The World in 2100

[Gareth3]

It's a little different from the "conworlds" that are usually discussed here, but I was thinking of creating a setting of Earth in the year 2100, extrapolated from real economics and demographics. I did something similar on the old board, but I'll be less ambitious this time. Is there any interest in this? Any advice?

[Salmoneus]

Hard to give advice with nothing to comment on - any advice I gave would wind up just being my own version of how I predicted the next 80 years to go.

I suppose one thing I could suggest would be general: have a sense of your intentions. What is this setting for? Is it just pure prediction, or is aiming at creating a particular setting? If the latter, it's good to keep an eye on the destination as you travel, so that you don't need course corrections late on - and of course to stop you being overwhelmed by options.

I think the problem for predictions now is that there's basically two viable models for 2100: everything is much like it is now (boring!) or everything is completely different from how it is now (impossible to predict!).

And remember: economics. Things like politics and fashion are ultimately the product of economics. So start from the big economic story, and work out the details from there. Specifically, look at contradictions, which drive change. I would suggest that the three big contradictions in modern capitalism are mechanisation (our economy is based on paid employment driven by profit-seeking, but soon almost all jobs will be done more profitably by robots), wealth concentration (our economy is driven by the extraction of wealth from the majority by an increasingly small minority, but as the wealth gap grows the wealthy run out of things to buy, and the poor run out of money to buy things with and start to get unhappy) and energy consumption (our economy is only possible because of cheap fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are running out and alternative energy sources will be expensive to switch to). The next contradiction will probably be resource extraction (we rely on extracting and using raw materials, but many of those materials are becoming expensive or impossible to source). The brewing question, which may or may not produce some critical contradiction at some point, is digitalisation (how many of our desires in life can be met through a digital life? If the answer is "most", that leads to a 2100 in which we spend most of our time in VR pods; if the answer is "not many", things stay much the same). And beyond that, two further questions will be "what is the ethical status of artificial intelligence?" and "what is the nature of individual identity in a world of hybrid and collective intelligences?"

Oh, and the other contradiction is the one that makes everything else unpredictable: Moore's law. Computing power increases exponentially, but our current demands for computing do not actually require that much computing power. So will computer development stop, or will new uses for computers be found?

Oh, and I guess the other contradiction is between freedom of association and sectarianism: increasing freedom (through greater movement and through greater connectivity) leads to ideological sorting (people associate with people who are like-minded), which leads to ideological extremism.

[Behind this idea of 'contradiction' lies Stein's Law: "if a thing cannot go on forever, it will stop". So find what can't go on forever, and think of different ways it could stop.]


Personally, in my main SF scenario, I take a short-term approach of 'dark ages'. The earth starves as fossil fuels go up in price and replacements are not introduced quickly enough. The internet leads to sectarianism and civil wars, and to crippling cyberwars; as a result, the political fear of sedition and the practical fear of viruses leads to an almost complete closure of the web (what remains is a series of un-connected networks with public access primarily through read-only consoles). There are nuclear wars on the subcontinent, and America collapses entirely at some point in th 22nd century. The world is taken over by authoritarian city-states.
All of this, however, is mostly because I wanted my space-travelling civilisation a few centuries later to still be recognisably human, and not to be inter-connected hybrid minds living in collective VR pods maintained by their robot minions. If I had to bet on it, I'd say a much more "optimistic" (and hence hard-to-recognise) future was more likely right now.

[Axiem]

Any projection on what the world looks like in 2100 is going to have to grapple with climate change, and make decisions regarding just how much warming has happened by then (/how acidic the oceans have gotten/etc), and what the world looks like ecologically as a result. Potential crises regarding draught, natural disasters, and food insecurity (among other climate-dependent things) are going to drive a lot of economic/demographic events.

[zompist]

Ah, a chance to trot out some of my pet peeves. These can be divided into "futures that move too fast" and "futures that move too slowly."

An example of the first: pretty much any sf involving AI. To sf writers, it seems that fully sentient AI is only a decade away, and always has been. Few seem to want to deal with the idea that intelligence is a really hard problem, far harder than quantum mechanics or shooting a space probe around several planets to get gravity boosts. (Note: AI ≠ automation.)

Similarly: any future where interstellar colonization is far advanced within, say, two centuries. (Mass Effect is set in 2183; Star Trek TOS took place around 2265.) Colonization takes a long time.

There's a lot to be said for "things will be very much the same." After all, there has been huge change since 1918, and yet we have:
* exactly the same political institutions in the US and UK
* almost the same political parties
* the world economy is still dominated by Europe and the US (though less so)
* capitalism is the dominant economic system, but troubled by increasing inequality
* there haven't been any major religious revolutions
* an awful lot of everyday life is quite similar (what you eat, what a hammer looks like, how a kindergarten works, what a wedding looks like, what a major symphony orchestra plays)
* men's business attire is almost identical (compare 1818!)

On the other hand, the major boner in a lot of sf is assuming that work will stay about the same. E.g. Brave New World assumes that a huge classs of "morons" will be needed for menial work, in agriculture or industry. Heinlein assumes that his futuristic transport system would be manned by people who talk and act like 1930s factory workers. Most 1950s sf viewed the future as pretty much like middle-class 1950s America.

So if you want a likely future, or just an interesting future, think hard about what people do. What are some typical jobs? Has present-day inequality accelerated or been reversed? Has something replaced the corporation? What are the worst jobs? Based on the jobs they have, where do people live and how much can they afford? How much education do they need? What jobs can't automation take over?

Obviously you have to decide what to do about climate change. Basically, you're either writing some terrible apocalypse, or about the early decades of a near escape.

Oil is a big problem, but replacement by renewable resources looks far more doable than it once did. But other resource crunches are coming, especially water, fish, and forest products.

