Not just the UI, but The tech is realistic and possible and usually backed up by basic scientific principles.
The social scenarios are also quite likely in the future.
Even the language makes sense - a kind of hodge-Podge universal accent.
And it tangentially originates from Larry Niven’s belter stories just before mankind sent the ram robots to distant stars.
The Expanse is everything to like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyV3GZ9xnGM&t=3140s (NSFW language)
It's interesting see the differences from the books on this topic.
The books focus more on the use of belter's sign language, just some small and most common word is written and the rest is just defined as patois.
The series instead almost never shows sign language and it uses and evolves the spoken language much more than the books.
I suspect the Expanse series used his work as inspiration, since the patois is virtually identical on the show. Mays is in a league of his own. [0]
"Tightbeam" was in use as early as the 1930s, by E. E. Smith. Interestingly, this means the term was coined before lasers were even invented! https://sfdictionary.com/view/1943/tight-beam
Meanwhile, Robert Heinlein was writing about "spacing" people in 1952: https://sfdictionary.com/view/400/space
The Expanse's culture (language, slingshot gravity-racer livestream stars, class relations, etc.) feel so plausible. And the character relationships are deeply nuanced - like how even though Ashford was always challenging Drummer's control of The Behemoth, they showed genuine mutual respect, even love, for one another when it mattered.
I think Avasarala is actually one of the better written characters. As far as character development goes, she has one of the best arcs in the whole series. In the beginning, she is a politician and power broker who takes zero shit from anybody, especially the men who are supposed to be her superiors. Various tragedies like the Earth nearly getting wiped out nearly turn her into a bloodthirsty Belter-killing monster. She eventually softens substantially and only wants to do what's best for the human race as a whole. (But still taking shit from no one.) That she is an older Indian woman whose language would make a lumberjack blush is just an interesting twist.
One of the central themes of the Expanse (the books and the show) is that unlike most plots in books or movies, there are no good guys here. There are only people who are driven by some greater purpose (greed, power, loyalty to government, justice, etc). They do good things, they do bad things, they do stupid things. They are complicated, just like real people.
As an example, the characters that we might try to think of as the "good guys" are the crew of the Roci. Holden is a navel-gazing military wash-out who nearly starts an interplanetary war between Earth and Mars via pure speculation. And NEVER apologizes for it. Amos' background isn't explored in much detail in the show, but in the books he worked for a brutal crime boss on Earth and more or less just kills whoever gets in his way or because he thought they might. Alex was an absentee father and husband. Naomi abandoned her young child. And ALL of them stole their ship from the people of Mars. (They use the euphemism "Legitimate Salvage" in sorry-but-not-sorry kind of way.)
Finally, context is important. In the future of The Expanse, human civilization is pretty much A Fucking Mess. The Earth is overcrowded, half the population is on welfare, and crime is rampant. Mars is effectively a military state. In the Belt, you are as likely to die from a random equipment malfunction as saying the wrong thing in a bar. So a lot of parallels with countries in present-day Earth, just amplified.
Anywho, I don't agree with torture either, but it's hardly a surprise that it happens in that universe.
> ALL of them stole their ship from the people of Mars
I'm not sure how it is in the book, but in the TV show, a ranking officer of the Martian navy explicitly tells the ship that they are in control. As legitimate salvage goes, it seems pretty defensible. The only reason they don't go deeper into it seems, to me, to be because explaining that (and proving it) would be Very Hard, and they'd rather avoid the risk.
Yes, that's how they got possession of it and managed to make use of it. It is not at all the same thing as relinquishing ownership, which that Martian officer would not be able to do in any case because he didn't own the ship. The reasonable expectation is that they use the ship to do the job they needed it for, and then return it to it's proper owners.
This is, of course, only the second worst case of piracy thinly disguised as salvage in the Expanse. The title for the worst case of course goes for Behemoth.
I stopped watching it though once the "protomolecule" stuff started. What is backed by science about it?
Its not backed up by science and thats not the point. The point is how humans react to it and how the story progresses after that is really great, one of the best series overall i've ever watched.
I've always thought that movie/series genre are just a facade for the real genre:
- Slasher movies are supposedly about the boogey man/monster killing protagonist, but it's really about how humans interact when put under stress and show their true color
- (Heroic) Fantasy movies are supposedly about wizards and knights and witches, but it's really just a huge politics playground
- Science fiction movies are supposedly about new technology/aliens/space stuff, but it's really about how something outside of our knowledge changes us, challenges our values, and reveals who we are. That's usually technology but can be anything.
