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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?
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?
Maybe immortality cancels out curiosity.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
So, interstellar Twitter is *not* a sign of an advanced civilization.
(Though that would have been my guess all along.)
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.)
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
Eric Frank Russell had the same criticism, and was far more lighthearted about it.
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).
> 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.
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"
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.
Precisely because of that, any alien race capable of reaching us, would have to be too far ahead us, it would be a difference bigger that the current difference between humans and ants.
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?
"stupid North Americans driving tanks" are genius compared to an ant, if the 2 of them could communicate. No matter how stupid they are, just for being able to drive, they must be able to understand concepts far beyond the most intelligent ant.
And the difference of such alien civilization (one capable of contacting us from a so huge distance), compared to us humans, would be far bigger than the difference between us and the ants.
This is another example of how bad slashdot has become (absurd posts being modded better than a reasoned post). I feel less eager to use my mod points right now, I dont see the point of using them.
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
"Roadside Picnic" is by the Strugatski brothers.
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.
The title is "The Twenty-sixth and Last Voyage". According to the Wikipedia, it was never translated.
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