Sci-Fi Icon Neal Stephenson Finally Takes on Global Warming
wired.com
wired.com
Has anyone written an AI yet that can read the article and tell you that before you waste your time?
While you're at it you can do the same with questionmark / questions, cause the answer is probably "No.".
HN does use software to (de)prioritize certain titles and URLs.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/actually-no-remove...
If you comment on the webstore page with the request to add finally I will add the feature this week.
Because climate change is a major, global, and increasingly visible threat to our presence on this planet - and Stephenson hadn't made it a theme of any of his books over the last four decades. In the opinion of the article's author, this is significant. Seems reasonable to me.
More so, cloud computing is present and quite important in this book, even though I don’t think the term was used as such. It’s essentially distributed compute that you rent to run your code, and prices vary based on demand. The climate change theme comes into play here, when all compute is rented to run weather simulations in an effort to fight climate change.
There’s also software that edits facial expressions, for instance to eliminate signs of stress during a video call (we’re not quite there yet, but FaceTime’s Eye Contact feature seems to be a step towards that). This, again, is from ‘94.
I do wonder often how much of the current tech is inspired by [hard] SF. Another example seems to be Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which very likely was inspired by Iain M. Banks “neural lace” from the Culture series.
Edit: typing this on phone, and I edited a few times for corrections and to add more info.
I worked really hard to understand the first chapter’s dense descriptions of ridges, grids and virtual machine elements, all the while thinking how a single picture would have made things far simpler.
When a later chapter started describing a torus in great detail I thought, if I’m going to be working this hard, I’d rather be reading a technical book about a topic I was interested in. So I did, and I remember it was way easier, and more edifying.
There are hundreds of other writers that have written science fiction based on this premise.
No, that's not what I meant at all.
If you think I'm exaggerating, here is an excerpt:
But a few weeks ago, at dinner, a conversation with my teenage son went awry. I was trying to talk to him about possible college plans, and he wouldn't engage. I pushed. We gotta get started, I explained. Applications. Money. Campus visits.
And he said, “Frankly, I just feel sort of nihilistic about it.”
I followed up. About what?
Well, it turned out—the whole thing, really. College, jobs, the ecosphere, the future. The boomers blasted it all into oblivion while Gen X screwed around on the internet.
Here's where I blew it. Instead of giving him the we're-all-in-this-together-change-the-future speech, I said, “Kiddo, I think there's a chance that when all this shakes out, some people will get to be inside the dome and most people won't, and I'm just hoping you'll get inside the dome before they shut the door.”
Like I said, cultish.
The author was talking to his son, who was feeling unmotivated about going to college because the world was ending soon. The author's reply was the section I quoted.
“Dad, I’m depressed and unmotivated about going to college.”
“Son, the world is ending in the near future in sci-fi fashion and I want to make sure you survive in the dome.”
No matter how bad climate change is, I can assure you, we won’t be living in a dome to escape the hellscape in 20 years. People who believe this are exhibiting cultish behavior.
(It is likely that elevated CO2 levels will harm human cognition, it isn't widely known probably because it's too depressing. There are counterarguments like "oh that happens only above 1000ppm we're far from that" but they're based only on short-term experiments.)
My assurance is reality. Reality isn’t a science fiction novel.
Interestingly you only get these absurd predictions from a very narrow group of people, which lines up quite well with what my original comment said. It’s a religious movement, not an accurate assessment of climate science.
The real effects of climate change will be difficult enough. We don’t need to waste energy on inventing fantastical ones.
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/continued-CO2-emissions-wil...
Combine this with wetbulb temperatures which force everyone to stay in airconditioned indoors for weeks or months in large part of world (this too is supported by climate science). Fantasies? I hope so but expect the worst.
A single study that predicts brain damage from CO2 “by the end of the century” is pure speculation at this point. The link you shared even says it’s still very unclear what the effect is.
I’ll say it again; the actual science says that climate change is a serious problem. It doesn’t say that we are headed into the apocalypse in the next decade.
The actual paper linked from the article links to some research like: "systematic relationships were found between most of the cognitive function scores and CO2 concentration, including from 550–945 ppm". Thinking that in 20 years we could go over 550ppm outside certainly isn't a fantasy, or?
I’d also recommend “Mother Earth Mother Board”, an essay of his also in Wired about the laying of an intercontinental fiber cable. Hugely enjoyable and a good peek into his writing.
Written by someone with bad attention span when it comes to reading fiction (easily bored/distracted).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co...
The timeline does jump around between world war 2 and "modern" times. There was a large stash of gold, but I don't remember that being particularly important in the grand scheme of the book.
It's one of my favorite books of all time.
If you're looking for something built around a more traditional plot, Anathem or Reamde might suit you better. People also like Diamond Age, but I think it falls down at the end--IMO at that point he still hadn't figured out how to write endings.
