Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.
There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
91–100 of 468 posts
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#92I love Ray Bradbury. My favorite short story author.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#93Growing up, I hated this guy. Boring! Now, I can recognize writing talent.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#94I feel like the modern version of this would have the neighbourhood largely intact, but humans killed via miniature drones.
Drives home the point how few anticipated that batteries would advance so much.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#95Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.
As far as we know life is only present on Earth, we presuppose that in the vastness of Cosmos there are other instances of it or that it can re-emerge from almost zero, but the reality is that we simply don't know. So maybe there is a possibility that wiping out all the life on Earth also wipes it from the entire Cosmos, forever.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#96USSR animated version (1984): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oxP3TyuQx0
Where'd the Turkey dinner come from if it's a nuclear wasteland?
All joking aside; an excellent animation
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#97Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.
As far as we know life is only present on Earth, we presuppose that in the vastness of Cosmos there are other instances of it or that it can re-emerge from almost zero, but the reality is that we simply don't know. So maybe there is a possibility that wiping out all the life on Earth also wipes it from the entire Cosmos, forever.
Or perhaps the comment you were responding to was asserting "knowing" or "caring" is not something Nature can do.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#98One thing which I find striking here is that a modern home and attendant conveniences roughly embodies 10--15 horsepower of effort, or the work of 40 or so full time house staff.
Thus far, the only notable robots are little disks which vacuum up floors (and they're getting outlawed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104371 ) and some innovations just haven't become widespread (an uncle of mine piped his home for a central vacuum system, compleat w/ a switch at each connection for on/off) --- I really can't recall a device with widespread demand since DVD and then Blueray players (or maybe the Wii? the PS2 counts as a DVD player arguably). I don't know anyone who has done more than read about "Smart Mirrors" for example....
What will be the first device to bottle up AI and other modern technologies in a package and become widely in-demand/distributed?
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#99For most of my life it's felt like we've been moving away from this scenario, but lately it's felt like we're sliding back towards it
The great sleight-of-hand of the 20th century is that it never went away, we all just collectively decided to stop thinking about the fact that at every given moment for the rest of human history we'll never be more than thirty minutes away from total nuclear annihilation.
The world doesn't have enough nuclear weapons for "total nuclear annihilation".
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#100Ray Bradbury has some great ideas, but I hate his writing style. It’s far too flowery, he’s on a spectrum that contains Hemingway at one extreme, and Bradbury near the other. I prefer Hemingway. Writing style at least.
To each his own, I suppose.
I particularly like Bradbury's style. It reads very prose poetic. One of my favourite is Dandelion Wine, which you will probably hate.