The Future According To Stanislaw Lem 196
An anonymous reader writes "The Paris Review has an article about SF author Stanislaw Lem, explaining Lem's outlook on the future and his expectations for technological advancement. Lem tended toward a view that technology would infect and eventually supplant biological evolution. But he also suggested an interesting explanation for why we haven't detected alien civilizations: "Perhaps ... they are so taken up with perfecting their own organisms that they've abandoned space exploration entirely. According to a similar hypothesis, such beings are invisible because technological ease has resulted in a 'Second Stone Age' of 'universal illiteracy and idleness.' When everyone's needs are perfectly met, it 'would be hard, indeed, to find one individual who would choose as his life's work the signaling, on a cosmic scale, of how he was getting along.' Rather than constructing Dyson Spheres, Lem suggests, advanced civilizations are more likely to spend their time getting high.""
unlikely (Score:2)
Maybe... (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe immortality cancels out curiosity.
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Yes, that's what he suggests, and it isn't a new thought, though it is 'worriesome'.
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
I look forward to the day I can break away from daily "work" and just pursue my interests and hobbies.
And in fact, this is the economy of Start Trek: an economy of plenty, rather than our current economy based on scarcity. People do what they do because they want to, not because they get paid for it.
I don't think the Star Trek scenario is unreasonable, if we were to find better ways to generate energy. Nobody has to be idle (though they could be if they wanted). That isn't a species-killing idea, it's just another evolutionary step.
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Life in the year 2100.
The entire population has moved underground. The planet looks more like it did before human arrived than it did today. One lives in a apartment that is totally secure and sound proof. There is a totally automatic transportation system in underground tubes. One can not even visit an address unless one has permission from the occupant. The apartment will not have a kitchen since all food will be centrally cooked and distributed. The rooms will always be at a certain temperature and
Re:Maybe... (Score:4, Insightful)
In principle, I'm all for this. Practically, however: life always expands to take up all the space/resources available to it. The Star Trek economy needs either infinite resources (impossible) or population controls (distasteful) to be feasible. Otherwise at some point you'll get a virus such as a religious doctrine that says have as many kids as you can and suck up as many public resources as possible, and do nothing else with them, and we'll be right back at the edge of scarcity and collapse.
"Which is the greater danger - nuclear warfare or the population explosion? The latter absolutely! To bring about nuclear war, someone has to DO something; someone has to press a button. To bring about destruction by overcrowding, mass starvation, anarchy, the destruction of our most cherished values-there is no need to do anything. We need only do nothing except what comes naturally - and breed. And how easy it is to do nothing."
-- Isaac Asimov
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I wish that people would stop this silliness about population controls. Have you been asleep for 40 years? Right now, in an age when European politicians are pulling out their hair trying to get people to make more kids, it's hard to find an industrialized country that it making children at the replacement rate. Many countries are actually shrinking, including populous ones like Japan, Italy, Russia, etc. Many more would be shrinking were it not for immigration. In countries like Mexico that are traditional
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The Earth as a whole is exploding in terms of human population.
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What the fuck did I just read!
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Latest UN figures say population will top out in 2050 at about nine billion and then decline, with most growth now in Africa and parts of Asia. As education levels rise (particularly amongst women) fertility rates go down. Much of the developed world is not reproducing at replacement rates.
Overpopulation is a red herring.
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It might start to decline before 2050 (famine, wars over resources scarcity).
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Otherwise at some point you'll get a virus such as a religious doctrine that says have as many kids as you can and suck up as many public resources as possible, and do nothing else with them, and we'll be right back at the edge of scarcity and collapse.
S'uthlam was in that exact position in "Tuf Voyaging".
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Re:Maybe... (Score:4, Funny)
As one alien species said (about humans):
"You mean you have to pay to live on the planet you were born on??"
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Once you do that, the Gateses and Kochs of the world can be safely ignored. They won't have any power anymore.
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That says more about you than the nature of a being that doesn't die.
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That I just threw out a premise out there for others to play with? I doubt you had that in mind with "about you".
It's a premise for a 1950-ish sort of scifi.
You could even back it up with some philosophy about civilizations and how they calm down and anchor intelligent species and even some science about how lower testosterone levels kill off the drive to do anything.
You know... to make the box you're putting it in seem more solid.
Except it's still thinking inside a box.
The main question is "Where are the E
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Don't worry I've seen Zardoz. :-)
I feel the idea that immortality = boredom is way off for several reasons.
