An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene | Hacker News Reader

An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene

nautil.us

97 pointsdnetesn54 comments

> [KSR on the Fermi Paradox] My feeling is, the universe is too big, and life too planet-specific for intelligent life forms to communicate with each other, except for by accident and very rarely.

What does the possible variation in life forms have to do with the nature of communications mediums or techniques? Encoding might be different but the mediums used will depend on level of technological advancement and not the specifics of how the life forms communicate face to face. (That's speciesist. I meant lifeform-to-lifeform.)

I love that KSR mentions Banks' Culture novels.

While I'd agree that biosphere sustainability is critical, I don't think it's the only critical problem, or even the most short-term problem, we may have. I may be paranoid, but I'm very worried that there is a Great Filter[1], and that it is some sort of abuse/misuse/weaponization of biotech at, or just beyond, our current level of technology. Just past that would be concern about unfriendly AI.

There are also some existential threats to modern advanced civilization due to low-probability but unmanageable-if-they-occur problems. Other than an asteroid we can't detect in time, there are also supervolcano eruptions that decimate world food supplies (volcanic winter).[2]

[1] http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano

> What does the possible variation in life forms have to do with the nature of communications mediums or techniques?

Lots of stuff apparently.

What if a species communicates using pheromones and checks for specific smells similar to their own as in this strip http://xkcd.com/638/

What if there are creatures that live millennia and take days to form cohesive words.

What if the creatures are able to use physics that is unknown to us or that we can't detect?

It's more basic than just talking. Feynman has a great lecture on just making sure you have 'left' and 'right' correct.

http://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/teachersguide/pdf/Chap05.p...

> I'm very worried that there is a Great Filter[1], and that it is some sort of abuse/misuse/weaponization of biotech at, or just beyond, our current level of technology.

So you are very worried, that the Great Filter is in the somewhat near future of humankind.

But in the link you gave [1], the author personally thinks [2] that the Great Filter is probably in our past, in the evolution of higher life forms and intelligence.

[1] http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html

[2] "I personally think that most of the Great Filter is most likely to be explained by the steps I think we understand the least about: the steps in the biological evolution of life and intelligence"

Anthropocentric climate change can be our big filter. Don't underestimate it.

While I agree with what you say, I think your tone is a bit hyperbolic. Your last sentence is Polonious-level "advice" that is as cliched as it is obvious. The real trick is to not over- or under-estimate AGW.

Bad things could happen if we over-estimate significant events, just as much as if we under-estimate.

But the point of the article was, that there is some reasonable evidence that the Great Filter is in our past, so there is no particular need to postulate a necessity of more Filters into out future. Sure there can be more in the future, but they are not needed to explain the Fermi Paradox.

I've always been much more worried that the solution to the Fermi paradox is: we ARE alone as sentient beings. That we're the jewel of the Universe.

Sure, it's highly unlikely. But imagine the profound tragedy that our self-extinction would mean.

Kim Stanley Robinson's books are all pretty fantastic. I recommend the Red Mars trilogy as well as 2312. His vision of the future is exciting and optimistic, his deep knowledge of science and technology topics is enlightening, and his writing ability and character creation are fun and imaginative. It's great stuff for any hard science fiction fans.

Great books. Zero understanding of the singularity or transhumanist ideas though.

Oh I think he gets those ideas, but as can be gathered from his characters, he doesn't think people will go for it. And the spacers in 2312 are pretty transhumanist I'd say.

I have not read 2312 yet, although it is on my list. As for most of his other works, he explores ideas of immortality and such, but only in the context of humans. He explores what happens in a society where humans live forever, without all our weaknesses, idiosyncrasies, and quirks. He also presumes such biologically limited humans will remain the dominant species and their tribal power structures the mechanism effecting change. That makes for good storytelling when your audience is regular old humans. But not very accurate predictions.

I yield to no one in my appreciation for the Mars trilogy, but 2312 is a lazy, stupid book.

Its world is incoherent -- the premise is that in 300 years of advance, in a solar system where Mars and Venus have both been terraformed in a timescale in under 250 years or so, where humanity has near-magical technology, the problems on earth are EXACTLY the same problems that an academic liberal like KSR thinks are the problems today (basically: global warming + the developing world is poor). Somehow, we can turn Venus into a pastoral world but we can't scrub a few trillion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere? Really?

