq, but France and Russia decided they didn't care because they had huge oil interests in the country. Would it then be decided that the invasion would not take place? Would the UN just decide policy based on a majority vote? Or would the UN simply be composed of philosopher kings, not political ambassadors from each country? I suppose that'd be nice.
And it'd be great if Optimus Prime took on Godzilla (seriously, it'd be cool), but that's off topic. Just like talking about the implausibility of the US submitting itself to the UN in anything but a symbolic way, in an attempt to dismiss the plausibility of the US submitting itself to a UDSE.
This guy (apparently a Master's of Political Science) exhibits the symptoms of expert's pessimism: deep knowledge of a subject leading to a great deal of skepticism that meaningful change can take place. It's the same kind of thing that leads to people saying things like 'The human genome project will take a thousand years', 'I could see a day where the world has five computers', or 'No heavier-than-air craft will ever be able to cross the Atlantic ocean.' OK, so those are all engineering analogies. People said the same kind of thing about the American political project, back when it was first getting started and for a long time afterwards. 'People governing themselves? Preposterous. It'll never work.'
A demosphere? I figure that's about equally preposterous.
The Demosphere
A friend of mine who hasn't bothered to start a blog yet sent me this email in response to my latest post (and to a lengthy google chat):
Notice that the US is hardly consistent in overthrowing governments that aren't supported by the majority of people and replacing them with one that is. In fact, they often do exactly the opposite. I think you should amend your theories that the US is crusading for freedom and democracy in order to account for all these counter-examples. If you said somethine to the effect that the US was mainly looking out for it's own interests (i.e. usually its economic investments in one way or another), and then, only as a very ancillary reason, for the well being of the local people, then that would be much more realistic, but then again, it wouldn't sound nearly as honourable.
By the way, it doesn't surprise me that all these examples exist (I'm sure there are loads more that aren't mentioned), but I don't have time to become an expert on international politics. I think if you want to develop your current theories, you should at least bring up some of these counter-examples and try to knock them down rather than trying to forget about them (for the record I find it kind of disturbing that you are so willing to support the idea that we should forget about relevant history, as in your affirmation of my sarcastic suggestion regarding the history of Iran and Iraq). It will make you sound more fair, not to mention credible. I'll leave it to you to debunk all these crusades for freedom and democracy in disguise.
Finally, for what the anecdotal evidence is worth (sometimes it is worth a lot), I can attest that many Guatemalans explained to me in much greater detail than is given in the article, the history of their armed conflict and the US's involvement. In fact, I sat in on a seminar delineating the entire history at the language school I went to in Quetzaltenango (second biggest city in Guatemala - Mayan name: Xela). Though I certainly don't remember all the details, I can say that the US's overarching interest in United Fruit was indeed the name of their game, even when the government they overturned was elected by the people.
Here's my response:
All of which is very true. I wouldn't try to debate or deny any of it.
I also think it would be pretty hard to debate that a strategy like that pursued in South America, or to an arguably greater degree in the Mid-East over the past half century or so, is likely to prevail in the long run. If the true goal is a global democratic superstate (and as you know that's exactly what I think it is), undermining democracy is counterproductive. The hypocrisy leads to resentment against the US government, both in the target country for direct effects and in the home population (even despite the economic benefits they reap) due to cognitive dissonance.
Looking ahead maybe fifty years I see a world with two institutions that have never existed before: first, a legislative body elected by and responsible to the entire human species, and second, a free trade zone encompassing the entire planet. The second will arise pretty naturally from todays smaller free trade zones (Europe, Asia, and increasingly most of the Americas) merging with each other, a development that would be complementary to the creation of a UDSE. I hereby dub this entity, a global democratic free trade sphere, the demosphere.
I'm not too rigid on this: I could accept everything but a few islands or even a single sizable independent polity from remaining outside the prevailing framework. The free trade zone and the meta-democracy zone don't even have to be contiguous: I could see one polity joining the UDSE without participating in the trade pact, and another doing precisely the opposite. Nevertheless, I'd expect most of the world to belong to both.
The proliferation of free trade deals and the establishment of an international parliament open only to democratic states will conspire to change incentives drastically. Where in the twentieth century it was often more profitable to prop up any dictator who would ensure the smooth operation of US companies, it will instead become crucial to support democracy wherever it takes root, and to extend free trade wherever the opportunity presents. Far more money can be made by maximizing human capital and trading with it, than can be found by using them simply to scour their land for resources.