#1 Death isn't everyone's motivation to do things. Sure it works for some people, but those people should pause before throwing around such blanket statements.
#2 Shades of the "everything has already been invented" thinking. The idea that we'd run out of things to do. That's hubris. Seriously that's "Watch me predict the entire future of humanity right here in 10 seconds" kind of thinking.
#3 Motives? D
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I'm not talking about humans.
Particularly stock humans. As a stock human I could go for days just looking at the second hand on a watch making rounds.
I'm talking about aliens who have achieved immortality through... say... genetics, BUT inadvertently ticked off the check box for "curiosity" in the process.
Or better yet, like you say, ticked on the check box for boredom.
Not being bored because immortality is boring, but bored cause now they can't NOT BE bored.
The Borg would probably be bored out of their min
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Nice story thanks. :-)
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Zelazny usually is. :)
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Re:Maybe... (Score:4, Interesting)
How should I know? They are aliens.
I just gave you a premise. Imagine your own damn scifi alien race. With or without hookers and blackjack.
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How come "Maybe immortality cancels out curiosity." is related to " Imagine your own damn scifi alien race. With or without hookers and blackjack."?
Because SCIFI.
You know... The main topic.
You know, those completely imaginary stories, which people imagine around premises like "Maybe A with maybe B equals maybe C... Hmmm... How would that go?"
The second comment is me telling you to go and IMAGINE a plausible story of your own, around that concept or some other.
And I told it as a JOKE, which includes a reference to a comical SCIFI show.
Funny thing is, I added the Futurama reference to MAKE SURE no one mistook my reply for something other than jovial.
Clea
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Not everyone lives under a rock either.
And if you are arguing that you've never heard of that Futurama reference before...
You are either lying, have been in a coma for the last couple of decades (it's a show from the '90s, bro), are 3 years old, have been in a prison (solitary) for the last couple of decades or in some other way removed from the society in general and geek/nerd crowd in particular.
I'm leaning towards being a convicted murderer who just got out of prison and killed the real cribera, stealing
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He's not the real owner of that ID.
Notice the sudden change in the pattern of posting? [slashdot.org]
Which was sporadic with months between posts, and then suddenly he gets into a daily argument over a well known internet meme?
The real owner of that ID has long been digested by dogs or fish.
That's why you should not live alone, away from the civilization.
Someone will notice that, will come to your door, kill you, and take your slashdot ID.
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I think his beef is that a number of us have long since grown out of our "trite comment" phase, when some of us (or at least I) had the good fortune to be too intimidated to open my mouth and say something dumb on the internet.
Unfortunately the newer batch of posters seems to have no such inhibition, and happily prove their ignorance to all.
Re:unlikely (Score:4, Interesting)
not necessarily. That just applies to us, and its a fallacy to assume that others are like us.
Imagine an alien race so super intelligent that they consider they've already invented everything, they don't actually invent it until they have a need for it, and frankly, talking to the chattering money-boys on a distant planet just hasn't been something they need, strangely enough
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No, they'd outsource that work to engineered squids.
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I don't think its terribly unreasonable to postulate that a sufficiently advanced society may be world bound and following their bliss.
A sufficiently advanced society may actually have come to the realization that FTL travel/communication is impossible and that travelling to the nearest inhabited planet would be a centuries long one way expedition with little or no return on investment. So, if an advanced civilization figures out that they are forever trapped in a single solar system, with one or two habita
highly probable (Score:4, Insightful)
getting high (Score:3, Insightful)
The trouble with getting high is that there's always some jerk who ISN'T getting high because they're jacked up on taking advantage of everyone else's idleness to promote their own self-interest. Sorry, but evolution isn't going to let people get away with being sloths.
Re:getting high (Score:5, Insightful)
your high is different to mine.
Some people might smoke pot, others get drunk. Some gamble and others fuck as much as they can.
And some have "making money" as their high, some have "screwing other over in power games" as theirs.
But there's also going to be someone who likes doing stuff as their personal meaning. Even in a society based on self-interest and personal abuse, there's going to be a few Crazy Eddies.
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...evolution isn't going to let people get away with being sloths.
Evolution "isn't going to let people get away with being sloths" and simultaneously be successful at propagating their genes.
A lot of the slothful are fine with that.
Eh... (Score:3, Insightful)
The most reasonable explanation why we haven't found alien life is...
Alien life got a good look at us.
Crazy? Yep. Greedy? Yep. Still fight over dirt? Yep. Not trusworthy? Yep. Supercrazy religions in charge? Yep.
