Science-fictional shibboleths | Hacker News Reader

Science-fictional shibboleths

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57 pointsohjeez54 comments

For me, a book should get one free pass on which they can build a plausible, self-consistent universe. If that one pass is "awesome, friendly AI with near-perfect dominance over spacetime" (The Culture), well, OK, fine. Just stick to it, then. (Spoiler: In Look to Windward, the Culture is blamed for some lesser culture's war, as the Culture did it by accident. This seemed so implausible I thought it was going to be a plot twist.) -- Yes I know the Culture isn't hard sci-fi (unless you just assume Minds exist and can do all that stuff), but it's the most uplifting stuff I've read. A perfect idea of how civilization should be. It literally affects my mood in a very positive way when I read them.

But if every other chapter there's some new damn "thing" that doesn't seem to make sense in-universe then I feel like I'm just being snowed. There was some book I was reading with new words every other page. Then, on some space ship, "janitor rats" appear, that are rats, but somehow cybernetically linked to the ship over time or some such nonsense. For no apparent reason other than to have cyber rats. Nope.

Greg Egan is the master of making it perfect, holy shit. His books can be a bit hard to get through. I know I didn't fully understand them, then I found out he has said that you shouldn't expect to read a book without a pencil and paper to take notes. Some of the books even have tutorial videos, explaining his [alternative] physics or such.

Well Banks is careful to point out that the Minds may, as far as we are concerned, be god-like but they can't predict everything (for various reasons, including moral qualms about too perfect simulations of individuals possibly having their own rights) and although they are perfectly capable of reading the state of meat based "minds" they don't do it as it's taboo (hence the "Grey Area").

Edit: The Aritrary says in The State of the Art:

"I'm the smartest thing for a hundred light years radius, and by a factor of about a million... but even I can't predict where a snooker ball's going to end up after more than six collisions."

Yep. But still... starting a longass civil war and not immediately jumping in to clean it up? I mean I guess it's possible but it certainly makes the Culture come off as incompetent pricks at a minimum.

It might have been an attempt by Banks to address some of the criticisms of the Culture - that it was "too good". Also the Culture's revenge attack by their terror weapon (literally) on the Chel who planned the attack on the orbital show's how nasty they can be if they think it is justified ("good" doesn't necessarily, it seems, imply "nice").

Excession had some old, powerful, influential minds that weren't at 100%. If i remember, one even self reported - which wasn't allowed.

I like to think there are things like loyalty and senility for minds but a million times more complicated. There's nothing specific in look to windward, but some damaged mind might have been in control, with the others covering up for it.

I'm a bit perplexed by his issue with the realism of futures in which we wear mini-dresses and three-piece suits, drive gas-burning automobiles (or hovercars: it's just a rabbit/smeerp replacement), carry handguns (or blasters: see rabbit/smeerp), eat the kind of food we eat today, live the kind of way we live today, and most importantly think the way we think today.

Especially after an article attacking space opera tropes.

Frankly, if the sci-fi of half a century ago had assumed that a decade or two into the next millennium we'd live in neat little houses on suburban Earth, don suits to go to work in our (non-flying) car, eat hamburgers and worry more about humans in other countries than alien empires it would have been absolutely right.

> it would have been absolutely right.

Science fiction is not future prediction.

Well, 1950s SF did have a bit of trouble imagining the social changes that did actually occur. Even when they tried to be progressive by having a woman scientist or something they always made it seem strange like "I'm looking for Doctor Smith" "I'm Doctor Smith".

> had assumed that a decade or two into the next millennium we'd live in neat little houses on suburban Earth, don suits to go to work in our (non-flying) car

But this is changing, it's not the 1950s any more. By a fifth of the way through the 21st century, it's quite common that

1) The business attire is often jeans and t-shirt

2) Women go to work almost as much as men

3) The couple in the "neat little houses" may not be married. Or may be the same gender and married. Or there may just be 1 person there.