Indeed, it's very possible that exporting democracy directly could be made profitable. Iraq itself is providing a model of this: the amount of corporate activity in the country, from security to construction, is simply massive. Enormous economic activity is being generated by Iraq's reconstruction; at the moment, it all amounts to speculation, but if Iraq is successful in becoming a stable, democratic state the payoff in terms of mutual trade will far outstrip the investment in time and money. If the system has a moral hazard, this is it. With war profitable again, the democratic core of the UDSE might be tempted to overdue military integration. As the number of involved states and corporations increase, along with their available wealth and capacity for investment, there could well be a brief spike in the number of integrative wars, a bizarre postmodern World War III in which rich states are fighting in order to make the poor rich.
Such an event is best avoided, in my opinion; besides being largely unnecessary (there being a general movement towards free trade and national-scale democracy anyways), it risks creating a unified opposition that could make the formation of a demosphere more time-consuming and costly. At the same time, such a resistance would in itself make such a large-scale military intervention necessary (many believe the current Islamic threat is already such a resistance.) Human nature being what it is, military intervention will be necessary on occasion, but prudence suggests using it only when every other option has failed.
The 20th century was a transitory stage, bridging the mercantile European empires of the 19th century with the demosphere of the 21st. The US came of age in a world shaped by the first, and had to play by its rules while it was still just one of many. Now that it bestrides that world as a colossus, it has the opportunity to remake the world in a shape more to its liking. Given its national character (the best of it, not the worst) and its long-term best interests, along with the overall momentum of history from smaller polities to larger ones, that shape is almost certain to be a demosphere.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
The Next UN and the Last Empire
The American political project has it's roots in an attempt to send elected representatives to the House of Commons in London; for years before the Revolutionary War broke out, delegates were crossing the Atlantic to converse with everyone from the King on down, trying to get them to accept MPs from drawn from the 13 colonies. It's interesting to speculate about what might have happened, had King George agreed to the colonists demands. Perhaps the British Empire might still be around, uniting the world, the Parliament in London housing thousands of MPs from America, Canada, Australia maybe even India. Such an Imperial Parliament might eventually have absorbed the entire planet, functioning as a kind of UN with an army.
Of course, in our history King George refused, the colonists revolted, the Red Coats were set loose on them and eventually, two hundred years later, the power that dominates the world still speaks English. We have a UN, but it doesn't have an army; there's a massive army, but it's not under control of the UN. This reduces the use of both: one lacks power, the other credibility.
I can't help but wonder if that other world wouldn't have been more peaceful than ours. The combination of democratic politics and overwhelming force is a difficult one to resist; had the British Empire not suffered that schism, and succeeded in making London a new Rome, most of the Great Power wars over the past two centuries might have been avoided, either squelched by the imperial military or defused by politics.
Indeed this would seem to be a natural endpoint of human politics. Violence as a rule is most intense at the frontiers of a polity; outside it's a war, but inside it's a crime. Individual polities come and go, but the territorial reach of those polities has extended fairly steadily throughout history. The British Empire is the largest in history, and also the most recent. Following it's dissipation some sixty years ago (along with every other extant empire, whether European or Asian) two new empires - the Soviet and the American - immediately began expanding into the void.
A lot of people dispute the extension of the term 'Empire' to America, as America doesn't exercise direct political control over it's satellite states. Indeed, it regularly allows those states to oppose it. But then, attempting such control would be contrary to the whole American political system, which is predicated on individual freedom. What America does do is periodically invade countries and 'impose' democracy on them, making their political system similar enough to America's that they are converted from threat to ally, or at least neutral trading partner. It's been doing this steadily for a hundred years now, ever since it finished colonizing the Western half of the continent (the country's first imperial project) and began to turn its eyes increasingly abroad. America and Islam are remarkably alike in this one specific way, that both consist mainly of an idea that wants to take over the world.
The US doesn't go in for direct control, but nevertheless it's been doing its best to draw up an international parliament for a hundred years now. The League of Nations was the first, deeply flawed version. The UN was the second, and it's been passably more successful, but manifestly fails regularly at it's stated aim, the preservation of peace of stability. I have a feeling version three is on it's way within the next five or so years; it'll be one of the legacy projects of the next president, whoever it turns out to be. Identity is irrelevant when historical inevitability is in play, and the eventual unification of the planet under one political hegemony is one of those things that almost any conceivable history is likely to lead to. With no challengers, such an entity would likely survive for a very long time. Under it's auspices, war would become a distant memory, surviving mainly as policing actions: overwhelming, relentless, accurate, authorized by multiple layers of authority, based primarily on intelligence and evidence, and careful of minimizing inconvenience to the innocent (not unsurprisingly, behaviour the US military already strives to hone, though it has a ways to go.)