Destroying our own environment? Yep. Wipe out any other species for fun, profit, or they're just in the way? Yep.
Why would any intelligent creature want anything to do with us?
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"Why would any intelligent creature want anything to do with us?"
In the same way that some people here on earth study primitive societies there would surely be some alien anthropologists out there interested in us.
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"Anthropology is the study of humans, past and present."
From http://www.aaanet.org/about/wh... [aaanet.org].
Not sure what is redundant here.
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Sounds reasonable.
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The most reasonable explanation why we haven't found alien life is...
...the aliens live (or used to live before their star blew up) light years away from us, and they have to follow the same laws of physics as us.
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If we found lower forms of life on another planet, would we roll our eyes at them and ignore them? Or would we be fascinated by them and study them?
Re:Eh... (Score:5, Funny)
because we have Elvis and Beethoven, and they don't.
I thought the aliens already got Elvis.....
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Actually, they have everything we have of Levis and Beethoven, except their physical bones. We have been blasting it out to space for quite a while.
It is possible (Score:2)
but then, many things are possible. What if one of these hypothesized aliens derives a higher reward from blasting signals into space than from any other method? What if it sees that as the ultimate fulfillment of its being? We don't know what their psychology is like, or even if they have a psychology. They're hypothetical aliens hypothetically doing something. We have no relevant facts to constrain our speculation.
Twitter (Score:5, Funny)
So, interstellar Twitter is *not* a sign of an advanced civilization.
(Though that would have been my guess all along.)
ok, SERIOUSLYnow... (Score:2)
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter
High-power industrial civilization may not last. (Score:5, Insightful)
Records of human civilization go back over 3000 years. Industrial civilization goes back less than 200. A good starting point is the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, the first non-demo steam passenger railway. There were earlier locomotives, but this is the moment the industrial revolution got out of beta and started changing people's lives.
Only in the last 80 years or so has human exploitation of natural resources been able to significantly deplete them. Prior to WWII, human efforts just couldn't make a big dent in the planet. Things have picked up since then.
There are lots of arguments over when we start running out of key resource. But the arguments are over decades, not centuries or millenia. The USGS issues mineral commodity summaries. [usgs.gov] There are decades of resources left for most minerals, but a lot of things run out within 200 years. Mining lower and lower grade ores requires more and more effort and energy. For many minerals, that's already happened. People once found gold nuggets on the surface of the earth. The deepest gold mine is now 4 miles deep.
For many minerals, the easy to extract ores were used up long ago. Industrial civilization got going based on copper, lead, iron, and coal found in high concentrations on or near the surface. All those resources were mined first, and are gone. You only get one chance at industrial civilization per planet.
Civilization can go on, but it will have to be more bio-based than mining-based. Energy isn't the problem; there are renewable sources of energy. Metals can be recycled, but you lose some every round. It's not clear what this planet will look like in a thousand years. It's clear that a lot of things will be scarcer.
(And no, asteroid mining probably won't help much.)
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With the obvious exception of U-235, mining something doesn't actually make it disappear. It'll still be around in a landfill somewhere, if it whatever it was made into wasn't recycled.
So, no, we're not going to run out of raw materials unless our population keeps growing exponentially. And the best projections have it peaking in the 10-12B range, then declining back to lower than it is now (note that, absent immigration, the USA and western Europe are already experiencing a population decline).
On the o
Re:High-power industrial civilization may not last (Score:4, Informative)
Coal, oil and similar do basically disappear. If we got blasted back to the pre-industrial revolution, that lack of easily available concentrated energy would make it much harder to industrialize.
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The problem is energy. Could be solved though, there is enough solar and solar-derived around. Burning Uranium for electricity might kill real space-travel though or at least make it a lot harder. There is not that much of the stuff around.
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Given a couple of hundred million years things would probably be back to plentiful when it comes to all those resources.
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Given a couple of hundred million years things would probably be back to plentiful when it comes to all those resources.
Possibly true, but that isn't much help for those of us who plan to live (and have our descendants live) during the next few centuries.
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There are lots of arguments over when we start running out of key resource.
Well, the only key resource we're actually in danger of running out of is phosphorous. Anything else we have lots of, can recycle, or can substitute for.
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The deepest gold mine is now 4 miles deep.
