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Science fiction and the death of the sun

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Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#121

Post by bccdee »

perilunar wrote: post #59

I've never really understood the pessimism of the dying sun trope in SF. If humans are still around in billions of years then our descendants will either have spread throughout the galaxy, or will have the technology to either tweak the Sun to not go nova, or to move the Earth out of harm's way. Seems like a major failure of the imagination. (Also: the idea that we need to find other planets to live on if the Sun goe…

That's awfully optimistic.

For one, why would we colonize the galaxy? We probably can't beat lightspeed. It'll take generations to get anywhere, plus a huge upfront investment, and for what? We can't send resources back, so it is not an investment. Terraforming would be extremely challenging, extremely slow, and would (if we were very, very lucky) still just get us a worse version of Earth. It just isn't a rational choice.

"Tweaking the sun" is probably unfeasible. We could crash our entire planet into the sun and it'd have little effect. The sun is really really really big and we are really really really small. Similarly, adjusting Earth's orbit would require a colossal amount of energy and reaction mass which we just don't have, and probably never will.

There's no reason to assume that humanity will inevitably advance through some exponential techno-apotheosis such that we'll eventually be able to do anything we want. Instead, it's much more sensible to assume technological growth will follow a sigmoid curve. Technological advancement has a ceiling determined by our resources and abilities, and that ceiling is almost certainly too low to accommodate a galactic civilization of stellar engineers.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#122

Post by [deleted] »

clarionbell wrote: post #60

New Sun by Gene Wolfe is a great example of that genre. Also of the unreliable narrator, as the protagonist is writing his autobiography, is not well educated and suffers from rather interesting neurological divergence (he forgets nothing). All in all, it makes for a very good series. Especially once you realize that you are reading about sci-fi world, as written about by a person living in essentially ancient societ…

[deleted]

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#123

Post by atombender »

You can't have an article about the dying Earth genre and not mention The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.

The novel is deep and mysterious, involving — among many other things — a far-future Earth in which aliens have placed a black hole inside the sun.

It's one of those books whose true meaning and cryptic clues are mined endlessly on mailing lists, forums, and podcasts (there are at least four that cover this book).

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#124

Post by JumpCrisscross »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #51
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scientific method didn’t exist before the Enlightenment. We had tolerant societies before the present. But the notion that science should trump religion is modern. That doesn’t imply a glorious present. Just a qualitatively different one from any period before the modern era.

> But the notion that science should trump religion is modern. Not particularly: in both the Medieval and Islamic worlds, the writings of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) introduced this concept. And, then as now, it depended on an irrationalism about religion (or a view that religion was a sort of noble lie for controlling the masses) that was widely rejected by the medievals who tended to prefer a harmony model of natural reas…

> in both the Medieval and Islamic worlds, the writings of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) introduced this concept

That isn't "the scientific method replac[ing] religion as the explanation for physical phenomena," it isn't a society being organised around the principle of scientific supremacy, it's a single leading thinker being ahead of their time. The Almoravids were a conservative Islamic society.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#125

Post by fractallyte »

ubermonkey wrote: post #112
fractallyte wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He relished challenging readers' thinking and preconceptions. You can make up your own mind - there's a collection of his Astounding/Analog editorials in this book: https://archive.org/details/collectededitori0000john And then there's this, Jeannette Ng's acceptance speech for the John W Campbell Best New Writer Award: https://youtu.be/sQ58zf0vzB0?feature=shared (She began by calling him "Joseph Campbell", with the a…

>He relished challenging readers' thinking and preconceptions. Yes, on things like (checks notes) segregation. Huh.

He wasn't afraid to dive into the details of topics that many people shun or simply dismiss.

He made arguments, and encouraged counter-arguments. Without that, there would be blind consensus, and at worst, societal stagnation. It's his relentless urge to shake things up that made him one of the most prominent figures in science fiction.

It's very telling that there wasn't some kind of disagreement with Jeannette Ng's shockingly ignorant outburst, or the delighted applause of her equally ignorant audience.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#126

Post by Vecr »

gwern wrote: post #107
Vecr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The The Magician's Nephew is about red giants, or at least the expanding phase of a star like the sun. It's from the 1950s, and C. S. Lewis wrote science fiction earlier.

No, I think OP makes a good case that Lewis did not mean an expanding red giant in _Magician's Nephew_, even if he could have used the most recent science at the time to choose to do so: "“So big, so red, and so cold.” “It has always been so,” said Jadis. “At least, for hundreds of thousands of years. Have you a different sort of sun in your world?”" A red giant expanding to the point of taking up much of the sky wou…

How would it appear large in the sky though? Gravitational waves are out, maybe solar wind and light pressure were supposed to be keeping the planet orbiting higher? Or is the point that the planet was always close, but only cooled down enough for life after the star started cooling down?

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#127

Post by OkayPhysicist »

pixl97 wrote: post #120
strogonoff wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure such utilitarian math is the true solution, attempts to put a number on the value of human life seem all silly. I would rather say that the failure of a robotic mission costs an amount X, while the failure of a human mission intuitively has infinite price.

Conversely setting human life to infinity cost quickly breaks down with the trolley problem. Any problem where groups a or b are going to die then whatever group is bigger lives, even if it doesn't make sense, such as group b is all very old and group a is very young but slightly smaller.

To be fair, it's not really a breakdown of the trolley problem. It's the point of the trolley problem. Setting the value of a human life to infinity basically gives you deontology, in that both outcomes are approximately equally bad, and thus your choosing to get involved at all is unethical.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#129

Post by someone7x »

Salmoneo wrote: post #49

Another entry in the dying Earth/Sun or Last Civilization approach is The Phoenix in Obsidian aka The Silver Warriors from 1970 by the oft forgotten but quite seminal Micheal Moorcock of Elric fame, but He wrote way more than that. Set in a frozen Earth and with a Sun that is just a white dwarf. The last surviving sea is so salty and dense is gelatinous and ship actually "flap" over it. It's part of the John Daker/Er…

The Ice Schooner as well, but sadly no wikipedia page for it.

> In this far-future adventure, Captain Arflane leads his crew of the schooner Ice Spirit across the endless seas of ice covering Earth. To any survivors of this brave expedition will go the legendary riches buried beneath the ancient ice . . . the once-great city of New York!

https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Ice_Schooner.html?i...

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#130

Post by paleotrope »

weinzierl wrote: post #95

Since it fits the topic and my efforts to find this story have been unsuccessful for years, I'll give it a try: I am looking for a short story about an astronaut conducting radiation measurements on the dark side of the moon (or maybe mars). The astronaut ponders the strange measurement results when it dawns at him that the sun must have gone supernova and earth probably scorched. He returns to earth as the last livi…

I was the same way when I was young, then I found out about books going out of print and then later, library book sales, and then even later, about librarians actively culling their book collections to make room for newer books.
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