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The Future According To Stanislaw Lem
An anonymous reader writes "The Paris Review has an article about SF author Stanislaw Lem, explaining Lem's outlook on the future and his expectations for technological advancement. Lem tended toward a view that technology would infect and eventually supplant biological evolution. But he also suggested an interesting explanation for why we haven't detected alien civilizations: "Perhaps ... they are so taken up with perfecting their own organisms that they've abandoned space exploration entirely. According to a similar hypothesis, such beings are invisible because technological ease has resulted in a 'Second Stone Age' of 'universal illiteracy and idleness.' When everyone's needs are perfectly met, it 'would be hard, indeed, to find one individual who would choose as his life's work the signaling, on a cosmic scale, of how he was getting along.' Rather than constructing Dyson Spheres, Lem suggests, advanced civilizations are more likely to spend their time getting high.""
like posting on /.
It's full of trash!
Screw you, Slashdot. You can't hippify my favorite pet author.
A race could not become so technologically advanced without curiosity. Pretty sure they would want to know what is out there
... to root for the advancement of civilization. Sounds like a noble and realistic goal.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
our memories and attention spans have gotten noticeably worse over the last century, though our quality of life has increased immeasurably. he may be right. solving our economic needs who wouldn't want to focus on feeling better?
The trouble with getting high is that there's always some jerk who ISN'T getting high because they're jacked up on taking advantage of everyone else's idleness to promote their own self-interest. Sorry, but evolution isn't going to let people get away with being sloths.
I think he's been staying home for the last decade or so.
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The most reasonable explanation why we haven't found alien life is...
Alien life got a good look at us.
Crazy? Yep. Greedy? Yep. Still fight over dirt? Yep. Not trusworthy? Yep. Supercrazy religions in charge? Yep.
Destroying our own environment? Yep. Wipe out any other species for fun, profit, or they're just in the way? Yep.
Why would any intelligent creature want anything to do with us?
no combination of actual materials and energy sources can achieve the sci-fi visions.
Since it's the same elements and forces all across the universe, no one else will have achieved it either.
It's that simple. The assumption that somehow spaceships and sci-fi colonization is *going* to happen is flawed.
It's over. Finished. Deal with it.
I've seen one in my attic
Table-ized A.I.
Stanislaw Lem needs to shut the fuck up and go home.
He did. He died in 2005. The chatting classes are indulging some mental masturbation rehashing Lem's nonsense. Don't get worked up.
Paris Review? How is this tripe getting on Slashdot anyhow?
The existing UFO sightings are consistent with an advanced civilization who observe us, perhaps even tinker with us, but generally stay out of sight. The "high" ones may be the numskulls who crash in New Mexico deserts.
Table-ized A.I.
Maybe immortality cancels out curiosity.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Yes, yes, but the asteroid mining/species in space nonsense is very important though....
I can sort of see this, but I don't see it being that prevasive among an entire race...its just seems silly to think they wouldnt think of a way to prevent that if living for thousands of years caused that. I would imagine some might even want to "mind wipe" back to some point to live a fresh new life.
Much easier to conquer those not expecting it.
but then, many things are possible. What if one of these hypothesized aliens derives a higher reward from blasting signals into space than from any other method? What if it sees that as the ultimate fulfillment of its being? We don't know what their psychology is like, or even if they have a psychology. They're hypothetical aliens hypothetically doing something. We have no relevant facts to constrain our speculation.
So, interstellar Twitter is *not* a sign of an advanced civilization.
(Though that would have been my guess all along.)
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WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Records of human civilization go back over 3000 years. Industrial civilization goes back less than 200. A good starting point is the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, the first non-demo steam passenger railway. There were earlier locomotives, but this is the moment the industrial revolution got out of beta and started changing people's lives.
Only in the last 80 years or so has human exploitation of natural resources been able to significantly deplete them. Prior to WWII, human efforts just couldn't make a big dent in the planet. Things have picked up since then.
There are lots of arguments over when we start running out of key resource. But the arguments are over decades, not centuries or millenia. The USGS issues mineral commodity summaries. There are decades of resources left for most minerals, but a lot of things run out within 200 years. Mining lower and lower grade ores requires more and more effort and energy. For many minerals, that's already happened. People once found gold nuggets on the surface of the earth. The deepest gold mine is now 4 miles deep.
For many minerals, the easy to extract ores were used up long ago. Industrial civilization got going based on copper, lead, iron, and coal found in high concentrations on or near the surface. All those resources were mined first, and are gone. You only get one chance at industrial civilization per planet.
Civilization can go on, but it will have to be more bio-based than mining-based. Energy isn't the problem; there are renewable sources of energy. Metals can be recycled, but you lose some every round. It's not clear what this planet will look like in a thousand years. It's clear that a lot of things will be scarcer.
(And no, asteroid mining probably won't help much.)
Lem wrote about all kinds of possible futures. A small percentage do match the description in the summary but the vast majority conflict with it. Most of his work is about reaching out and exploring in various ways. His work is so varied it is difficult to come up with one theme that describes it all. If I were to try to come up with major themes then I would give at least these:
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
How is medium getting on slashdot anyhow?
How is Beta getting on slashdot anyhow?
For that to be true all civs would have to have advanced to the same tech level. I don't think that is likely.
There's gold on the moon. There's probably gold on a number of planets. As stated, the entire asteroid belt is estimated to be about 4% of the mass of the Moon, so that isn't helpful. Even on Ceres of the 4 largest asteroids (the 4 making up half the belt's mass), there has been water detected. There's probably a lot of resources trapped in the moon.
The whole series of his reviews of fictional books is wonderful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
One of my favorites is Die Kultur Als Fehler, or 'Civilization as a mistake':
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Yes, maybe they're all genetically modified self absorbed drug addicts... Eventually they'd get bored and come on over to see if we had better drugs here than they had; something they hadn't tried before. Or maybe they'd just get the munchies and come here looking for better snack food. Or get tired of us bringing down their high with all our fighting; and come by to tell us to "mellow out, man."
Evolutionary selection pressures never stop. Even within a dominant species, if there is any level of genetic difference, there will be both genetic drift and evolution. Other species also apply selection pressures (think of evolving viruses, for instance).
The purpose of life is to feel good and be happy after all.
That's exactly what we all do isn't it!? Most people don't offer enough *mutual* reward to bother with. Why would more advanced aliens be any different. Unless...we threaten to rip them a new one in their space-time continuum :/
Science Fiction author? At least that is what I thought.
Evidence from our oribital flights gives plenty of evidence of tissue damage in space from both lack of gravity and radiation. We can't reasonably do much about the radiation without having massively heavy spacecraft which does not seem practical.
Unless we are tossing these resources into a black hole, they're all still right here.
And given the basic Geek Assumption, that technology always gets better all the time and limits are just in our heads, we'll find a way to recycle our garbage into resources.
Right?
With the obvious exception of U-235, mining something doesn't actually make it disappear. It'll still be around in a landfill somewhere, if it whatever it was made into wasn't recycled.
So, no, we're not going to run out of raw materials unless our population keeps growing exponentially. And the best projections have it peaking in the 10-12B range, then declining back to lower than it is now (note that, absent immigration, the USA and western Europe are already experiencing a population decline).
On the other hand, our industrial society has been based on the assumption of an ever-increasing population (as an obvious example, Social Security assumes more children than elderly, an increasingly shaky assumption). We're going to have to make some changes by and by, when population goes into a semi-permanent decline.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Once we become programs running in vast pieces of hardware (perhaps cellular automata running in the densest packing of matter, the dozen or so nearest neutron stars), and our we process information 1 billion times faster...communicating with anything farther away than a meter will involve what seems like months of waiting....instead, we'll live our lives in our virtual worlds, tailoring them to our fancies, making them much more interesting than the "real" world. A small portion will keep the hardware running....for the rest of us, the real world will recede to infinity...even if signal reception from far off places is automated, that info will come in spurts separated by "geologic eras" of silence...and the information will be exhaustively pondered in a matter of milliseconds....no point in talking to organics....it's idiotic....you don't even talk to the beings simulated on the other end of the neutron star...only your neighbors...those within a few nanometers...or send "snail mail" to friends up to a millimeter or so away....
Turning inward..turning their backs on the ultra-static and boring "real" world, where nothing ever happens....
