Freeday 8 December 2000

Pic of the day: It may not be visible at this magnification, but this picture is of a new house being built on one of the farms in the small rural village where I grew up. This picture is from my trip to the west coast of Norway this fall. At the very least, you can see just how rural it is. :) That valley behind the houses is sheer beautiful wilderness, and it goes on and on for hours... but so do I, unless I stop now!

Gaseous society

It began innocently enough, in that I looked into a discussion group for strategy games for the PC. There I found mention of Alpha Centaury, which I have mentioned before. I remembered that I had not played it much, and the vague distaste I felt for it because it was so complicated. It is a great game, but if you have even a parody of a life, you don't have the time to immerse yourself in its complexity. It can still be fun, I guess, but I felt that experience lacking.

I did however remember the plethora of cool quotes from the fictional characters there. Some of the things were said so well that I could not have put them better myself. So I started to play through on the easiest difficulty level, jotting down the words of wisdom as they appeared. I originally planned to just quote them, but of course they made me think. (Old habit, I guess.)

***

"As distances vanish and the people can flow freely from place to place, society will cross a psychological specific heat boundary and enter a new state. No longer a solid or liquid, we have become as a vapor and will expand to fill all available space. And like a gas, we shall not be easily contained."
--Sister Miriam Godwinson, But for the Grace of God".

Hasn't this already happened to some extent? I guess we are in the "liquid" state now. In the feudal society of the middle ages, people were locked into place like the atoms in a crystal lattice. Every man had his place. There he was born, and there he died. Ironically, it may have been the Black Death - the bubonic plague - which ended this in Europe. Suddenly many farms were up for grabs, and many nobles died from their confused serfs. And people ran off into the woods to escape the plague. Even the church did not seem so powerful in the face of this un-prophesied disaster.

Society never really locked into place again. With the dawn of capitalism, owning soil was no longer the only form of power. And with the coming of industy, people were encouraged to move from their small farms to the cities to work in the factories. A mobility that has just grown over the decades, until we are here now.

A couple generations ago, it was quite normal that your grandparents all lived in the same village, or in neighboring villages if there was the risk of inbreeding. (Actually, it was quite normal that your grandparents were dead, but I mean while they lived, that's where.) People did not travel all that far, most of the time. There were always some adventurous people. Genetic markers indicate that in truly ancient times, women wandered much further than men. I have given up finding a good explanation for that. We'll just have to wait and see. But now, we all move about.

If we look at some of the most dramatic inventions of the last few hundred years, quite a few of them are about transport. The steamship, the railroad, the bicycle, the car, the plane. (Actually the bike, the car and the plane were invented nearly at the same time, believe it or not. Or so my history books assured me.) Other inventions were about virtual movement, or the movement of thoughts: Telegraph, telephone, radio, television, grammophone, tape recorder, telefax, e-mail, the Web.

***

In recent years, it has become more and more common that people telecommute - that they go to work by logging on a computer somewhere else in the world. I had expected more people to move out in the countryside now that this was possible. But that seems to be rare. I guess either the countryside is too regulated by the local authorities, or people don't want to live too far away from their exotic restaurants and their advanced movie theaters and all the other comforts of city life. Still, there is some diffusion out into the countryside.

Will communications continue to improve? Will the fictional Sister Godwinson's dream come true? It's hard to think what could make us physically more mobile in the near future. There is the flying car, of course. With a flying car, it would suddenly NOT be necessary to have those last five miles of road to the small house in the woods. Today every home has to be connected to a road. Where I live, you can see the roads from the air as ribbons of homes. With the flying car, they would no longer be flowing like a river - they would spread out like a gas, across all available space ...

But the flying car has been in prototype since my early childhood, I think, and certainly has been for the last several years. The personal chopper is also just around the corner all the time. The personal jet pack is, luckily, all but forgotten. So, I guess we are still in the liquid state of society. But we are already not easily contained ... and we may be approaching boiling temperature.

At that point, the laws of the old days - today - will make no more sense than the medieval rules do now. Do you really want that, Sister Godwinson?