On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 10:54 AM, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> wrote:
> What, to me, are even more interesting than the scientific angles are > the social ones. What are the implications of (potentially) 7-8 > generations existing at the same time, as a matter of course? Malthus > comes to mind. > > Thoughts? > [snip] Issac Asimov stories "Caves of steel" and "The Naked Sun" come to mind. I quote from the Slate article on it http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/11/the_caves_of_steel_the_naked_sun_isaac_asimov_s_portrayal_of_radical_life.html <quote> The murder mystery The Caves of Steel was Asimov's first big success as a novelist. In the book, the victim is a roboticist from Aurora, the first of 50 planets colonized by explorers from Earth ("Spacers"). The first colonists were selected for their abilities and so were healthier than average. Their ships were sterilized and so brought no diseases with them. The Spacers have become a sort of galactic upper class, more technologically advanced and military powerful than those left on the overpopulated, resource-strained Earth. While Earthlings live to about the same age we experience today, the Spacers expect much lengthier lifespans. The contrast is highlighted by Elijah Baley, a police detective on Earth, and Hans Fastolfe, an Auroran politician who was a colleague of the murder victim. Fastolfe expects to live to be between 300 and 350. But he is wary of the drawbacks of such a long life. "If you were to die now," he says to Baley, "you would lose perhaps forty years of your life, probably less. If I were to die, I would lose a hundred fifty years, probably more." Fastolfe goes on to sketch out for Baley the mores of Auroran society. The birth rate is kept low, "Developing children are carefully screened for physical and mental defects before being allowed to mature," and humans constitute a sort of leisure class, with all the labor done by robots. Baley is horrified by all of this, but not for the same reasons as Fastolfe, who is troubled by his society's stability. "It is possible to be too stable," he says. In Auroran culture, "individual life is of prime importance." Aurorans are, in his view, unable to collaborate with one another, and too risk-averse, because of their longevity. Asimov followed The Caves of Steel three years later with The Naked Sun, in which Baley travels to Solaria, another Spacer world. Whereas Aurora boasts 50 robots for every person, on Solaria, there are 10,000 for each individual. On Solaria, there is a strong taboo against physical contact, which is thought to be inherently dirty, and the 20,000 residents "view" one another by a sort of hologram-video-conferencing. Solarians, even more than Aurorans, are devoted to individual comforts. The Solarians, in their splendid isolation, have no police detectives. This is why they call on Baley, from Earth--until the murder of the story, they claim to have had no crime. "We on Solaria have no experience with these things. In a way, we don't understand people. There are too few of us here," a Solarian leader tells Baley. The Solarians are individually wealthy and long-lived. But they do not innovate or, really, love. Baley returns to Earth and reports to his superiors: "When you ordered me to Solaria, you asked a question; you asked what the weaknesses of the Outer Worlds were. Their strengths were their robots, their low population, their long lives, but what were their weaknesses?" Baley pauses, before delivering his punch line: "Their weaknesses, sir, are their robots, their low population, their long lives." </quote> -- Vinayak
