Sf is about futures, not the future. (It is also about everything else but a lot of it is about futures.)
A Torrent Of Faces by James Blish and Norman L. Knight (see
here) is set in 2794. In the twenty-eighth century in Poul Anderson's Technic History, the Terran Empire annexes Ansa while Unan Besar is being colonized. The two futures could not be more different. Blish and Knight imagine one trillion people, all but a tenth of one percent of them unemployed, living (if I have understood the text correctly) in one hundred thousand cities spread across Earth. There is interplanetary travel but no prospect of an FTL drive or of interstellar travel.
A Torrent Of Faces is a more serious attempt at fictional futurology but neither scenario is probable. Will an FTL drive be developed? Is the galaxy full of intelligent life? Will political and economic decision-makers maintain a massive unemployed global population in comfort? The answer to the third question is definitely no.
9 comments:
kaor, paul!
first, even assuming the existence of an economy capable of housing, feeding, and clothing a trillion people on earth/terra, I believe there will be grave problems. what will that trillion, if they can't or don't have to make a living, DO??? It's my belief most will not be interested in being scholars, philosophers, aesthetes, etc. we are far more more likely to end up with something like what is seen in Anderson's "Quixote and the Windmill," billions of people succumbing to drink, drugs, despair, ennui, apathy, frustration, destructive rage.
sean
Sean,
That problem is mentioned although there are also many amateur scientists, researchers, book-binders and printers, under-the-counter speculators etc.
But I think that the biggest flaw in the novel, published 1968, is that the authors did not realize that populations with comfortable life-styles and access to contraceptives will reduce, not increase, in numbers.
Paul.
kaor, paul!
your comments still does not address the problem I touched on: what will people DO in any kind of post scarcity economy where very few or none has anything real to do? One scenario is that seen in GENESIS, where after AIs took over making all the real decision making, and humans became pampered idle pets, they more and more lost all heart even for reproducing, and mankind died out.
Sean
Sean,
But we have discussed this before. "People" in a completely different society will not be people as we know them or as they have been. With resources and will (both possible), an educational and social system would be able to develop the potential of every individual, all the previously untapped potentialities of the brain and of individual personalities. We have not scratched the surface. The sky is the limit. Theists believe that God created everyone for a purpose. I do not believe that but I do believe that everyone can find purpose, meaning, value and significance if they are not held back, suppressed and alienated by society.
Paul.
Paul: human behavioral flexibility is not infinite; it operates within fixed biological constraints, if we don't assume genetic modification.
We're mammals, and the products of an evolutionary history, and with that we're just stuck.
I think we might eventually have a civilization where literally everyone is a philosopher, a creative artist, an athlete and many other things but that might take a while! In the nearer future, everyone has something they can do: cabinet-making; motor mechanics; sports; playing a musical instrument etc.
Kaor, Paul!
But I can't believe in what you hope for. BECAUSE it contradicts all the real world evidence given us by actual human history and behavior. Nor do I expect that to ever change. Genetic engineering of the kind mentioned by Stirling is far more likely to produce something like his monstrous Homo drakensis.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
We do not need genetic engineering to change our ways of learning and living. We have changed from hunters and gatherers to what we are now. The real world evidence is of our ability to change.
But this is only what I think. We began by discussing a novel by James Blish and Norman L. Knight and, while that work offers both hope and warnings about the future, it does not describe the kind of change that I am talking about.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Then we have to agree to disagree. MY view remains that the best we can hope for in any era of history are societies and nations which are not too terribly bad. I prefer realism to what I consider Utopianism.
Ad astra! Sean
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