Bruce Sterling on The Future

[telomerase]

Nuclear rocket engines good enough for human colonization of the Solar system date from the 1960s:

http://freedom.orlingrabbe.com/lfetimes/neil_armstrong.htm

Bruce is taking Steampunk to its extreme, and trying to pretend that we have 21st century computers mixed with steamships.

 

[Byron Quick]

People--GOOD PEOPLE--are dying to prop up the idiotic fantasies of middle-aged engineers. It's sick.

To date, the people who have died in the endeavour of manned space flight have been holders of degrees such as aerospace engineering, medical degrees with flight specialties, and related specialties...not to mention being volunteers.


Think they were "sick" too? The Columbia Seven's families don't...and they support continued manned space flight.

Tell you what...I'm willing to ride the next one even if they know it's not coming back.

Hell, I'd take the ride up if they said I'd have to attempt re-entry in a hang glider.

Some folk...in their quest for safety, security, and the avoidance of risk would still be living in caves in Europe.

 

[Chris Rhines]

ALL fiction is fantasy, to one degree or another. I detect a fair bit of hypocrisy in those people who sniff at sci-fi, but eagerly snap up novels about successful pro-gun revolutions in the United States...

Sterling is pretty well on with a couple of his criticisims, namely the incandecesnt light bulb and prisons. The rest of it is pretty much twaddle. His comments on coal-fired power reveal a tremendous ignorance on that subject, unsuited to a writer of science fiction. Internal combustion engines are obsolete tech to be sure, but I distrust the new-tech obsession with hydrogen and fuel cells (hell, Sterling Cycle engines have been around for a zillion years. Not cool enough, I guess...)

As for manned space flight, well, what can I say? Some people want to stay on this rock, and that's fine, it has it's nice spots. But the people who want everyone to stay on this rock deserve only contempt.

- Chris

 

[Mark Tyson]

Chris Rhines:

I don't hold my nose up at ALL science fiction. But warp drives and the like are just not science. There's nothing wrong with fantasy - I just don't like fantasy masquerading as science. Bending some of the rules of science and leaving some thing unexplained is OK, but just pulling all kinds of technology out of your ear like so many writers do? There just isn't any science involved in some of the sci-fi movies and books out there! They just make up whatever they want.

But I guess you're right that all fiction is fantasy to some degree. 2001 didn't explain how the monolith and its builders worked, it was just assumed that aliens so advanced would have technology unimaginable to us.

So what do I think is "Real" science fiction? Well, I liked Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson for one. It's all based on technology that's understood in principle today. Check it out.

Edited to add: I don't really read novels about pro-gun revolutions either.

 

[tyme]

So aliens arriving on earth is ok, but warp drives are not? How do you know warp drives/timetravel/teleportation are impossible?

Where do you draw the line between scifi and sci-fantasy? Somewhere between Red and Blue mars, or between Blue and Green mars, or neither? What about Sheffield's Higher Education? Or Ender's Game (especially the end)? Or on the computer/neural side of things, what about Neuromancer or Snow Crash?

 

[longeyes]

We need big goals to stretch our Reason and our Imagination, otherwise
we will devolve into mud-stuck navel-gazers, and not even at our own but
Britney's.

 

[spartacus2002]

Regarding the "end the prisons" concept:

We can all agree that there are some folks who should probably be locked up due to either the heinous nature of their crimes or their proclivity to commit them: pedophiles, serial killers, others I'm too tired to name right now. However, there are other ways to punish, deter, and rehabilitate folks who break certain laws, without incarcerating them.

Here are certain facts that you might not hear much about, but since I've been both a prosecutor and a defender, I think I can speak about them semi-intelligently at least:
1. For certain segments of the population, "Doing Time" is no longer something to be feared or avoided, but in fact has become a rite of passage or sign of manhood, giving the individual street cred.
2. Prisons are institutes of higher education on how to become a better criminal. Guess what the inmates do: They spend much time passing secrets, tactics, and tips of the trade back and forth.
3. If you stop incarcerating folks for victimless crimes, i.e., vices (drug use, prostitution, etc.), your prison population would plummet.
4. Many of the theories of "lock 'em up" have their basis in the assumption that there are no other valid ways to punish, deter, or rehabilitate. In other words, it's like the dad who always administers an asswhipping instead of taking away the car or the TV; he cannot think outside the box.

Until we start thinking of law and order more in terms of intelligently creating an unwillingness in the general population to commit certain acts that we call "crimes" instead of thinking of it in terms of moral outrage that someone would DARE to break the law, the system will remain broken.

 

[tyme]

[blockquote]We need big goals to stretch our Reason and our Imagination, otherwise we will devolve into mud-stuck navel-gazers, and not even at our own but Britney's.[/blockquote]
Don't look now, but I think we're there already.

 

[swifter]

What C.R.Sam said...
"specially if they pee in it
Tom

 

[Mikul]

A lot of the technologies that we use a quite silly if you look at them.

The gasoline engine. What a mess! Dirty, painfully inefficient, and we know it. The inane complexity of the modern automobile engine is proof that we know the gig is up, so we add dozens of gadgets and doohickeys onto the fire in the can to try to eek some degree of efficency. And why? Because no one wants to try something new. The auto is cheap because there is a HUGE industry behind it with major values of scale. Gas (as in the vapor state of matter, not gasoline) powered vehicles would be better, but too expensive until it was accepted on a larger scale.

Space exploration is a joke. There seems to be no goal and no limit to the silly projects that NASA will waste money on (why does NASA launch commercial satellites at a LOSS?). This isn't kindergarten art class where we play around until something comes out right. This stuff is beyond expensive. Lets have one clear goal and work at it until we succeed or prove that it cannot be done and then pick a new goal.

Yea, I know that reality is a dirty thing, but I agree with quite a bit of what he says.