The UN's main problem is that the participating states all use wildly different political systems, most of them some form of authoritarianism (which is better than the prevailing totalitarianism decades ago, when the Soviet Union was a much bigger political influence, but still....) The reason the US works well is that it's political system is fractal, a democratically accountable continuum all the way from the PTA board up to the Office of the President. The EU suffers from a similar problem: as an appointed body attempting to sit atop democratic countries, it's effectiveness is severely diminished.
The main difference between the UN and whatever comes next will be that it has a bouncer outside, and he's asking for ID to make sure you're old enough (you better be a functioning democracy), and probably enforcing a dress code too (no egregious human rights violations.) I'm going to call this hypothetical entity the United Democratic States of Earth, or UDSE. That one thing - the enforcement of minimum standards - will be enough to make it a far stronger entity, for several excellent reasons. First, the nations that compose it would be drawn from the most developed, most powerful of the Earth's nations. Second, real democratic accountability would persuade the populations of those nations - especially the US population - to turn over a great deal of military responsibility to the UDSE, thus giving it the muscle to enforce it's beliefs. That combination of military power and democracy would make the UDSE essentially the same thing as the hypothetical Imperial Parliament.
Get the UDSE in place, apply Barnett's peace-waging strategies for a century, and at the end of it all the world could have reached Fukuyama's end of history: the total disappearance of interstate war, with liberal democracy, capitalism, and human rights prevailing more or less everywhere, under the auspices of a benevolent regime whose existence might prevail for thousands of years.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
The iFly: You Will Be Assimilated
Imagine a future where the air is thick with robotic insects, gathering not food, but information. They're everywhere, following patterns of human interest: sparse where there's nothing to be seen, but swarming like locusts where there is.
I'm going to call them iFlies, for no other reason than I think it sounds catchy (though I refuse to copyright or trademark the term, because I think it would be very cool if Apple picked it up....) They're working on the prototypes now. Not too long before they're out of the labs and into the hands of the military, the police, emergency services ... put a camera and a mic on them, and you've got a swarm of little flying cameras, great for gathering intelligence for assault, arrest, or search-and-rescue. Journalists would love the things, too, for obvious reasons.
It won't be long between being issued to the military and being available to private citizens, probably a handful of years, and when they come out I predict massive popularity. Who wouldn't want a little flying camera (at this point in its history becoming the iFly, perhaps rolled out as a peripheral for your third generation iPhone, which, face it, you're going to have in a couple of years anyway) that could dart up much closer to something than you can get yourself, either practically or safely? Combine it with wearable displays, and it would be like having a roving eye. Great for spectating at sports events, live music, or for any of a hundred other uses where it might be nice to get a direct look at something 200 meters away.
Of course, these things would require pretty ubiquitous wireless in order to really shine. Instead of just buying one of these little iFlies, you could rent time on them from a company owning iFlies all over the world. You'd have your own, of course, that you carry with you (for those times when you want to see something close by), but you could also access units anywhere else. I'd imagine this would be the killer ap. You could be present at breaking news as soon as it breaks, typing the location into your phone and grabbing an available iFly (or piggybacking on someone else's, if all the local units are already taken.) Newsgathering would be changed almost beyond recognition; journalism would cease to be a profession so much as just something people do.
The iFly would lend itself to social viewing quite readily. Just as people now share music, they would be able to share video feeds, not just sequentially but simultaneously. This would be pointless right now: watching multiple screens at once is too taxing. But with a multitude of viewpoints all focused on essentially the same thing, it could work. The interface is simple to envision: in the center of your screen, you see the view from the iFly you're operating; surrounding it like a halo are shrunken views from others, the nearer the larger, fading off into a haze as they get farther away. A really seemless interface would simply track the direction of a persons attention, so that one could seemlessly slide one's viewpoint from one iFly to another. In effect, it would be as though humans have taken not just one idea from the insect kingdom (the mechanics of flight at their size scale), but through it another: viewing the world through compound eyes. Although this update of the compound eye is distributed across a vast area, in effect the entire surface of the earth; characteristically, technology has imitated nature, and improved on it.
Whoever gets the iFly out there, not necessarily first or best, but right, will change the world (and make an absolute killing, to boot.)
Renew the Infrastructure? Alter the Monetary System
The Minneapolis bridge-collapse is surely a tragedy, one that will be forgotten within the week. But as this Popular Mechanics article Brittle America points out, it draws attention to a looming issue that is currently much ignored: the decay of infrastructure in the West. Not just bridges, but highways, roads, plumbing, the electrical grid ... much of it was built many decades ago, and beyond it's intended lifespan. At best, it's obsolete; at worst, crumbling.