His thinking on every issue makes those plastic wading pools look deep. His treatment of economics in particular makes me think that he once heard someone describe economics, but only in a language he only partially understands.

His proposed solutions range from the simplistic (really smart computers make the planned economies that he longs for right now more plausible -- novel) to the utterly insane (the way that we solve environmental catastrophe and poverty on earth is literally to air-drop animals into northern Canada).

As a political novel, 2312 is deathly dull. Go to any college campus or most of the internet, and you can hear every concern KSR raises described in much greater nuance and detail, and reasonable attempts at much more convincing solutions thought up. As a science-fiction novel, 2312 reiterates the Mars trilogy without adding anything. But its true, breathtaking failure is in stitching together its (bad) political novel with its (rehearsed) science fiction novels, the terrible amalgamation making both components worse due to just how poorly the two sides fit. The science fiction part makes mockery of the political part -- these political problems simply do not make sense in that world. The political part drags the book off trap in the science fiction. It's really quite impressive how bad it is.

There is a way to address poverty and environmental catastrophe in a technologically advanced future of terraforming. 2312's approach of just ham-handedly putting today's unaltered problems into a setting that is otherwise quite alien is not that way.

> the problems on earth are EXACTLY the same problems that an academic liberal like KSR thinks are the problems today (basically: global warming + the developing world is poor).

Well, if you were to tell someone in 1714 that we had gone to the Moon, had robots on Mars, had eradicated smallpox and cured a bunch of other deadly stuff, had the internet on everyone's pockets, nuclear energy, etc, they probably wouldn't believe that at the same time we'd still have people living like they do in some parts of Africa.

I have no particular expertise, but I'll just toss this out there: I suspect that the popular modern view that the Earth and our biosphere are "tightly balanced and interwoven" is just wrong. I doubt that any system requiring such careful balancing and sporting such immutable inter-dependencies could have ever come into being through random evolutionary changes. I think rather that the biosphere is incredibly resilient, independent, and that nothing we or anything else does to it short of moving it further from or closer to the sun, stripping its atmosphere, or burning off its water will change its essential nature as a warm, watery rock supporting an incredible diversity of life.

There's no rule that says the biosphere has to be resilient in every dimension we might push on it. If the biosphere has been stressed in a particular way and life (animal and mammalian life, specifically) rebounded, that does not mean the biosphere is resilient to any other kind of stressor, and it's only mostly assured that it's resilient to that particular one because of empirical evidence. We don't have models accurate enough to confirm your suspicions about the hardiness of the biosphere. There may be an attractor to current life-supporting conditions even under a broad range of stressors, but if human progress is adding an additional stressor (that we may not even recognize), we could be screwed.

Agreed, it doesn't mean those things. But I think that when we say we'll be "screwed" it doesn't necessarily mean the earth will be fundamentally different after the screwing is completed. The dinosaurs got screwed, and so did the Neanderthals, and in the end all that did was make room for us, the latest species about whom the Earth cares not at all.

That humans will impact the planet is a certainty. Like all species, it's constantly "screwing" the environment. The missing link is that, in turn, the environment "screws back". This exogenous will force humans into adaptation - only failing that comes the extinction scenario.

So it's not like we have a choice. Unless the entire species subscribes to nihilism (which I doubt it's at our core, or we wouldn't be here today), we have to adapt.

But most people seem to be concerned with Earth continuing to support our particular form of life.

Sure, no matter what we do, life will find a way to continue and flourish, probably without us. But the point is, we care about Earth supporting us.

I think this dialogue pretty much sums it up: http://i.imgur.com/o79ym.jpg.

We're fucking ourselves over big time and we won't be missed.

original link: http://humoncomics.com/mother-gaia

the image you posted has a footer atribution that has nothing to do with the comic.

It will take more than nuclear winters, volcanoes, or asteroids to wipe out life on Earth. Short of a supernova or another event that heats the surface of the earth to hundreds of degrees Centigrade, everything from archaeic bacteria to tardigrades will survive any catastrophic event and eventually more complex life will evolve again. The earth's biosphere will far outlive any civilization.

But we're not talking about tardigrades and bacteria: we're talking about millions upon millions of species that do have complex interdependencies with each other and the environment in general. We have no way to predict which species, when together decimated, might drastically impact our survival because they hunted pests that killed major oxygen producers or transmitted diseases through different animal and human populations. We have no way to know where in the equilibrium we are and which levers might set off a catastrophic downward spiral.