TFS is written primarily in the present tense, which is kind of odd seeing as Lem has been dead for nearly a decade. We are already living in Lem's future, and the future for Lem himself is pretty much a steady-state.
there will always be exploration & discovery.
And the more important driving force, needs to be satisfied, will also rise with supply. If only to have/gain/be(!) "more" than others. It's the food envy of developed nations.
Industrial civilization got going based on copper, lead, iron, and coal found in high concentrations on or near the surface.
The last revolution was based on silicon. The next will be based on carbon. Short supply isn't exactly a problem.
Don't forget all the military SF for the ammosexuals out there.
Citation needed.
The sites indexed by 'oogle say it's about 4 kilometers deep.
In his novel "Fiasco", Stanislaw Lem posed an interesting question about the silentium universii... what if faster than light communications are possible? The consequence would be for any interstellar civilization to abandon the slow radio communications... hence extrasolar civilizations could only be discovered during the time window when detectable radio communications are used. As physics would have it, Lem seems to be right. Quantum entanglement seems about to supply us with faster than light communications, thus eliminating the need to communicate with our spaceships through slow radio waves.-Ignacio Agulló
Coal, oil and similar do basically disappear. If we got blasted back to the pre-industrial revolution, that lack of easily available concentrated energy would make it much harder to industrialize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Given a couple of hundred million years things would probably be back to plentiful when it comes to all those resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
First off, there are 14 spheres including the master one, and they're burrillium. We have one (you're welcome). Earth came through with the hook up (think THC), all natural and healthy. The guys who originally built the first sphere are bypeds like us. They're technically 40 million years old, but with the ability to step outside the space time continuam it's hard to tell exactly.
If you never saw a group of construction workers dead drunk instead of doing their job, day after day, and proud of it... well, maybe Lem did. Having actually lived in a socialist country, and all.
Given a couple of hundred million years things would probably be back to plentiful when it comes to all those resources.
Possibly true, but that isn't much help for those of us who plan to live (and have our descendants live) during the next few centuries.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"This is your brain on drugs."
"A mind is a terrible thing to waste."
but with a whimper.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Just read one of his books sometimes. If you are an engineer or a scientists, you will notice pretty fast that they are techno-mysticism and fairy-tales set in a pseudo-technological setting. His "predictions" will be of comparable quality.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
One of the very fundamentals of quantum entanglement is that it cannot be used for communication. If it can, the whole theory falls apart and all other predicted properties become questionable. So that is an immediate fail. I also have read "Fiasco" and I must say the the novel really is one. Never have I read anything claiming to be SF that had so little grasp of engineering or scientific realities. Lem is a clueless hack.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You know that he is dead, right?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The problem is energy. Could be solved though, there is enough solar and solar-derived around. Burning Uranium for electricity might kill real space-travel though or at least make it a lot harder. There is not that much of the stuff around.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Surely once sentience starts to spread out across the galaxy there will no longer be just history, but a constantly bifurcating one as the ever greater distances between events results in multiple timelines, histories, that have little influence on each other. i.e. It is not a question of what will happen but rather when everything will happen, where and how often.
That was written by the Strugatski brothers, not by Lem.
He did not.
And he did not watch any of Lem's movies.
Suffering is necessary and sufficient for the improvement of intelligence, but vice versa too.
The elimination of discomfort results in beings that do not optimise themselves via evolution or otherwise for the greater capability to solve bigger problems once and for all.
But the more intelligent you are, the greater the overriding bigger problems you can see, and this necessarily makes one's outlook increasingly depressing. Indeed, could it not be that the correlation between mental illness and intelligence is at once the action of a case of "too much is not better for survival"?
One would expect, given evolutionary pressure, that we would long ago have reached a species-wide state of optimal average intelligence. But the easier we make life for ourselves, the more we rest on our grandfathers' laurels, and the dumber the next generation is.
So a "super advanced" society probably consists of .... People! Just like us, but with perhaps better technology or better personal capabilities, but occupied by bigger problems. (survival is more difficult the longer your outlook).
Perhaps if we instead averaged our rate of individual suffering (say by the application of taxes inversely proportional to measured individual suffering, so that the load is truly fairly shared from the individual "subjective" viewpoint, whatever one's initial conditions in life) and then also focus our combined resources on the problem of truly universal *survival*, we might see a greater rate of genius, and a lesser rate of idiocy.