I couldn't help but think of a video a friend sent me some weeks ago, Money as Debt by Paul Grignon. Much of the movie consists of a historical and logical vivisection of the financial world, but about an hour in he spends a few minutes describing an alternate sort of money supply, one created not as debt but as value. It would be backed up by the creation of infrastructure, being the best sort of collectively shared wealth. Instead of trading paper tokens representing promises to pay back to central banks, people would trade paper tokens standing in for shares in transportation systems, communication networks, and power grids.
One of the benefits of such a system (separate from those mentioned in the movie)? It would very much favor the creation of new infrastructure, and the renewal and maintenance of that already existing. Value-based currency would depreciate in value as the infrastructure backing it up aged (I can't really say why this is so, to be honest; it's just my intuitive economics speaking.) To maintain the economy, the infrastructure would require maintaining; to grow it, it would have to be extended or replaced. Definitely something to think about as technological change and environmental constraints continually raise the opportunity cost of using the antique crap we all inherited from our grandparents.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Back-Door Uploading: The Free Alternative to Cryonics
These two sites, CyberRev and LifeNaut, are earily similar to an SF story I was working on, involving an upload constructed from a bog-standard human simulation architecture overlaid with all the recorded experiences of the original (of course, the upload is separated from the original, and the original - charged with species treason for playing video games and thus helping to train AIs up to the Turing level - has his brain very precisely wiped of the personality traits and memories that made him a rebellious youth in the first place ... thus making the upload choose between life in virtual heaven and a perilous journey in the world of atoms to reunite his original with his original memories.)
The basic idea at the two sites is to harness expected future computing power to do a kind of poor man's back door mind uploading. This amounts to throwing as much personal data as possible into a secure place (I'd hope impregnable would better describe the facilities, given the privacy implications of this.) Pictures, video, diary entries, personality tests, favorites lists, purchase histories (okay, I made that one up, but you have to admit that would probably be a useful check on other data): any data that is in any way specific to you, gather it in one place and then keep on feeding it.
Imagine if this kind of thing really took off: people wearing portable always-on cams and recording and instantly backing up everything they see and hear. If this uber-archiving became widespread it would create enough information to utterly confound present day historians; they'd rejoice at the abundance and curse their inability to make good use of it.
But really, what would be the point of recording so much? You're sure as hell not going to sit there and re-watch any but the slightest fraction of it; you don't particularly want anyone getting their hands on it, not without your permission anyway, because they'd use it to self stuff to you or incriminate you or in some other way use to do something to or against you. Whatever isn't dangerous or interesting (and that'll be most of it) is just useless. Dead data, archived away forever to no good purpose.
The bet is that future historians will be not be drawn from a population of standard humans, but AI orders of magnitude more intelligent, beings for which humans are as easy to understand as bacilli are to us. They'll take a basic (by which I mean exhaustive and cross-disciplinary) knowledge of what makes humans tic, likely a standardized model of some kind, and then use the archives to do some mixture of setting various universal but variable parameters and training the model up (in some sense it would be as though it lived your life through from the beginning all over again, at least from when you started recording.) Whatever comes out on the other side won't be you, exactly ... but if done well enough, you yourself might by hard-pressed to tell the difference (that is, if you put enough data in: two pictures of your family and a video of you joking around with your buddies at the bar is not likely to produce a faithful rendition.)
This idea is loopier than cryonics, in the sense of being so diagonal to the various views of the world people hold that it simply baffles them, so I don't see it ever really catching on. The same logic applies as in cryonics: by the time people might start to catch on to the feasibility of the idea (freezing yourself in case of death to be revived in case of more advanced technology), the technology will be so advanced that it will simply be able to prevent death from anything, rendering the practice moot. I very much doubt that cam-wearing people recording every mundane thing they see and do will ever become a common sight, at least for reasons of psychic longevity; by the time enough people really clue into the idea, direct uploading - simply doing a brain scan and using that to set a model running - will be both doable and likely relatively common.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
A Military Coups in America: Revolution or Regime Change
Most people assume it couldn't happen in the States: troops in the streets, martial law, political executions on a massive scale. It's a subject that has been treated in the past. This essay, Origins of the American Military Coups of 2012 by Lieutenant Colonel Dunlap at the Army War College, is particularly worth reading. Still, it seems unlikely at first. The American military has been under the perfect control of the civilian government ever since the founding of the country. It's composed of patriotic American citizens sworn to defend their country, men drawn from every walk of life and every part of the nation, who would never take up arms en mass against the population. Coups d'etats are a problem faced by other countries, basket-cases with corrupt governments and restive populations split by a mix of mutually repulsive, vehement ideologies or simple ethnic division.
Actually, put that way it doesn't seem so foreign, does it...?