4) Smoking is very uncommon

5) The work is sometimes from home, or your job might be moving to somewhere cheaper like a call-center in India or a factory in China.

7) The local mall is struggling due to online shopping.

8) people don't pre-plan their social engagements like they used to - they're always in contact with their friends so the era of "I'll meet you in the cinema lobby at 8" (or bust) is over. In fact the cinema might be netflix and chill at home.

9) The car might soon be self-driving.

These changes add up over time. This movie from 1981, supposedly set on Jupiter's moon Io in the late 21st century, has scenes that look very looks outdated to me, particularly a room full of men smoking: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082869/

The point isn't "the world is exactly the same as the 1960s", the point is that the world is much more similar to that of the 1960s than the early 2000s depicted in any scifi from that period, especially the scifi written on the premise that the idea that anyone in half a century's time would still work in an office and drive a gasoline powered car was desperately unimaginative.

I'm sure there's a lot of subtle-but-significant ways in which society will have changed by 2065 too (whether influenced by scientific advances or not), but I'm not convinced that they'll find the idea of characters set in their time period eating hamburgers nearly as unlikely or amusing as some of the things we might invent in their place.

Oh sure, people around 1950-70 looked at the pace of change over the last 100 years: from horse and cart and gas lamps to electricity, intercontinental jets and moon landings and projected in on linearly to moon and Mars colonies in the next 50 years. And then ... that progression clearly wasn't linear, it peaked and slowed down after then.

But change hasn't stopped though. It could speed up again. Even if it doesn't, those Mars colonies and robot asteroid mines are not ruled out just delayed - they are back on some people's long-term plans now.

Naturally this has already been extensively covered by tvtropes, I present the "Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness" [0]

The author makes some good points about particular types of errors. I would not, however, call them shibboleths, that word generally refers to something quite specific and seemingly arbitrary that an in-group uses to identify itself to others in the know. Also, the idea that sci-fi is not actually sci-fi unless it's hard sci-fi reeks of No True Scotsman. Some of the author's examples were far more egregious than others; I would argue that violating conservation of energy and/or momentum is fundamentally and entirely different to a particular choice of society or political system such as a Megacorporation or Empire, In Space!

[0]: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienc...

Agreed about Empires. It seems uncharacteristically shortsighted to assume that a couple hundred years of earth history categorically rules out Empire as a sustainable model of government over all space and time.

On the other hand the 3He thing gave us Moon. The 3He thing may not hold water, but the film just isn't about that.

Edit: Oh, and don't worry about jeryk-cam, it's very sedately paced in that respect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(film)

Of course, it's a good movie, so no jerky-cam.

Jerky-cam may have once been a stylistic decision, but nowadays is done to give the illusion of excitement and action without having to actually provide the action, which is way easier for the movie studio. A frequent "jerky-cam" complaint I hear is that people don't know what's going on, they don't know who is fighting who, where it's happening, who's winning... and the reason for that is that there is no location where it is occurring, there are no spatial relationships between the combatants, and the action of the fight does not produce a "winning" or "losing". If you de-jerk the jerky cam, what turns out to be under the jerkiness is just cinematic mush.

I'm not trying to be sarcastic or cynical, I mean that descriptively. Get a modern jerky-cam action scene into something like VLC or mplayer and step through it at 20% speed. Seriously, it's worth doing once, if it's easy for you to acquire the video, as an exercise in media appreciation and education. What you'll find is almost certainly what I'm describing, there's no "there" there. It's not that you're "too old" or slow to follow it, it's that there's nothing to follow.

There's a whole subreddit dedicated "de-jerking" such videos: https://www.reddit.com/r/ImageStabilization/

Star Trek gets really funny: http://www.slashfilm.com/star-trek-motion-stabilized/

I just wanted to say, jerky-cam has it's place (albeit often not in action scenes).

An example of good jerky-cam is HBO's The Knick. It's a turn-of-the-century period series that doesn't have a sentimental veneer to it, but shows the gritty truth of life during that time.

