Less on the Social Ramifications of Time Travel

Time traveler Noÿs Lambent

Yesterday I started reading Isaac Asimov's time travel novel, The End of Eternity for the 17th time. In related news, today I came across a blog post called More on the Social Ramifications of Time Travel. Golly. And I sometimes worry that I take science fiction too seriously....

Well, maybe I've only read The End of Eternity 15 times. But who's counting? In any case (15, 17 or 23), I enjoy reading this novel and I agree with Asimov who excused the scientific implausibility of time travel by saying that time travel stories are simply too much fun for writers to avoid dabbling in them.

I've always found it hard to get too serious about Eternity. I think Asimov was joking when he said that humans used time travel to send clover seed through time. He seemed to take more seriously the potential impact of future technology being made available to less technologically advanced eras. There is a rather long section in The End of Eternity about the problems arising from using time travel to make available a cure for cancer. Each person who might be saved by making the cure available to them must be carefully evaluated in order to be sure that saving their life does not cause a Reality Change. Thank goodness for the Momentum of Time! Of course, those who are told that they cannot get the cure are resentful.

The "big social issue" presented by Asimov is the sorry fact that the existence of Eternity causes human extinction and a failure of humans to spread through outer space to other worlds. Time travel is used to make Earth a safe and stable environment for humans. As the story is told by Asimov, humans stop evolving and eventually they simply die off.

One of the interesting aspects of The End of Eternity is that it is an Asimov novel that includes the idea of there being other human-like creatures who evolve on other planets of our Galaxy. A major reason for the extinction of the human species was that while humans played around with time travel technology, those other beings developed space travel technology, moved into outer space and colonized all of the available star systems before humans ever got around to developing interstellar space travel technology. We must ask: did any of those other space travelers also develop time travel? If so, how did they avoid the "trap" that led to human extinction?

More importantly, why is it that, as Noÿs explains:

"There are other stars with other planets, you know. There are even other intelligences. None, in this Galaxy at least, are as ancient as mankind, but in the 125,000 Centuries man remained on Earth, younger minds caught up and passed us, developed the interstellar drive, and colonized the Galaxy."

Why did it take 4,000,000,000 years for humans to evolve on Earth and the "younger minds" 4,012,500,000 years? Providing a reason for this cosmic coincidence was one of my goals for The Start of Eternity, a collaboratively written fan fiction sequel to The End of Eternity.

Image Credits. Noÿs Lambent is currently living in Athens. When contacted, she gave permission for her image to be used and commented, "They won't believe it's me, anyhow."

Singular Patriots

In Alcor we trust.

State of the Union
January, 2020

Mister Speaker, Madam Vice President, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:

Presidents have come before Congress for 230 years, in times of war, prosperity and, now, Singularity. It is fitting that we look back, briefly, on past times of strife and struggle. Not so long ago this mighty nation was on the brink of ruin, faced with ballooning deficits and ever increasing costs for medical entitlements and social security payments.

Now, thanks to the wise actions of this legislative body, those old days of tribulation are behind us and our union is stronger than ever before. This year, rather than stop smoking or lose weight, millions of Americans are free, freer than ever before, to continue making selfish and short-sighted decisions. Tonight we can celebrate the source of our new found freedom: the Singularity.

Our faith in the Singularity allows us to have confidence in the cryogenic preservation of our sickly and dying patriots who volunteer for immortality. Rather than burden their fellow citizens with the cost of their medical care, this year alone, a record 7.3 million Americans were reversibly frozen. (Applause) These singular patriots have truly achieved the best of both worlds. While in this world they were free to enjoy the pleasures of self-indulgent excess and the hyper-consumptive lifestyle. And in the future post-Singularity world they will enjoy miraculous wonders that we can only imagine in science fiction stories and binding cryopreservation contracts.

However, our work is not yet done. I now call upon congress to increase the government incentive that is paid to our good citizens who volunteer for cryonic life-extension and the guarantee that they will live in post-Singularity America. Although the great visionaries of the Singularity assure us that post-Singularity America is never more than 30 years in the future, many Americans wisely take no chance and have themselves frozen now. Our great patriotic motto is: why wait? It is wise to have yourself frozen before your lung tumors swell or your neurodegeneration proceeds very far. I say, save what is left of your youth for your wonderful life in post-Singularity America! (Applause)

As convincing as that argument is, some of our sick and dying citizens still balk and hesitate. Of course, we know what truly motivates Americans. We are a nation where logic has always taken the back seat to free market forces. Therefore, I am sending legislation to the Hill, proposing that current medicare and social security recipients be paid a lump sum $32,000,000 benefit, compounded at a 45% annual interest rate, to be paid in full when these cryogenically preserved patriots resume their lives in post-Singularity America. Our goal is to make medicare and social security entirely virtual entitlements that will only ever be paid out in post-Singularity America. (Applause)