A coups in the US is a probably a certainty in the near-to-mid term. Probability theory alone suggests that, at least once in US history, there will be a military coups. After all, no state ever lasts forever, and military intervention is the most common type of sharply discontinuous political event that leads to the death of one state and the birth of another (climate change, historically, is a distant second.) Military intervention can either be external - successful invasion by another country - or internal, ie, a military coups. When you're talking about the towering giants of history, military revolts generally precede outside conquest.
Now, you could apply Copernican probability theory - the assumption that there is nothing inherently special about the place or time from which we observe - to the question of how long the current constitutional order will survive. It's been around since 1787, so there's a 5 percent chance that the union is in it's final 11 years of existence, and a 5 percent chance that it will last for another for and a half millenia. And, of course, a 90% chance that it's remaining span is somewhere in between the two.
Copernican theory is a clumsy tool, however, for use only when no other data points exist. Data about the US abounds.
If you're talking about a coups, politics is one of the areas that deserves close attention. Part of the agreement the military, in effect, has with the political class is that they trust the politicians to make the call when it comes to going, or not going, to war. This requires that the military believes the political class to have the best interests of the country at heart and, beyond that, to know the best way of realizing that interest. The contract has held for almost two and a half centuries, and has largely worked out for the best. But there's nothing to say it couldn't sour in the future (and in fact, there's plenty of evidence it's souring right now.) If the common perception amongst the population that politicians were nothing more than venal, corrupt criminals were to spread to the troops as well, the military might well decide at some point that enough is enough, and simply remove the government from office.
Here's one scenario: Washington in general, and Congress specifically, finally puts an end to the Iraq war. The US military is withdrawn as fast as it can, and the country collapses into bloodshed along sectarian, political, and ethnic lines. The consequences of that little collapse lead to a larger one; a discredited US finds itself increasingly pressed everywhere around the world. The economic fallout of that loss of credibility is grim: possibly a sharp drop in the value of the dollar, maybe even just a long-term period of slow growth while the rest of the world rockets ahead (one or two percent in the US, but a decade of twenty percent in China, India, and Brazil....) Precisely what the consequences would be is hard to tell, but one lesson of history is that no war has ever been lost without some sizable fraction of wealth being taken afterwards from the loser.
Meanwhile, the military seethes. They know they could have won the war, but were betrayed from the top, sold out for cheap and ephemeral political gain. It becomes a bitter narrative, endlessly muttered by by soldiers, by former soldiers, and by their supporters. Their numbers grow; as the economy struggles, more people are willing to believe the tale of betrayal and treason at the top, especially with corruption and scandal becoming more apparent by the day. Finally things boil over. Congress is dissolved (ie imprisoned or executed), the president is replaced with a five-star general, and the American people wake up the next day to find themselves living in a military dictatorship.
This is perhaps the uglier scenario, driven as it would be by vengeful bitterness. It could be made uglier still: the successful nuking of an American city, for instance, would in this scenario turn Americans against their government with even greater malice. Media and academia, too, insofar as they're seen as supporters of that government, would come in for rough treatment. This is the kind of scenario where the streets might run red with blood, where hundreds of thousands might 'disappear' in detention centers and secret executions.
The second scenario is not necessarily so grim. The premise is the opposite to that of the first: America doesn't lose Iraq. In fact it succeeds, and proceeds to perform regime change on a regular basis, once or twice per decade taking out an odious government and inviting in a massive global network of NGOs and corporations to rebuild the country afterwards, establishing the conditions for a democracy and then protecting whatever starts to grow. This is essentially Thomas Barnett's view, and it is a strategy that bears thinking about. Executed correctly, it would benefit the entire world, from the country being invaded (which in exchange for some short-term instability is presented with both freedom from repression and economic opportunity), to the global community (who would gain in both a newly opened economy, and a reduced security threat from a basket-case regime.)
The danger comes in the downstream risk to America's own political order. Once again, were the general perception that the civilian government is deeply corrupt, counter-productive or even injurious to the country's interests to deepen, what would there be to stop the military from executing regime change at home? Indeed nothing would be easier. There wouldn't even be a military to oppose them.
Rome's transition from republic to empire bears comparison. For centuries, Rome made a habit of sending its army out, conquering foreign lands, and establishing Roman governance. Practice made them good at it, until Caeser was able to roll up the whole of Gaul within just a decade ... after which he made the logical connection that if a city could be conquered and her lands taken away, well, Rome was just another city and the same principle applied.
