[FRIAM] off-label technologies, exaptatiion and exponential technological growth.

Steve Smith sasmyth at swcp.com
Sat Aug 7 13:08:04 EDT 2021 

DaveW -

> Highly recommend John Brunner's /The Sheep Look Up/ for fans of
> ecological disaster.
>
> davew
Well offered.  

When I first read /Sheep/ (in the same era it was published?) it was too
pessimistic for my young, naive, cynical but optimistic tastes.   I was
lead there by his Stand on Zanzibar (69), more for his stylistic
approach of interleaving news headlines of over-the-top
socio-environmental disasterlets with the everyday lives of
day-after-tomorrow average peoples... than the apocalyptic import.

In fact, Zanzibar represented such a long, slow slide/tumble/spinout
compared to the threats of my childhood (nuclear war, asteroidal impact,
burning rivers) that it fed (created?) my own morbid fascination with a
future that (maybe) *I* could be flexible enough to navigate while the
previous generation (elderBoomers and LostGen and GreatestGen) would
fail or flail with those changes.   Now, of course, I "am one" and doubt
I will be flexible enough, though I might be lucky enough to die of
something much more mundane than environmental/social collapse.

I was not aware until just now (reading up on Brunner in Wikipedia) that
/Zanzibar/, /Sheep/ and two others (/Jagged Orbit/, /Shockwave Rider/) 
constituted what came to be called his "/Club of Rome Quartet/" named
after the very real Club of Rome
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome>.   Merle's 2019 meeting in
Stockholm lead me to revisit the systems dynamic models that grew up out
of Limits to Growth <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth>
study commissioned by the Club of Rome.  

Much of Brunner's work now reads to me (or in reflection of my first
read) like proto-cyberpunk.   They were day-after-tomorrow (decade after
next?) stories which have proven to have presaged a great deal of what
in fact has come at us over the horizon.   /Shockwave Rider/ really fit
that niche for me and set me up to appreciate Gibson's work (e.g.
/Neuromancer/Mona Lisa Overdrive/Johnny Mnemonic/, etc) when it was
published in the early 80s.  

The /Infinitive of Go/ nicely tied multiverse conceptions into the
then-rebudding (pun recognized?) field of bifurcation theory (coined by
Poincare nearly 100 years previous).   Brunner's relatively flat
characters and pat plots convolved with his very astute
scientific-technical-sociopolitical insights made him a bit of a hybrid
or bridge creature between the classic golden agers and the modernist
hard-sf writers.  

Like many things these days, I'm finding I appreciate him more and more
through the lens-system of 50+ years of hindsight.   I didn't invite the
Rainbow Family to "camp on my lawn" this year, but I *am* a lot more
sympathetic with that kind of energy than I (even) did when I was young
enough to engage in that kind of freewheeling activity. 

I feel like Dave and I have bent this thread all the way back around the
Nick's original "Psychonauts"?

It's spirals all the way down?

