Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

users.wpi.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 469 posts

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#351

Post by mbernstein »

the_af wrote: post #179
mbernstein wrote: post #91

Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.

> Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself. You got downvoted for paraphrasing the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains", from which Bradbury took the title of his story. I supposed that's to be expected online. Small consolation, but at least some of us understood you :) And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished u…

Thanks. Glad at least a few people understood. I pulled out my copy of Martian Chronicles today (which I'm fortunate to have signed by Bradbury) when I saw this pop up on the main page.

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#352

Post by jodrellblank »

frmersdog wrote: post #123
briansm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of when November 2019 came and went (the date that Blade Runner is set in)

Off the top of my head, events in popular science fiction that have "already occurred": First Laughing Man Incident - Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2024) Third Impact - Neon Genesis Evangelion (2015) Fourth Corporate War - Cyberpunk (2022) Geisel Library Walk - Rainbows End (2025) 2020 Tokyo Olympics - Akira (2020)

Domingo Gonsales is flown to the moon by tying himself to wild swans, and meets Lunar Christians - The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin (1601)

Manned mission to the Moon by giant gun - Jules Verne (1865 ish).

Manned trip around Saturn by comet - Jules Verne (1877).

Time traveller sets off to the future - H.G. Wells (1894)

Martian invasion of Earth - War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1905)

Global telephone network reaches as many connections as a human brain and wakes up - Dial 'F' for Frankenstein, Arthur C Clarke (December 1, 1975)

Birth of Dr Susan Calvin, founding of US Robotics & Mechanical Men, development of 'Positronic Brain' - Asimov's robot stories (1982 and after)

British space station under construction - The Outward Urge by John Wyndham (1994)

Portal to parallel universes - Sliders (1994)

Doctor Samuel Beckett steps into the Quantum Leap Accelerator and vanishes - Quantum Leap (1995)

Skynet becomes self-aware - Terminator 2 Judgement Day (August 29, 1997. at 02:14 am Eastern Time)

HAL 9000 AI computer operational (1997), first human voyage to Jupiter system (2001), first landing on Europa and alien life discovered (2010) - Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey

Moon leaves Earth Orbit after nuclear waste explosion, taking human-occupied Lunar colony with it - Space:1999 (13 September 1999)

Efficient international flight, using Zeppelins and blimps - Rudyard Kipling (2000)

Global climate disaster - The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Replicants - Bladerunner (2016)

Keanu Reeves smuggles digital information in his brain - Johnny Mnemonic (2021)

Arnold Schwarzenegger kills to survive in a typical American TV show - The Running Man (2025)

Woman relifed into robot, rich people discover workers' rights - Fritz Lang's Metropolis (2026)

First colony mission to Mars, 100 colonists on the largest spaceship ever built - Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (2026)

Tibetan monks finish listing all the names of God, stars start going out - The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke (when computers were rentable and could print 1000 names per second)

and many more: https://scifi.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_of_fictional_future_e...

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#353

Post by mbernstein »

inigyou wrote: post #192
the_af wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself. You got downvoted for paraphrasing the poem "There Will Come Soft Rains", from which Bradbury took the title of his story. I supposed that's to be expected online. Small consolation, but at least some of us understood you :) And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished u…

It's common for spammers to use an LLM to post a short summary of a thing in the thing's comments, to attract upvotes.

Fair, but even though I don't comment often, my account is almost 15 years old. So I'd hope that at least pushes back against the spammer aspect - but ultimately, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#354

Post by cautiouscat »

XorNot wrote: post #263
cautiouscat wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're closer to the stove, kind of. At least with things like Tovala. I've never actually met someone with one though.

I really wish we could just get a thermal imager integration for a stove which could catch a pot of boiling water about to boil over and back off the heat automatically.

Best we can do is Wifi to set your timer.

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#355

Post by WillAdams »

XorNot wrote: post #277
zimzam wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced safety is solved: given how often LLM's hallucinate and automated cars get confused, what happens when something unusual happens and the robot thinks a person's arm needs to be "folded" and breaks it? Or a person's clothing looks like the wall and a robot tries to move their arm through a person's chest? Sure, for each individual situation one can imagine a safeguard but being in close proximity to…

Even simple dangers like pinch points on joints or not stepping on curious pets are an issue. My son would adore a humanoid robot around the house, but could I leave him unsupervised around it?

Recent example in the news:

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-chess-playing-robot-grabs-and...

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#357

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

paulorlando wrote: post #201

It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction. In addition to "There Will Come Soft Rains" we have short stories like Stephen Vincent Benét’s "By the Waters of Babylon." In that story, society has been bombed back to the stone age. Even religion is a stone age recreation. Something like hot and cold running water seems like it must co…

> "It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction."

Quite the reverse. That people say that the fear of war (nuclear or not) is "quaint" means that the wealthy and privileged first world has forgotten about war and that's not a normal state of affairs. The 18th and 19th centuries were wracked by war after war between major powers, culminating in the First World War ("the war to end all wars" remember?) and then Second World War in the first half of the 20th century. It was very surprising to everyone that another global war hadn't materialized by the 1980s.

Fear not, military rearmament spending worldwide has shot upwards as nations prepare for the inevitable wars to see who will be the new global top dog. We are all about to re-learn some old lessons, albeit at a heavy cost.

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#358

Post by Nifty3929 »

mrloopex wrote: post #110

Born in 1968 I missed “duck and cover” but rode the wave of Reagan brinkmanship with my skater friends until 1990, watching all the broadcast TV PSAs and songs and art about nuclear war. It was real. It pervaded daily life: the notion that two old white men were having a pissing contest with every human as disposable bargaining chips. And as always, 25% of the US population cheered for purification of the planet beca…

"... two old white men were having a pissing contest ..."

This is the big mistake that so many people make: assuming that these folks are behaving irrationally, or somehow focused on something other than what is best for humanity or their own country.

The unfortunate truth is that these people are actually behaving rationally, and doing what they believe is in the best interest of their own country or even society at large. They are doing their best.

And, if you were thinking coolly and clearly, you would likely do the same things in their shoes.

This doesn't at all mean we're doomed - in fact quite the opposite. These are hard things to navigate (nukes, AI, etc) but we're up to the task and will come out the other side much better off.

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#359

Post by pavon »

rob74 wrote: post #252
armagon wrote: post #177

The most striking incongruity with our modern era to me is that the family was all outside when the blast occurred. With pervasive screens, we just don't get outside like we used to. And why on earth was that dad mowing when the house was able to take care of it?

That's one of the usual failures of science fiction: most authors imagine technological progress, but don't also predict what societal changes it might bring. So this family had a quaint picture-book suburban 1950s life, just with robots. Same as Asimov's Detective Baley smoked a pipe and had a traditional 1950s marriage with a stay-at-home wife - just with robots...

I don't know that it because Bradbury couldn't predict the changes. See The Veldt for example. It is more that painting an idyllic 1950's life cast a sharper contrast with the destruction and thus had stronger impact.

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#360

Post by inigyou »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #342
TimTheTinker wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Whenever the "tens of millions killed by communism" number gets trotted out, it's invariably considering everybody who died due to lack of assigned resources under communism. Which is fine, but it means you need to go over to the west and count up all the people who died of preventable means (not to mention making per-capita adjustments) as well for a fair point of comparison. Every person who died of preventable ill…

IIRC it comes out to over a billion deaths.
Post reply on HN