[Gareth3]

Thanks for the feedback. The inspiration for this is that FTL travel is a common technology in SF, but is impossible in real physics. So I thought I'd lean into the impossibility, and make FTL travel only possible by an inexplicable "psychic power", and all the other technology be completely plausible. Even better, have the only FTL teleporter be religious, and refer to it as a miracle from God. Having a rigorously extrapolated 2100 setting and then having a miracle-worker arrive to blow it wide open has obvious potential for drama and fish-out-of-water stories. So there's a few things I'll need to arrive at. The first is what kind of space travel is plausible with 2100 technology and 2100 economics. I'm very skeptical that there's any market on Earth for imports from space, but unmanned probes for scientific purposes could get very elaborate. The second is what being religious means in 2100. How do astronauts and scientists think about a miracle-worker, and vice versa? How does that vary with what part of the world they come from? The third is that even with FTL travel possible, who organizes the first interstellar voyage, and what's the purpose of it?

[Salmoneus]

Ah, a chance to trot out some of my pet peeves. These can be divided into "futures that move too fast" and "futures that move too slowly."

An example of the first: pretty much any sf involving AI. To sf writers, it seems that fully sentient AI is only a decade away, and always has been. Few seem to want to deal with the idea that intelligence is a really hard problem, far harder than quantum mechanics or shooting a space probe around several planets to get gravity boosts. (Note: AI ≠ automation.)

I very broadly agree. But I'd add three caveats. One you add yourself: you can have AI smart enough to do almost everything before you have "fully sentient AI". Second: we don't know how to make a fully sentient AI, which means it won't happen tomorrow; but since we don't know how to do it, we also don't actually know how hard or easy it might be. Specifically, if sapience 'emerges' through self-refining AI we don't know how far we have to push the technology before, as it were, the motor gets going. So while I don't think we'll have sapient AI in the near future, I also don't think it can be ruled out. And third: we should remember that we're never really talking about when a fully sentient AI emerges; we're talking about when a computer programme emerges that is sufficiently adroit in language-games to be indistinguishable in conversation from a sapient being. Whether 'full sentience' is a) impossible, b) achieved by definition as soon as we have a persuasively talkative computer, or c) somewhere in between is a problem that's mostly philosophical, certainly unknowable, and possibly nonsensical.

Similarly: any future where interstellar colonization is far advanced within, say, two centuries. (Mass Effect is set in 2183; Star Trek TOS took place around 2265.) Colonization takes a long time.

On this one, you're wrong. Colonization speed depends on the economics of travel (and reproduction), which is a variable, not a fixed value. It can therefore happen as quickly or as slowly as you want.

Basically, there are two problems with interstellar colonization: a) it's physically tantamount to impossible; and b) it's pointless.

This is, paradoxically, good news for interstellar colonization in fiction. The default assumption must be that the sum total of interstellar colonization in the next couple of thousand years will be, if we're really determined, maybe a computer orbiting proxima centauri. That means, however, that if a setting DOES include interstellar colonization AT ALL, both those core problems must somehow have been fixed. Since this will require unknown and currently imaginary physics, and tendentious if not outright implausible economics (and/or a massive mcguffin), the author is left free to set whatever rules they like, since any hypothesis is about as implausible as any other.

If, therefore, birth rates continue to be at replacement at best, and interstellar travel operates through fast but sub-light ships with stasis fields or the like, and all travellers travel as adults, then colonization will indeed take thousands of years and be extremely limited in scope. If, on the other hand, colonization involves limitless-range FTL teleporters and extensive use of in vitro gestation and robotic childcare, then you can have billions of people on thousands of planets within decades.

There are so many variables here that a wide range of scenarios can be produced. For instance, an interesting one that I don't think I've seen explored in depth is if you couple fast sub-light ships with cargo holds filled with eggs and semen. The slow travel means no colonization happens for a long time - but intensive in vitro fertilization can then produce a planetary population in very little additional time. [this has been seriously proposed. It requires no new physics, and avoids many of the problems of slow colonization, like in-breeding (you could reproduce almost the complete genetic diversity of earth if you wanted to).]

Once you take the technology out of the way (and the economic purposes for doing it in the first place), human breeding rates are so astronomical that things rapidly take care of themselves. If you put just one cruise ship of humans onto a planet with sufficient resources and have their population double every 30 years, there'll be over 10 billion people on that planet in under 300 years. And if 'doubling every 30 years' sounds extreme: well, a doubling rate of under 40 years was achieved in the middle of the 20th century, and that was with governments around the world trying actively to reduce fertility. How humans would respond to a world of ample resources and some sort of economic system than encouraged (rather than, as now, discouraged) childbirth, is hard to imagine. [historically, it was often common for the average woman to have 15-20 children; now imagine that happening with medicine capable of keeping all those children alive!]. And of course, you could say: oh, but we won't really have that sort of growth rate again. No, probably not. But with modern growth rates there'll never be colonization, so if you want it at all, you need to change the rules.

Hence, the only two viable predictions for colonization are: a) virtually none ever (under current conditions); and b) anything goes (because it depends on unknown new conditions and we can't know what those will be).

There's a lot to be said for "things will be very much the same." After all, there has been huge change since 1918, and yet we have:
* exactly the same political institutions in the US and UK
* almost the same political parties

"Not quite" on the first one. The two big developments have been the changing executives (massive centralisation in both countries, and the end of even vestigial royal power in the UK).
And "only technically" on the second one, particularly in the US. Two-party systems strongly encourage the perpetuation of the existing parties unless one party complete screws up (the US Whigs and the UK Liberals). But the flip side of that is that the parties are only, as it were, tickets to the race, and who holds those tickets can change dramatically. Chances are, there'll still be Republicans and Democrats in 2120... but who knows what their policies or demographics will be.

