
Let's put the future behind us - cstross
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/11/lets-put-the-future-behind-us-1.html
======
Animats
The future has less power than expected. From the beginnings of the industrial
revolution up to the first oil crisis, new energy sources were discovered,
exploited, and scaled up. Space travel requires insanely high power levels,
and it was assumed back in the 1950s that those were coming.

They weren't. In the last 50 years, there have been no new power sources.
We're still mostly on oil, coal, natural gas, and hydropower. Even solar cells
and atomic power are now more than 50 years old. The existing technologies
have improved, but there are no new ones.

That's why we don't have heated streets for snow melting, as seen in Disney's
"The Magic Highway" (1958). We don't have much space travel because chemical
rockets hit the power limits of chemistry around 45 years ago.

If controlled fusion is ever cracked, and it's not too expensive, we may see
some of the older futuristic ideas back.

~~~
r00fus
So from just your comment, my take is different - essentially, nuclear power
was demonized, mismanaged and ignored. We have the technology to have an
abundance of terrestrial power to do most things if we'd only embrace nuclear
power.

Look at Philae - because it didn't contain a fission source, it's stuck
without the capability to replenish it's power source. What would have
happened if we weren't scared to death of nuclear power?

[https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-bittersweet-
taste-...](https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-bittersweet-taste-of-
philaes-limited-success-199c49a3a46)

~~~
jacquesm
Nuclear power being demonized is one problem, another problem is that it is
simply very hard to do in a distributed manner without getting into a
proliferation nightmare.

So embracing nuclear power is a bit harder than it may seem from a
technological point of view. Also, since we can currently only use fission,
shielding will always lead to nuclear power being almost exclusively used for
heavy stationary projects or at best something that floats such as a very
large nuclear powered boat. In those cases the weight isn't a huge factor.

~~~
digi_owl
I think proliferation comes under "mismanagement".

This in the sense that rather than opting for a different fuel and matching
reactor for the civilian use, the civilian plants were in essence scaled up
military submarine reactors running on the very same stuff that went boom.

Basically the idea seemed to be to use civilian uses to amplify military
capacity. End result was a mixing of roles that one is hard pressed to
untangle.

------
gdubs
Any West Wing fan will recognize the futurist's "whine" as attributed to Leo
McGarry, the president's chief of staff:

    
    
      Leo McGarry: My generation never got the future it was promised... 
      Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly 
      the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore.
      Technology stopped.
    
      Josh Lyman: The personal computer...?
    
      Leo McGarry: A more efficient delivery system for gossip
      and pornography? Where's my jet pack, my colonies on the
      Moon?

~~~
justincormack
Or is that from They Might Be Giants, the World Before Later On (also 2004)?
Or is there an earlier source?

I'm trapped in a world before later on I'm trapped in a world before later on

Where's my hovercraft? Where's my jet pack?

Where's the font of acquired wisdom that eludes me now?

We're trapped in a world before later on We're trapped in a world before later
on

Where's our telray? Where's our space face? Where are all the complications we
won't see around?

~~~
lisper
You got your tricorder and your communicator -- both in one box no less! (And
smaller and wizzier than they were originally imagined!) You can even get a
phaser if you really want one:

[http://www.wickedlasers.com](http://www.wickedlasers.com)

And we're making pretty good progress on the holodeck. Sure, we're still
waiting for warp drive and the transporter, but still we're batting over 500.
That's not too shabby.

~~~
digi_owl
Communicator, yes. Tricorder, dunno. Not enough sensors really. Then again,
there is the sensordrone that may help with that.

------
DennisP
I'm sure he's right, while there's only one O'Neill colony. But I can't help
thinking that after a couple centuries of exponential growth, when there are
millions of them, that it will be a boon for human freedom.

I'm not convinced that such extensive surveillance will be necessary for
safety purposes. Detectors for explosives, and security around critical points
like airlocks, is likely to be sufficient.

Ultimately, when we can build them out of carbon nanotubes instead of steel,
we'll be able to make them much larger:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKendree_cylinder](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKendree_cylinder)

~~~
joshmarlow
I would worry about relying only on _specific_ countermeasures like explosive
detection. You can only build detectors like that for attack's that you can
imagine; it's always possible someone is a bit more clever and comes up with a
unique/lateral attack.

With extensive surveillance and AI good enough to interpret body-language with
a high-degree of accuracy, you could have a very _general_ detector; as long
as the person _knows_ they are being malicious, I bet it'll generally show up
in his/her body-language.

Which of course opens up the possibility of having patsy's who don't know they
are carrying a bomb or what-not and so have normal body language, so specific
and general detection mechanisms are probably going to be needed...