It's of course not just that, there are always exceptions, and I'm probably not the first one to have this view. But I think this is the reason I like almost anything sci-fi but can barely stand watching fantasy movies: I can't find myself to care about people fighting each other for a little bit more power.
It makes it easier if you think of it as "proto" being short for Protogen - the corporation that discovered it.
So while protomolecule sound like something out of the Power Rangers, it's an oddly plausible term.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/engines.php#id-...
Search found me this: https://web.archive.org/web/20080125030037/http://deoxy.org/...
and previous discussion! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500469
That kind of thing doesn't bother me. I don't think a dog could even comprehend a wheel. Even within the same species, major advances can look like magic to earlier generations. A top-tier scientist from the 19th century may well have pronounced just about all of today's digital devices impossible science fiction. "Billions of calculations per second in something in your pocket that runs on a battery you can recharge?" Lots of stretches there for a scientist from 1820. There are still people (who are not stupid) who don't believe we went to the moon.
Hard sci-fi just means a story that doesn't instantly fail undergrad physics and whose speculative physics are credible enough that a typical physicist won't roll their eyes.
Wormholes and warp drive, for example, have not been conclusively ruled out. Most physicists doubt you could build them in the foreseeable future (or maybe ever), but nobody's shown a reason they would "break physics."
Faster than light motion or reactionless drives that generate conventional momentum are however believed to be impossible.
It leads to some counterintuitive stuff. Giant massive ships that silently hover in the sky without blowtorching whatever is beneath them are strongly believed to be less plausible than something superficially more far fetched like the Alcubierre Drive. That's because reactionless drives that create conventional momentum "break physics," while so far we have not been able to rule out altering space-time curvature. If I were writing a hard sci-fi story with an Alcubierre Drive in it, I'd still have the astronauts going up to their warp ship in chemical rockets. I'd also have my warp ship using chemical or ion propulsion to move around when not using its warp drive, and the thing would have to have massive heat sinks that would glow red hot when warp is powering up to discharge all the power plant's waste heat (second law of thermodynamics).
Credible speculation in physics usually means that there exist mathematical solutions or models that suggest the possibility of something, but where we do not yet currently know if that math is "real" let alone "engineerable." There may also be things that are technically possible but that are so hard to do that they recede behind a kind of "probability horizon," becoming effectively impossible. An example might be a warp drive that requires so much energy and is so hard to build and control that the probability of someone doing it anywhere in the universe between now and heat death is near zero even if you assume that intelligent life is common.
Heck, actual science fiction authors in the mid-20th century got that wrong. Asimov, for example, while he had autonomous robots walking around, limited mobile computing devices (installed in anything smaller than a spaceship) to calculators and dumb terminals. Output was often limited to ALL CAPS printed on a slip or strip of paper (again, despite robots able to communicate verbally).
In his 70 year old series, everyone still uses film :)
BTW, you may enjoy Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis. Well worth reading, it adds quite a few interesting and plausible embellishments to Asimov's conceptual framework.
The two things out our world are a FTL jump drive (the Kearny-Fuchida drive only working at gravitational balance points) and the hyper pulse generators (sending FTL messages using the same physics). Everything else is well within established physics. Fusion engines? Check. Laser and direct energy weapons? Check. 12m high walking robots? Sure, why not. All beyond current engineering, but not beyond physics.
Even space travel is using reaction drives (fusion powered ones, but everything space born needs fuel to move) with acceleration well below 10g. And even the space-based tabletop uses acceleration and vectors instead of speed. A bitch to track on paper so.
I was also ok with the Epstein drive. It's a nice little plot enabler. "Yeah, space colonization is laughably implausible, but what if we had just this one piece of magic technology?"
So, the first scene in the first episode? Before the opening credits?
It would be one thing if they added the crazy alien magic plot device midway through a later season to get out of some writing hole they'd gotten themselves into, but they intentionally opened the first episode of the show (and the prologue of the first book) with a fleeting glimpse of what the protomolecule is capable of to set the stakes for the rest of the series.
And I'm fine with that because of how its handled. The protomolecule is less of a technology itself and more or a narrative tool. How it works isn't important. What is important is that it is a disruptive force that changes the direction of humanity.
Since they are not goofing off in basic things and they've done their homework, having space magic happen is much more entertaining than in e.g. Star Trek where basically everything is driven by plot-based technobabble so you really have no distinction between "standard technology" and "unfathomable space phenomena of the week".
Some of the space magic driven by protomolecule later on is fairly thoughtfull IMO and meshes nicely with rest of the show. I would advice you to continue watching - the series gets constantly better and better.