To dispell any notion of that sentimental perspective, the shots are taken with unsteady, hand-held frame (they also forgo the vasoline lens you'd see on something like Masterpiece theatre).

> The 3He thing may not hold water, but the film just isn't about that.

Honestly your point kinda ruins the article entirely. What does it matter that 3He mining is implausible? It's an excuse to tell a story, and the story being told is the important part, not the 3He mining. I don't watch something like Moon to learn more about 3He mining, so it's plausibility doesn't matter to me—although maybe that's not the same for the author?

I tend to find it tedious when sci-fans preen about how they howl and fling books across rooms for some scientific error they're clever enough to notice (as opposed to the dozens of errors they don't react to), errors that have nothing to do with the quality of the writing. The Three Body Problem has flat-out ridiculous science; it's still pretty good.

3He also gave us Iron Sky. Because if you're going to be mining Helium on the Moon, why not have it being done by Nazi refugees with Zeppelin-shaped spaceships?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Sky

This article seems to be aimed at the Astrophysics PhD-holding crowd. Should be called "Science-fictional shibboleths for the overly pedantic".

Fair play to the author for being honest about their tastes, but I can't see these issues being shared by the majority of readers.

The counterargument to some of those issues was drafted over 50 years ago in the form of Clarke's first and third law:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Accompanying these, Clarke wrote a detailed essay on all the reasons why spaceflight was once deemed impossible by a lot of well respected scientists.

Knowing what is realistic with currently understood science, makes the fantastical even more fantastic. Authors who get this can craft exceeding pleasing stories and plot hooks.

Premises:

1. "Upshot: any work of SF that takes 'Lunar 3He mining' as an economic premise is about as plausible as one that assumes combustion powered by the release of phlogiston."

2. This argument applies to essentially anything requiring space travel. It's expensive, very delayed, unworkable based on any kind of science as we know her today, low margin, and generally silly.

Conclusion:

Charlie, as a science fiction reader, has very little reading to do.

* "Faceless 80's style corporations ruling entire planets (hint: who handles the externalities?)" I dunno, who handles the externalities for 2010s-style faceless corporations?

* "small farming planets (hint: just one ecosystem for a planet?)" Yeah, that one's pretty stanky.

* "the glib dismissal of life support systems in space as trivially easy to maintain" If it's not trivial, it's not likely to work very well over any kind of long-term. Any system that requires heroic efforts from superior individuals is going to fail in short order, very likely the second time it is used. Of course, it may fail spectacularly, dramatically, and very entertainingly. But probably not.

* "political structures based on design patterns proven to be unworkable in the context of any society more modern than the late middle ages" Anyone got an example of a political structure proven to be workable in the context of, etc, etc?

* "AIs that follow the disembodied-brain-in-a-box mode of Hal 9000" It's been a while, is that the Berkeley response or John Searle's?

* "futures in which we wear mini-dresses and three-piece suits, drive gas-burning automobiles (or hovercars: it's just a rabbit/smeerp replacement), carry handguns (or blasters: see rabbit/smeerp), eat the kind of food we eat today, live the kind of way we live today, and most importantly think the way we think today" Unfortunately, any use of the term "cache-sex" is verboten and should be expunged from the literature as she is known. The writer of such should be expunged from existence.

Conclusion:

"Edit: if there's an entry for your pet shibboleth in the Turkey City Lexicon don't bother repeating it here—I'm taking familiarity with the canonical list of cliches as a given."

Given that most of this article either appears in the canonical list, or ought to if Sterling and what's-his-name had thought of it, this ending makes the article delightfully self-negating. Très poste-moderne!

On the other hand, this kind of list of things-I-hate-about-all-of-the-rest-of-you has been rather done to death; examples in any decent library abound in much the same way as silverfish. See, por ejemplo, Strunk and White.

4/10. A good effort, but not extraordinary.

John Company and VOC manged to rule large parts of the far east.

