Comment by dunkelheit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dunkelheit | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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 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).

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

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