* the world economy is still dominated by Europe and the US (though less so)
* capitalism is the dominant economic system, but troubled by increasing inequality

Although it's worth noting how dramatically capitalism changed from the capitalism of the gilded age [if you look at the concrete demands made by Marx, most of them were achieved through reform of capitalism.] Of course, now we're heading back there again...

* there haven't been any major religious revolutions

I don't think that's true at all! In 1900 in the UK, almost everyone was Christian; now, almost everyone is non-Christian. [they call themselves christian, but they don't believe in statements like "Jesus was divine", "the Christian faith is how we should live", or even "there is a God".] It's less obvious, because the big religious change this century hasn't been the development of new religions (though we've had plenty of them too along the way). But the sweeping advance of secular belief structures is just as significant! [not just in Europe - see also the decline of religion in China]. I'd also point to the dramatic gains made by conservative fundamentalist forms of both Christianity and Islam - the latter in particular looks very different in a lot of the world now from how it did a century ago.

* an awful lot of everyday life is quite similar (what you eat, what a hammer looks like, how a kindergarten works, what a wedding looks like, what a major symphony orchestra plays)

Well, that last one is a no true scotsman! "Major symphony orchestras" are defined by continuing to play what used to be played - lots of orchestras don't play anything like Beethoven, they're just not called 'orchestras' anymore. They're called "big bands" or... whatever it is you call concert ensembles in pop music. [also,

More: show

no, major symphony orchestras now play completely different repertoires from before. Partly this is due to rediscoveries (nobody in 1900 had ever heard Vivaldi, for example!), but mostly it's because the 20th century was a tumultuous time for classical music. If you go along to the Proms, you'll find, I'd guess, somewhere between 40% and 60% of the music is post-1900, much of it in a style that would have shocked listeners in 1900. Tonight at the Proms, OK, it's Mozart and Bruckner. But last night it was Mahler and Bartok, and tomorrow it's Bernstein's "On the Town". Monday, it's Bernstein and Shostakovich.

] I'm not sure what your point is with kindergartens... "kindergarten" refers to many different things in different places. We don't have kindergartens in the UK. Even in the US they didn't begin to be set up until the 1870s, and by 1900 they weren't yet that widespread. And education theory as regards young children has changed radically and repeatedly in the intervening years.

* men's business attire is almost identical (compare 1818!)

Yes, broadly, if you focus specifically on men working in formal offices, which were simply very conservative in the late 20th century.

I do agree with your general point, however.

On the other hand, the major boner in a lot of sf is assuming that work will stay about the same. E.g. Brave New World assumes that a huge classs of "morons" will be needed for menial work, in agriculture or industry. Heinlein assumes that his futuristic transport system would be manned by people who talk and act like 1930s factory workers. Most 1950s sf viewed the future as pretty much like middle-class 1950s America.

So if you want a likely future, or just an interesting future, think hard about what people do. What are some typical jobs? Has present-day inequality accelerated or been reversed? Has something replaced the corporation? What are the worst jobs? Based on the jobs they have, where do people live and how much can they afford? How much education do they need? What jobs can't automation take over?

. Indeed; although it's worth pointing out that there are actually two different questions here. One is: what do people do all day? the other is: how are resources distributed? The questions are linked for us, because the answer to both is "the working class perform tasks for the capitalist class in exchange for resources". But if resources become too plentiful (or too sparse), or the capitalist class have fewer tasks for workers to perform, that system breaks down and the two questions de-link.

Obviously you have to decide what to do about climate change. Basically, you're either writing some terrible apocalypse, or about the early decades of a near escape.

I would see this as, in the next few centuries, a much less important question. climate change changes some of the where and the who - some areas see emigration, others see immigration, with accompanying frictions - whereas the other questions much more fundamentally and permanently change the nature of social life.

Oil is a big problem, but replacement by renewable resources looks far more doable than it once did. But other resource crunches are coming, especially water, fish, and forest products.

I agree that of the three current contradictions I mentioned, energy scarcity seems most likely to be resolved without traumatic change - but we're still a long way from that point and there's a ticking clock.

[Salmoneus]

Thanks for the feedback. The inspiration for this is that FTL travel is a common technology in SF, but is impossible in real physics. So I thought I'd lean into the impossibility, and make FTL travel only possible by an inexplicable "psychic power", and all the other technology be completely plausible. Even better, have the only FTL teleporter be religious, and refer to it as a miracle from God. Having a rigorously extrapolated 2100 setting and then having a miracle-worker arrive to blow it wide open has obvious potential for drama and fish-out-of-water stories. So there's a few things I'll need to arrive at. The first is what kind of space travel is plausible with 2100 technology and 2100 economics. I'm very skeptical that there's any market on Earth for imports from space, but unmanned probes for scientific purposes could get very elaborate. The second is what being religious means in 2100. How do astronauts and scientists think about a miracle-worker, and vice versa? How does that vary with what part of the world they come from? The third is that even with FTL travel possible, who organizes the first interstellar voyage, and what's the purpose of it?

There's always a market for everything. The only question is whether a viable price can be agreed.

This seems an interesting and largely novel scenario, though it has echoes in things like Mass Effect (the teleporters, left by a prior alien civilisation, may as well be magic) and The Stars My Destination (FTL via people suddenly discovering that humans have the power to teleport just by thinking about it the right way).

[Gareth3]

I didn't think of The Stars My Destination, but it does seem to be a very similar idea. Thanks for mentioning it.

[Zaarin]

Similarly: any future where interstellar colonization is far advanced within, say, two centuries. (Mass Effect is set in 2183; Star Trek TOS took place around 2265.) Colonization takes a long time.

