Nobody's Problem: Against So-Called "Hard" Science Fiction
Nobody's Problem: Against So-Called "Hard" Science Fiction
High modernism vs. culture
For a while I’ve been thinking, oh, I should give some so-called “hard” science fiction a chance. One of the ones I considered was of course The Three-Body Problem and the others in that series, which is being hyped now because there’s a show of it. Sure, a lot of it seems driven by the TVTropes crowd and Anglo-analytic philosophy pseudoscientists, but that doesn’t mean it all sounds horribly bad or like something written by stereotypes of an autistic person for stereotypes of an autistic person.
I have had some people bring up the show (generally on the Internet) off and on and I retract my entire desire to give any “hard” science fiction books a chance. It’s not so much that I want to actively boycott them as they just don’t seem to be worth my time, though maybe they’re worthy of a boycott too.
What is the three-body problem? The chaotic, cosmic mathematics behind the Netflix TV show (bbc.com)
In the TV series, the bodies in question are three relatively massive suns of a trisolar system – the original home of the San Ti Ren (which means ''three-body people'' in Mandarin). And the chaos is much more obvious. In their corner of the Universe, the motion of the suns is inherently chaotic and unstable, meaning they face the prospect of being swallowed up by one of them, or spat out of the system altogether.
To communicate this complex scientific idea, two of the Oxford Five scientists play a hyper-realistic virtual reality video game. The participants pitch into different historical human civilisations that are all seemingly subject to the whims of a trisolar system. As the game progresses, some of history's more famous scientists take on the challenge of preparing political and religious leaders for the chaos.
So, I wanted to look up whether or not there was really no solution to the actual mathematical three-body problem and I found this:
Three-body problem - Wikipedia
There is no general closed-form solution to the three-body problem,[1] meaning there is no general solution that can be expressed in terms of a finite number of standard mathematical operations. Moreover, the motion of three bodies is generally non-repeating, except in special cases.[6]
However, in 1912 the Finnish mathematician Karl Fritiof Sundman proved that there exists an analytic solution to the three-body problem in the form of a Puiseux series, specifically a power series in terms of powers of t1/3.[7] This series converges for all real t, except for initial conditions corresponding to zero angular momentum. In practice, the latter restriction is insignificant since initial conditions with zero angular momentum are rare, having Lebesgue measure zero.
So, there is a solution to the three-body problem! Yet somehow, despite the aliens being an advanced spacefaring race, they somehow managed not to know the mathematics that we’ve had since 1912. How do they pull that off? Let’s say the aliens just have different priorities. Well, why don’t they learn it from us? We have figured it out in real life, but the book doesn’t paint it that way. Why does the book lie about this?
I would say it comes from an underlying psychological drive I’ve noticed in lots of places to try to bring back black magic. Why aren’t the aliens just, say, subject to an exploding star and they have to colonize our system because of that? The author wants the problem to be something relating to the idea of something being inherently unknowable. Of course he did an awful job at this since he picked a problem that’s been solved since 1912 to paint as something that’s supposed to be inherently unknowable. It’s the same as the popular drive exhibited by people like Turing to do black magic (who is also very much mentioned in The Three-Body Problem by name, and the BBC article mentions him as well. Aliens, your problem isn’t your star system, your problem is your historical figures being in love with black magic and the idea of demonic sun gods.) Why do people like Bertrand Russell act like we’re at the end of what we can know when we clearly don’t know everything? I am of the opinion people like him essentially want the world to be run by a demon on some level.
“That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
―Bertrand Russell,Mysticism and Logic including A Free Man's Worship
Why should anyone even believe that? If we’re going with freethinkers, I would prefer the saying of Voltaire: “if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him.” If you can’t believe in religion because you think of it as superstitions, magic, and basically superficial and childish things, OK, maybe that’s where you’re at (though ironic for people who want to discount the idea of mathematical knowledge, we even know how to predict prime numbers now.) But what’s this psychological need people have to just assume that in a world without divine interventions, people couldn’t resurrect people in regenerators Star Trek style, that we couldn’t add more hydrogen to the Sun, that we couldn’t reverse heat-death with paramagnets, and other optimistic solutions to problems? The desire to believe in “despair” as Bertrand Russell himself called it seems to go far deeper than some lack of desire to associate with anything too stereotypically churchy or magical-seeming, even if that’s a kind of egotism that needs to be overcome as well.