~~~
cstross
The worst threats aren't deliberate attacks: when you get thousands of people
living somewhere, there will be screw-ups, misunderstandings, and just plain
reckless behaviour.

We're used to living in a (relatively) fault-tolerant environment, where if I
damage my home's plumbing it will, at worst, damage my neighbours apartments
-- it won't kill them instantly by letting all the air out!

~~~
jacquesm
Apartment buildings have a pretty bad failure mode when someone leaves the gas
stove lit and they go for a holiday or if there is a leak and bad ventilation.

All it takes is for the gas to be temporarily shut down or for the owners to
be gone long enough not to notice before a sizable amount of gas has pooled
and a few days later _boom_.

In Romania they make this extra easy by exporting the interface to shut down
the gas to just outside of the apartment door. (This is not the fire-crew
shut-off valve, simply one that the gas company can seal off if you don't pay
your bills without opening the door to your apartment.)

Fortunately most gas gear has a shut-off for that scenario but stoves do not
and a couple of explosions per year due to gas leaks and left open gas taps
result.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=gas+explosion+apartment](https://www.google.com/search?q=gas+explosion+apartment)

------
spacefight
When I read the intro, I thought he's going to write about modern luxury
cruise ships.... not too far off.

~~~
lisper
This. If you've never been on the Oasis of the Seas (or her sister ship, the
Allure) it's worth checking out. Not nearly as dystopian as the article
imagines.

~~~
angersock
Oh, from an environmental standpoint, they're still quite there.

------
waterlesscloud
Maybe it's just the stuff people end up linking, but Stross's blog always
seems so negative. It's a bit of a drag.

~~~
justincormack
Dystopia has always been a glorious part of our culture, in the UK and in
Europe more generally. From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, through HG Wells,
Joseph Conrad (the Machine Stops), Orwell, JG Ballard, not to mention Pink
Floyd, Chris Morris and When the Wind Blows.

We love it, the discordance between what might have been and the plastic
shittiness of what is, and we hate that Hollywood happy ending bollocks where
everyone is going to live for even and ever and everything will be quite
super.

~~~
EdwardCoffin
Regarding The Machine Stops, I think you mean E. M. Forster:

[http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html](http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html)

~~~
justincormack
Yes, of course.

------
DanielBMarkham
_" They've actually made wearing a tracking tag a rewarding experience. Of
course it's entirely voluntary, keeping count of entrants and exits can be
justified as a safety measure, and it saves you from having to carry cash
around in your swimsuit ... but, but, tagging...After you stop spluttering
with indignation, you realize that it's an inevitable part of this
package..."_

I am still waiting for this experience, where I realize that humans must be
tagged and tracked like animals. So far it hasn't come.

We've taken combat-trained soliders -- many times with live weapons -- and put
them on airplanes and flown them around the world. Nobody needed tagging.
We've had random groups of strangers thrown into lifeboats after various
maritime disasters. Nobody needed tagging. We have all kinds of examples where
one bad individual _might_ cause great harm to others, yet taqgging was not an
answer.

The only reason we're talking about tagging now is because the tech is here.
It's convenient -- and much easier than trying to figure out how to have a
civil society. Screw getting governments more responsive: just treat all of
the citizens as potential criminals.

The Panopticon is not the answer, for ludicrously simple reasons that any
half-educated person should be able to ascertain.

</rant>

~~~
jacquesm
In NL they replaced a perfectly good system for train tickets based on paper
with an electronic one that is failure prone but allows the operators to track
the movements of half the population.

------
_random_
Would rather have aging cured. Would make sense to manage things long-term for
everyone.

------
api
It's fascinating to me the power of the spirit of an age. Lord of the Rings
was in all its explicit elements a novel pining for agrarian feudalism. Yet in
spite of this it could not help but be progressive. Were it written in the
climate of today's never ending 70s tape loop, the moral would be that Frodo
should never have left The Shire to begin with.

------
pavel_lishin
The Roton looks like a пепелац from Kin Dza Dza.

------
mazork
The article was interesting, but am I alone thinking that those tenebrous,
click-baity titles are bad ?

~~~
gaius
Also while I enjoy his writing, I feel it's in bad taste to submit your own
stuff. It seems pushy.

~~~
jacquesm
You mean like this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3651482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3651482)
?

~~~
gaius
Yeah a thousand days ago, nice one.