In Mass Effect's defense, humans got propelled into the stars very abruptly via alien tech, not natural technological advancement, and their colonies were likewise being established under alien supervision. It's also pretty heavily implied that a lot of the Earth is a pretty scummy place to live, which will motivate colonists, and that colonization within the Sol system was virtually abandoned when easier colonies beyond became available. And anything else can be hand-waved thanks to the mass effect. :p So while Mass Effect isn't exactly hard sci-fi, to its credit it at least has its bases pretty well covered (and I think humanity being such a newcomer adds to the drama of the story, which IMO is more important than strict adherence to technical probabilities, though I think they could have made humans seem a little less...exceptional, which is a complaint I have against a lot of sci-fi--why should we be so special?).

[zompist]

On colonization-- introducing FTL isn't so much disagreeing with me as adding a magic element. And even with that, we're talking 82 years; you're not going to have much in the way of colonies in that time.

Even with 300 years, your math is a little optimistic. Europeans basically had half a planet to colonize, and in 500 years they didn't reach your 10 billion figure. Indeed, the Americas haven't reached even 1 billion yet.

More interesting is to speculate who would move to a new planet if possible. Unless you sent an army of robots over first, you're not moving to a bustling city; you're doing more like homesteading, and regressive severely in technology. I suspect most First Worlders won't be interested once they get an honest video of what the new lifestyle looks like.

On religion, what I meant is that the major belief systems are largely the same, including atheism. Almost 80 years ago, Orwell wrote that "the common people [of England] are without definite religious belief, and have been for centuries. The Anglican Church never had a real hold on them... and the Nonconformist sects only influenced minorities. And yet they have retained a deep tinge of Christian feeling, while almost forgetting the name of Christ."

[Gareth3]

One of the writers on Star Trek complained that human religion was thousands of years old, so expecting it to have all disappeared by the 24th century was ridiculous. That's not completely valid logic - maybe technology has changed human society in an unprecedented way, so religion has disappeared. But I think it's an acceptable way to construct a future setting by extrapolating from the past.

[hwhatting]

I don't know whether England was already basically as areligious in the 30s as Orwell says, but if I look at Germany at that period, you will see parts of society (urban intellectuals, but also big parts of the urban working class) for whom religion is something encountered rarely, in rituals like baptisms, marriages, and funerals, but without much influence on day-to-day life, people who wouldn't even think of looking to the churches for guidance - so, very much like most people today. These are also the environments Orwell knew best, so his insights may perhaps not be correct even for all parts of Britain. But you'll also see big parts of society, especially rural and small-town, where formally being Christian, adhering to Christian morals, going to church weekly etc., was very important. For that segment, the position of the Churches on social and political matters had influence, they'd vote for or against parties and candidates based on that, there were preachers who could sway public opinion. And the big change is that this has largely vanished. There still are some rural, deeply Catholic areas, but even there the power of the Catholic church is only a shadow of its former self; the Protestant churches underwent that erosion earlier and have even less people who look there for orientation. So, formally you could look at Germany and say nothing much has changed - most people still formally identify as Catholic or Protestant - but these labels have lost most of their meanings, except perhaps on which Church you marry in. And the number of people who openly identify as non-religious or atheist also has much increased; these people don't even turn to the Church for marriages and funerals any more - again, a big change compared to the 1930s and even more to the beginning of the 20th century.

[Salmoneus]

On colonization-- introducing FTL isn't so much disagreeing with me as adding a magic element.

Well sure, but we're talking about science fiction. Magic is essential to science fiction! The reason we call the whole genre speculative fiction is that we speculate some what-if and then see what follows from it.

And even with that, we're talking 82 years; you're not going to have much in the way of colonies in that time.

I don't think Gareth promised much in the way of colonies in that time. But it also depends what you mean by 'colony'. In Mass Effect, for instance, I didn't get the sense that colonies were much more than settler towns in space. With the right sort of FTL (like, say, FTL teleporters, or doorway spacetime loops), you could put a bunch of settler towns on planets. Of course, even in those optimal conditions, you're not going to get booming planet-cities in that time.

Even with 300 years, your math is a little optimistic. Europeans basically had half a planet to colonize, and in 500 years they didn't reach your 10 billion figure. Indeed, the Americas haven't reached even 1 billion yet.

That's not maths; that's economics.

Europeans in the age of exploration had four big problems when it comes to their fertility:
- extreme limitations in their ability to exploit natural resources. For one thing, they were dependent on extensive, inefficient agricultural systems. For another, they relied on relatively expensive building materials like wood, stone and metal. They did not have, for example, a supply of ultra-light origami graphene housing modules or high-intensity zymovats.

- a crippling vulnerability to death. They had high birthrates, but also high child mortality rates. And childbirth fatality rates. They did not have modern medical technologies. Note that as modern medical technologies developed in the 19th century, population growth DID boom.

- an economic system that did not prioritise population growth.

- an inherited cultural aversion to population growth that meant that their actual growth was even lower than economically optimal - their society had bizarre features like monogamy, chastity, and a late age of marriage that impeded their growth. [it's suggested that this was a social trauma in response to a combination of high mediaeval overpopulation and the paranoia induced by the black death]


If you can find a reason for humans to return to a relatively high-birth economy, with sufficiently cheap resource extraction and a low death rate, then population growth can meet or even exceed the levels attained in the 20th century. Of course, you have to find an economic reason for this to happen. But that's why this is science fiction!

More interesting is to speculate who would move to a new planet if possible. Unless you sent an army of robots over first, you're not moving to a bustling city; you're doing more like homesteading, and regressive severely in technology. I suspect most First Worlders won't be interested once they get an honest video of what the new lifestyle looks like.

Generally true as a baseline. But we also shouldn't go too far. For one thing, we probably would send an army of robots over, because the rest of our society will probably be robot-based by then. In particular, the initial set-up phase - even just things like building landing sites and the first farms - would take an extremely long time left to human hands; so a 'robot pioneer' phase setting up the essentials to receive travellers would seem an obvious choice. If nothing else, you'll probably have to use robots to do the initial surveys anyway.