Eh. It seems weird that you'd object to these things and read fantasy instead, where the list of things that wouldn't work that way is much longer. Unless you know a lot about space physics and hardly anything about medieval history?

In writing fantasy, you don't even try to base mechanics on current theory. Fantasy is predominantly about relationships, where the mechanisms of action are useful for furthering character colour and the plot but not in themselves key plot points.

In sci-fi, the mechanisms tend to be at least plausible developments of current theory. In some cases, they even form the basis of the work rather than a mere plot point. Compare Greg Egan's oeuvre, where in many cases the mechanism is the point of the work rather than a plot device.

On the other hand, all of the medieval castles I've seen have holes in the walls (somewhere high, in the name of security) where one would dump one's faeces out. Failure to take that in account is an error muchly similar to what is described here for sci-fi.

Most of the time writers just don't care about researching what they are writing about - this is not limited to sci-fi. Whenever a writer does any sort of research it's magnificent - see: The Martian. With knowledge readily available and basic facts easy to establish within seconds there is really no excuse.

I have to admit I've never dropped a book because of that so maybe writer's know they don't have to do it.

The Martian author, besides being thoughtful about his research, also used a master weapon: he published the whole thing online for every nitpicking nerd¹ to criticize and contribute. It's well known that the best way to get an answer to a question is to confidently give a wrong response.

¹ I say this as a self-identified nitpicking nerd, though I'm too ignorant to do it properly :)

Pity that he ended up writing a novel in which the main character is stranded on Mars because of an impossible martian storm; then communicates with Earth by absolutely implausible means (while there were many more obvious, among which the most classic "SOS" written on the sand); that he survives by growing potatoes that couldn't possibly germinate, planted in a highly toxic soil, and raised with a light source that does provide only a small fraction of the energy required to grow caloric food...

EDIT: I've already got one downvote, hurray! Would the downvoter(s) be kind enough to point out why and how they disagree with what I've written in the comment? Plus: at least wait to see what I have to say about Charles Stross himself and his novel "Glasshouse". :)

I don't think downvoting is fair but when you criticize it's good to provide explanations. So when you say it's "absolutely implausible" and it "couldn't possibly" then you should write why exactly it is so.

This article honestly reminds me of nothing so much as why I stopped reading current science-fiction, and why the science-fiction I wrote took more inspiration from Douglas Adams and DC Comics than anything from the "proper SF" sphere of the last few decades.

It seems like the whole genre has become the demesne of nitpicky amateur astrophysicists instead of about humanity through the lens of projection and symbol as it used to be.

I don't care how "hard" your science is, I care what your book has to say about humanity, or at least how well it manages to entertain and enlighten.

Try Lafferty's timeless sci-fi, e.g. the 55-year-old 'Slow Tuesday Night' about human responses to accelerated culture, http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/9781618249203/97816182492...

"A thoughtful-man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox, feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions.

“I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy."

Check Karl Schroeder, you may find him a refreshing change. His first book is available to read online at his website http://karlschroeder.com

From what you mentioned, it sounds like his books may be right up your alley.

Lockstep is a neat one. They have sublight interstellar travel, but it seems like FTL because everybody spends most of their time in hibernation, all on the same schedule.

A better title would have been "Terribly Non-Scientific Science Fiction Tropes", still amusing rant though.

Maybe even better is the link at the end to the "Turkey City Lexicon" list of common failings in SF/F writing (some also general writing pitfalls). https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-fo...

Is there any reason to assume that all types of aneutronic fusion are equally difficult to achieve? Extrapolating from other sorts of fusion I'd assume that D-He3 fusion would take much less activation energy than other sorts.

D-T is the easiest, D-D the second easiest and produces He3. So there's really no reason to mine He3 unless you happen to be orbiting a gas giant with lots of it handy.

Helion, a fusion startup funded by YCombinator, is working on a D-D/D-He3 reactor, breeding their He3. They say only 6% of the reactor's energy output would be neutron radiation.