However, I recommend against The Big U. It's awful.
In online discussions, I've seen Seveneves getting a lot of flack, which I also found peculiar because IMO it was great; pretty much a return to Snowcrash form but with the added bonus of a few decades experience (so he knows how to write endings etc :-) ).
But after Fall, my second-least-favourite of his may be Diamond Age. Can't recall for sure why, been ages since I read it. [EDIT:] Not that I thought it was bad, I think. Just the least good of many many good books. Apart, that is, from Fall. [/EDIT]
It still is my favorite of NS books but easily accessible it is not.
Reamde would be the most accessible, it's basically a more techy Tom Clancy novel partly set in World of Warcraft.
It seems like at least one child of my comment agrees with me. It's interesting (and kind of neat) how much fans of Stephenson seem to disagree on the merits of his individual works.
You can tell which places Stephenson visited during his research, because he’ll describe them in great detail, like the business district of some city in the Philippines.
It gets a little better as it goes along, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it.
Similar writers - Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Umberto Eco, Douglas Adams.
This slow ponderous style with brief moments of impactful plotting might not suit all.
Having said that, there are some authors mentioned in this thread that didnt immediately click with me that are now my favorites. There's usually at least one (relatively) short book that should give you an entryway to try them out, without the full commitment.
It's a good tip to try short books of writers first, I'll do that. Although generally I let myself be guided by reviews, and it works for me in general, Cryptonomicon is one of the outliers.
If you haven’t read snowcrash, grab that, it’s a fanatastic book.
So, maybe don't start with that one. Snow Crash, the Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon are probably all good ones to start with and all still very much on topic despite being a few decades old now.
He's the one author that I think would really benefit from releasing both a "mainstream" copy of his works and then a "director's cut" of the same story.
My favorite remains Zodiak -- I read it over and over as a teenager and when I moved to Dorchester, MA years later had deja vu when I realized how well he captured the Boston area. I used to do stealth rides on my bicycle around Boston late at night because, yes, the cabbies will try to kill you. Fun times.
Read it 4 times by now, which is quite rare for me.
Seveneves I didn't particular like and sometimes skipped pages at a time. Just goes to show how peoples taste is different.
Seveneves: just stop after act 2. Pretend the last couple hundred pages of the book don’t exist.
Fall: this is the first Stephenson book that I ended up skimming. I could not bring myself to care about the endless retelling of Paradise Lost. And yes, I’ve even read The Big U. It was better than Fall, imo.
People treat it like it is not his style because it is an absolute romp. It sends up every action/sf trope in one book. Russians, crashing a business jet, plasma cutter, off-grid extremists, you name it, it's in there.
Having now finished it I can say that it is definitely worth it, but I would recommend to start with something simpler, e.g. Diamond Age.
It's pretty good.
This, for anyone interested, is an entirely deserved potshot at Ian McEwan's 2010 Solar.
So it was a bit shocking to learn the following:
From the article: "From 1999 to 2006, Stephenson worked as a member of the technical staff at Jeff Bezos' private space rocket company, Blue Origin. A three-year stint at Intellectual Ventures Lab, the R&D arm of the science investment firm started by Microsoft Research founder Nathan Myhrvold, involved some climate-change-related research."
The Blue Origin work seems pretty logical.
The Intellectual Ventures stint/k proves that we all have a price for rose colored blinders.
Presumably Stephenson realized how ethically challenged IV is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures
But nobody talks about how, as the oceans acidify, the basis for the whole, worldwide ocean ecosystem is teetering at the edge of collapse, and that, what, two billion? people today depend on that ocean ecosystem for their protein. (Calories are cheap. Protein is dear.) Wars will happen over access to the scraps.
Meanwhile, as extremely densely populated parts of the planet become uninhabitable -- first, the crops will fail -- the people who live there will not sit down and die. They will move, in their millions. (It is already happening, across and around the Mediterranean.) The places they will try to go are already populated, and crops there will be in trouble, too. There is a huge amount of barely populated northern land, in Asia and North America: Russia and Canada, perhaps about to become usably arable. But the refugees will not be going there, and will not be equipped to make the places livable. They will head for civilization, in places that do not want them.
Political pressure to try to keep them out will put right-wing extremists in power, whose solutions will resemble what were called "final". Once in power, they will start wars, as they do. Will those rapidly become nuclear wars?
Any ideas about how to prevent global collapse long before actual climate disaster takes hold would be welcome.
Anyway, if civilization collapses, fossil fuel production and, thus, consumption, will plummet, and atmospheric CO2 concentration might start down, provided we have not got a positive-feedback cycle already locked in, as the tundra melts and decays.
But there is also no reason for the rates to match. It might even happen faster, but that will not be useful until much later.