I also call upon both the House and the Senate to extend the Avatar Science Tax Incentive. We need to continue to provide this incentive to Hollywood for the creation of more fictional and uncritical accounts of miraculous future technologies that will satisfy, or at least seem to satisfy, the quest for mind transfer and our dreams of eternal life. (Applause)

My fellow Americans, what does all this mean for you? Nothing less than eternal life in a future age of miraculous wealth and personal luxury! Contact your representatives today and demand that they give you what you deserve. Now is the time to demand your own piece of the American pie. Think of what has been learned from the great visionaries like Bernard Madoff and demand your $32,000,000, compounded at a 45% annually! (Applause)

We have come through a difficult decade. But a new dawn is perpetually upon the horizon. A new decade stretches before us where the Singularity will again be dangled just beyond our grasp. We won't quit. We will seize the opportunity afforded by the dream of Singularity! (Applause) Let's seize this moment to carry the dream forward and strengthen our union once more.

Thank you. God bless you. God bless the United States of America. And God bless the Singularity! (Applause)

Realism in Science Fiction

Annalee Newitz recently asked "Why Is Hard Science Fiction So Unrealistic?". Newitz is interested in the tradition of literary realism and she says: "realism in fiction and film has generally been an effort to represent the experiences of ordinary people". Is there a shortage of "ordinary people" in hard science fiction stories?

The definition of "hard science fiction" is problematical because it is at risk of changing in response to evolving conceptualizations of science. We live in the age of science, an age characterized by cultural change that is due to science and technology. As recently as 30 years ago science fiction was a much simpler part of human culture than it is today. In 1978, William Bainbridge and Murray Dalziel were able to comfortably divide science fiction into three parts: hard science fiction, fantasy, and new-wave. (see: "The Shape of Science Fiction as Perceived by the Fans") Today, there is a much broader collection of well-recognized sub-genres in science fiction.

In the data set analyzed by Bainbridge and Dalziel, Isaac Asimov was ranked as the most distinctive hard science fiction author. In 1978, Asimov was one of the iconic figures of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Larry Niven is a good example of the next generation of hard science fiction authors. Science fiction is "hard science fiction" to the extent that it concerns itself with scientific advance and technological change and does so in a way that respects the nature of the universe and how science allows us to understand the universe. In my experience, authors with a personal interest in science and an understanding of how science works are the most likely to write interesting hard science fiction.

There are two common misconceptions about hard science fiction. Bainbridge and Dalziel explicitly stated one of these misconceptions. They wrote that hard science fiction: "refers to stories built around certain facts or speculations concerning the 'exact' or 'hard' sciences". It is true that the exact sciences dominate research expenditures, press coverage and popular concepts of what constitutes science. It is true that icons of hard science fiction such as Asimov and Niven were trained in mathematics and "hard science". Those truths are a consequence of the fact that the historical development of science is shaped by working scientists who tend to "divide and conquer". Scientific problems are sorted according to ease of progress and many physical science problems are the easiest and so have been tackled first. Simple problems like how to describe the nature of electromagnetism were studied first. More complex and challenging biological and social science topics are only now starting to receive adequate attention from scientists. Thus, identifying hard science fiction is not a matter of distinguishing between fiction that involves "hard science" or "soft science". Hard science fiction can certainly involve "soft science"; what is important is only that science and technology elements be present as a core aspect of the fiction.

Annalee Newitz raised (in her article) a second major misconception about hard science fiction. In discussing hard science fiction she equates hard science fiction with scientifically-accurate storytelling. This is simply wrong. There are sub-genres of science fiction within which scientific realism is prized highly. For example, the restricted comfort zone of mundane science fiction never pushes us beyond the current facts of science. However, both Asimov and Niven often extrapolated far beyond the "facts" as currently known to science. Two examples are Niven's stasis field and Asimov's Eternity. These two imagined technologies are "space/time bubbles" within which the known laws of physics explicitly do not apply. Science can tell us nothing about Niven's stasis field or Asimov's time travel device, yet they are both plot devices that exist comfortably within the genre of hard science fiction. They are depicted as the products of future science and technology and they are incorporated in their respective stories in a scientific (if entirely speculative) way.

Realism in science fiction is not to be confused with scientific realism.

Having raised the red herring of "scientifically-accurate storytelling", Annalee Newitz turns to another issue that seems to be her main concern: the types of characters and plots that we find in hard science fiction. Newitz constructs a dichotomy between science fiction with

1) "rebel heroes and extraordinary leaders" and "unrealistic megabeings with superpowers" and "alternate realities...focusing on technologies"

and fiction with

2) "ordinary people" and the "regular guy" and "building up social worlds" by showing "everyday life".