I really really like the type of Sci-Fi / Adventure Story where the protagonist engineers and builds their own world from scratch (or almost) - see My Side of the Mountain [1], The Game [2], [Conrad Stargard series][3], Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, etc, etc .

So I really liked the first book in the Safehold Series [4] and I put up with the atrocious names (Zhasphar Clyntyn?!?!?) and the insipid, trite and self-congratulatory characters, and even the lead mallet subtlety of religion.

But by God, the series has just worn me out. I was almost screaming at the last book.

So I guess the shibboleth is the use of Zh in place of J.

Another shibboleth: lack of space suits in Star Trek - so many issue solved just by wearing space or encounter suits.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Side_of_the_Mountain (pre-teen)

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_the_Game (young adult)

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Stargard (polish)

[4]Not linking to this tripe.

SF runs the gamut. I enjoy the hardest of the hard science fiction a'la the Martian but I like a good space opera, too.

Like the author said at the beginning of the article, a lot of SF is about character (first) and metaphor. If an author has to invent a method for unspooling pocket dimensions do dump heat into for the sake of the story, so be it.

I think boron and lithium aneutronic fission require even higher activation energies than he-3

From the article that one links to: "Used Furniture"

Yes! That's the one that sets me off the most. I'm not too concerned about where a book lies along the range of hard sci-fi to space opera as long as it's a fun read, but I hate books that recycle other stuff too much. The worst offender here that I can recall was a series of stories that basically copied the plots from Greek myths and made them into sci-fi stories. I want to say it's from Frederik Pohl, but I'm not 100%. I also completely agree about the "space westerns".

I wanted to see if The Expanse (1) was any good on list.

It was fine until the section on "spaceships with continuous high acceleration fusion-powered motors or similar that don't glow white-hot"

1) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3230854/

Honestly, I was positively giddy when, during the first minutes of Avatar, I noticed the huge red-hot radiator panels on the ISV Venture Star.

Yes! I practically giggled when I saw that, because it meant somebody had cared enough to get it right, and I was therefore much more willing to sit back and enjoy the rest.

This is fine, but lots of rubbish here. The second point is especially filled with science fiction....

General relativity? rest mass? Kinetic energy? These are real terms but the context here is all wrong...

don't use words you don't understand IMO.

Interesting, I've seen this reach the front page three or four times in the last few days, and this is the first time I've seen it get any discussion.

Are these examples "shibboleths"?

I love this stuff. I'll quibble with a few things.

(1) Conspiracies

I totally disagree. I find long-lived conspiracies quite believable, but with the caveat that they must be socially realistic and have plausible operating principles.

First of all, a long-lived complex conspiracy cannot remain totally secret. That's not plausible. Something's going to leak. But it can act and/or distract (disinformation, etc.) so as to limit the damage and exposure brought about by these leaks. Keep in mind that in today's information overload world the information might be out there but if it's not clamoring for attention it will be ignored. When was the last time you Googled the secret initiatory practices of the Order of the Blahblahblah?

But more importantly: people do not engage in long term coordinated complex action without motive, and just "eeeevil!!" or even just profit or power are not sufficient motives to keep people in a coherent "always-cooperate" game theoretic mode with one another for that long. If power and profit are the motive then the group will dissolve through internal strife. Other motives are needed.

A long-lived complex conspiracy therefore rapidly converges with religion or cult. It must have a Doctrine(tm), an initiation process, some form of eschatology either real or metaphysical, etc. If it's a really nasty cult-driven-conspiracy it might employ cult mind control techniques. These as we know from the real world can be devastatingly effective. Whole massive groups of people have been convinced to commit suicide (Jonestown), so why couldn't they be convinced to perpetuate a lasting criminal or "parapolitical" conspiracy even at risk to themselves and their own personal fortune or power?