Hell, if there is a nuclear winter or asteroid impact, we are far enough along technologically that many humans, maybe even millions, would survive and rebuild civilization (say using nuclear power, chemical engineering, desalination, and hydroponic agriculture to survive underground until the environment clears up). I guess it just depends on how you define the biosphere and survival.

We survived one back in the sixth century [1]. There's some speculation that the European Dark Ages were caused by this impact rather than the end of Roman rule (the traditional interpretation).

But the biosphere got itself back to its previous state remarkably quickly, apparently, though it's hard to tell if that event contributed to the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the start of the Little Ice Age.

[1]http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1248518/Did-a... apologies for the appalling quality of the reference but I couldn't find the journal articles from google.

Robinson is indirectly proposing that humans alive now massively sacrifice their well-being, with a severely crippeled economy and totalitarian government.

In exchange for some non-existent, hypothetical future that nobody alive today (i.e. those who would actually suffer under his proposal) would ever experience.

This is absolutely monstorous. This is Pol Pot-level evil.

Sure, let's instead roll the dice that whatever's in our best interest now, and in the near future, won't be too bad for future generations, despite that we can see that we're altering the biosphere in significant ways without a good understanding of the long-term effects and with no plan to reverse the changes we're making and have made, much less a plan and the technology to deal with unforeseen consequences. Is that not monstrous?

What if our decisions, due to the culture and lifestyles of developed nations, free markets, and short-to-mid-term democratic attention spans, lead to an ecological catastrophe that can't be technologically ameliorated 100 years from now? What if it could have been mitigated at present with modest intellectual effort and modest cuts to standards of living?

I recognize many problems with the sort of governance that would be required to mitigate long-term ecological and technological problems (ecological collapse, grey goo, unfriendly AI), but calling it "Pol Pot Level" evil to trade some quality of life in the present for reduced risk of having the biosphere take a wrong turn a generation or two from now, seems polemical. If reduced quality of life increases mortality rates, that's unfortunate, but concern about people today should not trump concern about people in the future, to the extent we can foresee risks due to stressing the biosphere in ways we have no empirical analogs for.

I think the popular idea that technology can and will overcome problems we cause in our biosphere, is unsupported (and unsupportable, even if it's true) by evidence. We either take it on faith or we don't; I choose not to.

You are assuming things go well and not taking into account human nature.

To think that it is morally good to sacrifice people's well-being for future generations is a fundamental misunderstanding of morality. It is making a moral "something" out of "nothing."

In that sense it is just like, say, a witch doctor that says you must sacrifice your firstborn child to appease the spirits. Or, for that matter, a Pol Pot who claims that people must be sacrificed for some non-existant, unknowable "good." That is specifically why I referenced Pol Pot.

I wanted a non-religious example, but really any religious or non-religious butcher who clamors for human sacrifice based on a false moral imperative would do.

You don't need a non-religious example; environmentalism is a religion. Its precepts include that nature is good, that human activity is bad, and that by existing we are "destroying the planet" by taking it further away from some perfect pristine state that it would otherwise be in without our influence. The exact method as to how we are alleged to be "destroying the planet" changes from one generation to another, but it will never change that we are doing so. And so long as we raise children to believe in environmentalism, some of those kids will grow up to be scientists who find ways to cloak their religious views in a thin veneer of science...but that doesn't make them scientific views.

I don't think it's helpful to call environmentalism a religion. It's a non-objective ideology, and I wish there were a single word for such a thing. Maybe we ought to redefine the word "religion" to mean "non-objective ideology," though. Then we could call it a religion.

Anyway, Robinson was not espousing environmentalism so much as distant-future-generation-ism. That's a distinctive (but equally incorrect) moral position. Not all environmentalists subscribe to the future-generational-imperative, and vice versa.

I actually find the future-generational-imperative to be more widely and uncritically assumed by everyday people, so probably more important to point that out than just plain old environmentalism.

Can you think of any other "non-objective ideologies" that are as religion-like as environmentalism? I mean, I suppose you could describe some other sorts of ideologues as worshipping "the market" or "society" or "progress" or "history" or some such, but none of those are as god-esque as "Gaia" or "Mother Nature". Are they? Or are there others I've overlooked?

