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by guard-of-terra
4960 days ago
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Is solar shade so much hardrer to launch than retooling all the biology to live at 45C and still dealing with the world that sucks? Launching a large slightly opaque mirror to shade select aread of Earth does not seem impossible to me. It seems he bet everything on climate being out of control. |
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This was the very first (of several) objections that I had.
Stross is a pretty good writer (at least, he can be at times), but every time he turns his hand to futurism I think he fails miserably. He's got a worldview that I think he's invested in, and he's got a tone (deflating what he sees to be the overenthusiastic techno-nerds) that he likes, and both make him pretty bad at prediction. He sees Moore's law in his own life, but fails to apply it or similar principles to the world going forward. If he was practicing futurism in 1912 he'd be writing that cars are inherently a stunt because we can never build enough roads or find enough fuel for them, and in the year 2412 people will be living in mile high brick building surrounded by a wasteland of horse manure from the perpetually animal-clogged streets.
There are so many problems with the "ZOMG we're all going to be roasted by global warming". I'll leave aside the fact that there's been no increase in average temperatures in 15 years (to avoid the whole "climate change denier" fight that no one wants to have) and just accept as given for this discussion that, yes, average temperatures might rise 2 or 3 C. Given that space launch gets cheaper every year, given that robots get better every year, given that manufacturing gets cheaper every year, etc., it will be trivial in 50 years - let along 500 - to have robots build huge solar shields in orbit, or have robots build huge dikes around our coastal cities (we reclaimed thousand of acres of land from the oceans in the middle ages - we can't do that in the 21st century?), or have giant naval cannons fire explosive shells full of light block aerosols into the upper atmosphere, or, or, or ...
There are so many ideas that aren't 50 years out - let alone centuries out - that can solve these problems.
I think that it's a truism that different countries have different default outlooks. It can't be taken too far, but there are archetypes. Russians are darkly amused by the inevitability of defeat. Americans are gee-whiz let's change the world neophytes. Germans are prone to being a bit dour, etc.
Stross seems to be in the mainstream of British / Scottish cultural thought (at least as it's been revealed to be by fiction, both science fiction and mainstream). Stereotypical American apocalyptic fiction, I suggest, is about raging against the problem and striving to overcome it...and British apocalyptic fiction is more often than not about coming to terms with it.
tl;dr I find Stross' futurism uninteresting and wrong-headed because he seems to find reasons to justify his slightly depressive theres-nothing-we-can-do attitude.