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.""

Comments

Re:Horse Shit

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:High-power industrial civilization may not last

[dryeo]

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.