I think the slings and arrows of outrageous fortunes might well create our exceptions for us, such that the total individual accumulated pain would never end up perfectly mono-distributed. This would likely be enough to manufacture a few extremely valuable minds...
With ore you can (and this is an approximation) heat it up and get out the stuff you want and do modest steps to purify it. In a landfill although the metals are already extracted from the ore there are many types of metal in there. You can't simply heat up the landfill and get a stream of steel, aluminum, copper, etc out as the metals will be combined with each other and other things. Getting things out of a landfill is more difficult than from ore. The only hope is to separate out the material before it goes to landfill (which is increasingly being done) and even if you just buried all the aluminum cans together that would be better than mixing them. Metals used in small amounts (e.g. gold in a phone) need to be individually removed.
For plastics there is some ability to recycle, but it is hard to separate them into the exact types (i.e. it is hard to test for cheaply every plastic bottle) and so the recycling is downcycling as a mixture has to be assumed unless a single formulation for all plastic bottles is mandated. Without this it means a requirement for new raw inputs periodically, or an acceptance of lower quality of product (opaque bottles because of the mixture of materials).
There are lots of arguments over when we start running out of key resource.
Well, the only key resource we're actually in danger of running out of is phosphorous. Anything else we have lots of, can recycle, or can substitute for.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What is it today with all of the crack pot articles on /.? Is the regular crew too stoned and the children have taken over?
Lem is a clueless hack.
He probably is now, as he has been dead for almost 10 years. You on the other hand are alive, but somehow it does not make you less clueless.
this is the same thing they said about Socialism (everyone would just sit around getting high instead of doing interesting shit).
Right, that's what happened. Look at what the rate of alcoholism was in the USSR.
Niven's view of such devices seemed pretty realistic, that the problem would take care of itself after a few generations.
Even if you were immortal, a droud would still be equivalent of death; remove the constraint of time, and limitation is measured by the boundaries of your mind's total potential state-space.
Any sufficiently intelligent being - no matter how powerful or long-lived - would avoid pleasure-death.
How is medium getting on slashdot anyhow?
How is Beta getting on slashdot anyhow?
If you thought Eternal Summer was bad, wait until you see what happens with Global Warming.
If we survive until the sun dies, I hope we got something together by then.
The deepest gold mine is now 4 miles deep.
That's 4 km not miles
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Once you have warp drives, etc
Its an excellent article, enjoyed it. I think it unlikely that the majority of civilizations would converge to a state of idleness and pursuit of bliss. First, there are too many physical forms of life and ours with our needs of physical pleasure and/or need for idleness, at times, is probably not common to all. Second, regardless of the physical form, there are too many paths that civilizations could take. Some could certainly enforce a specific lifestyle - by bio-engineering, medication or by law and enforcement but there remains individuals always in our cultures that choose to be different. As with a more robust nations, there are always some who pursue travel and exploration as a hobby and a means of pleasure.
wood.
Well actually, he's been dead for the last decade or so...
I personally think this boils down to common sense. First, any alien civilization with the ability to travel and colonize the galaxy is orders of magnitude more advanced than us. They have technology that we can't even imagine yet, similar to how ancient mesopotamia couldn't have imagined the technology we have today. What I'm getting at is that such a civilization probably doesn't need to "visit" us as we are imagining. More likely, they can just "push a button" from clear across the galaxy and instantly know everything about us and our planet. Again, we are talking about a civilization that must be orders of magnitude more advanced than us.
Secondly, such a civilization no doubt has policies about this kind of thing. And those policies no doubt require them to leave us alone, as they are required to leave any up-and-coming intelligent civilization alone. Why? Because we haven't yet passed the "ultimate test" which all up-and-coming civilizations will face -- overcoming the possibility of blowing ourselves up or causing our own extinction through any other technological means. Think about how we view animals. There is certainly injustice in the animal world, but we humans don't interfere. It wouldn't make sense to interfere. We leave nature alone to choose its own course, as it as for millions of years. That's how the aliens view us: as animals in the process of evolution who must choose their own fate. Once we pass the big test, only then will they consider making contact. What constitutes passing the test? That's easy: the universal abandonment of coercion as a political philosophy and means to an end. Only a civilization which has univerally abandoned coercion (except of course in self-defense) can qualify as "clear and safe" to the more advanced civilization.
