On Fri, Jul 27, 2018 at 07:40:50AM -0700, Mirimir wrote:
On 07/27/2018 06:04 AM, John Newman wrote:
On Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 10:58:31PM -0400, Steve Kinney wrote:
<SNIP>
I like Douglas Rushkoff, or his work at least: I make a point of reading everything of his I can get my hands on. He seems to have mastered the art of presenting information in a context that never quite crosses the line to offend Liberal and Oligarch sensibilities, but the data itself tends to convey an inherently radical message to anyone with more than half a brain & clue. He has often been been the first to bring the most useful and interesting "new stuff" to (nearly) mass market audiences. Students of propaganda should not miss the Rushkoff canon.
I think Kurzweil and most of the other "futurists" out there are really just shity wannabe sci-fi writers. Cory Doctorow excluded perhaps, he can actually write at least, and hasn't staked his name and career on predictions of some sort of technological ex machina that will save humanity from its own over-indulgence and inability to think in the long term.
Cory Doctorow is cool, and all, but his fiction is ~lame. I like the ideology pretty much, but the writing just doesn't grab me. But then, I'm rather into action porn, so hey.
LOL! I've never read any of his novels, just a few short stories, a long time ago. I can't remember what I thought of them particularly (which is a bad sign I guess). But I know a lot of people dig it, and I think its at least real literature, not "futurist" daydreaming. I think we are on the cusp of an existential crisis, and the world is about to burn down around us ... :) Literally, even.
Anyway, I'm reminded of Old Bill Burroughs' stuff about the rich planning to escape Earth on nuclear-pulse-driven ships. He didn't flesh it out, but it basically involved planetary-scale destruction.
Neal Stephenson used a nuclear-pulse ship, based on a lot of real research that went into Project Orion, in Anathem. It's a cool idea, and it's something humanity could more or less do right now - if the people with the money had any interest in such things. I really like Anathem, probably read it 3 or 4 times.. one of my favorite NS books.
Now of course, the g-forces involved would have killed everyone in the ships. But consider Vinge's ships, combining bobble tech with nuclear pulse propulsion. Bobbles, for those who don't know Vinge's stuff, are spherical stasis fields. Inside the bobble, time stops for some set external time. So from the outside, bobbles are perfect spherical mirrors. To everything, including acceleration. And you can have a complex structure, with configurations of bobbles nested within bobbles. So basically, the ship periodically drops a nuclear device, bobbles and rides the shock wave, and then de-bobbles and repeats. And there's no limit to the size of the nuclear devices. Could be the entire planet :(
I need to read some Vernor - I don't know his stuff at all, but actually own a couple paperbacks (unread, obviously). Too many fucking books, too little time. -- GPG fingerprint: 17FD 615A D20D AFE8 B3E4 C9D2 E324 20BE D47A 78C7