Just The Caffeine Talking

The Pessimistic View

In my last 'blog post I may have come across as a little over-pessimistic. My theme was the fundamental impossibility of telling "realistic" future stories. In particular, I mentioned that by the time humans venture to other star systems, they will no longer be human by our standards.

Is that true?

Well, consider. It's going to take a while for human civilization to expand into the Solar System. Probably longer than I would wish — I've pretty much given up on being able to afford a vacation in space before I'm too frail to go. But I do think expansion beyond Earth is inevitable. In time there will come a point when the bulk of human economic production is off Earth, and sometime later the bulk of human population will no longer be on Earth, either. The only question is when that will happen.

So how long will it take?

Depending on who you listen to, the space industry will be somewhere between one and three trillion dollars by 2040. Now the space industry is not the same as industry in space, but that's where most of the future growth has to come from. The more you can make in space, the less you have to launch on expensive rockets (and yes, even a reusable SpaceX BFR with costs to orbit approximating FedEx international overnight rates is still expensive).

Anyway, let's take the low end figure of 1 trillion dollars as our starting point, and the United Launch Alliance's estimate of 1000 people in space by roughly the same year of 2040. Even if the space economy grows at an anemic 1 percent annual average, that means it would nearly double by the end of the century. By 2200, it would be 5 trillion in constant dollars. If we assume the population scales with the value, that means 5000 people living in space a century and a half from now.

That's pathetic. Where's my interplanetary civilization?

Ah, but behold the magic of compound interest. A thousand years later, in A.D. 3200, those 5000 people have become 100 million. And a thousand years after that, the number of people in space is 2 trillion! So even with a low-ball estimate for growth, the number of people off Earth will surpass this planet some time in the middle of the Fourth Millennium. That may seem like a long time, but by the standards of everything except our mayfly lifespans, that's nothing. If the human species lasts only a million years — and the oldest known Homo Sapiens remains are about 300,000 years old — then for two-thirds of human history, we will be an interplanetary species, and probably an interstellar species for a significant fraction of that time.

Arthur C. Clarke put it better. I can't find the exact quotation, but to paraphrase, "If Mankind survives as long as the least successful of those creatures we deride as Nature's failures, the dinosaurs, for all but a vanishingly brief instant in the childhood of the race, the word 'ship' will mean 'spaceship.'"

However, there are a couple of things which do advance faster than compound-interest economic and population growth: scientific knowledge and technology. Consider the famous Moore's Law: that computer processing power roughly doubles every 18 months. If computing power continues to double every couple of years for the next millennium, we're looking at a world with machines something like ten to the 150th power smarter than what we've got today. That's ten followed by 150 zeroes. A googol of Googles.

That is why I said the first humans to visit other star systems won't be human by our standards. Individuals will command millions of times more information and processing power than our entire civilization possesses right now. Even if we can capture only a millionth of the Sun's energy output, individuals will have megawatts of power at their disposal.

Those aren't humans. Those are gods.

There's a common trope in science fiction: the Elder Space Gods. Ancient alien civilizations with powers far beyond our comprehension, who've been around since before intelligent life arose on Earth. Well, here's a data point: so far all our searching hasn't uncovered any signs of technological civilizations elsewhere in the Galaxy. We know that planets are common, we think that life should be common, so where is everybody? Well, someone's got to be first, and it looks like we're elected. Congratulations, humanity: you get to be the Elder Space Gods. Let's try to be the benevolent white-robes-and-glowy-crystals kind, okay?

One more thing to blow your mind: this picture of godlike humans as the Elder Race of the Galaxy is the pessimistic scenario.

Pure Fantasy

Most of science fiction is pure fantasy.

Seriously. Take my own story A Darkling Sea. It involves humans traveling to another star system and interacting with aliens. That's fantasy, right there. There's no way to actually travel faster than the speed of light, and we have no evidence of any other intelligent life in the Milky Way. I might as well have written about people sailing a magic crystal galleon to Elfland.

Sticking to "hard science" is no help. By the time humans can travel to other star systems, they won't be human, not in any way we would recognize. They probably won't even have permanent physical forms, for instance. It's much simpler to travel between stars as data. And a future human civilization which is willing and able to spare the energy to launch starships — even if it's a once-a-decade or once-a-century shoestring operation — must still have access to energy and resources on a scale we can barely imagine. A "realistic" story about interstellar travel would be a tale of gods, not men. 