Also, advanced alien tech in pretty much all science fiction follows Arthur C. Clarke's dictum about magic. Of course they're going to be able to do things humans don't understand. Do you really think we would be able to explain everything a billion+ year old civilization could do?
spoiler alert
The books are a couple seasons ahead of the show, and this becomes and even more prominent plot point.
It's internally consistent so far, which is more important IMHO. What I mean by this is there's definitely things that are effectively "magic" to us, but not in the way lazy story writers use it (think ST:TNG where they just invent some technobabble that solves the problem in the last 5 mins of the episode).
I particularly liked where Detective Miller explains to Holden why he can see him, effectively saying something like "there's a few billion neurons in the human brain, like a massive keyboard - we just have to push the right combination of buttons"
Earth mining is often done in horrendous and poor conditions. Megacorps and industry do kill millions of people on earth today with little explanation or repercussions.
As an example, slave societies don't have industrial revolutions because there's never a need to invest in labour-saving devices. Indeed, the Romans knew of water wheels and windmills but never used them much because you could just buy a few slaves. If slavery hadn't been introduced to Rome, who knows what alt-history would've emerged from the Roman engineering prowess.
Keeping humans alive in space on the other hand is stupidly expensive.
It is now. But the most expensive part of that is shuttling people and infrastructure up the Earth's gravity well.
Imagine that our society retains some level of sanity for the next couple decades. In that scenario, we'll continue on the path of expanding to space, starting with a rudimentary cislunar economy. This means near-Earth asteroid mining and in-space construction, which lets us drastically reduce the amount of mass needed to be launched into orbit. That economy would not be independent - it would sell resources mined in space (to be shipped to the surface) and manufacturing services, hopefully moving most heavy industry upwell. In exchange, they'd buy food, organics and specialized components from Earth.
Imagine couple decades of iterative improvement on this. Eventually, humans will be able to survive long-term in space with minimum input of terrestrial resources. E.g. almost-closed-cycle greenhouses that can supply a ship with food for a decade until they need restocking with substances that can't yet be created in space. Such capacity allows people to expand further, access more resources and ship them back.
What's the value for Earth in this? Continuing the exponential growth past the carrying capacity of the planet. The more industry is moved upwell, the more space there is downwell for habitation, consumption and service economy.
Why not robots? Light lag. To me, the challenges we need to overcome to send humans into interplanetary space are easier than those required for fully autonomic, AI-powered robots. If that's true, then we'll have to make interplanetary expansion a mixed human/robot endeavor. The time it takes for a signal from Earth to reach Mars is between 5 to 20 minutes - so 10-40 minutes RTT. This is unacceptable for any kind of serious remote operation, so even if robots do most of the work, you still want human controllers to be on the work site.
Once you start sending mixed human/robot on long-duration missions far from Earth, dumber robots operated more directly by humans - and, importantly, serviceable on-site, will be the cheapest option.
Also like The Expanse: shadowy mega-corps, and space pirates!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Truckers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgdeaHr5LT0&ab_channel=Movie...
Square pigs:
http://cinephilecrocodile.blogspot.com/2018/06/space-trucker...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVH9o7OMAkU&ab_channel=TheMo...
Both the film and that blog's stylesheet are the embodiment of 'so bad it has to be good'.
2. We're nowhere near the level of smart, self-repairing automation. Given the distances involved, there's value in having a community of smart, agile, self-replicating flesh-and-blood humans to tackle unknown engineering challenges as they appear.
3. People keep expanding, and settle for good. Years pass. An interplanetary economy forms. People on the further edges focus on resource extraction and building up infrastructure for long-term settlement - but they still need things only Earth can provide, like food (and organics in general). So they trade.
4. Decades pass. On the outer edges of humanity, people are born who've never seen Earth. They start to develop their own culture and identity. Mars is being colonized. The trade arrangements is stable - Earth sells organics and R&D, they buy lots of resources to use for in-orbit manufacturing.
5. Many more decades pass. Mars is full of people who were born there, and never seen Earth in the first place. They trade with Earth and the space dwellers - the Belters, in Expanse - for resources. They develop their own culture too. Over generations, the Belters become adapted to low-gravity conditions, and can no longer survive Earth's gravity - cementing the cultural divide.
6. More decades pass, you arrive at the world of The Expanse. Mars and the Belt both declared independence, as they're their own separate cultures and nations. Trade dependencies, however, remain. Earth and Mars both have the advantage of infrastructure density and crucial resources abundance - they're developing their planets and surrounding orbital space. Stuck in an arms race, they develop superior military. Meanwhile, the Belters are stuck in a disadvantaged position. They own most resources in the Solar System, but can't effectively control them with inferior technology. And none of the resources are actually missing on Earth and Mars - they're just more expensive to get. The Belt has all the riches, but no leverage to turn them into wealth and power.