A plausible Big Bad X-Files Conspiracy therefore must be a cult and is going to look and operate like a cult. It's going to have internal cult jargon and crazy doctrines that will sound shockingly batshit to outsiders but that internally actually serve as belief-and-language-based social signaling. (Galactic emperor Xenu, etc.) If it's a conspiracy that lasts longer than a life span then it must have a doctrine that transcends the personality of its leadership and some mechanism for transfer of kingship. It's going to have totally brainwashed True Believers following manipulative and obsessed upper management for whom the cult is a proxy for their personal ego. It's going to have some process for both initiating new members and purging itself of dissent. The later is going to look like the shame-driven practices you see in manipulative cults in which the dissenter is first shamed and vilified before being banished or killed.

Profit or power are not sufficient motives, but a "carrot and stick" can be a part of cult mind control. Membership may have its benefits if the cult is powerful, rich, or well-connected, and once one has accepted these favors they are a "made man" indebted to the cult. Blackmail can also play a role. Many gangs and mafia groups require members to commit a crime or misdeed in order to join, and revelation of that crime or misdeed can later be dangled as punishment.

Fundamentally a long-lived conspiracy with coherent goals is going to be a cult that operates a lot like the mafia. In fact it's not uncommon for mafia like criminal conspiracies to have racial identity doctrines, honor codes, a romantic image of themselves, and other mythologies that serve at the very least as social glue. Many began with political goals -- the true Mafia were if my memory serves me originally a political resistance. Combine that with some crazy-ass religion or political eschatology and you've got your cigarette smoking man and his compatriots nailed.

I actually take an opposite tack on conspiracies: while I think the woo-woo variety of conspiracy theory is woo, I also think there's a kind of faux-rationalistic over-reaction in skeptic circles that amounts to "coherent group motive denialism." Conspire just means "to act together," and secrecy through flat silence or through distraction is definitely possible within certain realistic bounds. Hell, if nobody wanted to ever be secret we never would have invented encryption!

Finally though -- it is true that nothing remains the same forever. At some point one of two things is going to happen: the conspiracy/cult is going to act in a big way and in so doing both reveal itself and immanentize its eschaton, or it's going to fade away and dissolve into socioeconomic background radiation. If the group is strongly motivated the former is more likely, especially if it feels "the time is nigh" (it has enough power) or conversely if it feels itself losing power and feels forced to act. Sometimes the latter is driven by the leadership's need to maintain internal credibility. If people start doubting then they must escalate. (Some propose that ISIS is now launching international terror for exactly this reason, though they are far from secret. But the same principle applies.)

... and remember that end-justifies-the-mean fanatics can be very very bad, so we're well into plausible villain territory. If the end justifies the mean and the ideology provides a moral 'out', people will do insanely evil stuff... like... I dunno... tell people gas chambers are showers? Open fire on cafes? Force children to drink poison? Only the author's personal depravity is the limit to what they might imagine such a group plausibly doing when the chips are down.

Who knows, maybe that's a big part of the story? What happens when your dismissed-as-wacko conspiracy nut is proven dramatically "as in breaking news" correct? Or maybe your conspiracy theorists' investigations actually prod the group into paranoia-driven action? Such a group is likely more paranoid than the foil hatters that might chase them.

An alternative plot twist I thought up once for the X-Files and that would fit into the emerging 'rational fiction' trope is if Mulder discovered that while (most of) the paranormal stuff wasn't real and the aliens weren't invading... the conspiracy that The Smoking Man belonged to believed alien invasion was nigh and was all the more dangerous as a result. The stuff that did turn out to be real might have a rational (but perhaps still very SF) explanation... and the conspiracy plot revolves around how its existence has inspired insane paranoia among an element of our intelligence apparatus who are utterly convinced it's a sign of impending alien invasion. Think of it as a more elaborate SF-based version of a comet inspiring a dangerous doomsday cult. The big finale could have been Mulder now struggling to find a credible way to reveal the truth about UFOs (which might still have a neat SF edge... von Neumann probes?) to the world not just for truth's sake but to stop the impending global-scale Jonestown meltdown of the conspiracy.