So back to so-called “hard” science fiction: it generally all seems to be based on the idea of inherent limits to knowledge and it seems to only be able to be written by people flagrantly misrepresenting reality, which is a great reason to ignore it as a genre. TVTropes is really horrible about representing science fiction correctly, since they declare the opposite of books like The Three-Body Problem to be basically just Back to the Future or maybe Star Wars. However, those weren’t even meant to be speculative fiction, the real opposite would be more like Star Trek, but you can’t say that because then it makes it too obvious what the real motivations are.
Modern so-called hard science fiction, like Elon Musk’s project to replace his brain with an external AI, seems to be essentially a quest to throw one’s mind away, to violate it yourself and replace it with the worship of demonic forces and black magic. It is one of many symptoms of the current age, where the human mind seems to find itself at some real limits but people don’t want to push beyond them to see what’s on the other side. Thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle attributed the uniqueness of humanity to the human mind, yet the spirit of the modern age seems to have not changed at all: to try to throw it away in the face of darkness and superstition, except this time the followers of darkness and superstition are ironically self-styled “skeptics” who are “accepting reality” (despite being rather obviously detached from reality.)
Once upon a time, some people actually defined “soft” science fiction as essentially science fiction about the soft sciences, and the chief example was Ursula K. Le Guin. Now, of course, Ursula K. Le Guin is being cancelled for basically just being a White woman. Meanwhile, all the new science fiction and fantasy books are basically just glorifying black magic, sometimes very literally, and the German idealism that very explicitly inspired older works is considered too idealistic in the vernacular sense. People want their minds damned, rent, shattered, and violated, but they don’t want to understand things. Science fiction was originally “scientifiction,” and it was originally supposed to be based on real science, hard or soft, so I doubt its founders would be very pleased with this state of affairs and would probably be considerably less annoyed at all the Flash Gordon pulps which don’t necessarily prioritize being accurate than to the shamefulness of completely misrepresenting science to the public to sell some sensationalized books.
Romanticism in science - Wikipedia
When categorizing the many disciplines of science that developed during this period, Romantics believed that explanations of various phenomena should be based upon vera causa, which meant that already known causes would produce similar effects elsewhere.[2]: 15 It was also in this way that Romanticism was very anti-reductionist: they did not believe that inorganic sciences were at the top of the hierarchy but at the bottom, with life sciences next and psychology placed even higher.[2]: 19 This hierarchy reflected Romantic ideals of science because the whole organism takes more precedence over inorganic matter, and the intricacies of the human mind take even more precedence since the human intellect was sacred and necessary to understanding nature around it and reuniting with it.
Various disciplines on the study of nature that were cultivated by Romanticism included: Schelling's Naturphilosophie; cosmology and cosmogony; developmental history of the earth and its creatures; the new science of biology; investigations of mental states, conscious and unconscious, normal and abnormal; experimental disciplines to uncover the hidden forces of nature – electricity, magnetism, galvanism and other life-forces; physiognomy, phrenology, meteorology, mineralogy, "philosophical" anatomy, among others.[2]: 6
If “soft” science fiction is simply science fiction about softer sciences, then perhaps this is a much higher goal and we should all strive to be soft and spurn “hard” science fiction instead. After all, why was Isaac Asimov basically diametrically wrong about robots? All they want to do is make art while people do their chores. He was wrong because he studied circuits, wires, and other “hard” subjects instead of studying people. Robots are good at making derivative art (though not anything astoundingly new and original) because they’re based on people and that’s what people are good at, and they’re bad at doing chores because that’s what people are bad at. There’s nothing wrong with learning about physics, but even the great physicists tended to be very interested in more humanistic types of questions than most contemporary physicists are. Hardness is rigor mortis, fossilization, ossification. We don’t want to be dead, we want to be alive.
The chrysalids : Wyndham, John, 1903-1969 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
'Purity . . .' I said. 'The will of the Lord. Honour thy father . . . Am I supposed to forgive him! Or to try to kill him?'
The answer startled me. I was not aware that I had sent out the thought at large.
'Let him be,' came the severe, clear pattern from the Sealand woman. 'Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled—they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature. Who, then, were the recent lords of creation, that they should expect to remain unchanged?
'The living form defies evolution at its peril; if it does not adapt, it will be broken. The idea of completed man is the supreme vanity: the finished image is a sacrilegious myth.
'The Old People brought down Tribulation, and were broken into fragments by it. Your father and his kind are a part of those fragments. They have become history without being aware of it. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend: soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted—a place among the fossils. . . .'