Caeser, of course, sought personal gain, though he justified his actions by pointing to the corruption of the Senate, claiming that it acted not on the side of the people but for the wealthy minority. His stated intentions were not to win a throne but to restore the old republic; almost certainly, these statements were mere public relations. But would a modern general be so cynical? One can well imagine some Caeser ordering the dissolution of Congress, all the while stressing that his motivation was merely to clean the slate and go back to a better day ... and actually meaning it. As an example, the gerrymandering of congressional districts is widely seen as a gross perversion of the democratic system; the coups leader could declare that elections based on such a system fail the test of free and fair elections, and all leaders so elected thus utterly illegitimate. First he would occupy Washington, banishing Congress from the city. Next, he would plead for cooperation and patience from the American people; the military government would last only so long as it would take new elections to be held, and that - given the American peoples' boundless experience in conducting elections - would likely be a very short time, almost certainly less than a year. In fact, there's no reason not to let all or most of the sitting congress run for their seats; competing in a fair arena (ie, congressional districts modeled more like third-grade shapes and less like regions of the Mandelbrot set) most of those congressmen would likely lose anyways, and if they were allowed to run it would do a lot to increase the perception of fairness.
Of course, there's no reason the people would have to passively allow their government to be dismantled, but it's worth keeping in mind that general confidence in presidential and congressional competence (19% and 14% respectively) are dwarfed by confidence in the military (64%.) The scenario presented above requires only that this massive divide continue long enough for some old warrior to decide to use that political capital to affect change back home.
There's also no overwhelming reason that the coups leader would have to be true to his word. He could, like Caeser, use reform as merely a pretext to the seizure of power. Even if he didn't, the possibility of another military coups would be eternally at the back of everyone's mind. Nevertheless, this second scenario is quite a bit more user-friendly than than the first; America, rather than becoming a nightmare of repressive government, would in all likelihood remain a livable country, as the transition from old republic to new republic, or republic to whatever comes next, would be managed in a much less destructive fashion. If a military coups is indeed in the long run inevitable, I for one would prefer it to follow the second rather than the first scenario.
Monday, July 9, 2007
The Future Evolutions of Google Earth
Having been bored and with nothing better to do, I settled in for the evening and poked around the planet a bit with Google Earth. I checked out Baqubah, then flew over to Machu Pichu, where I turned on terrain and followed the trail up to the ruins. Then off to Vancouver, a tiny nest of concrete and steel packed into the rocky mountains; from there, I followed the border to Toronto. After that, back to Tokyo, where I explored the urban warrens of Shinjuku and Shibuya. That's more or less a tour of where I'm thinking about living, where I used to live, and where I live now, respectively.
One thing pops out when you compare Japanese cities to Western cities. Turn on 3D buildings and you'll see what I mean. Tokyo and Osaka are exhaustively, thoroughly, obsessively mapped. Vancouver, Toronto, and London (the three Western cities I chose for comparison) are almost entirely not, the sole exceptions being for the most part skyscrapers. Those skyscrapers are largely rendered (not photographically, but some effort has been made to create cartoonish models of the buildings as they actually appear.) Japanese buildings, however, are almost entirely blank, giving only an indication of proportion.
I'm not sure what this means. I suspect it is possible that the Japanese government might have invested in having the blueprints of every building in the country fed into a database and then layered the information in google maps as a survey tool. Western governments have not, I suspected, bothered to trouble themselves with such activities; as a result, models will generally be made by citizens (who will tend to concentrate on the larger, flashier structures, for obvious reasons) or corporations wanting to show off their HQ to the world (ditto.)
It's easy to see a lot of ways that Google Earth, or successor software, might evolve to take advantage of greater information and greater processing power. If an automated way of interpolating photographic data onto unrendered 3D structures could be found - assisted by photos with timestamps and GPS coordinates - a simple trawl through the photosharing networks would gather enough data to render every building in every part of the world in very high detail, full-color and fully textured. Refined a little more, some feedback from the photos on the actual shapes of the buildings would allow models of even higher accuracy to be built. It would be natural from there that the interface be extended to easily enable a walking pace through a city, so that areas might be explored in more detail. The same photo-mapping algorithms would enable rooms to be easily added, a feature for which businesses and citizens could likely find a million uses. Natural features would be amenable to the same process: zoom in far enough on a forest, and eventually you're traveling underneath the canopy, marveling at the trees; find the mouth of a cave system, and you can go spelunking; take a dip off the beach and swim through a reef, or in the deep ocean and plumb the depths of a continental trench.
That's what you could do with good photo-mapping. Video-mapping is the next logical step. Cameras are proliferating everywhere. London is perhaps the most extreme, with it's Ring of Steel, built of concrete and surveillance cameras (no steel, somehow not so surprising in this metaphorical age we live in.) England as a whole has millions of them. Follow David Brin's advice, connect all those cameras to the internet in real time, and that network becomes less the scary tool of a postmodern police state but a true public resource (the police state isn't necessary anyway: citizenry will do all the security work, millions of eyes being so much better at catching criminals and terrorists than are thousands that it's pretty much a law of nature.) Now feed all that video - stationary, wearable, portable, remote or autonomous - into google earth, along of course with any other open web-connected cameras on the planet, and voila: the earth rendered in real time, complete with all moving parts including people. The world would, for humans at least, take on complete transparency.
