21–30 of 85 posts
Using science fiction to discuss politics is like using the Starship Enterprise to drive down to the corner grocery. Politics is small. Exploring the edges of reality is large.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This person has been demoralized, and unknowingly wishes to inflict that fate upon everyone they come into contact with. The frenetic obsession with "capitalism" and the hopelessness of the future is simply the claw of the crab, pulling its victims back down into the bucket.
Funny you say that when capitalism has no morals beyond profit. Just have a look on what Boeing it's doing.
"...but as far as themes go, I’m more inspired by [authors who are] usually clearly anti-capitalist, criticizing scenarios used in Golden Age science fiction — such as building cities on Mars or expanding beyond the Solar System — by portraying them as capitalist hellscapes." The golden-age optimistic science fiction placed humans on a stage in the future with aliens, and confronted both with challenges on a far grea…
Using science fiction to discuss politics is like using the Starship Enterprise to drive down to the corner grocery. Politics is small. Exploring the edges of reality is large.
Funny you talk about the Starship Enterprise... Star Trek is super political lol
TOS went there a little. STD goes there all day.
"...but as far as themes go, I’m more inspired by [authors who are] usually clearly anti-capitalist, criticizing scenarios used in Golden Age science fiction — such as building cities on Mars or expanding beyond the Solar System — by portraying them as capitalist hellscapes." The golden-age optimistic science fiction placed humans on a stage in the future with aliens, and confronted both with challenges on a far grea…
I don't really find such science fiction pessimistic. In the way this "golden age optimism" is arguably just coddling humans with lies about the harm that they do, science fiction that critically examines the systems being built and suggests ways to repair. Ways to empower. Ways to unify against systemic harms in a way that includes all people. We have the entire solarpunk genre specifically for how humans can build…
Using science fiction to discuss politics is like using the Starship Enterprise to drive down to the corner grocery. Politics is small. Exploring the edges of reality is large.
"...but as far as themes go, I’m more inspired by [authors who are] usually clearly anti-capitalist, criticizing scenarios used in Golden Age science fiction — such as building cities on Mars or expanding beyond the Solar System — by portraying them as capitalist hellscapes." The golden-age optimistic science fiction placed humans on a stage in the future with aliens, and confronted both with challenges on a far grea…
For good or not capitalism is efficient at incentivizing people to exploit resources. It's easy to project that into guessing that at least our early forays to heavenly bodies will be propelled by that impulse. It's probably the reason that earthly new world cultures are more capitalistic than the old world's. Some ideologies promote exploration more than others. You don't have to like it to predict it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of sci-fi is to lay off the most obvious and current convictions and impulses and to imagine other possibilities.
But still use your medium as a vehicle for a very obvious and current "understanding" of politics... with the completely natural "I love Science^tm" veneer tailor-made for Reddit, nice Hugo award material, I guess? Oh, just noticed it's nature.com
Does it bother anyone else that the picture featuring the author shows a blackboard containing seemingly unrelated equations just to make it look "this-is-high-brow-complex-mathy-stuff-that-I-am-an-expert-in"? Why would someone who wants to be taken seriously as a scientist pose in front of something like that?
The photographer needs a nice photo, she needs the article to sell books and not get traped again in the ivory tower. Eveyone is happy. It's part of the job. Like politician using a suit and smiling. (Aparently smiling people with suits don't steal or start random wars.)
I looked at the equations, they look correct but so unrelated that made me chuckle. I imagine she was chuckling while writing them. I'm not sure if there were one or two persons writing that, probably one (but two persons writing random (correct) equations is more fun).
The equations have a nice flow, the space/kerning and vertical aligment are correct. It looks like whoever wrote them understand the equations. [1] It's not a proof that she is a genius, but it's small bonus point for me.
The last "2" in a^2+b^2=c^2 is too low, it looks like she made a mistake guessing the space necesary to write the equation and had to make a emergency correction. It happens to the best. Anyway, it's horriblely unrelated to the other equations [chuckling], almost trolling.
If I have to guess, she first wrote the Drake equations as a sibling comment says, it's in the center and very well written. The photographer asked for more equations, so she added the gravitational force equation. Then another and another. And then some equations in between.
It's very difficult to write something meaningful on the spot. I'd need like 15 mitutes to thing what to write and perhaps another 15 to write it. So a random wall of equations is silly but difficult to avoid.
[1] A few years ago we had two exams that were identical. One of them had a similar good flow, but the other had the same numbers/symbols in almost the same position, but they were horrible aligned, like if someone just copy the number/symbols without understanding anything at all.