And why need it be severely regressive in technology? There'll be an extreme bottleneck in resource extraction, sure, so technology will have to be low-resource and largely bootstrapping. There'll be inefficiencies of scale, and things will tend to be standardised. But you'd be able to ship over a fair quantity of lightweight materials, and things like computers can be extremely miniaturised. It's likely that with 3D printing and advanced carbon compounds, you could generate some quite complicated things on site. Bustling it won't be, at first, but I don't think we have to assume prairie living either. There probably wouldn't have to be any digging of the soil, for instance - food would be generated aeroponically. [indeed, since the native soil would at first lack the complex ecology of earth soil, aeroponics would be almost essential]. And there wouldn't be the homestead penalties of being far from civilisation - the initial colony would probably initially be quite densely packed, for improved efficiency, so your 'homestead' would be just around the corner from the hospital and the spaceport.

It will have to be, at least at first, a simpler life than on Earth. But that's no necessarily a problem - lots of people want a simpler life. And even more may want a simpler life in a couple of centuries. It depends what's going on on Earth at the time. If Earth is a paradise, few people will want to leave. But if Earth is overcrowded and smoggy, hot and polluted and low-resource so that everything costs a fortune, then a nice new world of grassy plains may seem tempting. It also of course depends on the colony world. An earth-like planet vegated with compatible vegetation would be much cheaper to develop than a toxic hell-world where every house needs lead walls.

The other thing I think lots of people forget in this regard is the sheer fact of differences of scale. Say only 1% of people might be tempted to emigrate. Well, with 10 billion people, that's 100,000,000 prospective colonists! Bring it down to 0.4% of people - that's 40 million people ready to sign up, and if it's only 0.4% that just means that colonism is as popular on earth as neopaganism is in the US today. I can absolutely see that happening. But even if it's 4 million, or 400,000, or 40,000, you could still have a viable colony. The population of Earth is so huge even today that you only need a tiny, tiny fraction of people to want something for there to be a huge demand.

[the problems are instead about funding colonisation - the money will be harder to source than the people, I think. But consider something like a lottery system - get 40 million hopefulls to buy a lottery ticket of £100 each, and you've got £4bn to play with already.]

On religion, what I meant is that the major belief systems are largely the same, including atheism. Almost 80 years ago, Orwell wrote that "the common people [of England] are without definite religious belief, and have been for centuries. The Anglican Church never had a real hold on them... and the Nonconformist sects only influenced minorities. And yet they have retained a deep tinge of Christian feeling, while almost forgetting the name of Christ."

Respectfully, if you think religion in the UK is the same now as a century ago, either you don't know about religion now or you don't know about religion then. Religion isn't even the same now as in my parents' generation. Orwell may have suspected that people didn't really follow the details of doctrine, beyond belief in a christian god and heaven/hell and the basic requirements of church attendance and obedience to church laws and respect for the vicar. But now there isn't even that 'deep tinge of christian feeling'. Look at figures for church attendance, or for the numbers saying that religion is important in their lives, or for the frequency of prayer. Now for most people 'christian' is an ethnic category, not a religious one.

[I wouldn't call them atheists, however. Most post-christians are still theists - they believe either in a non-christian "God", or in a "spiritual power" - and even of those who don't believe in gods only a fraction identify as atheists.]

EDIT: what HWH said (as usual). Of course, being from a rural (or formerly rural) area myself, I'm perhaps more sensitive to this. And of course I'm also half Irish, and religion in Ireland has changed beyond recognition!

[Salmoneus]

I think they could have made humans seem a little less...exceptional, which is a complaint I have against a lot of sci-fi--why should we be so special?).

Well, every intelligent species is likely to be special somehow. And it's hard to a human writer writing about human characters for a human audience not to make the humans stand out at least a little...

...but of course, there's many ways to do that. In one (high-) SF setting of mine, humans are indeed exceptional... as something one step above vermin. Humans are infamous around the galaxy for being small, weak, stupid (or at least bloody-minded and lacking in long-term planning), incredibly fast-breeding, avaricious and prone to uncontrolled expansion. They're one of the more recent species to gain (or be give) FTL, and they're from a poor planet, so they don't have many actual colonies. But the setting has a lot of inter-species space stations, and wherever you go in the galaxy it seems as though there's always a Human Quarter - filled with humans who somehow hitched a ride there, couldn't get the money to leave, and just resorted to settling down and breeding instead. Human quarters (or human decks, etc) tend to be filthy, poor, and overcrowded. They're basically space-rats...

[Zaarin]

I think they could have made humans seem a little less...exceptional, which is a complaint I have against a lot of sci-fi--why should we be so special?).

Well, every intelligent species is likely to be special somehow. And it's hard to a human writer writing about human characters for a human audience not to make the humans stand out at least a little...

Well, sure, I wasn't proposing making humans the Bolians, but most sci-fi seems to assume that we show up and the entire universe makes way for our grandeur, brilliance, and versatility.

...but of course, there's many ways to do that. In one (high-) SF setting of mine, humans are indeed exceptional... as something one step above vermin. Humans are infamous around the galaxy for being small, weak, stupid (or at least bloody-minded and lacking in long-term planning), incredibly fast-breeding, avaricious and prone to uncontrolled expansion. They're one of the more recent species to gain (or be give) FTL, and they're from a poor planet, so they don't have many actual colonies. But the setting has a lot of inter-species space stations, and wherever you go in the galaxy it seems as though there's always a Human Quarter - filled with humans who somehow hitched a ride there, couldn't get the money to leave, and just resorted to settling down and breeding instead. Human quarters (or human decks, etc) tend to be filthy, poor, and overcrowded. They're basically space-rats...

