December: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
The next poll will pick two books. I'd like to do it that way to keep a strong second place contender from being overlooked, and so I don't have to update the poll so often.
Discuss The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin in the comments below.
Snow Crash was written by Neal Stephenson in 1992. The novel features a bit of a Calexit scenario, and is known for popularizing the term "avatar" (paving the way for James Cameron's true magnum opus). These days, Neal moonlights as Magic Leap's "Chief Futurist". Seems appropriate.
Previously: Announcement post • Mars, Ho! • Foundation
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jelizondo on Thursday December 06 2018, @03:42PM (5 children)
It was a very good read even when a couple of things bordered in the incredible for me. The sophons already mentioned and the concept that a civilization exposed to constant destruction could materially advance beyond our technological level.
I side with Stephen Hawking in this matter: attracting the attention of ET could be catastrophic. We accept, without proof, that any civilization more advanced than ours would be gentle; forgetting that during WWII Germany was very advanced and very evil civilization.
I found very interesting the many references in the book to the political situation in China during the Cultural Revolution but I could not quite grasp why the government, after killing most of its scientists and engineers, would embark in a large astronomical project.
At any rate, the book is worth five stars and the sequel is very good, albeit a bit darker.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 06 2018, @04:09PM (1 child)
I don't think Nazi Germany was a civilization. It was a culture, within our greater Western civilization.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Thursday December 06 2018, @05:12PM
I’ll concede the point. But other examples abound. The more advanced western civilization, supposedly Christian, wiped out the Aztec and the Cherokee civilizations (amongst others). Consider that the Aztecs had human sacrifices, which could be seen as barbaric, but the Christians were not above burning people alive. My point being that material superiority is not correlated with moral (or philosophical) superiority.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 06 2018, @04:23PM
Listening to a bunch of Isaac Arthur [youtube.com] Fermi Paradox videos on YouTube, I'm not so sure anymore. It seems to me that if we were going to have a problem with this, we would just be swarmed without even attracting attention to ourselves (and future stupendously large space telescopes and gravitational lensing will allow us to locate civs). If there's no faster-than-light travel, we are as safe as can be. If there is, we have been visited or are being visited. And robust (not self-destructive) intelligent life is probably rare, thus the galaxy has not been colonized (as far as we can tell).
If we start planting humans on Mars, Ceres, Callisto, Titan, etc., asteroid mining, and building a Dyson swarm, humanity should have some staying power and enough splinter groups to keep things fresh and expanding. From there we can explore and/or conquer the galaxy on a relatively short timescale. We'll find what's in our cosmic backyard sooner or later.
As far as intergalactic travel goes, it's questionable if we'll accomplish it. But if we do nothing, Andromeda and some local group galaxies will merge with our own eventually, bringing many new star systems to us and potentially some intelligent aliens. Humanity could last for billions of years and reach this stage simply by distributing ourselves throughout the galaxy. A group or two could get wiped out but others will stick around. There will be some divergent and self-directed evolution, which could make our cheap sci-fi humanoid aliens a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Thursday December 06 2018, @07:30PM (1 child)
I think their tech advancement is explainable. If I recall the cycles could last a couple years or thousands of years and although that which was constructed and built might be lost there was retention of information across the cycles. If we had continuous information retention and growth since the time of our greats we would be much further along. In the West's cycles of expansion and destruction we tended to lose a lot that we had to make up for regarding scientific development. The Trisolarsn society seems to me that they had a leader like Augustus and thinkers like Plato/Aristotle/Leonardo/Tesla who never died and just continued to exist and think. Regardless of physical progress, the progress of the mind could still be great.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Thursday December 06 2018, @11:02PM
Well, in my mind, explainable is kind of thin. Suppose everything is wiped out. Need iron? Start by rebuilding the roads, the foundries, the forges and so on. Now think particle colliders, computers, spaceship factories and other more sophisticated enterprises and every start sets the civilization back hundreds or thousands of years, even if the knowledge is retained.
More, in the case of iron and other minerals, the easily extracted ores have already been used and while you can recycle them, they are now dispersed all over. I’m not saying impossible but it seemed a weak point. It would have been more credible to say that the extra influx of ultraviolet radiation, for example, forced them to dehydrate and wait for better times, without destroying everything in the surface.