- Steve

>
>
> On Fri, Aug 6, 2021, at 8:28 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>
>> ... unbending  the psychonaut thread
>>
>>> And something will have to power the artificial magnetosphere after
>>> the teraforming..
>>
>> ... as I understand it, Mars lost it's magnetosphere a (long) while
>> back and nobody knows why (with the atmosphere and liquid water
>> following, blown off into space by the solar wind).  
>>
>> I think we should just wait another millisecond in our exponential
>> technological growth curve and build a Stapledon Sphere
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olaf_Stapledon> (more commonly
>> referenced as a Dyson Sphere) instead.   Stapledon's Golden Age era
>> _/First and Last Men/_ presaged both terraforming and genetic
>> engineering .  
>>
>> Jack Williamson (whose horn I toot here often), another Golden Age
>> author, wrote (in modernish times - 2001) the novel Terraforming
>> Earth (he died at 98 in 2006).   A good friend of mine (who
>> introduced us) met Jack when he (my friend) was a pre-teen and kept
>> in touch for the next 50+ years, gave him the title "Terraforming
>> Terra" which Jack really liked but they both were ultimately
>> overruled by his publisher.   /Terraforming Terra /is much more
>> poetic than /Terraforming Earth/, no?
>>
>> (speaking of Terraforming... Mars) I held off reading Kim Stanley
>> Robinson's Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy (ca early 90s) until Musk
>> started being convincing (to me) that he might get a modest number of
>> humans TO Mars in his (and my?) lifetime.  I'm still an ffFFFing
>> luddite about these things, but I also see an inevitable arc here.  
>> Robinson did a good job (I thought) of characterizing the
>> sociopoliticalspiritual implications of all this.   I forget how he
>> solved the magnetosphere problem (or powered it).
>>
>> For anyone who thinks there are endogenous existential threats afoot
>> (e.g. climate change) and also appreciates speculative fiction, I
>> highly recommend Robinson's Ministry-for-the-Future
>> <https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50998056-the-ministry-for-the-future>
>> written/published before COVID but not by much.   While it doesn't
>> exhaustively discuss every sociopoliticaleconomictechnical response
>> to a tumbled gyro of our noo-bio-cryo-sphere of a planet, it covers a
>> lot very convincingly.  I don't suggest any of his maunderings will
>> come true or even have more than passing resemblance to the future we
>> are stumbling into in the next few decades, but it was satisfying to
>> read someone who has clearly researched the hell out of the stuff
>> coming at us like a swarm of bugs hitting our windshield (while we
>> proudly outdrive our headlights).
>>
>>>
>>>> On Aug 6, 2021, at 4:52 PM, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
>>>> <mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>  Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Don't forget about Mars!
>>>>
>>>> LANL physicist Steve Howe was a proponent of plowsharing Rover
>>>> <https://www.lanl.gov/science/NSS/issue1_2011/story4full.shtml>
>>>> into a nuclear rocket for Mars with the argument that the radiation
>>>> exposure to astronauts by the drive was less than the extra time
>>>> spent outside the earth's magnetic field (charged-particle shield)
>>>> in the cosmic/solar radiation flux.
>>>>
>>>> He went on to promoting antimatter (anti-protons) instead:
>>>>
>>>>    
>>>> https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/06/steven-howe-breakthroughs-for-antimatter-production-and-storage.html
>>>> <https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/06/steven-howe-breakthroughs-for-antimatter-production-and-storage.html>
>>>>
>>>> Oh yeh, and he's the first person I know to have self-published
>>>> (science) fiction through Amazon (before Doug Roberts even). 
>>>>
>>>> He used to carry a briefcase full of copies on his work-travels to
>>>> sell on the plane and/or restock the rack at the ABQ Sunport.   I
>>>> Just checked his Amazon page and it seems he's continued to riff:
>>>>
>>>>     Steven-Howe
>>>>     <https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B005L9MAL2?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-sidecar-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader>
>>>>
>>>> His first book exposes his techno-libertarian tendencies.  I just
>>>> learned of the sequel(s).
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>
>>>>> Sent: Friday, August 6, 2021 8:24 AM
>>>>> To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com> <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
>>>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] for our psychonauts
>>>>>
>>>>> Reminds me of that period in which people were desperately looking for something to do with nuclear explosives other than kill one another. Like:  "Let's blow a new hole in the Isthmus of Panama!"  Project Plowshares, it was called. 
>>>>>
>>>>> Nick Thompson
>>>>> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
>>>>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/>
>>>>>
>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
>>>>> Sent: Friday, August 6, 2021 10:57 AM
>>>>> To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com> <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
>>>>> Subject: [FRIAM] for our psychonauts
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> What Should We Make Of Sasha Chapin's Claim That Taking LSD Restored His Sense Of Smell After COVID?
>>>>> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-should-we-make-of-sasha-chapins <https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-should-we-make-of-sasha-chapins>
>>>>>
>>>>> I haven't read it, yet. I'm hoping posting it here will remind me to actually read it.
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
>>>>>
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