
Asimov's Foundation - thallukrish
https://medium.com/@thallukrish/asimovs-foundation-39a79fc03545
======
eesmith
> Why would I bang my head on obscure stuff if my next meal or a decent living
> is assured to me ?

What sort of view is this?

We know that many people do exactly that.

Darwin was a self-funded "gentleman scientist", as were many other scientists
of his era. (See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist.))
Why did Darwin work on obscure stuff like insect pollination when a decent
living was assured to him?

Why does Elon Musk work on "obscure stuff" like rocket science, when he has no
need to work for the rest of his entire life?

On less grandiose levels, I know people who would spend their time doing FOSS
if they had a basic income, instead of making a living developing commercial
proprietary software.

We also know some lottery winners will continue to work - because _most people
like to be engaged in productive activities_.

> Because science fiction is the opposite of history, it is a wild painting of
> the future. And you find that human race wherever they are, whether they are
> confined to this tiny planet or spread across the Milky way in the future,
> they never change.

I don't think that's the right view of SF. SF authors rarely paint about the
future. They paint about the present day in a different and often futuristic
context. And they write for what their readership knows.

Asimov's future humans are mid-20th century Americans ... in space.

But even then, Asimov's humans _do change_. The Earth culture of the Caves of
Steel are different than the Spacer culture.

As an even more direct counter-example, the Gaia project in Foundation and
Earth is a deliberate attempt to make a different type of human. From
[https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Gaia](https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Gaia)
"the human beings on Gaia, under robotic guidance, not only evolved their
ability to form an ongoing group consciousness, but also extended this
consciousness to the fauna and flora of the planet itself, even including
inanimate matter. As a result the entire planet became a super-organism."

If that's not change, I don't know what is.