No, because you are describing folks in shitty parts of the world. They will die just fine in regular wars and just because they aren't nuclear or the world will not end because we had them doesn't make it any less tragic.
> Any ideas about how to prevent global collapse long before actual climate disaster takes hold would be welcome.
Raise your children better than you were, because it won't be you dealing with the problems.
There is a huge amount of barely populated northern land, in Asia and North America: Russia and Canada, perhaps about to become usably arable.
This isn't really so for most, if not all crops.
The problem isn't the cold, it is growing season length, and sunlight, and shade.
I'm in southern Quebec, 300km from New York state. Some years, certain crops fail to reach maturity, as the growing season is shortened by too much rain / cloud cover. EG, old human editable yellow corn has a longer growing season than newer 2-colour/"peaches-n-cream" varieties, and sometimes never matures.
And in the spring/fall, the sun, even where I live, does not get far about the horizon, even at peak.
Many crops also cannot handle 24 hours of sun! Plants literally need rest cycles too.
So it is not only cold which restricts crop growth, but the length of sun per day.
Peat moss, and other such plants, do not need to produce large fruits or nuts to survive. And of course, our crops are picked for making the largest fruit/nuts, so require more time to be usable.
Stepping back from this issue, one thing of note.
Massive amounts of cropland is not used in southern Quebec, and other regions of Canada. Sometimes, it is not profitable to farm, and you can find lots of land sitting fallow.
Canada could easily double or even triple its crop output if food was more expensive.
I don't know how this applies to the rest of the world, but I do know that the EU does pay some farmers not to farm.
Outside of the economic realities, there is the fact that sometimes more tha 50% of Canada's wheat crop rots in silos.
This may seem horrifying, but is logical and sensible. Growing crops is not under our full control. Pests, drought, too much / not enough sun, means that there are bumper, and poor crop years.
You always want enough, or in the bad years people could starve.
Which leads to why the EU pays people not to farm, yet keep farmland. If conditions change, say some regions are at war, or have economic breakdowns, this fallow land comes into use, else again, we starve.
Anyhow, point is, warmer Earth doesn't mean cropland opens up.
> So it is not only cold which restricts crop growth, but the length of sun per day.
> Anyhow, point is, warmer Earth doesn't mean cropland opens up.
Oh, surely it will help to at least some extent? Wheat, and even more so barley and rye, have been grown up to at least the middle of Finland and northern(ish) Sweden for hundreds of years. And those were the old not-so-refined varieties.
Why was all of this nonsense even necessary? As if the article writer just had to wedge in a completely forced narrative about COIVD apocalypse terror for the hell of it. Such worries among a large crowd of mostly young people such paranoia despite nearly complete vaccination? What was the goddam point of such heavy handed vaccine mandates in the first place if even after these vaccines that presumably work well to dramatically reduce the risk of serious illness, people should still scurry back behind all the health measures? At this point it's like going into panic mode over people possibly transmitting the ordinary annual flu to each other if the vaccines reduce the chances of death as much as is clinically claimed.
It's very obvious the writer is just acknowledging the odd circumstances of the meeting with Stephenson. This isn't Reuters -- the writer is setting the scene for the reader and adding personal perspective. He doesn't dwell on the topic.
Your response about Covid is ironically exactly what you're accusing the author of, an off-topic narrative wedged into a discussion about something else.
Ultimately people can’t accept nonzero risk and conversely think that it is possible to eliminate all risk of something (at the same time happily accepting risks thousands of times higher)
People really couldn't grasp, and diluted themselves into endless guru talks.
Society should focus on invisible training (skills and communication)
I’m also guessing a large part of how politicians can make themselves seem useful is making people safe. There’s not much else for them to do any more everyone is so well off.
(Also your comments about vaccination and "panic" are bs.)
Very few nations (including the US) have vaccination rates that are high enough to generate herd immunity.
Vaccines do prevent a vaccinated person from becoming seriously ill if they become infected. Vaccines don't do much to prevent a vaccinated person from becoming infected and, once infected, infecting others.
Masks do help to prevent an infected wearer from infecting others. Surgical masks have low effectiveness at preventing the wearer from becoming infected. That's why its important that enough people wear masks: we each protect each-other.
Individualistic societies seem to be having a particular problem with these concepts.
Above all, the more individualistic individuals even within those societies.
To spell it out: Even in America -- which for all I know you, andyjohnson0, could well be from just like I'm pretty sure helloworld11 is -- there are sensible people like you.
But yes, in those societies three are more of the helloworld11-style "Rah, rah, mah freedum!" ones than elsewhere.
People are dying or getting sick and it impacts their lives. Nothing forced about that narrative. If it bothers you to read about it, you could probably hold off on reading new things for five years. Perhaps things will have changed then.
Are you being dishonest or are you really that poorly informed?