Comes via Sore Eyes from Charlie Stross’ blog and the commentathon that ensued when he pointed out, quite reasonably (as I’ve been saying to Martin for yonks too, and don’t get me started on eternal bloody life again or We Will Have A Row) that interstellar travel’s a complete and utter pointless fantasy, and that human space travel even within the solar system is unlikely at the very best.
Comment 237 of 450-odd sums it up:
237:
For those just joining, here is a summary of many of the previous comments. Be careful! What you’re about to say might have been said already.
“I don’t know who you are, Mr. So-called Science Fiction writer, but you are a pessimist! You of all people should be pushing fantasy, not poo-poo headedness!”
“I did not read your article, but you are wrong!”
“How can you not understand that humanity will inevitably invent magic ponies, which will carry us to the stars on their backs?!”
“Why are you so narrow-minded, Mister Physics and Numbers?! Leave the equations out of space travel: they don’t belong there!”
Thank you, and good night.
Well, quite.
But this explosion of comments is the flowering of a totally erroneous political mindset, one that as far as I can see doesn’t get discussed much publicly any more in SF fandom foir fear of flamewars.
What seems to have gripped many of the engineering/libertarian-verging-on-wingnut chohort, like Instapundit and his fellow Randite robotarians – is that we can fuck up this planet, but something will save us, be it cryogenics, uploading (selected, special) personalities to computers, or maybe just the sudden miraculous invention of an interstellar hyperdrive and a handy, earth-like planet ready and waiting in some other star system.
It’s the old ‘cavalry to the rescue’ thing again. Jeez, fuck something up, wait for the grownups to come along and fix it, story of the wingnut life. But what if you are the grownup and there is no-one else? Cowboy movies have a lot to answer for.
When is the Right going to get to grips with the fact that we have one planet, and if we fuck it up, we all die. There is no afterlife, there is no Battlestar Galactica, there is no warp drive, Shane’s not coming back and there are no High Elves: there’s this planet, and when it’s dead we’re dead with it.
Nope, easier to bury yourself yourself in magical thinking by treating speculative fiction as though it were real and believing any old bollocks, if it means you can evade responsibility for your collective actions in the here and now.
bjacques
June 20, 2007 at 1:03 pmI used to play SimEarth. The great thing about that game is that if you were about to poison the earth because all your nuclear plants started melting down, you could drop a Monolith on the earthlings, 2001-stylee. The earthers suddenly invents spaceships and take off to colonize the stars (where presumably there are other Monoliths to save their asses next time).
I used to hang with those L5 Society types back in the mid-’80s (bonus points: I worked at NASA), but I just liked space colonies as an incredibly cool thing, like the spaceport / disco in “Heavy Metal,” not as some substitute for a non-fucked-up planet. But it did take me awhile to stop bristling at people who said space colonization was a sucky idea compared to cleaning up Biosphere One (aka The Earth). Sci-fi-romantic ideas are hard to shake, but 20 years on it does sorta kinda make sense to spend the money on earth first, so we don’t, you know, run out of breathable air or drinkable water (or motivate 90% of humanity to wipe out the other 10%) before we get finished building those space colonies.
Aerospace engineers or programmers who read ’70s-era sci-fi authors like Larry Niven or Jerry Pournelle (or Spider Robinson and Orson Scott Card) pride consider themselves “hard-headed realists” when it comes to social programs and go around shouting “TANSTAAFL!!” But they think of space exploration or Singularities as the next best thing to a free lunch: free refills after you buy the first FTL colony ship or solar power satellite.
All those freebies will probably come along one day, a private planetoid for every deserving Libertarian and so on, but not anytime soon and probably not in their lifetimes. Meanwhile they’ll just have to go on sharing the planet with 6 billion collectivists and second-handers (i.e., Ayn Rand villains).
Yeah, I’ve been there. Can you tell?
>:-D
Palau
June 21, 2007 at 3:32 amWhat gets me is that for people with such a vested interest in physics, they always, always forget Newton’s first law and disregard entropy.
Onwards and upwards, always twirling, twirling towards freedom!
Palau
June 21, 2007 at 3:35 amI used to play SimEarth with my kids in its various iterations: one son’s become a bit of a gangster, the other’s in insurance.
Could there by chance be a connection?
bjacques
June 21, 2007 at 1:47 pmIf they’d become railroad tycoons or built the world’s greates rollercoaster, I’d say yes!
Palau
June 22, 2007 at 11:56 amI go for the Bloaty Heads myself. Loved that game :)