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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.""
A race could not become so technologically advanced without curiosity. Pretty sure they would want to know what is out there
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?
Lem died ten years ago and little of what he predicted appears to be actually happening, so no.
Lem is a favorite of literati because he was very critical of America and its authors, so they dust off his musing now and then and wank themselves.
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?
I've seen one in my attic
Table-ized A.I.
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
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.
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.)
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
Get out of here, Stalker.
For that to be true all civs would have to have advanced to the same tech level. I don't think that is likely.
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.
Eric Frank Russell had the same criticism, and was far more lighthearted about it.
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).
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.
> He never singled out the US as a specific target
Actually, he did once. In one story from "The Star Diaries" the protagonist travels to the cold war era US by mistake, where he witnesses nuclear attack "duck and cover" style drills and general bomb scare. Lem's satire is quite heavy handed, and I believe he was ashamed of writing it. That story is usually omitted in the reeditions of the book.
actually almost everything he predicted barred the washing machines is happening already. That is a pity because I would prefer the washing machine he described instead of sad reality.
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.
Perhaps Lem comes off less morose in jzyk Polski
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Don't forget all the military SF for the ammosexuals out there.
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
and two cars in front of our debt-bondage
You COULD choose not to take on greater financial burden than you could bear.
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.
Since it's the same elements and forces all across the universe,
That is neither provable nor falsifiable.
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.
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But the movie was really nice! But don't worry, if FTL communication is possible, then Quantum Theory and Relativity fall apart completely and both at the same time! This could even mean magic is possible! (No, it is really not likely to happen....)
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I think you are on to something there. Lem was certainly one of the worst SF authors ever with regard to actual understanding of science and technology.
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.
Well, not necessarily. However, FTL communication, let alone travel, would kill most of Relativity and Quantum Theory, and those would need to be replaced before anything could really be done with the new insights. So, say at the very least these things would be >> 100 years in the future, provided that the necessary minds would even get a change in today's anti-idea academic establishment.
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.
What's the story title?
"Roadside Picnic" is by the Strugatski brothers.
That was written by the Strugatski brothers, not by Lem.
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.'"
you don't read Lem for hard science.
Lem's concern wasn't on science, per se, it was on exploring alternative human conditions. The "science" was just a prop.
Like many Sci-Fi authors in the 1960s and later, Lem wasn't interested in the gee-whiz march of technology. At that point technology was marching fast enough that you either had to resort to problematic tech such as FTL drives and telepathy or risk having your science be disproven and your tech be obsolete within your own lifetime.
I too, am a Cyberiad fan, incidentally.
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.
Well, you are right about that. Unfortunately, I also find his characters bland and soulless and his "exploration" of the human condition far too simplistic.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Yes. Enjoy 15-30 years of BEARABLE slavery. But you OWN something... Just ask the taxman.
You have Stockholm syndrome - and don't recognize it. You should read about Edward Bernays, some time - before lashing out in pseudo-moral rage against a proposition who's arguments you fo not actually comprehend.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It depends on what you need to do, and what you know about it.
If you are not willing to walk away from it, on short notice? Then buying nothing is wise.
The trick about big financing is that you don't own a house - a bank owns you. Your on their plantation.
If you didn't barter or pay cash, you are on Massah's rules, Massah's time.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The title is "The Twenty-sixth and Last Voyage". According to the Wikipedia, it was never translated.
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.
Since when is science fiction rated by the predictions of the authors? I thought this was the work of futurists. Lem was critical of America? Have you read him?
-- 29A the number of the Beast
No idea, I have read him in Spanish and German and in both languages the translations seemed to be very similar in tone. In fact Lem's prose is extremely comical when he wants (just check out the Star Diaries!!!). The only thing from this author I have read in English is Solaris. Awesome. Makes up for a very good short-story duel with Philip K Dick (alternately reading a short story from each author)
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Indeed, I never read that! Now I can go to sleep having learned a really interesting fact about one of my favourite authors and books!
THX :) (sorry, no moderator points left)
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Debt is optional, dude. You cant even claim you need debt for school, full time at in-state schools generally runs ~10k/year which is easily achievable with a student-level job.
In this one, people like me who live well within their means are not considered quite respectable.
I dont personally hold people without debt in low esteem. But more importantly, you shouldnt care: in a world where foolishness is held in high regard, being thought low of is of no consequence.
"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...
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
Lem has ignored one glaring simple fact, "that we are looking in the wrong way."
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
I believe in not crafting logical progressions based on invalid premises.
"Since X, therefore Y" when X is an unknown is unsound. You could perhaps say "probably", and pay respect to the fact that a lot of the knowledge we have is based on assumptions.
Unfortunately one never really "owns" anything (except perhaps their own life). Even when you "own" your home (or car, etc.) it can still be taken from you for not paying your taxes, be they property taxes, unclaimed income taxes, dealing drugs, etc.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire