Kim Stanley Robinson: The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations | Hacker News Reader

Kim Stanley Robinson: The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations

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49 pointsduggan18 comments

I have weird feelings towards KSR. His Mars trilogy is awesome in imagining a realistic kind of future that wouldn't be so awful to live in. He is interested in alternative forms of social organization and does a good job of depicting them (he is obviously sympathetic to local egalitarian governments but in his novels they are often quite realistically hampered by indecision and lack of consensus).

Yet I couldn't but feel disgust towards his later novel Aurora. Spoilers follow.

In the novel a group of colonists on a big generation ship (a transparent metaphor for the spaceship Earth) fly towards a nearby star. Near the end of their voyage they encounter lots of ecological problems that they don't quite know how to deal with. When they arrive they are dealt the final blow - the most hospitable planet contains a deadly pathogen that shatters all hopes of establishing a colony. The author is clearly unsympathetic - their problems are the retribution for the hubris of their ancestors. The solution to the problem is emphatically not science and tech, which is helpless (it even can't quite pin down what the pathogen really is). What is the solution that he approves of? Fly back to Earth, quit thinking about anything so arrogant as star expansion and lie on the beach enjoying the surf.

Yet we don't have anywhere to go back to. Sure we must temper our hubris but the only way to solve our problems is forward.

But right now, we do. Let's not fuck up the planet, eh?

I thought it asked an interesting ethical question about generation ships, yes, it was voluntary for the people starting the journey, but the second generation and so on? The main characters mother clearly resented the people starting out, several other characters didn't. And unless I'm misremembering, some of the settlers did stay behind to work with the materials of the system's asteroid belt to make space habitats.

I dunno, I feel like it /should/ appeal to those libertarian types that make a big fuss about how they were coerced into the social contract of where ever they were born. As being born on a generation ship you are denied the exit option in the voice/exit choice.

Yeah, ethics of generation ships is interesting. But I'd say the problem is present in attenuated form even today. Is it ethical to give birth to beings (our children) who haven't asked to be born? Indeed the negative answer to this question is the basis of several anti-natalist philosophies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism

> some of the settlers did stay behind to work with the materials of the system's asteroid belt to make space habitats.

The author was clearly unsympathetic to them. They died rather quickly and all they got in the book was a short "signals stopped coming" mention (which was another infuriating thing).

I thought Aurora was flawed in one major respect. The novel suggests that galactic expansion is impossible for civilizations because foreign star systems will have alien pathogens or other environmental factors hostile to human beings. So far, so good, an enjoyable explanation for the Fermi paradox and a contrary view to the optimism in KSR’s earlier novels about terraforming planets.

But in Aurora KSR also decides to make the generation starship’s quantum computer evolve to become sentient. Now the obvious question to resolve is that machines wouldn't be susceptible to all the biological challenges that KSR listed, so why can't civilizations expand to other solar systems in machine forms? But KSR doesn't grapple with that at all, it is completely passed over.

Well, the pathogen is not the reason but one of the reasons. The message is clear - if not one thing then another will get you. Again, I feel that this is a metaphor for expansionism in general, not necessary galactic expansionism in particular.

> But in Aurora KSR also decides to make the generation starship’s quantum computer evolve to become sentient. Now the obvious question to resolve is that machines wouldn't be susceptible to all the biological challenges that KSR listed, so why can't civilizations expand to other solar systems in machine forms? But KSR doesn't grapple with that at all, it is completely passed over.

Yeah, it was a kind of a gimmick. KSR is clearly more interested in societies and ecologies than AIs. And this is not a bad thing in my view.

I sure don't get the sense that people are thinking harder about the future.

The great majority have quietly and calmly made the choice to socially distance, but they looking into the near future when they expect to feel safe enough to go back to the things they were doing before, not contemplating their place in something new.

I hope that the "great majority" are thinking like that, but if the great majority is quiet, then it is hard to gauge their opinions. So far, I have been disappointed by the atmosphere on various discussion forums for outdoor hobbies, where someone posting "Here are my plans for whenever this situation finally passes..." is quickly downvoted by the rest of the community and elicits a few overt reactions along the lines of "It is irresponsible to even think about the future until we have a vaccine!". Plenty of people seem to think that there is a "New Normal" that makes plans, hopes or aspirations not just invalid but even morally objectionable.

I can't help feeling there is no going back. Like Frodo, some wounds just can't heal. But maybe it's not a bad thing. Maybe we needed a shock to the system to save us from other things down the road. If we can pull together through this, maybe we can science our way out of climate crisis and automation/job-loss crisis next decade.

We've had it pretty easy for a long time, plenty of suffering independantly and not well off, but no world wars and major global catastrophe's like the dustbowl and great depression and ww2 all in a single decade (or close to it).

I hope we do always remember this, and I also don't think life after this resembles 'normal' for a very very long time.

Having just read Steven Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now", I'm skeptical of any article that paints this cynical view of how humans are wasting the earth, living their short-sighted lives with no regard for their future descendants.

The reality is that science, described here as "keeping the whole system of technical improvisation from falling down", is eradicating extreme poverty and disease on an incredible scale. It is also making poor countries less poor, which in turn makes their people better off and, yes, make them contribute less to pollution (it also slows population growth). It seems likely to me that the hits taken by the economy in these circumstances will be felt harder in poorer countries, slowing this positive progress for a while.

The author actually notes that the earth holding close to 8 billion people is only made possible by science. He describes this as "unnatural and unstable". This, combined with the fact that further scientific progress is required for all these people to be healthy and well-fed makes me tend to agree with the poster reacting the the novel Aurora and noting "we don't have anywhere to go back to".

It is also making poor countries less poor, which in turn makes their people better off and, yes, make them contribute less to pollution (it also slows population growth).

How is that? People who are less poor – almost per definition – consume more and hence tend to use up more resources/cause more pollution per capita.

Some of the reasons put forth by Pinker:

* a poor country prioritizes growth while a richer one can afford to consider the environment

* a richer country has access to more efficient technology

* on the level of individuals, moral (or future) concerns are not in the forefront of your mind until you have your immediate needs for shelter, food etc. covered.

> * a poor country prioritizes growth while a richer one can afford to consider the environment

Can afford to. May even consider it. But don't act.

> * a richer country has access to more efficient technology

But will not encourage that efficiency unless there's some kind of profit to be made from switching away from the less efficient incumbent.

> * on the level of individuals, moral (or future) concerns are not in the forefront of your mind until you have your immediate needs for shelter, food etc. covered.

PS5, Samsung S999, Lexus, Jetski, Outdoor entertaining re-model.

"To continue using a private window, sign in or subscribe." A question to other firefox users. Do you disable the private browsing to read this article?

I disable javascript, it works against this kind of shit for now.

An extra plus is saving battery if on mobile.

Turn of JS if you're using μBlock Origin or μMatrix.

Well that was easy. And it even remembers it per-site.

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