Her patterns became less harsh and decisive. A kindlier shaping softened them, but, for all that, she seemed to be in a mood which required an oracular style of presentation, for she went on:
'There is comfort in a mother's breast, but there has to be a weaning. The attainment of independence, the severing of ties, is, at best, a bleak process for both sides; but it is necessary, even though each may grudge it and hold it against the other. The cord has been cut at the other end already; it will only be a futile entanglement if you do not cut it at your end, too.
'Whether harsh intolerance and bitter rectitude are the armour worn over fear and
disappointment, or whether they are the festival-dress of the sadist, they cover an enemy of the life-force. The difference in kind can be bridged only by self-sacrifice; his self-sacrifice, for yours would bridge nothing. So, there is the severance. We have a new world to conquer: they have only a lost cause to lose.'
Another driving force behind modern so-called “hard” science fiction seems to be basically high modernism which is basically the artistic expression of fascism regardless of what people are taught in schools (at least try to remember T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, people.) High modernism was largely characterized by a rigid distinction between high culture and low culture, as opposed to the more fluid boundaries that used to exist back when Bach was writing folk songs and playwrights were using populist sources like the Faust chapbook to write their plays, and not primarily by being experimental, which was around before modernism and is still around (though modernism per se is not fascistic, hence why I say high modernism specifically.)
People always want to blame distraction for the decline of our culture but I would say high modernism probably has more to do with it than distraction, since distracted people could still easily be distracted by Disney clips or even opera clips rather than twerking videos. However, the people who blame distraction are generally neo-LaRouchite high modernists themselves. If you like all the Greek philosophy and German philosophy kind of intellectualism, as counterintuitive as this might sound, read the American pulps and their descendants such as comics and later science fiction. They have much more of it than you’ll ever find in European opera, not that European opera is bad. Rock and roll, rather than being all lowbrow trash like the American fascist and other high modernist types want to say, is basically the Faust myth incarnate, which is probably something all these people who want to play with black magic and self-identify with Doctor Strange could learn from (the latter is one of many examples of how the American pulps and their descendants are the real heirs of German idealism among many of the other highbrow philosophies.)
We have such great culture now even if a lot of it is relatively older so companies reasonably fail to continue producing films, games, and comics at the highest standard that people have, and independent authors and producers likewise do the same with their books etc. Let’s not be spoiled brats and reject it all at once just because some of it fails. I saw so many people with death metal t-shirts and Stranger Things t-shirts at the solar eclipse today while everyone was blasting disco watching it so I have a lot of hope for people. People might not like Nicki Minaj like they’re being force-fed, but it’s not because they’re distracted, it’s because they like Cannibal Corpse and ABBA even if companies seem to be too scared of accidentally being politically incorrect to give them what they want and that pushes a lot of people toward high modernism, neo-LaRouchism, and really just American-style fascism which has notable differences from what you learn about in your history classes with Hitler and WWII.
Please resist the urge, mutants, to become a LaRouchie just because the Internet makes it easy due to the relatively free spread of information compared to when it used to be easy to point at LaRouche and his followers and be like “those are the crazy people with fliers and signs,” and you want to read philosophers instead of listening to Nicki Minaj. What’s easy is not generally right. The descent to Hell is easy. If it were easy everyone would do it, but they don’t, they mostly descend into Hell. Bertrand Russell might very well have been worse than Hitler like Lyndon LaRouche said, and Bertrand Russell is very relevant to modern so-called “hard” science fiction, but your enemy’s enemy is not your friend. Modern so-called “hard” science fiction mostly comes from a desire to try to give science fiction the same status as high modernist realism anyway, which makes it notably different from even the Isaac Asimov style of hard science fiction which was mostly published in the pulps. Modern so-called “hard” science fiction didn’t cause us to live in a science fiction world though, Star Trek and its ilk did, because people invented cell phones based on communicators. No one has invented anything based on these kinds of books you see vaunted on TVTropes which mostly owe their philosophy to Bertrand Russell, who probably really was worse than Hitler.
The eclipse and having people try to show me the book The Three-Body Problem on the Internet has given me something easier to write about than what I was first planning, a post about the history of evolutionary theories, and even this one is too long for e-mail. Come back, mutants, when you want to hear the real history of evolution! That has a lot to do with the kinds of German philosophers you’re largely not supposed to like but everyone wants to anyway. I always have a lot of explaining to do when I tell people yes, I do believe in evolution, but I don’t think schools teach it accurately, this is a major heresy that I need to cover pretty soon, but this is probably an important precursor to understanding parts of it even if it doesn’t seem directly related anyway. Happy Eclipse day!