That's 4 km [mining-technology.com] not miles
TFS is utter bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Lem wrote about all kinds of possible futures. A small percentage do match the description in the summary but the vast majority conflict with it. Most of his work is about reaching out and exploring in various ways. His work is so varied it is difficult to come up with one theme that describes it all. If I were to try to come up with major themes then I would give at least these:
Ideal Vacuum (Score:2)
The whole series of his reviews of fictional books is wonderful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
One of my favorites is Die Kultur Als Fehler, or 'Civilization as a mistake':
They'd get bored (Score:2)
Evolution is hard to stop (Score:5, Insightful)
Evolutionary selection pressures never stop. Even within a dominant species, if there is any level of genetic difference, there will be both genetic drift and evolution. Other species also apply selection pressures (think of evolving viruses, for instance).
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Evolutionary selection pressures never stop. Even within a dominant species, if there is any level of genetic difference, there will be both genetic drift and evolution. Other species also apply selection pressures (think of evolving viruses, for instance).
Evolution never stops permanently at least.
It is conceivable that the selection pressure on humans could go away temporarily if we achieve something like perfect medicine, or a world where any person would be equally likely to have biological children and grandchildren. The effect of that would be to radically increase diversity among humans both in terms of genes and in terms of traits. This would then lay the groundwork for potentially rapid evolution once the selection pressure reappears due to some syst
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Selection does not necessarily select the strong and the intelligent, selection selects the ones that pass on their genes.
For example, there is still considerable selection pressure for any genetic expression that helps us produce plentiful sperm and ova. There is also strong selection pressure for having functioning penises, vaginas, uteruses. These pressures could ease in the future with sufficiently advanced medicine.
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It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any long-term evolutionary advantage for a species. Horseshoe crabs have been rocking along on tiny brains for about three orders of magnitude longer than Homo sapiens has been around.
Space Travel = Fast Evolution or Perish (Score:2)
Science Fiction author? At least that is what I thought.
Evidence from our oribital flights gives plenty of evidence of tissue damage in space from both lack of gravity and radiation. We can't reasonably do much about the radiation without having massively heavy spacecraft which does not seem practical.
"Expectations"? (Score:2)
TFS is written primarily in the present tense, which is kind of odd seeing as Lem has been dead for nearly a decade. We are already living in Lem's future, and the future for Lem himself is pretty much a steady-state.
Not with a bang.. (Score:2)
but with a whimper.
Lem is a hack with no understanding of technology (Score:2)
Just read one of his books sometimes. If you are an engineer or a scientists, you will notice pretty fast that they are techno-mysticism and fairy-tales set in a pseudo-technological setting. His "predictions" will be of comparable quality.
not really (Score:2)
Even if you were immortal, a droud would still be equivalent of death; remove the constraint of time, and limitation is measured by the boundaries of your mind's total potential state-space.
Any sufficiently intelligent being - no matter how powerful or long-lived - would avoid pleasure-death.
Social networking is the Singularity (Score:2)
"one individual who would choose as his life's work the signaling, on a cosmic scale, of how he was getting along"
well, that certainly wouldn't be a problem for humans. There are already plenty of humans who make it their lifes work the signaling of how they are getting along. And if they could do it on a cosmic scale, they would.
It stands to reason that any sufficiently advanced alien race would reach a point where they invent their version of facebook. It also stands to reason that the invention of the
Save us from speculation based on introspection (Score:2)
This really irritates me. I am sure Stanislav Lem is an interesting and I am sure Stanislav Lem 's reputation in not going to be harmed by me, so I feel free to really let go on this.
The first point I'll make is this is extremely low quality speculation, and the second point I'll make is it's extremely and insidiously destructive of our own future in some very specific ways.
First, this is the rankest type of speculation; it's not even thought provoking, at least productive-thought provoking. Lem is posit
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I think he's been staying home for the last decade or so.
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You know that he is dead, right?
Not Horse Shit, alcohol (Score:2)
this is the same thing they said about Socialism (everyone would just sit around getting high instead of doing interesting shit).
Right, that's what happened. Look at what the rate of alcoholism was in the USSR.
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Said UFO sightings are also consistent with Santa and Rudolph doing some advance reconnaissance.
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It's absurd that given what we *know* as FACTS about materials and energy sources, that anyone would think intergalactic (who brought up galaxies anyhow?) travel is even remotely possible.
There are intelligent Africans who live in mud huts, and there are stupendously stupid North Americans driving tanks.
So what does technology have to do with intelligence?
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It's absurd that given what we *know* as FACTS about materials and energy sources, that anyone would think intergalactic (who brought up galaxies anyhow?) travel is even remotely possible.
Precisely because of that, any alien race capable of reaching us, would have to be too far ahead us, it would be a difference bigger that the current difference between humans and ants.