So we're not going to fly off to Earthlike worlds beneath other suns and start homesteading. We've discovered plenty of extrasolar planets, but only a handful have even the potential to be habitable by something we would recognize as alive. Nor will we terraform planets into new Earths. The effort and time scales involved are simply staggering, and the justification for all that work simply doesn't exist. In another few decades the big problem for humans will be depopulation.

Don't even start about time travel.

Well, what if we retreat to a more sociological view of science fiction? Fiction about the impact of new technologies on society? But that's pure fantasy, too. To understand the impact of a new technology on a future society the author has to have a complete understanding of that future society and then of how the technology would affect it. Nobody really understands present-day society, let alone a hypothetical future. 

We're not really exploring taboo ideas and "dangerous visions," either. For the most part, science fiction writers are desperately conventional. Example: suppose it were possible to accurately determine a person's aptitudes and know in advance what job he or she is best suited for. That's extremely likely to occur as we learn more about the brain. Suppose someone were to write a story set in a future where being assigned to a career was the norm. What story would they write?

I can predict with 99 percent certainty that the story would be about someone defying the system, and overcoming adversity to do something the brain scans say they shouldn't be good at. In short, a story repeating the shibboleths that have defined Western liberal society for the past two centuries. A story so brave and transgressive that Washington Irving and Sir Walter Scott would nod approvingly at it.

You want edgy? You want "transgressive"? Let's see a story that doesn't reinforce the Western college-educated progressive conventional wisdom of the Current Year. Let's see a story defending intolerance, or fundamentalist religion, or inequality. The only really transgressive writer I can think of is John Norman, and guess what? He is reviled, because his fiction actually does violate contemporary norms. It's icky. We don't really like that when it happens.

So what are we science fiction writers doing, if we're not depicting the future or exploring new ideas? Well, we're telling tales of pure fantasy, but we live in a "scientific" era so we dress up our fairy tales in spacesuits.

And that's okay. Storytellers have to fit their stories to the audience's understanding. When Homer wrote of strange creatures and exotic islands, he had to send Odysseus off to the remote and mysterious western half of the Mediterranean (and even then he put the whole voyage into a tale-within-a-tale narrated by a character famous for his skill at lying). When an anonymous English monk translated Beowulf into Old English, he also changed it to suit a Christian audience.

G.K. Chesterton once said, "Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed." Science fiction carries on that tradition. We tell our readers that the dragons of an uncaring cosmos can be overcome. The monstrous distances, the demon of entropy, the terror of discovering that we are nothing but animate matter. We show those dragons being beaten. It's worth doing.

Thoughts On The Dreaded Backstory

David McGrogan writes interesting roleplaying games, and he had some interesting thoughts about fictional characters in his most recent 'blog post. You can read it here. If you're lazy and want me to just tell you what it says, his main point is that the urge to bolt a backstory onto archetypical characters (like James Bond or Darth Vader or The Mad Hatter) is all the rage in current media, because it's a way to "monetize the franchise" or whatever the buzz phrase of the week is in Hollywood. The obvious current example is the forthcoming film about Young Han Solo, but we've also seen Young Sherlock Holmes and Young Indiana Jones and even multiple competing origin stories for the Wicked Witch of the West.

The problem, of course, is that adding the backstory diminishes the very archetypical quality that makes the character popular in the first place. How many Star Wars fans would be just as happy not knowing young Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker's opinions on the topic of sand?

Mr. McGrogan isn't the first to notice this. His 'blog post reminded me of something the legendary screenwriter William Goldman wrote in his book Which Lie Did I Tell?, about the lion-hunting film he wrote, The Ghost and the Darkness.* The movie was not a huge success, and Goldman identifies one reason as Michael Douglas's desire to explore the backstory of his enigmatic expert hunter character.

Douglas (and, after some arm-twisting, the director) thought about the hunter as a character rather than an archetype, which in Goldman's opinion weakened the role and the film, because instead of a super-cool lion hunter he turned into a guy with a string of failures in his past. In his book Goldman uses another example: would it really improve Casablanca if we found out exactly why Rick Blaine is an exile? Our vague imaginings are better than what the writers could ever come up with. "I like to think you killed a man," says Renault, and that's good enough for us.

Know when to stop explaining.

*About the real-life horror-movie killer lions of Tsavo. If it wasn't true nobody would believe it.