I believe the sci-fi RPG Faith took a similar direction.

[Salmoneus]

I think they could have made humans seem a little less...exceptional, which is a complaint I have against a lot of sci-fi--why should we be so special?).

Well, every intelligent species is likely to be special somehow. And it's hard to a human writer writing about human characters for a human audience not to make the humans stand out at least a little...

Well, sure, I wasn't proposing making humans the Bolians, but most sci-fi seems to assume that we show up and the entire universe makes way for our grandeur, brilliance, and versatility.

That, I think, is the key.

Early on, there was an assumption that humans were superior to all species of aliens in almost every way. Indeed, in the Golden Age, Campbell wouldn't allow stories to be published unless they stressed human supremacy.

Over time, though, people asked: but what's so great about humans? Why would they be special? To which almost everyone provided the easy get-out answer: humans are more versatile. [they did this in fantasy as well as in SF, for that matter]

Which is fair enough in theory, but mostly it's an excuse for bad alien-building. It's basically saying "all these other species are two-dimensional stereotypes who can only do one thing, but HUMANS can do everything! Maybe they're not as logical as a vulcan/elf or as violent as a klingon/orc, but they can do both, and that's why they're special!"

It's much more interesting when a writer makes the humans into the klingons (or vulcans) by emphasising what specifically they do well. Like, "breed like rabbits" or "display incredible stamina and healing powers".


One franchise that doesn't go down the humans-are-better route (I don't think? not obviously, anyway), btw, is Farscape.

...but of course, there's many ways to do that. In one (high-) SF setting of mine, humans are indeed exceptional... as something one step above vermin. Humans are infamous around the galaxy for being small, weak, stupid (or at least bloody-minded and lacking in long-term planning), incredibly fast-breeding, avaricious and prone to uncontrolled expansion. They're one of the more recent species to gain (or be give) FTL, and they're from a poor planet, so they don't have many actual colonies. But the setting has a lot of inter-species space stations, and wherever you go in the galaxy it seems as though there's always a Human Quarter - filled with humans who somehow hitched a ride there, couldn't get the money to leave, and just resorted to settling down and breeding instead. Human quarters (or human decks, etc) tend to be filthy, poor, and overcrowded. They're basically space-rats...

I believe the sci-fi RPG Faith took a similar direction.

Interesting. I don't know it; I'll have to look it up...

[Zaarin]

Well, every intelligent species is likely to be special somehow. And it's hard to a human writer writing about human characters for a human audience not to make the humans stand out at least a little...

Well, sure, I wasn't proposing making humans the Bolians, but most sci-fi seems to assume that we show up and the entire universe makes way for our grandeur, brilliance, and versatility.

That, I think, is the key.

Early on, there was an assumption that humans were superior to all species of aliens in almost every way. Indeed, in the Golden Age, Campbell wouldn't allow stories to be published unless they stressed human supremacy.

Over time, though, people asked: but what's so great about humans? Why would they be special? To which almost everyone provided the easy get-out answer: humans are more versatile. [they did this in fantasy as well as in SF, for that matter]

Which is fair enough in theory, but mostly it's an excuse for bad alien-building. It's basically saying "all these other species are two-dimensional stereotypes who can only do one thing, but HUMANS can do everything! Maybe they're not as logical as a vulcan/elf or as violent as a klingon/orc, but they can do both, and that's why they're special!"

It's much more interesting when a writer makes the humans into the klingons (or vulcans) by emphasising what specifically they do well. Like, "breed like rabbits" or "display incredible stamina and healing powers".


One franchise that doesn't go down the humans-are-better route (I don't think? not obviously, anyway), btw, is Farscape.

I think that's a good point. By assuming humans are the baseline, one can then make the aliens specialists, which is less interesting but also easier. (That's why I appreciated the Cardassians; it's a little less easy to pigenohole them in a one- or two-word niche, unlike the "violent, honorable Klingons" or the "greedy, opportunistic Ferengi" or the "logical, dispassionate Vulcans" or the "treacherous, aloof Romulans," etc. Long-running nuanced characters like Dukat and Garak helped.)

I believe the sci-fi RPG Faith took a similar direction.

Interesting. I don't know it; I'll have to look it up...

I'm not terribly familiar myself--I know it from another RPG made by the same company--but as I understand it Earth is a backwater and humans are basically regarded as rapid-breeding vermin who make useful cannon fodder in the other, more important powers' armies. I thought the idea was somewhat refreshing contra old-fashioned sci-fi.

[zompist]

Well sure, but we're talking about science fiction. Magic is essential to science fiction! The reason we call the whole genre speculative fiction is that we speculate some what-if and then see what follows from it.

Sure, you can write space fantasy... I'm not going to fact-check Star Wars. (Though even for fantasy there's matters of taste, and the Midichlorians are in bad taste...)

I think a lot of sf writers don't consider themselves to be dealing in unlimited magic, but in adding in a minimum of assumptions and developing these with high plausibility and consistency. Which can be hard to do!

At the same time, I realize that most everyone wants to write and read Age of Sail orientalist romance, only In Space. And yes, you can add magical elements one by one till you approximate this. But precisely because everyone wants to write and read this, I think it's worth questioning the enterprise (or the Enterprise) and thinking out alternatives.

Generally true as a baseline. But we also shouldn't go too far. For one thing, we probably would send an army of robots over, because the rest of our society will probably be robot-based by then. In particular, the initial set-up phase - even just things like building landing sites and the first farms - would take an extremely long time left to human hands; so a 'robot pioneer' phase setting up the essentials to receive travellers would seem an obvious choice.

Robots don't solve the problem, they introduce a new one!

I said that most First Worlders wouldn't want to be colonists. That was to recognize that the people most willing to give up their country and head to the frontier are dirt-poor people... e.g. my ancestors 150 years ago. If you did have magic FTL, and the chance at a reasonably good pioneer life, you could certainly find a hundred million Bangladeshis and Africans and Latin Americans to fill up your colonies.