Newitz is asking: can't there be a better mix of realism and hard science fiction? We can ask, why does hard science fiction tend to be divorced from realism? These questions only make sense if you adopt a conventional definition of literary realism, and for the moment we can do so.

I think the fundamental source of the perceived split between realism and hard science fiction is that there are two fundamental directions from which science is approached in literature, a split that has variously been characterized as involving The Two Cultures or Culture Wars or postmodernity. This split involves a "glass half empty?" argument about the nature of science and its impact. Hard science fiction was born as a genre that was often "optimistic about the value of scientific and technological progress" and it remains so optimistic that its great works often depict dramatic transformations of human culture and human existence. In contrast, much of what counts as literary realism in science fiction is pessimistic and depicts imagined worlds where science and technology are powerless to change human existence for the better.

Hard science fiction stories traditionally extrapolate a scientific idea or technological power in such a way that we are transported to an imagined culture where the ordinary has been transformed into the extraordinary by science or technology. That is often the whole point of the story: science changes everything. Newitz is suffering from her misconceptions if she imagines that it makes sense to hope that hard science fiction will become more realistic in the literary sense. It would be paradoxical and self-defeating for a hard science fiction author to imagine a wonderful bit of technology and then write a story in which that technology changes nothing and people simply remain as the "ordinary people" of our everyday experience.

I sympathize with Newitz when she complains about science fiction television programs that strive to deliver realism. Most of these television shows are produced by people who think that they can cash in on the popularity of science fiction by putting a spaceship or a cloned human or some other "wiz-bang" plot device into a story and have it constitute interesting science fiction. Such television shows tend to be mind-numbingly "realistic" by endlessly showing people who are unable to change themselves for the better no matter what wonderful technologies are available to them. These programs depict conventional literary realism but the methods and workings of science are almost never realistically depicted.

Transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary is often a central part of hard science fiction. The typical protagonist of hard science fiction is an ordinary guy, but that guy often does something great or is transformed into something great by the application of science and technology. That is why hard science fiction is often so unrealistic...if you define "realism" as a depiction of current everyday existence. Hard science fiction is often about showing the ways by which science can lift us out of our current reality. Newitz specifically mentioned Asimov and she claimed that he was a failure at realistically depicting everyday life. Some of his science fiction was set in the 20th century and I'd challenge Newitz to explain how those stories (particularly many of his robot stories) failed to be realistic.

Hard science fiction authors such as Asimov are probably best known for taking readers into strange new lands where the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary and that probably takes some people out of their comfort zones, particularly television executives. If hard science fiction is done well, then even a world in which the ordinary has become extraordinary can be realistic about the nitty-gritty of everyday existence. Literary realism may have originated among non-science fiction writers and it may have originally been restricted to realistic depictions of current-day existence. There is nothing preventing science fiction authors from bringing realism to imagined cultures where everyday life is extraordinary if viewed from our perspective. Some types of hard science fiction can certainly seem unrealistic if you restrict your concept of realism to the perspective of one culture at one point in time. Science fiction is very much concerned with challenging those kinds of conceptual limitations. I'm willing to redefine and broaden the meaning of "realism" in the context of science fiction.

It is fun to follow hard science fiction authors like Asimov to distant imagined cultures. While doing so, we can be transported to places where everyday events are far from ordinary (according to our standards) and ordinary people (according to the standards of the imagined culture) get to do extraordinary things (measured by our standards). In The Start of Eternity, Gohrlay is an ordinary person in her culture. She just happens to be a Neanderthal who lives on the Moon. It is still possible to write about her life with realism. Cellular Civilization is set more within our everyday reality, but it is still possible for even the most ordinary characters like Charlie Parker to be transformed into something extraordinary by technology. In such stories I do not feel any conflict between hard science fiction and realism. Of course, I don't feel the need to adopt a restrictive view of realism.

Nor do I expect most people (including Newitz) to understand and appreciate hard science fiction. The narrowness of the Golden Age of Science Fiction provoked the "new wave" struggles to broaden the scope of science fiction. That led to the current popularity and diversity of science fiction and a state of affairs where we have hoards of "experts" on science fiction who do not understand science. Most of what passes for science fiction in popular culture is parasitic on the genre and endlessly tells us the same boring story: people living in the age of science who do not understand science are like deer standing transfixed by the head lights of an on-rushing car. I suspect that hard science fiction is a sub-genre that can only be understood and appreciated by people who are part of the scientific sub-culture. People familiar with science are comfortable with imagining alternate realities and can develop a flexible conceptualization of "realism". Once you make those moves, you are not left in the past with a narrow view of literary realism and you will become aware of the large amounts of realism that does exist within hard science fiction.

Image. Cover image for Cellular Civilization. Image credits.