
An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence/an-astrobiologist-asks-a-sci_fi-novelist-how-to-survive-the-anthropocene
======
harshreality
> [KSR on the Fermi Paradox] My feeling is, the universe is too big, and life
> too planet-specific for intelligent life forms to communicate with each
> other, except for by accident and very rarely.

What does the possible variation in life forms have to do with the nature of
communications mediums or techniques? Encoding might be different but the
mediums used will depend on level of technological advancement and not the
specifics of how the life forms communicate face to face. (That's speciesist.
I meant lifeform-to-lifeform.)

I love that KSR mentions Banks' Culture novels.

While I'd agree that biosphere sustainability is critical, I don't think it's
the only critical problem, or even the most short-term problem, we may have. I
may be paranoid, but I'm very worried that there is a Great Filter[1], and
that it is some sort of abuse/misuse/weaponization of biotech at, or just
beyond, our current level of technology. Just past that would be concern about
unfriendly AI.

There are also some existential threats to modern advanced civilization due to
low-probability but unmanageable-if-they-occur problems. Other than an
asteroid we can't detect in time, there are also supervolcano eruptions that
decimate world food supplies (volcanic winter).[2]

[1]
[http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html](http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano)

~~~
sampo
> _I 'm very worried that there is a Great Filter[1], and that it is some sort
> of abuse/misuse/weaponization of biotech at, or just beyond, our current
> level of technology._

So you are very worried, that the Great Filter is in the somewhat near future
of humankind.

But in the link you gave [1], the author personally thinks [2] that the Great
Filter is probably in our past, in the evolution of higher life forms and
intelligence.

[1]
[http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html](http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html)

[2] "I personally think that most of the Great Filter is most likely to be
explained by the steps I think we understand the least about: the steps in the
biological evolution of life and intelligence"

~~~
rbanffy
Anthropocentric climate change can be our big filter. Don't underestimate it.

~~~
theworst
While I agree with what you say, I think your tone is a bit hyperbolic. Your
last sentence is Polonious-level "advice" that is as cliched as it is obvious.
The real trick is to not over- or under-estimate AGW.

Bad things could happen if we over-estimate significant events, just as much
as if we under-estimate.

------
swartkrans
Kim Stanley Robinson's books are all pretty fantastic. I recommend the Red
Mars trilogy as well as 2312. His vision of the future is exciting and
optimistic, his deep knowledge of science and technology topics is
enlightening, and his writing ability and character creation are fun and
imaginative. It's great stuff for any hard science fiction fans.

~~~
aetherson
I yield to no one in my appreciation for the Mars trilogy, but 2312 is a lazy,
stupid book.

Its world is incoherent -- the premise is that in 300 years of advance, in a
solar system where Mars and Venus have both been terraformed in a timescale in
under 250 years or so, where humanity has near-magical technology, the
problems on earth are EXACTLY the same problems that an academic liberal like
KSR thinks are the problems today (basically: global warming + the developing
world is poor). Somehow, we can turn Venus into a pastoral world but we can't
scrub a few trillion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere? Really?

His thinking on every issue makes those plastic wading pools look deep. His
treatment of economics in particular makes me think that he once heard someone
describe economics, but only in a language he only partially understands.

His proposed solutions range from the simplistic (really smart computers make
the planned economies that he longs for right now more plausible -- novel) to
the utterly insane (the way that we solve environmental catastrophe and
poverty on earth is literally to air-drop animals into northern Canada).

As a political novel, 2312 is deathly dull. Go to any college campus or most
of the internet, and you can hear every concern KSR raises described in much
greater nuance and detail, and reasonable attempts at much more convincing
solutions thought up. As a science-fiction novel, 2312 reiterates the Mars
trilogy without adding anything. But its true, breathtaking failure is in
stitching together its (bad) political novel with its (rehearsed) science
fiction novels, the terrible amalgamation making both components worse due to
just how poorly the two sides fit. The science fiction part makes mockery of
the political part -- these political problems simply do not make sense in
that world. The political part drags the book off trap in the science fiction.
It's really quite impressive how bad it is.