But if you have a "robot-based" society--

1) Why didn't they make Bangladesh and Africa and Latin America a paradise already? Humans are already well adapted to Earth and the transportation costs are zero.
2) What do you need humans for? If they're basically decorative, surely you only need a thousand or so in Robotopolis.

Charlie Stross has written a tongue-in-cheek version of this in Saturn's Children and Neptune's Brood: Through some regrettable accidents, the human race has gone extinct. But machine civilization thrives, perhaps even better than when it had humans to take care of.

And why need it be severely regressive in technology? There'll be an extreme bottleneck in resource extraction, sure, so technology will have to be low-resource and largely bootstrapping. There'll be inefficiencies of scale, and things will tend to be standardised. But you'd be able to ship over a fair quantity of lightweight materials, and things like computers can be extremely miniaturised. It's likely that with 3D printing and advanced carbon compounds, you could generate some quite complicated things on site. Bustling it won't be, at first, but I don't think we have to assume prairie living either. There probably wouldn't have to be any digging of the soil, for instance - food would be generated aeroponically. [indeed, since the native soil would at first lack the complex ecology of earth soil, aeroponics would be almost essential]. And there wouldn't be the homestead penalties of being far from civilisation - the initial colony would probably initially be quite densely packed, for improved efficiency, so your 'homestead' would be just around the corner from the hospital and the spaceport.

I think you've answered at least half of your own question. I'd point out that this sort of high-tech life divorced from the soil is possible today: just move to Antarctica. Or low earth orbit. Or the moon. Or the continental shelf.

Obviously such a life isn't impossible. Why don't millions of people live in these places? Basically, a) it's orders of magnitudes more expensive than living in a paddy in Bangladesh; b) not many people really really want to live in a tiny habitat where you can't easily take a walk, go to a bar, or find a really good bookstore.

Also, if you do want thriving colonies, there's an easy solution: set your story a few centuries later! That's what I do in my sf series.

(I still try to avoid the Age of Sail tropes, but mere time does let you build up those colonies into bustling nations.)

[Salmoneus]

Well sure, but we're talking about science fiction. Magic is essential to science fiction! The reason we call the whole genre speculative fiction is that we speculate some what-if and then see what follows from it.

Sure, you can write space fantasy... I'm not going to fact-check Star Wars. (Though even for fantasy there's matters of taste, and the Midichlorians are in bad taste...)

I think a lot of sf writers don't consider themselves to be dealing in unlimited magic

Hey, I said 'magic'. I didn't say 'unlimited magic'. The difference is the whole point. And please, don't be one of those people who insist on a dichotomy between real (ultra-hard) science fiction and "space fantasy". There has never been a genre of real science fiction, and there's no particular reason to see it as superior anyway.

But if your setting relies on magic to exist at all, it makes no sense saying that this magic is better than that magic (within reason). As the person writing the story, you get to decide the parameters of your magic. Maybe you decide on magic that allows small colonies a thousand years from now. Maybe you decide on magic that allows large colonies two hundred years from now. If your magic makes sense, why should we act like we have to hold our nose about one but not the other?

I get that you, as a writer, may have a certain preference, but it's a big world with room for many different sorts of fantasy.

Generally true as a baseline. But we also shouldn't go too far. For one thing, we probably would send an army of robots over, because the rest of our society will probably be robot-based by then. In particular, the initial set-up phase - even just things like building landing sites and the first farms - would take an extremely long time left to human hands; so a 'robot pioneer' phase setting up the essentials to receive travellers would seem an obvious choice.

Robots don't solve the problem, they introduce a new one!

Yes, we are dealing with fiction.

Yes, it's true that robot-built interstellar colonies do not exist, and indeed almost certainly cannot exist. That by definition means there is some problem with them. If you 'fix' one part of the problem, you'll be left with another part of the problem. To build a coherent SF setting requires a great deal of intellectual effort, addressing many parts of the problem at once, and ultimately at some point you'll need to allow, at best, some unchecked optimism, if not outright hand-waving. I am not setting out to write a complete SF setting in one post. You pointed out one problem; I pointed out a way around it. Sure, this in turn introduces other problems, but that's not a flaw in my solution, it's a flaw in your expectations. On the contrary, a solution that introduces further problems is from the point of view of fiction an interesting solution.

1) Why didn't they make Bangladesh and Africa and Latin America a paradise already? Humans are already well adapted to Earth and the transportation costs are zero.
2) What do you need humans for? If they're basically decorative, surely you only need a thousand or so in Robotopolis.

Again, there's no need to tear apart my incorrect-future hypothesis. I've already said it's not an actually good prediction. These questions you raise are not fatal flaws, they're things for the writer to use to shape their setting.

They also don't overlook the 'pro' of this sort of colonization: the fact that it's the only sort of interstellar colonization that is actually remotely possible, however unlikely).

[personally, I suspect this will only be done if for some reason it's realised that humanity on earth is going to go extinct, and a robot-raised space colony starts to look like a final ark. Ultimately the problem with any sub-luminal space-travel (other than with stasis or cryogenesis, which are their own sort of magic) is that nobody benefits personally: whether you send embryos or you send a generation ship, nobody signing up to the scheme will ever get to another planet. Nor will anyone funding or developing the scheme on earth ever receive any advantage from doing so (per se), because they and their family/nation/species will all be dead by the time the colony ship reaches the other planet. So I suspect the only reason we could really have for doing it is that is some impersonal, collective need. And since that need can't involve any actual material benefit to anybody, it's a conceptual need. Maybe "exploring the stars" could be enough of a motivation... but given our history with the priorities we've space travel so far, I suspect in practice for something this massive it woud have to be "preserving the species from extinction".]

