Good point. Can someone recommend some good optimistic science fiction?
A Miracle of Science (webcomic, 2002-2007)
We need more optimistic science fiction
51–60 of 211 posts
Re: We need more optimistic science fiction
#52OK, we know what's coming. - Energy is less of a problem, between cheap solar cells and batteries. - Materials may start to be a problem, but not yet. - Population is leveling off and dropping in some countries, but continues to grow in Africa and among the religious groups which keep women at home. - Equatorial areas are becoming uninhabitable. - AI is rapidly getting better. Not clear how good it gets, but if every…
- Population is leveling off and dropping in some countries, This is a problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk - AI is rapidly getting better. Not clear how good it gets, but if everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, you're in trouble. Or, everything gets so abundant that we can actually have high UBI This reminds me if why I disliked to movie Elysium. They had a robots that effectively…
you assume their compotence and forethought. Such things cannot be taken for granted.
Re: We need more optimistic science fiction
#53On Twitter, Colin Fraser pointed out that Black Mirror was somewhat optimistic in that the horrible evil technology actually works as described[1]. Truly pessimistic science fiction would have - people worshipping an AI God which is demonstrably dumber than a dog - friendly humanoid robots which don't really understand how to walk down a flight of stairs - gravitational warp drives which are purely cosmetic and canno…
You may be interested in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, an entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. The planet on which the dog was located then exploded, but not due to the battle fleet, instead it was because some people didn't want the planet to provide the right question to an answer they already had, but they didn't realise they didn't need to owing to the accidental interference of a dead species that had sent away all their telephone sanitisers before being wiped out in a pandemic caused by a dirty telephone.
Re: We need more optimistic science fiction
#54On Twitter, Colin Fraser pointed out that Black Mirror was somewhat optimistic in that the horrible evil technology actually works as described[1]. Truly pessimistic science fiction would have - people worshipping an AI God which is demonstrably dumber than a dog - friendly humanoid robots which don't really understand how to walk down a flight of stairs - gravitational warp drives which are purely cosmetic and canno…
There is a science fiction story, I don’t remember who wrote it or the title, where humanity discovers a way to modify the speed of light within a region. Excited, they work incredibly hard to implement the technology, only to discover they can only make it slower.
Maybe it was jumping to a parallel universe to travel and then jumping back. But the same issue: the limit was lower.
Re: We need more optimistic science fiction
#55An essay on optimistic science fiction but no discussion of Iain M. Banks’ The Culture series…? for that matter, it doesn’t mention any specific sci fi writer at all.
Re: We need more optimistic science fiction
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hilariously, a dyson sphere operating at 5% capacity would still generate more power every second than humanity currently generates in 10,000 years.
Sure, but 89 % of that 5% will be still used for interplanetary yacht fleet of owner of Chocó-Darién Inc.
The remaining 11% of 5% would need about 8 seconds to generate more energy than humanity currently generates in 10,000 years.
Luminosity of the sun: ~380 yottawatts (3.8 * 10^26 watts)
Sunlight conversion efficiency of a silicon based solar panel: ~20%
A Dyson swarm around the sun built with silicon solar panels: ~76 yottawatts
A Dyson swarm around the sun where 5% of the panels work: ~3.8 yottawatts
The leftovers from a Dyson swarm around the sun where 5% of the panels work and 89% of the output has been used for interplanetary yachts: ~418 zetawatts (4.18 * 10^23 watts)
Primary power production on Earth: ~20 terawatts (2 * 10^13 watts)
10000 years times 20 terawatts is 10000 * 365.25 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 10^12 = 3.16 * 10^24 joules
Since a joule is just a watt-second, it takes 7.6 seconds for that 418 zetawatts of leftover Dyson swarm output to match up to 10,000 years of current human energy consumption.
Re: We need more optimistic science fiction
#57OK, we know what's coming. - Energy is less of a problem, between cheap solar cells and batteries. - Materials may start to be a problem, but not yet. - Population is leveling off and dropping in some countries, but continues to grow in Africa and among the religious groups which keep women at home. - Equatorial areas are becoming uninhabitable. - AI is rapidly getting better. Not clear how good it gets, but if every…
actually materials may be not a problem, - 40% of all transport is for transporting of fossil fuels !
so after we lower amount of fossil fuels mined, transported, refined, we can start focusing on working with other materials or start using freed workforce/manufacturing capacity for other kinds of terraforming activities.
AI - how many connections in human brain? google says 100 trillion, how many transistors in one NVIDIA Blackwell GPU - 200 billion. so you need just 500 GPUs to have number of connections as brain does. those are transistors only for connections, you need much more transistors for processing which is connected thru said connections, so does one datacenter holds one brain worth of biological level processing already ?
Re: We need more optimistic science fiction
#58[dead]
Re: We need more optimistic science fiction
#59Agreed on all counts. Any advice on how so start writing some short amateur scifi from folks who have a writing practice or are at the start of developing one? Udemy classes, youtube tutorials / lectures, books on how to start writing scifi etc?
500 words a day, dead or alive.
another piece of advice, when I wrote I used a keypuller to remove my backspace key. Following the example of Phillip K. Dick, think like a serial writer, uncanny ideas are the birth of great literature
Re: We need more optimistic science fiction
#60If you're reading this, you should watch "Bicentennial Man" (1999)