Saturday 21 July 2001

Pic of the day: We won't terraform Mars in my lifetime, but it sure seems more likely than hopping from star system to star system in a flying car. (Screenshot from Civ2, the Mars now! scenario.

The future revisited

I started to think about this because of Mike Resnick's book Soothsayer. I read it, and liked it. I liked it so well that I bought both of the next books in the trilogy, Oracle and Prophet, as soon as I had finished the first. Since they were available as e-books, I did not have to walk out the door to buy them: A couple minutes and they were mine. Nifty. And kind of futuristic in itself, don't you think?

Of course, it did not hurt that Fictionwise offered a 25% rebate on the two remaining books once I had bought the first. (You can also buy them as a bundle and save on them all, if you are confident enough that you'll like it. Just don't blame me if you do not. I have odd tastes sometimes. But Resnick is quite a seller over there, it seems.)

Anyway, they can well afford a discount. $6.49 is ridiculous for an e-book that is just a reprint of a paper book. The costs of an e-book after layout is approximately zero. It takes a few kilobyte on your webserver and that's it. No cost of materials, printing or distribution. And they still sell them at approximately paperback price. No wonder e-books are slow to catch on. I don't begrudge writers and editors their money. (I keep telling you, a good editor is extremely valuable; a writer can and should not be expected to also be a good editor, anymore than a gold digger should be expected to make good jewelry.) But an e-book does not have all the costs of a paper book, and should be priced accordingly. Not given away, but somewhere lower. I still buy some, because someone has to create the market in the first place. Once there are more suppliers than can play golf together, prices will fall like a clatter of stones. At which time the non-idealists will hopefully join in. At least at Fictionwise, I know I'm buying from fellow nerds. Just look at their selection and you'll see what I mean. :)

***

Anyway, back to Resnick's book. It is set several thousand years into the future, for no good reason that I can see. The premise of someone seeing a multitude of possible futures is no more realistic five or seven thousand years from now. If psionics are possible, they might as well happen now. And in addition, you need to introduce other improbable stuff, like small spaceships that travel from planet to planet much like a car travels from city to city. Wouldn't it have been easier to stick with cars and cities in the first place? But then of course you would have people jumping to criticize that you had two hundred too many people living in Walla Walla and there are no polar bears in Trondheim. The far future is nice in that nobody can say they know it better than you do. :)

But apart from a couple gadgets, like holograms, the story looks more like a Western story. The attitudes at the "inner frontier" is very Western. Much of the action takes place in bars and casinos. ("Write about what you know" is a popular advice for writers. Heh.) The truth about the future is, of course, that we don't know it and can't know it. It could have faster than light travel (which as far as we know is not just impossible but illogical) and still have roulette tables no different from ours. I much doubt it, though.

In the case of these books, it doesn't much matter since the characters and the underlying concept keep me reading. But there won't be any bonus points for realism except in the characterization.

***

Now I am well aware that there is a broad tradition from Asimov onward concerning faster than light travel and galactic empires. It has probably taken on its own realism. Still, I have a slightly different picture of the far future, if any. I think we are in an "S" curve of development, which has been very rapid for a while but will stabilize as we start to reach our limits. These are not the laws of the universe. They are laws of economics.

We already know how to send spaceships with over 80% of lightspeed (given enough time to accelerate) with our current technology. But we don't even go back to the moon. Why? Certainly not because we cannot. People were there in the days when the hand-held calculator was a marvel of advanced technology. But we don't have anything to gain from it. The cost is simply too high compared to what we get back. The same goes for Mars. The latest couple of attempt by NASA to land probes on Mars failed miserably, because they had pinched pennies. There will probably be new attempts, but there is no sense of hurry about it. (I can only pray that a similar attitude may befall the attempts to create black holes in the Large Hadron Collider of CERN. What's the haste? It's not like we have lots of planets to move to if one of those critters happen to swallow Earth. But given time, we will have.)

Given time, the cost of lifting stuff into space is bound to go down. Now that satelites have moved from the realm of science to business, a slew of new technologies are being tried out. The cheapest will probably win. And some of them have the potential to become quite cheap. When lifting stuff into space comes cheap, it will eventually become profitable to mine asteroids. The moon is less certain. It may eventually become a tourist resort ... people are already paying millions of dollar for a few days in space. I'm sure the moon could be the honeymoon resort for the rich and jaded.

Once we spread around the solar system mining iron/nickel asteroids, fast propulsion systems will no doubt go into mass production. It won't happen in my lifetime, probably not in the lifetime of my little nephews, but it may eventually happen that humans set solar sail for other stars. Or perhaps they'll use other technologies that are faster. There is no reason to believe that it will ever be possible to freeze down humans and thaw them up again alive; but very deep hibernation is almost certainly possible: Other mammals have this already. If human lifespan can also be prolonged by a few decades, interstellar travel suddenly seems like a viable option. But the spread of humanity will be a painstakingly slow process. Terraforming even a roughly earth-like world like Venus is bound to take millenia. For more exotic planets it could take much longer before you can take those helmets off, if ever. It may even be simpler for humans to adapt to the planet rather than the other way around. Or at least meet it halfway.

So realistic "futuristic fiction" might have worlds very different from our own, and people more or less subtly altered to live there. But they won't hop from star cluster to star cluster. Still, the unique challenges of the alien planets could make for a lot of great heroic stories that are just waiting to be told. I occasionally try myself, but my imagination simply does not extend far enough. And these days, neither does my wrist.