The main reason I tend to think of it as a secular religion is due to the close specific parallels with apocalyptic Christianity. You've got this same idea of an original state of grace (the way the indians lived) that mankind has since fallen from, the idea that people have committed sinful acts against the deity (by polluting) and have ways they should worship/repent to it (recycling, planting trees, passing on their ideology to others...). Most of all the sense that we are doomed unless we change our ways because Mother Nature will fight back and punish us for our sins against it just feels SO Christian - not in the modern sense but more the older sense of standing on a street corner with a "the end of the world is nigh!" signboard. :-)

Sure, there's definitely some Gaia-worshipers here and there, but you're miscasting the environmentalism movement if you think they're a majority or even a driving force. I'd place the driving forces as first some sort of rational self-interest -- if your house is on fire, you don't need to worship the house to want to put out the fire -- and second as some sort of combination of a sense of stewardship and guilt, stewardship, a need to protect and care for things, and guilt at taking what we feel isn't ours. The guilt might blend into Gaia-ism, but I don't think it must.

The idea that we can be 100% confident that our current actions are guaranteed to create ecological catastrophe is just another iteration of the eternal short-sighted idea that the future will be just what we expect based on the fashionable ideas of today. The future may be laughing at our generation's idea that we're going to wreck the planet after practical fusion cleaned everything. Or they may be laughing at us worrying so much about "the environment" after the Great Civilization Collapse of 2023 reduces humanity to 2 billion anyhow. Or they may be laughing at how much time we spent worrying about ecological collapse while doing nothing about the obviously-inevitable-in-hindsight AI uprising. Or they may just be laughing at our concerns about environmental collapse as a broad spectrum of greener technologies ever so slowly but ever so surely took over and our mastery of our environment continued to grow to the point that we were easily able to have high tech and a nice environment.

For that matter, they may laugh at how much time we spent worrying about the environment as they live under the iron rule of the global government we created to "solve" the environmental problem, only for the global government to observe that if the "problem" is ever actually solved they have no reason to exist anymore, so, "mysteriously", the environmental problem is never solved, until it too grows too large to survive under its ponderous weight and collapses.

We don't know the future. We quite profoundly don't know the future. We honestly can't plan for it. We can only try to do our best today.

> We honestly can't plan for it. We can only try to do our best today.

The article mentions "long-range planning" as an aspect of intelligence.

People incapable of effectively affecting their future by taking action now (requiring "planning") are generally considered hapless. No one anyone'd want to work with, except to assist as with a helpless baby.

The article also mentions sustainable anarchist visions, in contrast to the shadowy "global government we created to 'solve' the environmental problem" you mention. (Or does that somehow mean the US, the world hegemon?) In fact, he mentions our "global economic system in the form of institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund", which obviously aren't designed for environmental sustainability.

"The article mentions "long-range planning" as an aspect of intelligence."

But our intelligence is dominated by the unpredictability of the world, including the six billion other approximately-equally-intelligent beings taking an active interest in affairs. The "time value of money" isn't just an economic concept, it's a fundamental truth that the further in the future you look, the less you can predict it, exponentially, and frankly disturbingly quickly.

We do not know what the future will hold, and anyone trying to plan 50 years in advance will be laughed at by those 50 years in the future. That includes you, that includes me, and I say that without any regard to the IQ either of us has, collectively or separately. We do not know, and the only thing I guarantee is that any plans you make will be laughably wrong.

But before you think this is just defeatism, remember, I said that we can try to do our best today. We should do what we can based on the problems we see today... not just because they will compound tomorrow, but because they are problems today.

However, claimed plans justified by any vague handwavings more than a decade or so into the future should simply be discounted.

Heck, step back a mere 17 years and read about "the end of history". Sure hope you're not still following any plans based on how that worked out.

Playing the devils advocate. While I don't agree with his long term idea, looking at the last 17 years don't really suggest he was all that wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last...

As to predicting things, the last 50 years have changed things far less than you might expect. 50 years ago we had Jet aircraft, satellites, cars did 80+MPH, computers used silicon transistors, nuclear reactors, H-Bomb, ICBM's, you could talk to people on the other side of the planet. Doctors could easily write a prescription for antibiotics or order an XRay to see what's wrong with you. There where even some video games.

As far as peoples day to day lives transistors got really cheap which enabled lot's of stuff. But, the top 500 super computers pull 274 Pflop/s vs 223 Pflop/s the same time last year so that seems to be slowing down. http://www.top500.org/lists/2014/06/

Sure, tech has been improving but most of the tech that's changing peoples lives is actually fairly old. The Internet is about to hit 40, Cat scans are 47, Cellphones are 41, and DNA was discovered 61 years ago.