The simplest explanation why we haven't found alien life is that there isn't any to find. If they evolved (and wouldn't they have had to?), then there is competition for scarce resources. That would drive every intelligent life form into space, in search of more--unless they destroy themselves before getting that far. So we're either alone or doomed.
"one individual who would choose as his life's work the signaling, on a cosmic scale, of how he was getting along"
well, that certainly wouldn't be a problem for humans. There are already plenty of humans who make it their lifes work the signaling of how they are getting along. And if they could do it on a cosmic scale, they would.
It stands to reason that any sufficiently advanced alien race would reach a point where they invent their version of facebook. It also stands to reason that the invention of the social network is also probably the Singularity that marks the downfall of said civilization...
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Humans have existed for 20.000 years? Technologically a little bit advaced for100 years. How long more? 1000 years. 1100 years is drop in an ocean of the life span of universe. The probability that two civilazation would live at convinient times to meet each other is close to zero.We have quite long distances which take time.
This really irritates me. I am sure Stanislav Lem is an interesting and I am sure Stanislav Lem 's reputation in not going to be harmed by me, so I feel free to really let go on this.
The first point I'll make is this is extremely low quality speculation, and the second point I'll make is it's extremely and insidiously destructive of our own future in some very specific ways.
First, this is the rankest type of speculation; it's not even thought provoking, at least productive-thought provoking. Lem is positing to *creatures entirely unknown* preferences, goals, in fact an entire motivational system. That's OK for sci-fi, but it really exposes a lack of imagination and critical thinking skills when he attempts to apply it to actual forms of life in the real world. Here's a certainty- we know nothing about the possible biology of other forms of life elsewhere are far flung galaxies and planets and we certainly know absolutely nothing about any psychology which they may or may not have.
Other living creatures may not even think of themselves as, or be, individuals with a welfare to mind. We evolved in a competitive environs and have the struggle to maintain ourselves against that environs and other creatures worked deeply into our genes, but what if other creatures are just not that way?
The whole idea that what "feels good" is somehow necessarily insidiously destructive to the individual has it biological basis in our unique brain chemistry. Some neurotransmitters and chemical compounds make use feel really good because evolutionarily speaking, they were associated with some survival enhancing behaviors. Separation (and purification) of those chemicals from their behaviors resulted in the problem we know as addiction.
Essentially the "feel good" chemicals are purified, enhanced then introduced exogenously. The nefarious effect is twofold. One is an unnatural level of feelings of pleasure brought on by these drugs which subverts the motivational system and against which we have no (inherent) defense. Thus rats pushing levels to get brain stimulation unto death. Thus people in opium dens. Thus heroin addition.
The other nefarious effect is the reduction of the endogenous production of those same (or naturally occurring similar) chemicals by our bodies. Simply, the body sees that it has enough of this stuff and shuts down its own production Now you not only crave the feel good, you feel awful if you try to quit the exogenic source- you're dependent on the drug.
But this is all specific to our biology. Some *totally other* biology may have no correlative problem.
It's amazing to me that Lem couldn't figure this out.
The second point is this fear of populations succumbing to sloth and no-utility pleasure seeking is a thinly veiled regurgitation of the rhetoric of 19th century conservative scolds. It's the belief that the dirty unwashed masses will devolve into nothing but hedonistic pleasure seekers, dragging us back to the stone age, if left to their own devices .
Absent the imposition of stern consequences -things like workhouses, the threat of destitution, starvation and a life of grinding poverty, people and society will self destruct within a generation. The impoverished model of human beings - it's really something from the Bronze Age- that this implies flies in the face of everything we know about the effects of non-coersive reward structures, human curiosity and knowledge seeking and the inborn desire for self actualization.
People wrecked by threats abuse, torture and the threat of torture, shortages of every sort including empathic responses from others in society and locked in chronically oppositional and dirty relations with everyone around them are, indeed, robbed of their basic humanity, and with that basic humanity goes their desire to engage in produtcive work and be motivated by faint things like intellectual curiosity.
\
The fact that the above sentence more or less describes the World As It Has Been for the past 40,000 years explai
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