That's how you arrive at "mining asteroids in poor third world-like conditions".
They'd probably be volunteering to go, no one would need to force them.
Just a "fun" fact I discovered recently: it's cheaper to buy new powerbanks and salvage the battery cells than buy the battery cells themselves. It is also cheaper to buy a whole new laptop than replace a laptop processor. That is insane levels of wastefulness.
Sure, there were horrible industrial disasters like Bhopal, but in the book the aforementioned megacorp kills millions seemingly out of sheer evil. It felt too videogamey for my taste.
I wish they made more sci-fi about robots and spaceships, I find that stuff entertaining and inspiring. If I want social commentary I have better sources than sci-fi writers.
And there is Sci-Fi that's not social commentary.
> And there is Sci-Fi that's not social commentary.
I'm not sure that this is true. I think you might be confusing the Action and Adventure genres with Sci-Fi. Star Trek, for example, is almost 100% social commentary.
It is certainly educational though, and to me, The Martian is rather in the category of “competence porn”
Not unlikely, I'd say.
From what I've seen, cost of living will increase to the maximum level the poorest can afford it (which is why I don't see how UBI can work without massive changes in other areas).
If mental and long-term health is not a concern, minimal-subsistence living conditions can be made for pennies. If someone snaps or drops-out, they can be replaced from thousands of others on the long application list.
And I don't just mean literal gold or mining.. The Internet in the late 90s and early 2000s, cryptocurrency today, etc... there will always be early adopters and entrepreneurial risk-takers (of varying levels of competency) who precede, and sometimes outlast, the corporations where there's money to be made..
In the Expanse lore, this happened because of the Epstein drive, a relatively cheap type of fusion drive that allowed humanity to go further faster, even in small scrappy ships.
So it would make sense that early pioneers would rush out to the belt and beyond to stake their claims..
Look at mining in the third world today. Not so automated, right? Why would it be any different out in the belt?
Hundreds of years and millions of people trying to eke out a living, particularly when you also consider the state of planet Earth in the Expanse (essentially a giant welfare state).. that creates an third-world equivalent out there, and I think it's pretty plausible..
Anyways, I respect your take on things regardless.. this is just mine.. the story gets so much better beyond book 1, if you're ever thinking about reconsidering. :-)
Incidentally, can anyone recommend some hopeful science fiction? "Schismatrix" is probably my favorite.
Worth noting that Earth isn't part of the Culture, it has been left in ignorance to stare out at an apparently silent universe.
The humanoids that populate the Culture belong to any number of entirely unrelated species that are capable of interbreeding through deliberate interventions (upgrades, really) that paper over the genetic, proteomic, biochemical, etc. differences.
None of those species are related to Earth's Homo Sapiens, or to any other species belonging to Earth's biosphere (though I think there might have been an allusion or two to panspermia insofar as origin-of-life goes).
So. When I say that Earth isn't part of the Culture, I mean to include anyone who has any Earth ancestors.
OTOH, the Culture has had observers, agents, etc. visit Earth (after being appropriately retrofitted to resemble Earth humans at least anatomically, and optionally biochemically and genetically) on occasion, to determine whether to continue with the policy of nonintervention. In the Culture books published so far, the policy holds.
The authors have said they approached each book in the style of the characters and story they were telling at that time.
The first book is a noir detective novel (that happens to be set in space and in the future) so I can definitely see how it comes across as bleak..
The next book and beyond are written in different styles.
Thanks for the Schimatrix recommendation! I'd never heard of it, and I looked it up.. Added it to my reading list!
I might recommend The Inverted Frontier series by Linda Nagata to you, that I've only just started... It's pretty good and I think falls under the hopeful sci-fi category (at least so far). :-)
Read more history and you'll see this is pretty much SOP for humans.
My favorite line from Sorry To Bother You.
> So, you making half-human half-horse fucking things so you can make more money?
> Yeah, basically. I just didn't want you to think I was crazy. That I was doing this for no reason. Because this isn't irrational.
With a laissez-faire system, the economic factors would decide whether machine or man labor is the most cost effective resource. When the mechanized means of production become more intelligent, faster, and accurate, what can the man or woman without any machines of their own do for money? They could work for less than the machines in dangerous conditions, doing the type of work that machines are too valuable for.
The optimist can also imagine a utopia where the need to labor vanishes and we collectively benefit from advances in science and technology, but that’s not a given.
I haven't read the books but this just seems like the "British imperial colonialism but in space" trope typical of space opera.
"/s" really is needed I guess
Do you have a better citation? Because loans are not feudalism — and if you want to insist they are, only Islamic Law jurisdictions (which bans interest rather than loans but eh) are non-feudal.
