Update

At The Abbey Hotel in Puerto Vallarta. Rainy season, but it’s still beautiful.  Only a handful of guest are staying at the hotel at the moment, mostly Denverites fleeing from the insufferable Democratic convention. Amen to that. The political blogosphere is a place I simply won’t go until well after November. This is proof, if any were needed, that the vast bulk of political blogging doesn’t make events any more vivid or immediate. All that you have in the end is a lot of people talking about the same thing, from a lot of ideologically and emotionally different perspectives while failing to provide a single shred of original information not accessible to any common prole with  an internet connection. Novel! I have nothing against blogging per se (obviously) but I don’t pretend that blogging is a new, energetic media desitined to replace professional journalism either. If it is, let’s see something new. Not new opinions, or viewpoints, or commentary: new information. Please.

Drop Whatever You’re Doing

Banksy has said something. It must be profound.

Or not.

Joyless Fussbudget Scolds LEAP INTO ACTION!

Michael Phelps is henceforth personally responsible for every overweight child in the world. God, if these nutjob freaks knew what I was raised on, they’d be reaching for the smelling salts from their fainting couches and demanding that I commit retroactive suicide to make up for my lifetime of carbon negligence and irresponsible dietary habits.  But nothing’s good enough for todays neo puritans. Phelps could have his picture on a box of  asparagus flavored wood chips and someone would be all over him for encouraging unsustainable forestry practices.

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A Better Tomorrow

We may never be able to transport humans, but we might very well one day have a Star Trek style warp drive. Not bad for a show that’s roundly dismissed as old-fashioned by the scifi hipster set ( yes, they actually believe they’re hipsters. I know, it’s heartbreaking, but I’m not going to be the one to tell them)

How I’d love to have a dollar for every time I’ve been told by someone that the tech in Battlestar Galactica is “more realistic” than Star Trek. Really? Ok, how does the artificial gravity work? How does the jump drive work? How are the air and water recycled? How is it that the Galactica doesn’t collapse under it’s own iron-clad mass, or that its sublight engines don’t rip through the ship from stern to stem at the slightest acceleration? Why isn’t Starbuck liquefied inside her cockpit the first time she makes a high G turn at space-combat velocities?

Battlestar is as much a fantasy as Star Wars – and Star Trek in it’s way. But Star Trek has the distinction of still being the standard against which new technologies are measured, more than 40 years on. We still talk about Star Trek style communicators and Star Trek Style warp drive. No one talks about “Battlestar Galactica style avionics or Star Wars style hyper drive, and it’s unlikely that anyone ever will. I’m not sure how to describe the reason for that in a way that Trek-haters, or general scifi haters will ever understand. It’s just that there’s an internally-consistent logic to the science and technology of Trek that fans and writers have been putting a great deal of thought into for decades. In fact, countless thousands of those fans became scientists because of Star Trek. Some of those scientists born out of the original series became science consultants on the Next Generation, or contributed their ideas online. Star Trek, more than any series before or since, shaped and was shaped by the scientific community.

Will any young boy or girl ever choose an education in science because they were inspired by Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, the remake of the Bionic Woman or the Sarah Connor Chronicles? That’s a rhetorical question. The answer is, of course, no – probably not even one. Science fiction doesn’t feel the need to bother with explaining how the future will work anymore. It pretends that it’s about “human drama”, which for the most part, involves bleak, despairing scenarios in which people treat each other horribly. How does the Sarah Connor Chronicles end? Judgment Day. Everyone dies. Nothing any of the characters do matters, or can alter the future in any significant way.

That’s what passes for “realism” now. The odd thing is, for all its emphasis on technology, it’s the constant examination of  humanity and the sense of moral optimism that people tend to equate with Star Trek – even before transporters and warp drive. And its that humanistic, strongly optimistic aspect of the show that contemporary critics seem to most vociferously despise about it.

The question “Is Science Fiction Dead?”, continually gets raised and honestly, I don’t know how to answer it anymore. I do know that the idea that science fiction should inspire and elevate the spirit is pretty much dead. But then, so is the concept of the human spirit. We’ve thrown it out. It’s too quaint. It’s unsophisticated and sentimental. Not acceptably Postmodern. Speciesist.

Even the great dystopian works of science fiction were a passionate protest against an anticipated insult to the dignity of the human condition. But if we’re not permitted to believe in ourselves, if it’s unfashionable even to hold our own species in esteem, then dystopianism ceases to have any meaning – and science fiction loses it’s final function. What does it matter after all if we end up with a Blade Runner future? We’re horrible creatures, a cancer on the living earth. It’s what we deserve.

If all faith is to be sorned and derided as a sentimental delusion; the refuge of emotional weaklings, then what place is there for faith in ourselves, our capacity to overcome our limitations and create a better tomorrow? Just as we can’t pick and choose which scientific truths we feel comfortable with, I’m not sure we can pick and choose which forms of faith we find to our liking. We may need to tolerate them all, if the concepts of faith in ourselves and the future are to have any meaning.

Best Movie Review Line EVER

…the turgid videogame anonymity of it all.

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Inventions that Changed the World

It’s not hard to argue that the flush toilet, which made modern, large-scale, sustainable urbanization possible, controlled the spread of diseases and parasites and enormously extended human lifespan has had more of an influence on human history than all the world’s religions and philosophies combined. Some more world-changers:

• the astrolabe
• the printing press
• the microscope
• the London sewer system
• the lever
• the hypodermic needle
• the compass

There are thousands of others of course. What do you think is the single most important invention in history? For me it would have to be the lever – the invention that started it all.

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The Engine of History

My friend Terry Robinson recently posed a question in one of his posts: can we trust forecasts and projections of the global geopolitical situation, even when those reports are authored by respected and authoritative scholars? It took me a while to think over my response, but the short answer I think is no  – and for a very simple reason.