Privacy enthusiasts are probably squirming at this point, but lets face it: privacy has basically been an illusion ever since Google. Though I imagine things will remain similar to the present in at least one respect. Whatever company provides the software would almost certainly provide property-owners the ability to shut their dwellings out of the system, if they so chose, thus keeping their domestic lives as private as they've ever been. In public, no such thing as privacy would exist. Anyone who wishes, anywhere in the world, at any time from now to the end of history, can see what you're doing. They could follow your entire public life if they so chose (though most people would likely just fastforward to the interesting bits.) If privacy is possible in such a world, it is only in the sense it is now: through obscurity.
Google Earth, at this point, has morphed into something less like the ultimate cartographic tool and more into a kind hyper-geographical earth: a linked, tagged, fully searchable skin of information that clings to reality like a shadow. It doesn't have to reflect reality precisely of course; in addition to privacy holes, people might throw up projected buildings as architectural proposals, or show cities as they were in the past (it would be interesting to rewind, say, Beijing or London for a few thousand years and watch them grow in fast-forward.) In addition to such straightforward fantasies, people might well populate the hyper-geography with avatars, interacting with other avatars or real people all over the world. I'd imagine that people would generally prefer to see whatever avatars are about; hiding one's avatar from real people is the kind of thing I could see becoming a gross breech of etiquette, or even being made a criminal offense. It's nice to be able to see how many people are about, and it would be a handy way to tell, for example, if someone is following you (indeed, privacy concerns might largely be allayed if people were able to see a list of exactly who was performing searches on them.) No one would have to turn on the avatar layer if they didn't feel like it, but if they did - especially in any area of particularly high interest (commercial, cultural, political, scientific, or military) - they'd witness a ghostly blur of people, teleporting in and out and around too fast for the eye to get a good fix on any but the few who aren't just popping in for a look-see, split-second sightseers on a lunch-break world tour.
I should note I started assuming the proliferation of contact-lens displays and other wearable devices about halfway through that last paragraph. They'd render this hypergeographical earth something that wasn't just there when you're sitting in front of your computer, but essentially a permanent feature of the human sensory experience. Not a bad culmination for a little program that currently maps out an uneven, high-ish resolution version of the planet.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Baby Universes and Space Exploration
A year or so ago I came across a story about Japanese scientists who were planning on making a baby universe (link to news report, link to original paper). And then I remembered this post at Accelerating Future, Space Travel: Not in a Billion Years, and it got me thinking.
Civilization is bound to get a hell of a lot smarter, a hell of a lot faster, over the next few decades. Some of that will come from better human-to-human networking, as the net figures out how to maximize the utility of its human components. A lot of the rest will come from faster, smaller, exponentially more powerful computers. Part of the corollary to that is that problems that look intractable now - in biology, neurology, economics, and in all probability physics - will be solved with ease in the near future. In all likelihood even more fiendishly difficult problems will present themselves, but what sort of technological spinoffs might lie waiting in the problems that have yet to be solved? Those in biology would make life a plastic thing with which we could do what we wished, at every level, engineering it as reliably as we've previously dealt with stone, metal and, well, plastic. The ones in neurology would allow human intelligence to be immeasurably improved, as well as replicated and then improved even more inside computers. But what of those problems that may be solved in physics?
Leonard Susskind's book The Cosmic Landscape shows how recent advances in string theory have indicated that there may be a multiverse in which every constituent universe obeys entirely different versions of the same underlying physics. The number of different possible universes is of course quite vast, but they would all lie on a multidimensional mathematical structure Susskind calls the cosmic landscape. Charting this landscape through brute computation would be an enormous undertaking, likely far more difficult than simply completing the human genome. It is not, however, inconceivable that such a map might be made with the kind of supercomputers likely to be in operation two or three decades from now.
A map alone is of no use, but if those early experiments suggested by Sakai et al. are fruitful, and it proves possible to create patches of space-time on different parts of that landscape, it may also prove possible to specify what part of that landscape they're created on. The paper, of course, envisions the baby universe splitting off entirely from ours so quickly that its existence would be undetectable. It would, just like ours, expand forever, just along different directions. But what if there were regions on the landscape where such a separation wouldn't happen? Where stable wormholes into adjacent universes might be found? There needn't be a lot of them. One in a trillion trillion would be a bounty vast beyond imagining.