There is a way to address poverty and environmental catastrophe in a
technologically advanced future of terraforming. 2312's approach of just ham-
handedly putting today's unaltered problems into a setting that is otherwise
quite alien is not that way.

~~~
sanoli
> the problems on earth are EXACTLY the same problems that an academic liberal
> like KSR thinks are the problems today (basically: global warming + the
> developing world is poor).

Well, if you were to tell someone in 1714 that we had gone to the Moon, had
robots on Mars, had eradicated smallpox and cured a bunch of other deadly
stuff, had the internet on everyone's pockets, nuclear energy, etc, they
probably wouldn't believe that at the same time we'd still have people living
like they do in some parts of Africa.

------
markbnj
I have no particular expertise, but I'll just toss this out there: I suspect
that the popular modern view that the Earth and our biosphere are "tightly
balanced and interwoven" is just wrong. I doubt that any system requiring such
careful balancing and sporting such immutable inter-dependencies could have
ever come into being through random evolutionary changes. I think rather that
the biosphere is incredibly resilient, independent, and that nothing we or
anything else does to it short of moving it further from or closer to the sun,
stripping its atmosphere, or burning off its water will change its essential
nature as a warm, watery rock supporting an incredible diversity of life.

~~~
akiselev
It will take more than nuclear winters, volcanoes, or asteroids to wipe out
life on Earth. Short of a supernova or another event that heats the surface of
the earth to hundreds of degrees Centigrade, everything from archaeic bacteria
to tardigrades will survive any catastrophic event and eventually more complex
life will evolve again. The earth's biosphere will far outlive any
civilization.

But we're not talking about tardigrades and bacteria: we're talking about
millions upon millions of species that _do_ have complex interdependencies
with each other and the environment in general. We have no way to predict
which species, when together decimated, might drastically impact our survival
because they hunted pests that killed major oxygen producers or transmitted
diseases through different animal and human populations. We have no way to
know where in the equilibrium we are and which levers might set off a
catastrophic downward spiral.

Hell, if there is a nuclear winter or asteroid impact, we are far enough along
technologically that many humans, maybe even millions, would survive and
rebuild civilization (say using nuclear power, chemical engineering,
desalination, and hydroponic agriculture to survive underground until the
environment clears up). I guess it just depends on how you define the
biosphere and survival.

~~~
marcus_holmes
We survived one back in the sixth century [1]. There's some speculation that
the European Dark Ages were caused by this impact rather than the end of Roman
rule (the traditional interpretation).

But the biosphere got itself back to its previous state remarkably quickly,
apparently, though it's hard to tell if that event contributed to the end of
the Medieval Warm Period and the start of the Little Ice Age.

[1][http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1248518/Did-a...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1248518/Did-
asteroid-strike-Australia-plunge-Anglo-Saxon-England-mini-ice-age.html)
apologies for the appalling quality of the reference but I couldn't find the
journal articles from google.

------
javert
Robinson is indirectly proposing that humans alive now massively sacrifice
their well-being, with a severely crippeled economy and totalitarian
government.

In exchange for some non-existent, hypothetical future that nobody alive today
(i.e. those who would actually suffer under his proposal) would ever
experience.

This is absolutely monstorous. This is Pol Pot-level evil.

~~~
harshreality
Sure, let's instead roll the dice that whatever's in our best interest now,
and in the near future, won't be _too_ bad for future generations, despite
that we can see that we're altering the biosphere in significant ways without
a good understanding of the long-term effects and with no plan to reverse the
changes we're making and have made, much less a plan and the technology to
deal with unforeseen consequences. Is that not monstrous?

What if our decisions, due to the culture and lifestyles of developed nations,
free markets, and short-to-mid-term democratic attention spans, lead to an
ecological catastrophe that can't be technologically ameliorated 100 years
from now? What if it could have been mitigated at present with modest
intellectual effort and modest cuts to standards of living?

I recognize many problems with the sort of governance that would be required
to mitigate long-term ecological and technological problems (ecological
collapse, grey goo, unfriendly AI), but calling it "Pol Pot Level" evil to
trade some quality of life in the present for reduced risk of having the
biosphere take a wrong turn a generation or two from now, seems polemical. If
reduced quality of life increases mortality rates, that's unfortunate, but
concern about people _today_ should not trump concern about people _in the
future_ , to the extent we can foresee risks due to stressing the biosphere in
ways we have no empirical analogs for.