Politicly things have changed a lot less than you might think. Most borders are about where they where 50 years ago, Israel was still having issues with it's neighbors abortion was a major political issue in the US etc etc.

We are already living in an ecological catastrophe. Humans are currently killing off ~20,000 species per year compared to the natural rate of ~1-5. (estimates vary widely)

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

Though, we could probably survive just fine even after killing 99% of all species on the planet so this might not be that bad long term.

So essentially you agree that at least a quasi-totalitarian world will be needed in order to "protect" the environment.

Of course, your premise is that people will just roll over and take it. A more likely scenario is a world war that would make WW II look like 3rd graders throwing sticks at each other.

A second faulty assumption is that a totalitarian regime would in fact protect the environment. Even if it we're put into place for that purpose, who watches the watchers? China is a good example... Nominally communist until the elite there gave up on communism and decided to get rich. A generation or two can change a lot.

True. I think the thing that a lot of the do-gooder types who wish for totalitarian government to solve some problem or other don't realize is the sort of people that kind of power attracts. Even if the people put in charge at first are the most wonderful, benevolent people the world has ever seen, it won't stay that way for long. Such people are just not ruthless and determined enough to stay in power in such a system for long. Somebody who cares for nothing but their own power will eventually find a way to bump off whoever's in charge and take control. Just the existence of those power structures are irresistible to such people.

It's kinda like the old regex quote - You have what you think is a serious problem, and you want to use a totalitarian government to solve it? Soon, you will have 2 problems - the original problem is still there, because nobody in charge really cared about it in the first place, only now you will be throw in the Gulag for daring to question what your new totalitarian leaders are doing.

I think China shows us that a totalitarian regime can in many cases be worse for the environment than even the most unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism. That's because totalitarian regimes will apply forcing functions to things like industrial activity and will make wasteful malinvestments for political purposes at scales far beyond the froth you see in market economies. Google China's ghost cities.

If people in the past had reacted to their 100% certainty that Malthusian predictions of imminent global starvation were about to be reached, then a lot of us would not be alive today.

If they had reacted by limiting technological progress (as you suggest) then we would almost certainly not be talking together over the Internet, and may have burned every single tree on the planet striving to maintain our civilisation without technological progress.

Luckily they did not, and our technological progress included a "green revolution" that managed to produce massively more food on the same land. Technology can and does solve problems like this.

Global government is a nightmare I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. I live in a country with three layers of government (local, state and federal) and adding a fourth would just multiply the waste, corruption and nepotism.

I don't really read that from him, more of a wish for a more democratic world and global equality witch he hopes will lead to a prioritization of climate goals.

It might not necessarily be possible in the real world but I don't see him pushing for totalitarian government.

I hope you have studied Pol Pot enough to make this comparison.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8313361

I still think it's completely inappropriate to make such a comparison in this context.

I really don't because Robinson is absolutely preaching an ideology that would lead to mass death if it were taken seriously.

What exactly is he saying to do, that is going to lead to these deaths? I can't find any mass death approval in the linked article.

Will they kill children by slamming them against trees or killing people with shovels? Or will they "interrogate" people until they die? Will they kill 20% of population in 4 years?

Your comparison is inappropriate and cheapens the suffering of people who lived under Pol Pot.

People right now all over the world and in the US are already being asked to sacrifice their well-being and lives for pursuits most of them find utterly meaningless[1]. In addition many of the millenial generation are already crippled by debt, underemployment, and vanishing prospects for retirement. You're essentially asking these people to do the same thing - namely "massively sacrifice their well-being" - and so really you're just choosing favorites. Either way both sides are demanding a sacrifice. The only difference is who is being asked to sacrifice.

[1]: http://www.gallup.com/strategicconsulting/163007/state-ameri...

So the weird pol-pot polemic stands. But this gets downvoted?

Who digs out the gold used to make the computer you typed your post?

People already live in poverty, with crippled totalitarian governments, to support you today.

I agree, it is evil.

The top ten gold producing nations are, in order: China, Australia, USA, Russia, Peru, South Africa, Canada, Mexico, Uzbekistan, Ghana [1]. So your statement doesn't hold.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gold_produ...

Edit: clarity

Robinson is directly proposing global-level institutions of government, that prioritise long-term planning. Interpreting that as crippled economies and totalitarianism is all you.

Yes, and it is the rational and only possible interpretation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com