(2) World-controlling corporations

I sort of agree and disagree. A world-controlling corporation is plausible but will have in becoming such a thing become a government. Therefore you have a similar convergence path here as you do with conspiracy -> long lived conspiracy -> cult. Corporation -> mega-powerful totalistic corporation -> nation state.

To become a government requires that the corp evolve new traits like a national mythology, the adoption of governmental function and ritual, and a support base in the general population. The latter is important: for this to happen, someone has to think it's a good idea!

It's not impossible that a corporate entity could undergo such a metamorphosis while retaining some of its original mega-corp DNA. But it would most certainly no longer be a corporation in the traditional sense. It would have some sort of national identity.

The socioeconomic, political, or technological forces that might push a corporation down this road and lead to it emerging as a government/nation might be quite interesting. It's not at all implausible given that Congress has something like a 15% approval rating.

Here's a back story for you: an aggressive Uber-like startup invents an economically plausible win/win way to shrink the exploding wealth disparity in developed nations... maybe something based on an innovation in game theory. But to make it work they need to change a few laws. Fast forward a hundred years and you have a global socialist state presided over by something that is now a government but retains the organizational DNA of an Uber-like growth company. For its brand of game theoretic win/win socialism to keep working it must meet certain numbers, which leads in practice to some kind of nutty/weird Keynesianism. ... and of course dissenters are provably (via game theory) threatening the well being of all.

That's quite plausible and no idiot ball is required.

(3) Space travel

I disagree that routine space travel is implausible, but I do agree that if you do it and have any hard SF aspirations then you must read up on physics and orbital mechanics. You've got to make a genuine attempt to make it physically plausible... unless of course you're going the SF-flavored-fantasy route of Star Wars in which case that's okay too. In that case it's got to at least be in-world consistent and not terribly cliche.

I do agree that MacGuffins like He3 are unlikely. Really interesting original motives for space travel and/or settlement are much better. These could include necessity (Seveneves), politics (escaping global dystopia), religion (or desire to freely practice such in a world where that's forbidden), weird but plausible economics (after two generations of global Japan-style stagnation, the World Central Bank decides a big space economy would make a better stimulus package than WWIII and launches a PR effort to sell it, etc.), a massive discovery that demands a major exploration effort, etc.

One that I've toyed around with is this: that in an almost post-scarcity and incredibly rich society people might do space travel for the same reason they climb Everest or try to break deep sea diving records... to have fun and show off. Implausible today but not implausible in an economy 10X larger or where technology like reusable spacecraft has geometrically reduced cost. Space travel and attempts at space settlement could be a sport. Think a cross between extreme mountaineering and Nascar.

Speaking of hiding in an asteroid belt: How big and how far apart are the objects in Saturn's rings? I can't find a discussion of it except for an oblique mention in Wikipedia's article that they can get up to 2km in size.

I am interested in your question as well, so I did some digging! According to wikipedia's article on Saturn's rings [1], the "main rings" are composed mostly of particles ranging from ~1cm to 10m in size.

Apparently observations of the "F ring" are consistent with particles ranging from microns to centimeters [2]:

"Comparison of optical depth profiles across the F Ring... indicates that centimeter-sized particles are the dominant source of opacity in a core ∼ 1km wide, while the micrometer-sized dust dominates in a much wider “envelope” that extends inward from the core."

The "E ring" seems to be composed predominantly of micron-sized grains, and is presumed to be fed by dust coming from Enceladus [3] [4].

I am not an astroplatentary scientist so I had to look up a map of Saturn's rings [5], apparently the E ring is very diffuse, and F is on the outside of the visible bands.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Saturn#C_Ring

[2] - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00191035929...

[3] - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00191035929...

[4] - http://www.sciencemag.org/content/311/5766/1416.short

[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Saturn#/media/File:Sa...

This makes them look pretty close together: https://youtu.be/qnApR8fdKRo?t=128

I thought this was about the authentication protocol at first. Disturbing memories of trying to role it out came flooding back.

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