There are intelligent Africans who live in mud huts, and there are stupendously stupid North Americans driving tanks.
So what does technology have to do with intelligence?
"stupid North Americans driving tanks" are genius compared to an ant, if the 2 of them could communicate. No matter how stupid they are, just for being able to drive, they must be able to understand concepts far beyond the most intelligent ant.
And the difference of such alien civilization (one capable of contacting us from
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But the movie was really nice! But don't worry, if FTL communication is possible, then Quantum Theory and Relativity fall apart completely and both at the same time! This could even mean magic is possible! (No, it is really not likely to happen....)
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Re:So we're doomed to the world of Wall-E? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lem was critical of Government, of official bureaucracy - whether public or private.
He never singled out the US as a specific target, and could be construed as subtly/subversively anti-authoritarian, in ways that were passable by the Communist governments of Poland and USSR.
The US is now no different than those. We just have Nike Fuel bands, and two cars in front of our debt-bondage. Whoops! I mean home.
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Eric Frank Russell had the same criticism, and was far more lighthearted about it.
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Perhaps Lem comes off less morose in jzyk Polski
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Re:So we're doomed to the world of Wall-E? (Score:4, Interesting)
> He never singled out the US as a specific target
Actually, he did once. In one story from "The Star Diaries" the protagonist travels to the cold war era US by mistake, where he witnesses nuclear attack "duck and cover" style drills and general bomb scare. Lem's satire is quite heavy handed, and I believe he was ashamed of writing it. That story is usually omitted in the reeditions of the book.
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What's the story title?
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The title is "The Twenty-sixth and Last Voyage". According to the Wikipedia, it was never translated.
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Indeed, I never read that! Now I can go to sleep having learned a really interesting fact about one of my favourite authors and books!
THX :) (sorry, no moderator points left)
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and two cars in front of our debt-bondage
You COULD choose not to take on greater financial burden than you could bear.
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Yes. Enjoy 15-30 years of BEARABLE slavery. But you OWN something... Just ask the taxman.
You have Stockholm syndrome - and don't recognize it. You should read about Edward Bernays, some time - before lashing out in pseudo-moral rage against a proposition who's arguments you fo not actually comprehend.
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Debt is optional, dude. You cant even claim you need debt for school, full time at in-state schools generally runs ~10k/year which is easily achievable with a student-level job.
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In this one, people like me who live well within their means are not considered quite respectable.
I dont personally hold people without debt in low esteem. But more importantly, you shouldnt care: in a world where foolishness is held in high regard, being thought low of is of no consequence.
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It depends on what you need to do, and what you know about it.
If you are not willing to walk away from it, on short notice? Then buying nothing is wise.
The trick about big financing is that you don't own a house - a bank owns you. Your on their plantation.
If you didn't barter or pay cash, you are on Massah's rules, Massah's time.
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I think you are on to something there. Lem was certainly one of the worst SF authors ever with regard to actual understanding of science and technology.
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you don't read Lem for hard science.
Lem's concern wasn't on science, per se, it was on exploring alternative human conditions. The "science" was just a prop.
Like many Sci-Fi authors in the 1960s and later, Lem wasn't interested in the gee-whiz march of technology. At that point technology was marching fast enough that you either had to resort to problematic tech such as FTL drives and telepathy or risk having your science be disproven and your tech be obsolete within your own lifetime.
I too, am a Cyberiad f
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Well, you are right about that. Unfortunately, I also find his characters bland and soulless and his "exploration" of the human condition far too simplistic.
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Since it's the same elements and forces all across the universe,
That is neither provable nor falsifiable.
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I believe in not crafting logical progressions based on invalid premises.
"Since X, therefore Y" when X is an unknown is unsound. You could perhaps say "probably", and pay respect to the fact that a lot of the knowledge we have is based on assumptions.
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Well, not necessarily. However, FTL communication, let alone travel, would kill most of Relativity and Quantum Theory, and those would need to be replaced before anything could really be done with the new insights. So, say at the very least these things would be >> 100 years in the future, provided that the necessary minds would even get a change in today's anti-idea academic establishment.
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One of the very fundamentals of quantum entanglement is that it cannot be used for communication. If it can, the whole theory falls apart and all other predicted properties become questionable. So that is an immediate fail. I also have read "Fiasco" and I must say the the novel really is one. Never have I read anything claiming to be SF that had so little grasp of engineering or scientific realities. Lem is a clueless hack.
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