That's a lot of maybes, of course. Any one of them could prove to be inaccurate. But if they're not, the possibilities are interesting. In fact, they sort of dwarf piddling little things like mastering the intricacies of life and the human brain. Civilization would become a master of space and time, able to create it according to its specifications, along with the matter necessary to populate that universe. What might remain scarce under such a scenario is a fascinating question to contemplate, but one corollary that might be drawn almost immediately is that space would cease to hold any interest whatsoever. This is so certain that it might serve as an ironclad explanation of the Fermi Paradox: any intelligent species reaching a technological singularity would be guaranteed to figure out the technology of universe creation, and with that, it would turn its back on the outside universe and focus on creating all the real estate it wanted.
Indeed, it's even possible that civilization as such might simply disappear into universes better suited to maintaining it, migrating entirely into those with much higher densities of matter and energy (at least as locally defined.) Perhaps, should they be the type to give a damn, they even restore their home-worlds to their pristine state before tunneling through into superior realities, leaving not a trace of their existence behind.
The lost civilizations that are muttered about in new age theories and SF novels might even have gone that way ... but that would be pushing speculation too far.
Monday, July 2, 2007
SF Plot Devices: A List
Well, here's just about all the separate SF plot devices I could think of, at least in a short period.
Step 2: find out if google knows more than I do.
Update: I found this list, which breaks things up into larger categories than I really cared to. The other list is more of a comedic exercise, a list of pitfalls to be avoided. I was more going for things that show up in almost every SF work I've ever read or seen. But there were a few things I missed....
Time Travel
- wormholes (it's always wormholes, if it's explained at all)
- or not. i forgot hibernation. that's only one-way though.
FTL
- wormholes
- relativistic time dilation (not really faster than light, but at least you arrive in months instead of millenia)
- hyperspace
Aliens
- from microbes to gods and everything in between
- ah, yes, and UFOs.
AI and Robots
- like aliens, only we make them, or become them, or both
Biological Mastery
- life extension (or immortality, if the author's brave enough)
- new species, new ecosystems
- evolutionary divergence of the human species
Space Colonization
- from solar to galactic
Human Extinction
- .... and the posthuman world
Parallel Universes
- other dimensions, other beings
- quantum many-worlds, with many histories
- cosmic landscapes, with different physics
Human Extinction
In the Scientific American (and via Belmont Club) a review of Weisman's book The World Without Us:
I’m not suggesting that we have to worry about human beings suddenly disappearing tomorrow, some alien death ray taking us all away. On the contrary, what I’m finding is that this way of looking at our planet—by theoretically just removing us—turns out to be so fascinating that it kind of disarms people’s fears or the terrible wave of depression that can engulf us when we read about the environmental problems that we have created and the possible disasters we may be facing in the future. Because frankly, whenever we read about those things, our concern is: Oh, my God, are we going to die? Is this going to be the end? My book eliminates that concern right at the beginning by saying the end has already taken place. For whatever reason, human beings are gone, and now we get to sit back and see what happens in our absence. It’s a delicious little way of reducing all the fear and anxiety. And looking at what would happen in our absence is another way of looking at, well, what goes on in our presence. ...
Weisman's a bit late to this party. The science fiction writer Stephen Baxter beat him to the punch five years ago or so, when Evolution was published(Bill informs me in the comments that the first mention was actually in 'The Earth Abides', G. Stewart, 1941.) It wasn't traditional science fiction, exactly: throughout most of the book, the main characters are speechless animals, representatives of various precursor and (in the last third or so) successor species.
The book essentially gives a vivid picture of how we evolved to our present state, postulates that we then succumb to a vicious mixture of climate change, natural disaster, and of course war, and then imagines how the world might go on without us (basically, intelligence never re-evolves, though the hominid line persists to the death of all life, five hundred million years later, when the earth is hot, dry, flat, and geologically still.) I found the first two thirds immensely interesting, but the final third hard to bear.
Science fiction often invokes plot elements that are highly unlikely, if not impossible, and I'd suggest Baxter's postulation that we go extinct to be a novel and very clever innovation. I can easily see a whole genre of fiction - posthuman extinction SF or some such - spawning around that one book, for I have to say I was deeply impressed with it overall. But although it's certainly be interesting to think about, but that the species could really disappear, gradually or precipitously, strikes me as unlikely. I know that puts me in quite the minority, these days, but it's never troubled me to be in sharp disagreement with the rest of my species.
What's really the issue here is less the extinction of man, however, than it is the extinction of civilization. And in a very short time - with developments in the usual litany of genetic engineering, robotics, AI - civilization will become independent of man; man may fall, but civilization? It's here to stay, and it's going to eat the stars.
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