Excellent old soviet cartoon based on this story (english subtitles) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oxP3TyuQx0
There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
431–440 of 468 posts
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Humanity" is far from "all the life on Earth". Nature will be better off once it happens.
> Nature will be better off once it happens. As long as "it" happens before we poison or otherwise harm our planet beyond some "tipping point" after which Earth becomes "inhospitable" to most/all "complex" life in general.
The world has been much more inhospitable than it is today and I'm sure it will recover. The problem I see with us is how we destroy everything in our path on an industrial scale. As long as the wheels keep spinning we extract everything we can, see water use for data centers as the latest example.
Other species co-exist in the eco-system, we destroy it.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Humanity" is far from "all the life on Earth". Nature will be better off once it happens.
I see this a lot, and I think it's sort of naive. Nature itself is doomed due to the way the universe works. It's also far more brutal and arbitrary than we could imagine being. The only way to even have a chance at avoiding the doom that "nature" is facing is for something to evolve that can manipulate and forestall this inevitability. I don't know if humanity is what can do that, and likely nobody knows. But nature…
I don't really understand what point you're trying to make. Yes the planet is doomed sooner or later. But I'm talking about nature as in trees, animals, etc. The natural eco-system. And it existed and evolved and adapted naturally long before humans and will continue long after we're gone.
In philosophy there is a debate regarding the meaning of the word nature and if humans should be considered a part of it, and I see the points, but that's a different discussion.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But the most unrealistic part of this story is how all the IoT automation continues to work in the absence of the Internet. It's actually one way this story about the apocalypse is more hopeful than the present day. We don't need the internet to make most of the things in that story work, but in our timeline we'd add it anyway to get and sell those good analytics.
Except that isn't really why it happened: iot being Internet tied is because it's much, much easier to get devices to work when you control at least one side of the server with skilled professionals rather then your average home user. And no one has really come up with an alternative: home assistant is good, but it's not for the non-techy. I will squarely blame IPv4 for some of this: NAT has meant that the key applic…
Unless you advocate for something reckless like "all incoming connections allowed", you will need a central aerver even with IPv6.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
That usually comes up as a detterance which is basically what nukes are at this point. Even Russia is not stupid enough to lob a nuke as an offensive strategy, it is suicide still.
There is increasing pressure from inside the regime for Putin to do so: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/07/11/asia-pacific/ch... What if they did it? They would be a paria politically, but countries would still buy their oil/gas because they need it and it's cheap, nobody would start nuking Russia over Ukraine [1], and using tactical nukes against nations that don't have them would become much more acceptable.…
My opnion is that you're underestimating the event where a country uses a nuclear bomb in this way. It signals that they are willing to cross any red lines and become an existential threat. In fact, imagine an alternative scenario where Russia straight up nukes Kiev instead of the gurella warfare and then invasaion/special millitary operation. In that case, there is no way Putin is not done within a week simply due to the fact that he becomes an existential threat for the entire world. A war/definitive millitary becomes much more justifiable in that case than it does currently for the US or EU.
The moment you use them, you lose their value as a deterrance anymore.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#436It 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…
We also don't fully appreciate how much this shaped the American Baby Boomer psyche. My dad talks of regular Nuclear War drills in elementary school.
>My dad talks of regular Nuclear War drills in elementary school.
The boomer generation covers 18 years. While such drills may have been common for those in school during the 1950s, I suspect it was much less by the 1960s.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's invariably considering everybody who died due to lack of assigned resources under communism You mean, those who were forcibly starved by their government, those who were forcibly murdered and displaced by their government, and those who were put into forced labor "re-education" work camps by their government. I'm not talking about the baseline of human problems and suffering that is everywhere -- that's not co…
wait so you're literally arguing "every death in communism is communism's fault but no death in capitalism is capitalism's fault" like, that's literally the argument you're making. You're not just implying it, you're saying it. seems like a pretty bad faith argument, IMHO.
> every death in communism is communism's fault
No. Everyone is going to die sooner or later.
I'm talking about wrongful deaths. It is wrong for a government to kill people for any reason other than conviction of murder. The Bolsheviks, Red Giard, and Stasi straight up murdered people because they owned means of production, disagreed with communism, or tried to escape to a different country. That us evil.
I know that most of the early deaths under communism were due to starvation, what GP calls "misallocation of resources". Thats a fancy term for stealing. Violation of private property - literally taking people's land and things - is evil and it's also directly responsible for the massive famines that happened under communism.
The longer I live, the more I'm convinced that the idea of communism arises because of envy, and not understanding that wealth doesn't just "exist" statically such that it can be fairly (re)distributed.
The real value is what people sell - either food, clothes, houses, and goods/services. By solving the wrong problem, Communism messes up the motivation to work, produce, and sell. And so everyone becomes far more equal - but poor and starving (except political leaders, they usually do far better than the populace... they're "more equal" than others).
It's an evil idea.
... and I am having trouble understanding why all this needs to be said again. Where the heck is the idea that communism is good coming from? The harrowing biographies and memoirs of those who lived under it are out there - all the content dying, famine, fear, the KGB banging on front doors at 3am to "disappear" people (who return 10 years later and talk about torture, prisons, guards authorized to do "anything" to prisoners, and gulags), the learned willing ignorance ("the less you know, the better you sleep").
I had a Russian co-worker over for dinner once who lived through the tail end of the Soviet Union. "The less you know, the better you sleep" is a quote from him.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
wait so you're literally arguing "every death in communism is communism's fault but no death in capitalism is capitalism's fault" like, that's literally the argument you're making. You're not just implying it, you're saying it. seems like a pretty bad faith argument, IMHO.
> every death in communism is communism's fault No. Everyone is going to die sooner or later. I'm talking about wrongful deaths. It is wrong for a government to kill people for any reason other than conviction of murder. The Bolsheviks, Red Giard, and Stasi straight up murdered people because they owned means of production, disagreed with communism, or tried to escape to a different country. That us evil. I know that…
So you’re getting more conservative as you grow older? Wow, how novel!
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " 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, cu…
Indeed. We are sleepwalking into WW III and no one seems to care.
We need to permanently retire the term "sleepwalking into war". When world leaders call for war, prepare for war, threaten war, and then cause as much war as they can, that's not sleepwalking.
Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
#440Born 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…
I'm born in Norway in 1975, and in the early 80's, while we didn't have "duck and cover" we had regular air-raid siren tests and my primary schools basement was a bomb shelter that doubled as an activity space. The sirens still exist, but the test schedule has slowed dramatically.
Germany tests their air raid siren system annually on September 11.