I think the popular idea that technology can and will overcome problems we
cause in our biosphere, is unsupported (and unsupportable, even if it's true)
by evidence. We either take it on faith or we don't; I choose not to.

~~~
jerf
The idea that we can be 100% confident that our current actions are guaranteed
to create ecological catastrophe is just another iteration of the eternal
short-sighted idea that the future will be just what we expect based on the
fashionable ideas of today. The future may be laughing at our generation's
idea that we're going to wreck the planet after practical fusion cleaned
everything. Or they may be laughing at us worrying so much about "the
environment" after the Great Civilization Collapse of 2023 reduces humanity to
2 billion anyhow. Or they may be laughing at how much time we spent worrying
about ecological collapse while doing nothing about the obviously-inevitable-
in-hindsight AI uprising. Or they may just be laughing at our concerns about
environmental collapse as a broad spectrum of greener technologies ever so
slowly but ever so surely took over and our mastery of our environment
continued to grow to the point that we were easily able to have high tech
_and_ a nice environment.

For that matter, they may laugh at how much time we spent worrying about the
environment as they live under the iron rule of the global government we
created to "solve" the environmental problem, only for the global government
to observe that if the "problem" is ever actually solved they have no reason
to exist anymore, so, "mysteriously", the environmental problem is never
solved, until it too grows too large to survive under its ponderous weight and
collapses.

We don't know the future. We quite profoundly don't know the future. We
honestly can't plan for it. We can only try to do our best today.

~~~
calibraxis
> We honestly can't plan for it. We can only try to do our best today.

The article mentions "long-range planning" as an aspect of intelligence.

People incapable of effectively affecting their future by taking action now
(requiring "planning") are generally considered hapless. No one anyone'd want
to work with, except to assist as with a helpless baby.

The article also mentions sustainable anarchist visions, in contrast to the
shadowy "global government we created to 'solve' the environmental problem"
you mention. (Or does that somehow mean the US, the world hegemon?) In fact,
he mentions our _" global economic system in the form of institutions like the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund"_, which obviously aren't
designed for environmental sustainability.

~~~
jerf
"The article mentions "long-range planning" as an aspect of intelligence."

But our intelligence is dominated by the unpredictability of the world,
including the six billion other approximately-equally-intelligent beings
taking an active interest in affairs. The "time value of money" isn't just an
economic concept, it's a fundamental truth that the further in the future you
look, the less you can predict it, exponentially, and frankly disturbingly
quickly.

We do not know what the future will hold, and anyone trying to plan 50 years
in advance will be laughed at by those 50 years in the future. That includes
you, that includes me, and I say that without any regard to the IQ either of
us has, collectively or separately. We _do not know_ , and the only thing I
guarantee is that any plans you make will be laughably wrong.

But before you think this is just defeatism, remember, I said that we can try
to do our best _today_. We should do what we can based on the problems we see
today... not just because they will compound tomorrow, but because they are
problems today.

However, claimed plans justified by _any_ vague handwavings more than a decade
or so into the future should simply be discounted.

Heck, step back a mere 17 years and read about "the end of history". Sure hope
you're not still following any plans based on how _that_ worked out.

~~~
Retric
Playing the devils advocate. While I don't agree with his long term idea,
looking at the last 17 years don't really suggest he was all that wrong.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man#mediaviewer/File:Freedom_in_the_world.svg)

As to predicting things, the last 50 years have changed things far less than
you might expect. 50 years ago we had Jet aircraft, satellites, cars did
80+MPH, computers used silicon transistors, nuclear reactors, H-Bomb, ICBM's,
you could talk to people on the other side of the planet. Doctors could easily
write a prescription for antibiotics or order an XRay to see what's wrong with
you. There where even some video games.

As far as peoples day to day lives transistors got really cheap which enabled
lot's of stuff. But, the top 500 super computers pull 274 Pflop/s vs 223
Pflop/s the same time last year so that seems to be slowing down.
[http://www.top500.org/lists/2014/06/](http://www.top500.org/lists/2014/06/)

Sure, tech has been improving but most of the tech that's changing peoples
lives is actually fairly old. The Internet is about to hit 40, Cat scans are
47, Cellphones are 41, and DNA was discovered 61 years ago.

Politicly things have changed a lot less than you might think. Most borders
are about where they where 50 years ago, Israel was still having issues with
it's neighbors abortion was a major political issue in the US etc etc.