And why need it be severely regressive in technology? There'll be an extreme bottleneck in resource extraction, sure, so technology will have to be low-resource and largely bootstrapping. There'll be inefficiencies of scale, and things will tend to be standardised. But you'd be able to ship over a fair quantity of lightweight materials, and things like computers can be extremely miniaturised. It's likely that with 3D printing and advanced carbon compounds, you could generate some quite complicated things on site. Bustling it won't be, at first, but I don't think we have to assume prairie living either. There probably wouldn't have to be any digging of the soil, for instance - food would be generated aeroponically. [indeed, since the native soil would at first lack the complex ecology of earth soil, aeroponics would be almost essential]. And there wouldn't be the homestead penalties of being far from civilisation - the initial colony would probably initially be quite densely packed, for improved efficiency, so your 'homestead' would be just around the corner from the hospital and the spaceport.

I think you've answered at least half of your own question. I'd point out that this sort of high-tech life divorced from the soil is possible today: just move to Antarctica. Or low earth orbit. Or the moon. Or the continental shelf.

Obviously such a life isn't impossible. Why don't millions of people live in these places? Basically, a) it's orders of magnitudes more expensive than living in a paddy in Bangladesh; b) not many people really really want to live in a tiny habitat where you can't easily take a walk, go to a bar, or find a really good bookstore.

No offence, but these are trivial objections.
Regarding cost, there are two reasons why aeroponics are currently expensive: i) it's a new technology, the costs of which are continually falling; and ii) actually we DO use aeroponically (and hydroponically) grown food, but because there are so many of us, and there is already a massive existing infrastructure of extensive agriculture, even if intensive agriculture could be made cheaper on earth, it would still takes centuries to replace it. Further more, just because a technology is not the cheapest option on earth doesn't mean it can't be viable cheap elsewhere.

On your second question: this is a ridiculous strawman. Nobody's suggesting a colony of people trapped in coffins. Even a small village has room to go to a pub, and in many cases find a good bookshop (the fact more places don't have bookshops is largely a reflection of the fact that bookshops aren't as central to most people's housing priorities as you seem to think), and plenty of people want to live in villages. In this case, we'd be talking about a settlement with all the advantages of a village - small community, lots of outdoors to go and walk in - but also with many advantages of a big city (hospitals, etc). To think that you couldn't even find a few thousand people on Earth who think that giving up their access to a good bookstore isn't a reasonable price to pay for that deal is just close-minded.


On the broader question of why we haven't colonised the Moon or Antarctica, etc: well, we have colonised Antarctica, hundreds if not thousands of people live there, and if it weren't so easy to come back in the winter we'd probably have long-term residents there. But more generally: because those places are horrible!

If you colonise on the Moon, you have problems like "it's expensive to get to", "there's nothing there", "there's deadly radiation", "the low gravity makes long-term residence impossible", "you can't breathe", "there's no pressure" and "the temperature is usually wrong". The fact that you might also want to grow some food hydroponically is hardly the one big obstacle with the Moon. But none of those obstacles apply to a habitable planet with relatively cheap FTL. So I don't see having to rely on aeroponics as being some killer flaw.

Besides, even your SF setting must have had young colonies at some point. So the "no young colonies, only old "bustling nation" colonies" line hardly makes sense.

[zompist]

Sal, I enjoy discussing sf, but please slow down and read. It's tedious to list all the things that I didn't say, such as:

"I insist on ultra-hard sf"
"there is only one kind of fantasy"
"you couldn't even find a few thousand people on Earth" who could do without a bookstore
"having to rely on aeroponics [is] some killer flaw"
"no young colonies, only old "bustling nation" colonies"

What should be obvious, but apparently it needs stating: yes, authors can write anything from pure incoherent dreamland to rock-hard near-future techno-fiction. Some people will not care if it's coherent or not. Some can enjoy it for the story or atmosphere, but still find the world inconsistent and enjoy discussing that. I am not preventing anyone from writing as they please. In return, please recognize that you cannot prevent people from reacting to that writing as they please. If you don't want to discuss plausibility and consistency in sf, that's fine, but then just don't.

I don't think you've responded to my main point at all, which is that trying to reconstruct the Age of Sail, or the Wild West, requires a whole lot of unlikely assumptions to produce utterly conventional settings. People like the overall concept, so they're going to keep writing them. But there are other settings that are more likely or more novel, and thus worth thinking about. It's like redoing Esperanto: I'll be the first to say you can do it if you want, and even do it well; but you ought to be aware of your options.

I'm also sorry you didn't recognize the bookstores as AN EXAMPLE and not some sort of monolith to be taken with grim literalness. The point is, people in advanced countries are not that mobile. There's a thousand things, which the pubs and bookstores were intended to evoke but not exhaust, that tie them to their country or city. Obviously people move, but most stay within their country, and of the rest mostly stay within the advanced countries.

Just positing FTL, or even FTL plus robots, isn't enough to motivate large scale colonization from advanced countries.

This isn't to say you can't have colonies at all. Science or a taste for adventure might lure a few hundred. If there's significant chances to get rich, you could get far more. And again, the global poor are your best bet if you need millions of colonists... but then you need something for them to do (that the robots aren't already doing).

(Edit to add: there's also coercion, of course. Doesn't quite fit a Star Trek future, but it has classic-sf roots, especially in Heinlein. Better not offend the robot overlords.)

Finally, most of this trope assumes what I think is extremely unlikely: that accessible exoplanets are basically Earthlike-- preferably already equipped with oxygen atmospheres, edible plants, and no natives. It's a genre convention, and thus very hard to avoid, but it'd be nice if the author at least does some actual hand-waving to address it. (E.g the Mass Effect dodge: aliens conveniently provided FTL warps to all the nice planets.)