Loans in themselves are not 100% "feudal", though I don't think it's a binary "is feudal" -vs- "is not feudal"; more of a "how feudal". The implication above was that loan repayment via mandatory labour is feudal (or at least "more feudal").
> if you want to insist they are, only Islamic Law jurisdictions (which bans interest rather than loans but eh) are non-feudal
That's a pretty big "eh" tbh; I don't many people think interest is the problematic part of loans. Don't think Islamic Law can be excluded here.
Needless to say, the likely-Earth-based shareholders are likely to be unimpressed by such a colonial government.
If they don’t own the rocket company and don’t threaten the main colony? That might end up like Jonestown.
And if they do threaten the main colony or even take it over entirely?
My point with my comment was that because mars is far away, any earth response on mars would be rather slow. Mars would have plenty of time to react if earth ships soldiers over or whatever and they wouldn't care about seizure of earth assets. As for ballistic missiles, to what end? Kill all the innocent colonists to get rid of the warlord?
Even if it was the person that owns the rockets, if they're on mars, they may no longer care about the earth assets. I mean, if its a one way trip, they wouldn't be able to do anything with them other than send supplies. I assume if they were to play warlord, its at a point where they no longer care about the supplies. If earth used those rockets to invade mars, mars would still have plenty of time to come up with a plan to shoot them down or whatever.
> Needless to say, the likely-Earth-based shareholders are likely to be unimpressed by such a colonial government.
If mars is a one-way trip away, why would they care about Earth-based shareholders?
Not saying such a takeover would end well for mars, just that the isolation leaves it wide open for some maniac to play warlord. I also think its more likely that its not the person who owns the rockets, if someone does decide to do that.
Military action between the main colony and outliers is going to involve not-yet-invented doctrine and tactics because we don’t yet have enough experience of building such settlements to properly consider what warfare in or between them will look like.
One thing we can say is: anyone who looks like a dictator, and is based on Mars, and who has interplanetary rockets, is a threat to Earth, because while stealth in space can always be beaten by having more sensor coverage, it’s really hard to action that information. Likewise, Mars will see the Terran space marines coming and, depending on industrialisation level, either have a really hard time doing anything about it, or find they’re being preemptively RFG’d to stop them doing that to Earth.
(Hello MAD my old friend / how about a nice game of chess?)
Well, I was responding to:
> The Outer Space Treaty means anything launched from Earth remains the responsibility of the nation who launched it. SpaceX most certainly is under the jurisdiction of the US and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
My response being that jurisdiction may not mean anything, simply because of the distance involved. That was my point. If mars is a one way trip, then earths influence may turn out to be quite minimal, simply because its hard and slow to move between earth and mars. If earths influence is minimal, then jurisdiction is a rather moot point.
A repayable loan is not feudalism.
At Musk’s target price for Mars flights, someone as rich as Bezos could pay for half a million people to go to Mars. (That said, if I had Bezos’ money, I’d buy flights from SpaceX to build a factory on the Moon to research space-based mining and manufacturing, and launch loops, with a view to expanding that into a full-blown colony over time).
That won't matter if SpaceX has a monopoly on the air they breath, the food they eat and the water they drink. One of the first legal questions they will grapple with is "Does earth law apply on Mars/to Martian citizens? Or is Bezos' contract moot"
Look at the history of colonization if you want to see the dynamic of human nature/greed/fiefdoms away from the mother country that is several-month's journey away. The Dutch East India company or the British South Africa Company may be decent case-studies, the only difference being that they could "live off the land" and exploit the natives. There are no natives on Mars, but I can't rule out exploitation.
Does the colony itself have to be owned by the transport company?
Any of the colony?
Including the life support, the factories which make the life support, the mining equipment which digs up the resources these factories use, or anything else?
I’m not expecting great things from human nature, but I expect Terran governments to forcefully insist on non-Monopolistic behaviour very quickly, even in the absence of abuse of power, as they’ll be lobbied by both potential investors and military hawks with “isolationism bad” rhetoric.
All of the Terran governments? I think it would be trivial to play different governments with launch capability against each other, especially if you can mine asteroids (or have technology that's almost there and can promise to supply cooperative governments raw materials in exchange of access to a launch complex and their domestic food market). The promises of riches in the colonies drove competition among colonizing countries, I don't see how it would be any different, it would be trivial to set up subsidiaries in the US/Russia/China/France and see who bites first.
(PS: this of course assumes that's there's anything to do on Mars, it's not clear to me what the Mars colonists would actually do there all day, except constructing the actual colony - but what then?).