The reason geopolitical analyses always go wrong is that they tend to be based on the assumption that politics and the competition for finite resources are the primary drivers of both history and contemporary trends. But they’re not – science and technology are. Politics might have started the First World War, but it was the invention and application of the Gatling gun that changed history. Marxism and the consequent Communist revolution that followed were based on a “scientific” theory of history that arose out of discoveries about the plastic qualities of human nature being made by the then relatively new science of sociology. Radicalized Islam is an allergic reaction to economic and cultural globalization – which have been made possible by technological developments in transportation and communication -  and so on.

With all due respect to Ray Kurzweil and his followers, developments in science and technology are notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to predict in advance. For example, there’s an outside chance (albeit a slim one) that the Large Hadron Collider will yield no discoveries of any consequence, leaving physicists nothing to do but debate how many angels can dance on the head of a branch of science that has already reached its experimental limits. Or it could produce an entirely new physics based on discoveries that no one anticipated. Those discoveries could have a greater impact on the course of history than all the ideologies and religious movements of the world combined.

Even the announcement today that the mass-production of renewable diesel fuel is now a practical possibility vastly outweighs 9/11in historical significance. Some very smart, very insightful people have spent the last 25 years charting the decline of our civilization after peak oil in exquisite ( not to mention enthusiastic ) detail. But it only takes a handful of minor breakthroughs by mere handfuls of individuals to radically change the direction of history and render every syllable written by erudite experts utterly obsolete.

Even if we had foreknowledge of scientific and technological breakthroughs, we can never fully anticipate the impact of those breakthroughs on society. Golden Age science fiction failed to fully predict the microchip and was therefore unable to imagine its profound implications. The internet was sort of predicted ( 2-way teletype machines in every home) but again, the world-altering significance of that possibility was never fully grasped.

Because it’s impossible to predict exactly who will produce which breakthrough at what time or in what nation – and because we can never fully imagine the unintended consequences and applications of new technologies, I don’t think it will ever be possible to make worthwhile projections about the course of geopolitics. Not that we shouldn’t try of course, but we always need to remember the the big picture is made of very unruly and unpredictable pixels any one of which can potentially transform the entire image.

Cheap, Renewable, Clean…Diesel

A lab in the states has engineered a species of E-Coli that eats sugar and excretes diesel fuel. Right now they’re producing barrels of the stuff, but plan on moving to large scale production in 3-5 years. As my friend Alec put it, ” if we can supply the world with beer, there’s no reason why we can’t supply it with manufactured fuel.” I never really thought of it that way, but I never completely lost my faith that science would find a solution to peak oil.

There’s still the problem of carbon-waste, but discovering a permanent fuel source doesn’t mean we have to give up making our technology cleaner and more efficient, and there are plenty of powerful economic incentives to ensure that process continues. It’s not the solution to all our problems, but it means that people needn’t freeze to death in their homes in winter, or that we have to give up air travel.

Gregarious People Often Tend to be Outgoing. Studies Prove it!

This is the season where a lot of journalists in China for the Olympics need to find something to write about other than the breakfast buffet in their hotels, or too-obvious puff-pieces about the glories of the NEXT SUPERPOWER. So we’re subjected to a lot of nonsense about differences between Eastern and Western cultures that people have been writing about badly for centuries. Ann Althouse vivisects a particularly lazy piece of us-vs-them writing by David Brooks. My favorite passage:

Here in Madison, Wisconsin, not traveling at all, I sit at my desk and hear the strains of the University of Wisconsin marching band practicing a few blocks away. They’re always playing as one, marching in formation. Are they Chinese? It seems to me, people can get together and put on an orderly display when they want to. Does Brooks really want to say that the Chinese people are just much more likely to want to than Americans?

It’s one thing to critique the political system in China, although most journalists and pundits seem to be shying away from that in favor of gushing odes to fireworks. But haven’t we already had enough of these idiotic attempts to shoehorn stereotypical ideas about the Chinese psyche into an ideological context for the purpose of making us feel better about ourselves?

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Who’s this “We”?

The Opening Ceremony we all gushed over was not what it seemed.

Blockbuster Fatigue

Salon’s Stephanie Zachareck suffers from it. Do you? Personally, I’ve hardly noticed this summer’s movies. We went to see Iron Man in Spanish, and I’ve seen some billboards around town for a movie about a heroic clown who fights some psycho who dresses up as a bat or something. But I wouldn’t say I’m burned out or over-exposed to Hollywood hype. It’s like internet advertising: it turns invisible after a while.

For example, I always hear people asking, “how does Facebook make any money?”. Well, they sell all your personal information to market researchers for starters. It belongs to them, after all. It’s right there in the service agreement. But also, they run ads. You have to actually look to notice them.

Anyway, if you’re feeling like you’re overexposed to movie and media hype, just take a break from the internet. The great thing about the concentration of all forms of media online is that it makes it much simpler to get away from.

The Right Kind of War

In the lead-up to the Iraq war, my email inbox was inundated by a tsunami of online petitions, appeals, and calls to protest from friends and anti-war organizations determined to stir up opposition to Bushco’s illegal and immoral New World Order imperial adventure. Now, with Georgia, not a peep from the usual suspects. Maybe I’m off a lot of mailing lists. Or maybe this is the right kind of war, the kind that doesn’t rouse people to protest because doing so wouldn’t fit with the script.  Who knows. Meanwhile, Google maps goes blank on Georgia. I’m reminded of one of the stupidest things ever said, by anyone, since our species evolved the power of speech: “The internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it”. That one never gets old.

It’s All Over Except for the Finger-Wagging and the I Told You So’s

All we can prepare for is extinction

Where else but the Guardian?

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