Slashdot Mirror
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.""
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.
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?
It's absurd that given what we *know* as FACTS about materials and energy sources, that anyone would think intergalactic (who brought up galaxies anyhow?) travel is even remotely possible.
There are intelligent Africans who live in mud huts, and there are stupendously stupid North Americans driving tanks.
So what does technology have to do with intelligence?
Lem was critical of Government, of official bureaucracy - whether public or private.
He never singled out the US as a specific target, and could be construed as subtly/subversively anti-authoritarian, in ways that were passable by the Communist governments of Poland and USSR.
The US is now no different than those. We just have Nike Fuel bands, and two cars in front of our debt-bondage. Whoops! I mean home.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.)
I disagree. It isn't worrisome at all.
I look forward to the day I can break away from daily "work" and just pursue my interests and hobbies.
And in fact, this is the economy of Start Trek: an economy of plenty, rather than our current economy based on scarcity. People do what they do because they want to, not because they get paid for it.
I don't think the Star Trek scenario is unreasonable, if we were to find better ways to generate energy. Nobody has to be idle (though they could be if they wanted). That isn't a species-killing idea, it's just another evolutionary step.
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
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).
No, you don't. You just have to give enough people cheap energy that they're no way to put the genie back in the bottle.
Once you do that, the Gateses and Kochs of the world can be safely ignored. They won't have any power anymore.
In principle, I'm all for this. Practically, however: life always expands to take up all the space/resources available to it. The Star Trek economy needs either infinite resources (impossible) or population controls (distasteful) to be feasible. Otherwise at some point you'll get a virus such as a religious doctrine that says have as many kids as you can and suck up as many public resources as possible, and do nothing else with them, and we'll be right back at the edge of scarcity and collapse.
"Which is the greater danger - nuclear warfare or the population explosion? The latter absolutely! To bring about nuclear war, someone has to DO something; someone has to press a button. To bring about destruction by overcrowding, mass starvation, anarchy, the destruction of our most cherished values-there is no need to do anything. We need only do nothing except what comes naturally - and breed. And how easy it is to do nothing."
-- Isaac Asimov
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes