Why do most wannabe SF writers reject science?

[Samuel]

Yeah. Any idea what caused a mass rejection of robots in the series? It is never really said.

Hmm... I guess the best way to sum up my feeling is that breaking the laws of physics should be used like time travel- only when you actually need to to tell a story. How often do people add time machines to stories for the hell of it? It is usually when a story can only be told with time travel.

[Simon_Jester]

I think most of the rejection of robots was a negative public reaction. The protagonists (mostly US Robots employees) tend to dismiss that reaction as the "Frankenstein complex," but given the number of things that go wrong with Asimov robots, I'm not sure all that worry was unwarranted. Poorly controlled human-intelligent robots are dangerous in the Asimov setting; the fact that actual robot manufacturers are optimistic about their own products' safety proves little.

[Samuel]

I think most of the rejection of robots was a negative public reaction. The protagonists (mostly US Robots employees) tend to dismiss that reaction as the "Frankenstein complex," but given the number of things that go wrong with Asimov robots, I'm not sure all that worry was unwarranted. Poorly controlled human-intelligent robots are dangerous in the Asimov setting; the fact that actual robot manufacturers are optimistic about their own products' safety proves little.

I don't think the flaws that pop up are usually dangerous, but you do have enough cases that are disturbingly so.

Lets see... we have:
Sally
Someday
Let's Get Together
First Law
Reason
Little Lost Robot
—That Thou art Mindful of Him
Christmas Without Rodney
Cal
Little Lost Robot
True Love
Robot Dreams

Yeah, I can see why people might be worried.

[Darth Wong]

A lot of times I'm not sure it's so much that writers really disdain writing hard science as that they tend to naturally take the path of least resistance, which means following in paths that are well-trodden by other writers that they've read, and in the case of sci fi this means following the lead of space opera authors who aren't particularly concerned with sticking to hard science, because that's what the majority of science fiction amounts to.

I don't think it's even a conscious decision. They do it without thinking, because the human brain is actually built to do exactly that kind of thing if you're not careful. We are creatures of habit, both physically and mentally. It's extremely difficult to write fiction without falling into well-worn patterns stolen from other genres (regardless of whether they make sense), because people are just wired to fall into habits and emulate common practice.

Add this to simple laziness and stupidity, and you get a perfect recipe for really idiotic science in sci-fi movies and literature. Especially when one of the principal sources of genre convention in sci-fi is actually fantasy, so that most sci-fi writers just treat the "science" as if it were some kind of sorcery.

[Serafina]

I don't think it's even a conscious decision. They do it without thinking, because the human brain is actually built to do exactly that kind of thing if you're not careful. We are creatures of habit, both physically and mentally. It's extremely difficult to write fiction without falling into well-worn patterns stolen from other genres (regardless of whether they make sense), because people are just wired to fall into habits and emulate common practice.

Add this to simple laziness and stupidity, and you get a perfect recipe for really idiotic science in sci-fi movies and literature.

Of course, the audience falls into the same pattern, expecting these worn out patterns stolen from other genres.

It's not actually a bad thing - some ideas need to be explored for a while and may contain some interesting twists.

But without some writers actually thinking, you do not have any genuinely new ideas.

[Junghalli]

I don't think it's even a conscious decision. They do it without thinking, because the human brain is actually built to do exactly that kind of thing if you're not careful. We are creatures of habit, both physically and mentally. It's extremely difficult to write fiction without falling into well-worn patterns stolen from other genres (regardless of whether they make sense), because people are just wired to fall into habits and emulate common practice.

Add this to simple laziness and stupidity, and you get a perfect recipe for really idiotic science in sci-fi movies and literature. Especially when one of the principal sources of genre convention in sci-fi is actually fantasy, so that most sci-fi writers just treat the "science" as if it were some kind of sorcery.

Oh absolutely. I was thinking of saying something similar myself but I couldn't find the words for it. I think you're probably absolutely right and a lot of times it isn't even a conscious decision to disregard hard science; the author just naturally falls into following certain tropes and genre conventions without thinking. Maybe later he has it pointed out to him that the universe he's created is unrealistic and since he doesn't want to go back and change things he defends it by saying that the story he wants to tell needs the unrealism and that trumps sticking to hard science, hence a lot of the defensive "it's the story that matters, not the science" statements that I suspect are part of what the OP was talking about.

I'll give you an example. I own a book that involves a starship expedition to another planet*. The starship has an FTL drive, but for the story to work it didn't need to have one. The expedition is to a star 30 light years away and the FTL drive has a speed of 10 c (so 3 years trip time one way), and there's no faster FTL comm (well, there might be, but the humans don't have it - long story) so they're out of contact with Earth the whole time. You could have written the exact same book and only needed to change a handful of sentences if you'd made the ship a lighthugger instead and had the crew experience a 30 year voyage with 10X time dilation, and having the crew travel in suspended animation would have necessitated only marginally more change. The FTL drive was one of only two really soft science elements in the book, so the story could have been made much more scientifically hard by its removal. I strongly suspect the reason it's in there was that the author just unconsciously fell into the mindset that a sci fi future had to involve FTL and didn't really stop to think whether FTL was actually necessary to the universe she wanted to create. I see the same thing in other stories too like Three Worlds Collide or the last book of Harry Turtledove's Worldwar** series. You get stories and settings that don't need FTL, where FTL could be easily dispensed with and in some cases the story might arguably actually work better without it, but the author puts it in anyway, probably mostly just because it's expected for a space SF universe to have it so the author doesn't stop to think about whether he actually needs it for the story he wants to tell.

* The book in question is Kay Kenyon's The Braided World; I doubt anybody's heard of it here. Interestingly I believe the first book in the same series (which I haven't read) involves an STL starship returning to Earth after a long voyage - you'd think this sort of author would be more likely to consider trying to tell her stories without resorting to the plot device of FTL...

** Personally I'd rather have had the decisive change in the balance of power in that universe be humanity inventing AGI. It would be vastly more realistic, more original, less predictable, and would have about the same effect.

[Simon_Jester]

I'll give you an example. I own a book that involves a starship expedition to another planet*. The starship has an FTL drive, but for the story to work it didn't need to have one. The expedition is to a star 30 light years away and the FTL drive has a speed of 10 c (so 3 years trip time one way), and there's no faster FTL comm (well, there might be, but the humans don't have it - long story) so they're out of contact with Earth the whole time. You could have written the exact same book and only needed to change a handful of sentences if you'd made the ship a lighthugger instead and had the crew experience a 30 year voyage with 10X time dilation, and having the crew travel in suspended animation would have necessitated only marginally more change. The FTL drive was one of only two really soft science elements in the book, so the story could have been made much more scientifically hard by its removal. I strongly suspect the reason it's in there was that the author just unconsciously fell into the mindset that a sci fi future had to involve FTL and didn't really stop to think whether FTL was actually necessary to the universe she wanted to create. I see the same thing in other stories too like

Point of order: accelerating starships to a gamma factor of 10 is not easy; unless you have soft-science shielding and propulsion systems it may not be feasible at all. All the really serious designs I've heard of top out at 10-20% of light speed, which doesn't even get you 5% time dilation.

Have you heard of something I haven't?
_______

Three Worlds Collide or the last book of Harry Turtledove's Worldwar** series. You get stories and settings that don't need FTL, where FTL could be easily dispensed with and in some cases the story might arguably actually work better without it, but the author puts it in anyway, probably mostly just because it's expected for a space SF universe to have it so the author doesn't stop to think about whether he actually needs it for the story he wants to tell.

I think Yudkowsky needed FTL to make the moral decisions faced by his protagonists urgent, rather than being things they could radio home and mull over for a decade or eight in a civilization-wide polling process.
______

Turtledove introduced FTL for a legitimate plot reason: it was intended to force the question of "how are the Lizards going to deal with the (vastly more innovative) humans?" Up until that point, the Lizards could take or leave humanity as they pleased; they had a large presence in the high orbitals of Earth and humanity had no corresponding presence around the Lizards' worlds.

The entire theme of the novels was in large part about the Lizards facing an outside-context problem* despite having an initial technological advantage. FTL merely served to take the problem to its logical conclusion in the lifetime of the protagonists.

*in the form of hyperadaptive monkeys
________

** Personally I'd rather have had the decisive change in the balance of power in that universe be humanity inventing AGI. It would be vastly more realistic, more original, less predictable, and would have about the same effect.

Hmm. That would be much more clever. I like it.

[Junghalli]

Point of order: accelerating starships to a gamma factor of 10 is not easy; unless you have soft-science shielding and propulsion systems it may not be feasible at all. All the really serious designs I've heard of top out at 10-20% of light speed, which doesn't even get you 5% time dilation.

Have you heard of something I haven't?

No, it's not easy (though there are a number of hypothetical propulsion schemes which might allow such velocities to be achieved at least in principle - sailbeams, laser thermal RAIR, lightsails, seeded path ramjets, Bussard ramjets), but it's still vastly more plausible than FTL. Besides, it wouldn't be necessary unless you were so lazy you literally just wanted to go and rewrite the odd word here or there; my point is you could eliminate the FTL and do that, that was how non-essential it was to the story. A few only marginally greater changes and the crew could simply have travelled in suspended animation.

I think Yudkowsky needed FTL to make the moral decisions faced by his protagonists urgent, rather than being things they could radio home and mull over for a decade or eight in a civilization-wide polling process.

I think you could have kept the same basic moral problem while keeping the focus on the three ships - remembering that the fate of the human and baby eater civilizations are effectively being decided right there. The super happies will have been transmitting their findings back to their home system and whatever action is taken there will depend on the reports they send. The humans can either:

1) Self-destruct. Upside: superhappies will never learn location of Earth. Downside: baby eaters keep cannibalizing 99% of their population.

2) Help the baby eaters blow up the superhappy ship (see above for upsides and downsides, only this leaves open the possibility of the two races developing a long-term relationship). Making this an option may require changing the relative power levels of the vessels a bit, I remember them being too unbalanced for this to happen in the story.

3) Help the superhappies while trying to decieve them as to the location of Earth. May not work very well as the superhappies already have brain-reading as a language (building an adapter for human brains should be possible...), unless they kill everyone in the crew who knows the coordinates.

4) Help the superhappies without reservation. Upside: baby eater "problem" is solved. Downside: human "problem" is solved too and we get forcibly happified.

The eventual fate of the human and baby eater civilizations will be very different depending on which one they choose. And the superhappies presumably won't wait 500 years for each party to talk things over with their own governments (all the suffering that happens in the mean time...). You'd have to tell a slightly different story, but you can still basically tell the story.

Turtledove introduced FTL for a legitimate plot reason: it was intended to force the question of "how are the Lizards going to deal with the (vastly more innovative) humans?" Up until that point, the Lizards could take or leave humanity as they pleased; they had a large presence in the high orbitals of Earth and humanity had no corresponding presence around the Lizards' worlds.

I know the reason he did it, but there are more plausible, more original, less predictable ways he could have had the balance of power upended. The Race's technology is so limited compared to what we'll probably have in real life in a few hundred years it wouldn't be at all hard to show humans decisively surpassing them while keeping well clear of anything as realism-brutalizing as FTL. As I said, my choice would have been AGI leading to a rapid technological Singularity. That would be even scarier from the perspective of the Race; they get intelligence reports filtering back that humans are doing some sort of big project and then we start rolling out super-advanced technology that they've never even dreamed of seemingly out of nowhere, as if it were being given to us by a god (and in a sense that'd not be a bad analogy for what would be happening). One year they'd be looking down their snouts at us and a couple of years later they'd be forced to deal with us a dramatically technologically superior civilization.

Even better, imagine the Race's leaders back on Home getting 10 year old reports of this happening, knowing that anything could be happening on Earth now... You could even sort of replay what happened in the actual book. The Race's leaders want to send a fleet out to smash Earth while they still have a shot, then a human ship (STL, but radically superior to anything they could build) shows up, and they realize it's already too late for that as with the technology on that ship we could eat any fleet they might send for breakfast.

Yeah, it's kind of wanky, but Worldwar was massive human-wank anyway.

[andrewgpaul]

Question:

What does "AGI" stand for. I'm assuming either Artificial ??? Intelligence or Anti Gravity ???.

[TheLostVikings]

Question:

What does "AGI" stand for. I'm assuming either Artificial ??? Intelligence or Anti Gravity ???.

Artificial General Intelligence, basically a "Strong AI" capable of human level intelligence across the board, and not "just" an AI specialized to deal with certain tasks/situations.

[Simon_Jester]

I think Yudkowsky needed FTL to make the moral decisions faced by his protagonists urgent, rather than being things they could radio home and mull over for a decade or eight in a civilization-wide polling process.

I think you could have kept the same basic moral problem while keeping the focus on the three ships - remembering that the fate of the human and baby eater civilizations are effectively being decided right there. The super happies will have been transmitting their findings back to their home system and whatever action is taken there will depend on the reports they send. The humans can either:

1) Self-destruct. Upside: superhappies will never learn location of Earth. Downside: baby eaters keep cannibalizing 99% of their population.

2) Help the baby eaters blow up the superhappy ship (see above for upsides and downsides, only this leaves open the possibility of the two races developing a long-term relationship). Making this an option may require changing the relative power levels of the vessels a bit, I remember them being too unbalanced for this to happen in the story.

3) Help the superhappies while trying to decieve them as to the location of Earth. May not work very well as the superhappies already have brain-reading as a language (building an adapter for human brains should be possible...), unless they kill everyone in the crew who knows the coordinates.

4) Help the superhappies without reservation. Upside: baby eater "problem" is solved. Downside: human "problem" is solved too and we get forcibly happified.

(1) doesn't exist without the FTL wormhole network and a technomagic way of blowing up stars; in real life, you couldn't stop the Superhappy civilization* from finding Earth and forcibly altering us into something they can tolerate, because they'd be able to fly around any firebreak you try to create to stop them.

And the others are tricky, because if we have a no-FTL universe that same constraint has to apply to the Superhappies. Which means that even if their civilization is vastly more powerful than ours and likely to remain so, there's still a practical limit on how fast they can do anything about us. The sense of urgency vanishes when you know you're worrying about the Superhappies converting your grandkids (or grandniece/nephews) in a century or two, rather than converting YOU next week.

Moreover, the loss of urgency undermines the explorers' moral standing to make species-shaking decisions: the reason their actions are defensible is that there exists no person competent to take the decision out of their hands in the available time. Change the timescale and it makes no sense for the protagonists to make a snap decision to do something as extreme as blowing up a populated star system (or, for that matter, collaborating with an attempt to overwrite human civilization with something utterly foreign to it).

*I would have picked the word "Ecstasists," but given the way "Superhappy" gets selected in-story it helps to illustrate how alien the aliens are, which I guess is all to the good.
_______

Turtledove introduced FTL for a legitimate plot reason: it was intended to force the question of "how are the Lizards going to deal with the (vastly more innovative) humans?" Up until that point, the Lizards could take or leave humanity as they pleased; they had a large presence in the high orbitals of Earth and humanity had no corresponding presence around the Lizards' worlds.

I know the reason he did it, but there are more plausible, more original, less predictable ways he could have had the balance of power upended. The Race's technology is so limited compared to what we'll probably have in real life in a few hundred years it wouldn't be at all hard to show humans decisively surpassing them while keeping well clear of anything as realism-brutalizing as FTL. As I said, my choice would have been AGI leading to a rapid technological Singularity. That would be even scarier from the perspective of the Race; they get intelligence reports filtering back that humans are doing some sort of big project and then we start rolling out super-advanced technology that they've never even dreamed of seemingly out of nowhere, as if it were being given to us by a god (and in a sense that'd not be a bad analogy for what would be happening). One year they'd be looking down their snouts at us and a couple of years later they'd be forced to deal with us a dramatically technologically superior civilization.

True. Of course, that's pretty much what happens with FTL; the Race goes from worrying about us and our zany experiments into worrying about an overwhelming threat in a year or two. A Singularity would be a more imaginative way to achieve the same result, of course, though it would have to involve a different set of characters since he'd already stranded his existing characters on Tau Ceti.

Yeah, it's kind of wanky, but Worldwar was massive human-wank anyway.

I prefer to think of it as alien-anti-wank: we win because the aliens are losers, in classic Campbell fashion. The question of whether anti-wank applied to one's fictional enemies is equivalent to wank applied to oneself is a bit tricky.

[Ariphaos]

(1) doesn't exist without the FTL wormhole network and a technomagic way of blowing up stars; in real life, you couldn't stop the Superhappy civilization* from finding Earth and forcibly altering us into something they can tolerate, because they'd be able to fly around any firebreak you try to create to stop them.

And the others are tricky, because if we have a no-FTL universe that same constraint has to apply to the Superhappies. Which means that even if their civilization is vastly more powerful than ours and likely to remain so, there's still a practical limit on how fast they can do anything about us. The sense of urgency vanishes when you know you're worrying about the Superhappies converting your grandkids (or grandniece/nephews) in a century or two, rather than converting YOU next week.

In a no-FTL situation, there is no feasible means to forcibly invade another star system in which the defender has control of their own stars' outputs. It would be even more pronounced with this specific scenario - at the moment of the encounter, the superhappies would be colonizing their first dozen or so star systems, while humans would be racing for the million star mark. There would also be no element of surprise - humans and superhappies at least would both be well aware of each other and the baby eaters for decades prior to contact. If the baby eaters are particularly dim, they might not be.

[Simon_Jester]

In a no-FTL situation, there is no feasible means to forcibly invade another star system in which the defender has control of their own stars' outputs. It would be even more pronounced with this specific scenario - at the moment of the encounter, the superhappies would be colonizing their first dozen or so star systems, while humans would be racing for the million star mark. There would also be no element of surprise - humans and superhappies at least would both be well aware of each other and the baby eaters for decades prior to contact. If the baby eaters are particularly dim, they might not be.

I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. My impression is that the Superhappies are vastly superior in terms of raw force- and if they aren't now, they will be soon, because their growth curve is tremendous. Also, I'm not sure you can easily have civilizations with "control of their own stars' outputs" in hard SF; Dyson spheres of solar panels are right on the edge of the "hard" domain, in my opinion. Sure, we can describe them, but they represent a colossal feat of engineering and I'm honestly not sure the requisite materials even exist in a normal solar system.

Remember, this story wasn't written purely for the sake of being entertaining; Yudkowsky was trying to illustrate a philosophical point (several of them, really). Since this story is a ethical parable*, setting up a situation where the characters' ethical dilemmas make sense is critical to the story. Trying to force-fit the ethics without certain plot devices, like FTL and a plausible way for humanity to 'blow the bridge' on a cosmic level, would probably have produced an inferior story.

*Admittedly of an unusual stripe, because it raises more questions than it claims to answer...

Also, it's interesting to note that of all the ways for FTL to violate physics, Yudkowsky chose one of the least harmful ones: the wormhole network. Wormhole networks aren't a good fit with general relativity, but they connect to the physics we know far more gracefully than, say, "warp bubbles" or "hyperspace."

[Ford Prefect]

Dyson spheres are bullshit. What he actually proposed was a Dyson swarm, which is quite doable with today's technology - it is just a swarm of independent satellites. You'd probably get like 1% of the sun's output rather than 100% (you can't enclose the whole thing), but 1 percent of the sun's output is still more than a metric fuckton of power.

No, what he actually proposed was a Dyson shell, and people who use the term 'Dyson swarm' should feel bad for perpetuating this notion that 'Dyson sphere' refers to an implausible variant which is a solid shell. I should be able to use the term Dyson sphere without having to indicate that I'm not a blithering moron.

[Ford Prefect]

I might have jumped to a bad conclusion based on the term and the way I generally see it used. Ford, you're right that the term shouldn't mean stupid, but it often does. I apologize for that.

It's not really your fault, it's just tihs tendancy that's cropped up which I find spectacularly irritating. Even Alastair Reynolds made the distinction in order to make his ancient precursor aliens seem more impressive.

[Simon_Jester]

Also, I'm not sure you can easily have civilizations with "control of their own stars' outputs" in hard SF; Dyson spheres of solar panels are right on the edge of the "hard" domain, in my opinion. Sure, we can describe them, but they represent a colossal feat of engineering and I'm honestly not sure the requisite materials even exist in a normal solar system.

Dyson spheres are bullshit. What he actually proposed was a Dyson swarm, which is quite doable with today's technology - it is just a swarm of independent satellites. You'd probably get like 1% of the sun's output rather than 100% (you can't enclose the whole thing), but 1 percent of the sun's output is still more than a metric fuckton of power.

I mentally classify Dyson swarms as a subset of Dyson spheres. But when we're talking about interplanetary-scale engineering, hell, anything that gets close to a "2" on the Kardashev scale, our vaunted "hard science fiction" starts losing its crispness. We're still in the domain of technology we can describe, but authors tend to wind up invoking stuff we can't confidently expect.

I know the mass exists to build a Dyson sphere (one of Dyson's original spheres, not a solid "Dyson shell."), but the elemental issue is a killer. Also the fact that we're talking about dismantling planets for building materials even if we can make solar cells out of hydrogen.

[Ariphaos]

Dyson spheres are bullshit. What he actually proposed was a Dyson swarm, which is quite doable with today's technology - it is just a swarm of independent satellites. You'd probably get like 1% of the sun's output rather than 100% (you can't enclose the whole thing), but 1 percent of the sun's output is still more than a metric fuckton of power.

Not just satellites - statites supported by photon pressure, as well. You can actually support a decent amount of mass at .1-.2 AU.

The configuration is non-trivial, but it's a given that a great deal of energy is in fact harvestable.

I know the mass exists to build a Dyson sphere (one of Dyson's original spheres, not a solid "Dyson shell."), but the elemental issue is a killer. Also the fact that we're talking about dismantling planets for building materials even if we can make solar cells out of hydrogen.

Building it at 1 AU is retarded. Mercury possesses more than sufficient material for a multi-level statite + satellite swarm hovering between .1 and .2 AU.

I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. My impression is that the Superhappies are vastly superior in terms of raw force- and if they aren't now, they will be soon, because their growth curve is tremendous. Also, I'm not sure you can easily have civilizations with "control of their own stars' outputs" in hard SF; Dyson spheres of solar panels are right on the edge of the "hard" domain, in my opinion. Sure, we can describe them, but they represent a colossal feat of engineering and I'm honestly not sure the requisite materials even exist in a normal solar system.

See above. It's actually more of a mathematical problem than a technical one - you want to avoid cooking your star (and any planets you might care about). Assaulting such a system is a near impossible venture. If you control more stars, you can pacify it, but that's about it.

Remember, this story wasn't written purely for the sake of being entertaining; Yudkowsky was trying to illustrate a philosophical point (several of them, really). Since this story is a ethical parable*, setting up a situation where the characters' ethical dilemmas make sense is critical to the story. Trying to force-fit the ethics without certain plot devices, like FTL and a plausible way for humanity to 'blow the bridge' on a cosmic level, would probably have produced an inferior story.

*Admittedly of an unusual stripe, because it raises more questions than it claims to answer...

My point was only that his story was in fact utterly impossible without FTL. It simply would not work. The Superhappies would be forced to stew in their home star systems and whatever humans felt gracious enough to let them have, because we'd be reaching star systems behind them before they even had the chance to launch there, simply due to a five century head start in littering the galaxy with our spawn. Our light sail networks would get there first.

The story itself is nonsensical on several levels - the superhappies will take on gross inefficiencies to support the whim of a conquered race but won't recognize the desire of another to remain in full control of its own destiny - and humans aren't even able to express that as an ideal, for some strange reason.

Also, it's interesting to note that of all the ways for FTL to violate physics, Yudkowsky chose one of the least harmful ones: the wormhole network. Wormhole networks aren't a good fit with general relativity, but they connect to the physics we know far more gracefully than, say, "warp bubbles" or "hyperspace."

You are deluding yourself - wormholes do not solve the causality problem any better than warp bubbles do, and the cleanest solution works the same for each. It is glossed over anyway, and rightly so - the method of FTL is not important to this specific story and its 'lesson'. It's just a device for the sake of plot - a contrived invention in order to present a dilemma that requires other absurdities anyway.

No, what he actually proposed was a Dyson shell, and people who use the term 'Dyson swarm' should feel bad for perpetuating this notion that 'Dyson sphere' refers to an implausible variant which is a solid shell. I should be able to use the term Dyson sphere without having to indicate that I'm not a blithering moron.

...so I propose a civilization that is in control of most of its own stellar resources. Had I used the term 'Dyson sphere', I would have been fine. But apparently because I didn't, that means I meant a shell, which makes me a blithering moron. If I had actually used the term swarm, though, I'm insecure for not wanting to look like such an idiot.

Cute.

[Simon_Jester]

I know the mass exists to build a Dyson sphere (one of Dyson's original spheres, not a solid "Dyson shell."), but the elemental issue is a killer. Also the fact that we're talking about dismantling planets for building materials even if we can make solar cells out of hydrogen.

Building it at 1 AU is retarded. Mercury possesses more than sufficient material for a multi-level statite + satellite swarm hovering between .1 and .2 AU.

See? You're talking about dismantling planets. I'm not saying dismantling planets is impossible, but it is nontrivial, and it's by no means certain we'll be able to do it.

Orion drives are very hard SF. Solar sails are very hard. Dyson statite swarms? Not soft, but not truly "hard" either. It's sort of like nanotech in that the engineering problems we need to overcome to be able to build the stuff are so large that they may not be soluble at all.

My point was only that his story was in fact utterly impossible without FTL. It simply would not work. The Superhappies would be forced to stew in their home star systems and whatever humans felt gracious enough to let them have, because we'd be reaching star systems behind them before they even had the chance to launch there, simply due to a five century head start in littering the galaxy with our spawn. Our light sail networks would get there first.

If that were the only problem, it could be worked around with trivial ease by, y'know, not making the Superhappies a younger species than we are. The meeting takes place at the point of intersection of three STL surfaces of expansion: the small Babyeater sphere, the medium-sized human sphere, and the large Superhappy sphere. Thus, the Superhappies are older than we are, or of comparable age, and we can't just surround them.

Or as another option, the Superhappies have better von Neumann machines than we do, and their technology is improving faster than ours. In that case, if they ever manage to get to a star first they can start to spam colony expeditions from it sooner than we can. Thus, we might have a very large region at the border of our sphere of expansion where newly colonized systems are not yet industrialized to the point of sending out their own colonies... while a Superhappy colony is sending out colonies after five to ten years. Again, this prevents us from simply overwhelming them, because we can't fully exploit a system's resources and build up impregnable defenses to keep rival colonists out fast enough to keep them out of the stars near their own homeworld.

The story itself is nonsensical on several levels - the superhappies will take on gross inefficiencies to support the whim of a conquered race but won't recognize the desire of another to remain in full control of its own destiny - and humans aren't even able to express that as an ideal, for some strange reason.

I think it makes sense when you try to understand the competing ethical systems involved. The Superhappies are really hardcore utilitarians, and their biotech is advanced enough that they can hack their own preferences. So it's fairly easy to see why they wouldn't have any respect for or comprehension of this human idea of "self determination." If you want something and it's right, you should get it because it is right, not because you want it; if you want something and it's wrong, you shouldn't get it, simple as that.

If that's the way you think and someone tries to justify child abuse* by claiming that they have a right to "self determination," you're going to call bullshit on them. And it shouldn't surprise you that aliens might do that; many humans do that, or would if they had the power.

Imagine you had the power to make entire nations of people do as you please, whether they wanted you to or not. Would you stop female genital mutilation in Sudan? If so, then you'd be doing exactly the same sort of thing from your perspective that the Superhappies are doing from theirs, for much the same reasons. If not, then I'm still reasonably confident you understand why someone else might... in which case the same point comes up.

*Based on their view of how we raise children, the Superhappies might very well name humans "Childabusers" in the same sense that we called the other alien species "Babyeaters."
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The catch is that because they don't attach value to their own personal preferences, as opposed to "what my preferences ought to be," they're quite prepared to meet aliens halfway... it's just that they won't ask the aliens' permission before forcing said aliens to meet them halfway. It's a weird blind spot, but one that evolves fairly naturally from certain schools of utilitarianism. It's like they don't mind wearing foreign clothing or using words from a foreigner's language but insist on "civilizing" the foreigners into something they can tolerate.

There's no question in their minds that they have a right to "civilize the savages" when there's disagreement over ethical values, but there's also no question in their minds that their own aesthetic values are no better or worse than those of an alien.
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Also, it's interesting to note that of all the ways for FTL to violate physics, Yudkowsky chose one of the least harmful ones: the wormhole network. Wormhole networks aren't a good fit with general relativity, but they connect to the physics we know far more gracefully than, say, "warp bubbles" or "hyperspace."

You are deluding yourself - wormholes do not solve the causality problem any better than warp bubbles do, and the cleanest solution works the same for each. It is glossed over anyway, and rightly so - the method of FTL is not important to this specific story and its 'lesson'. It's just a device for the sake of plot - a contrived invention in order to present a dilemma that requires other absurdities anyway.

Well, in this story wormholes matter because they can hypothetically be blocked, whereas it's inconceivable that you could block a method of FTL travel that allows you to move freely anywhere in space.

I agree that wormholes do not solve the causality problem, but they can at least avoid the question of what happens when I send FTL messages (or messengers) between two bodies approaching each other at high relativistic speeds. Which is the most obvious and grotesque instance of the causality problem.

[Samuel]

Dyson statite swarms? Not soft, but not truly "hard" either. It's sort of like nanotech in that the engineering problems we need to overcome to be able to build the stuff are so large that they may not be soluble at all.

Hard or soft is determined by if something is physically possible given current technology. At the least we can build a good portion using the asteroid belt for raw material. Mining a planet is hard, but when you have the Sun as your power source the difficulty goes away.

[Ariphaos]

See? You're talking about dismantling planets. I'm not saying dismantling planets is impossible, but it is nontrivial, and it's by no means certain we'll be able to do it.

Orion drives are very hard SF. Solar sails are very hard. Dyson statite swarms? Not soft, but not truly "hard" either. It's sort of like nanotech in that the engineering problems we need to overcome to be able to build the stuff are so large that they may not be soluble at all.

I actually calculated it as requiring somewhere around 3km worth of material. Mercury would still exist.

As for statite swarms, I imagine they would start with tests via polished bubbles - at 30-250 kw per square meter you can actually lift a meaningfully thick substance.

If that were the only problem, it could be worked around with trivial ease by, y'know, not making the Superhappies a younger species than we are. The meeting takes place at the point of intersection of three STL surfaces of expansion: the small Babyeater sphere, the medium-sized human sphere, and the large Superhappy sphere. Thus, the Superhappies are older than we are, or of comparable age, and we can't just surround them.

Still doesn't neglect the issue of communicating with them for decades if not centuries beforehand.

Or as another option, the Superhappies have better von Neumann machines than we do, and their technology is improving faster than ours. In that case, if they ever manage to get to a star first they can start to spam colony expeditions from it sooner than we can. Thus, we might have a very large region at the border of our sphere of expansion where newly colonized systems are not yet industrialized to the point of sending out their own colonies... while a Superhappy colony is sending out colonies after five to ten years. Again, this prevents us from simply overwhelming them, because we can't fully exploit a system's resources and build up impregnable defenses to keep rival colonists out fast enough to keep them out of the stars near their own homeworld.

As much as I find the "humans are retarded in the future, too" argument amusing, that would just be an additional contrivance.

I think it makes sense when you try to understand the competing ethical systems involved. The Superhappies are really hardcore utilitarians, and their biotech is advanced enough that they can hack their own preferences. So it's fairly easy to see why they wouldn't have any respect for or comprehension of this human idea of "self determination." If you want something and it's right, you should get it because it is right, not because you want it; if you want something and it's wrong, you shouldn't get it, simple as that.

They are not utilitarians. If they were, they would have rejected the idea of baby-eating out of hand in the first place. It can work with only a few species involved. You can also imagine encountering a borg-like comical extension of these things instead, pulling some random detrimental feature from every race it counters, so that while they are clearly far more advanced than humans... humans end up mopping the floor with them anyway.

If that's the way you think and someone tries to justify child abuse* by claiming that they have a right to "self determination," you're going to call bullshit on them. And it shouldn't surprise you that aliens might do that; many humans do that, or would if they had the power.

Self-determination as an ideal invites moral quandaries like our recognizing the babyeater problem as a moral dilemma, but at the same time it is internally self consistent - you don't need any additional rules to call bullshit on child abuse, child abuse is itself a violation of the code.

Imagine you had the power to make entire nations of people do as you please, whether they wanted you to or not. Would you stop female genital mutilation in Sudan? If so, then you'd be doing exactly the same sort of thing from your perspective that the Superhappies are doing from theirs, for much the same reasons. If not, then I'm still reasonably confident you understand why someone else might... in which case the same point comes up.

The superhappies wanted to prevent self-inflicted pain, both races wanted to stop the infliction of pain between stratas. It would be more appropriate to compare the superhappies to Puritans who might ban all forms of body modification, even done to oneself.

The catch is that because they don't attach value to their own personal preferences, as opposed to "what my preferences ought to be," they're quite prepared to meet aliens halfway... it's just that they won't ask the aliens' permission before forcing said aliens to meet them halfway. It's a weird blind spot, but one that evolves fairly naturally from certain schools of utilitarianism. It's like they don't mind wearing foreign clothing or using words from a foreigner's language but insist on "civilizing" the foreigners into something they can tolerate.

There's no question in their minds that they have a right to "civilize the savages" when there's disagreement over ethical values, but there's also no question in their minds that their own aesthetic values are no better or worse than those of an alien.

And so they stamp out a useful problem-solving feature (self determination) in favor of an inefficiency. That will eventually get them crushed, in a suitably infinite Universe.

Well, in this story wormholes matter because they can hypothetically be blocked, whereas it's inconceivable that you could block a method of FTL travel that allows you to move freely anywhere in space.

I agree that wormholes do not solve the causality problem, but they can at least avoid the question of what happens when I send FTL messages (or messengers) between two bodies approaching each other at high relativistic speeds. Which is the most obvious and grotesque instance of the causality problem.

The moment you allow a wormhole to be two-way, you permit causality violations, even if the entrances to the wormhole remain stationary with respect to each other - have two ships nearing opposite wormhole entrances pass messages through the wormhole while they approach each other at relativistic velocity. You still end up with the same problems, it just becomes a bit less trivial to express.

[Ford Prefect]

Cute.

What's 'cute' is that I wasn't talking about you. When I said 'what he proposed', I was talking about what Freeman Dyson proposed. I wans't even remotely referring to you, I was referring to how misuse of a term has resulted in the actual meaning being warped. For most science fiction fans, if I say 'Dyson sphere', they will probably think of the solid shell concept, even if I am referring to the actual concept of a solar collector array. It's a matter of personal irritation, like how the term 'evolution' is so frequently misused.

[Samuel]

They are not utilitarians. If they were, they would have rejected the idea of baby-eating out of hand in the first place.

Not if the offspring are non-sentient.

Self-determination as an ideal invites moral quandaries like our recognizing the babyeater problem as a moral dilemma, but at the same time it is internally self consistent - you don't need any additional rules to call bullshit on child abuse, child abuse is itself a violation of the code.

You aren't clear- how is child abuse a violation of the code?

As for consistency, hardly. The boundaries for self-determination is limited by people you have power over. It has no other justification than the fact that you are currently unable to impose your will on others.

And so they stamp out a useful problem-solving feature (self determination) in favor of an inefficiency. That will eventually get them crushed, in a suitably infinite Universe.

Can you explain?

I need to read the story to the part about superhappies, but these stand out as not making alot of sense.

[Junghalli]

OK, I'll grant there's a legitimate argument for FTL in Three Worlds Collide, although I'm still not absolutely sure it's necessary, especially if you handwave around the whole "invading a fully settled star system is ridiculously hard" problem (which would at worst involve magitech no worse than FTL, and you could probably find excuses that brutalize physics less horribly while still sounding plausible enough). It really isn't crucial to my point: there's other SF you can point to where FTL isn't needed at all for the story but is used anyway (I already listed two others that I immediately thought of offhand).

[Simon_Jester]

Dyson statite swarms? Not soft, but not truly "hard" either. It's sort of like nanotech in that the engineering problems we need to overcome to be able to build the stuff are so large that they may not be soluble at all.

Hard or soft is determined by if something is physically possible given current technology. At the least we can build a good portion using the asteroid belt for raw material. Mining a planet is hard, but when you have the Sun as your power source the difficulty goes away.

I'm not as confident in the capabilities of current technology as you are, but that doesn't mean I'm right.

I don't really want to get into a raging debate about this, but I hope I'll be forgiven if I regard Dyson statite swarms capable of absorbing substantial chunks of the output of a main sequence star as being "less hard" than, say, coilguns. Or Orion drives.

=========

If that were the only problem, it could be worked around with trivial ease by, y'know, not making the Superhappies a younger species than we are. The meeting takes place at the point of intersection of three STL surfaces of expansion: the small Babyeater sphere, the medium-sized human sphere, and the large Superhappy sphere. Thus, the Superhappies are older than we are, or of comparable age, and we can't just surround them.

Still doesn't neglect the issue of communicating with them for decades if not centuries beforehand.

As I understand it, ordinary radio traffic doesn't propagate for more than a few light years before it becomes effectively indistinguishable from the background. You'd have to go deliberately out of your way to detect an alien species and start talking to them across interstellar distances, and there are reasons not to do that. So it's fairly plausible for scout ships to not notice each others' presence until they're all converging on the same star. Of course, in that case the scout/colony interaction between the three races will be repeated in massive parallel throughout the region of first contact, which makes the moral choices of the participants in any one contact largely irrelevant.
_______

As much as I find the "humans are retarded in the future, too" argument amusing, that would just be an additional contrivance.

Umm... I think you're misunderstanding the "aliens might be smarter than we are" as "humans are retarded." There's a difference. Do you contend that humanity must necessarily set the galactic gold standard for technological innovation and general intelligence? Because I honestly can't see that as being something we can realistically infer from a sample size of one intelligent species. Remember, the same story also presents us with at least one alien species that is our mental equal, perhaps slightly our inferior. Yudkowsky is not deliberately trying to portray humans as the fools of the galaxy here.
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They are not utilitarians. If they were, they would have rejected the idea of baby-eating out of hand in the first place. It can work with only a few species involved. You can also imagine encountering a borg-like comical extension of these things instead, pulling some random detrimental feature from every race it counters, so that while they are clearly far more advanced than humans... humans end up mopping the floor with them anyway.

This might very well happen eventually (one of the commenters brought something similar up on the website). Unfortunately, humans have the bad luck to encounter the Superhappies before they managed to assimilate their way into being the sick old man of the galaxy.

As for the "utilitarians would autoreject baby-eating" point, that may depend heavily on whether one assigns ethical weight to technical efficiency. YOU do, I'm sure, but the Superhappies may not consider an efficient method for achieving a goal to be ethically superior to an inefficient one. They seem chiefly concerned with the 'naive utilitarian' goal of preventing suffering and creating happiness, and applying that rule and only that rule can create some dreadfully perverse outcomes... by human standards.

If that's the way you think and someone tries to justify child abuse* by claiming that they have a right to "self determination," you're going to call bullshit on them. And it shouldn't surprise you that aliens might do that; many humans do that, or would if they had the power.

Self-determination as an ideal invites moral quandaries like our recognizing the babyeater problem as a moral dilemma, but at the same time it is internally self consistent - you don't need any additional rules to call bullshit on child abuse, child abuse is itself a violation of the code.

I'm not sure I explained myself clearly. What I'm getting at is that the Superhappies themselves do NOT apply the principle of self-determination; to them all actions should be determined by a universally understandable moral code. You have no right not to do the right thing as far as they're concerned. It doesn't matter if self-determination is internally consistent to them; they don't care about it. As far as I can tell they've never heard of it. And when they seen an alien species attempting to justify doing something horrid to its own offspring by invoking "self-determination," they're going to (from their point of view) call bullshit.

Imagine you had the power to make entire nations of people do as you please, whether they wanted you to or not. Would you stop female genital mutilation in Sudan? If so, then you'd be doing exactly the same sort of thing from your perspective that the Superhappies are doing from theirs, for much the same reasons. If not, then I'm still reasonably confident you understand why someone else might... in which case the same point comes up.

The superhappies wanted to prevent self-inflicted pain, both races wanted to stop the infliction of pain between stratas. It would be more appropriate to compare the superhappies to Puritans who might ban all forms of body modification, even done to oneself.

The Superhappies were also trying to prevent certain types of pain that people inflict on each other, and allow to happen to children (who are by nature unable to decide to embrace pain). The Superhappies might be willing to leave us alone if we could honestly argue that all of us who feel pain chose to feel pain after considering the alternatives, but neither we today nor story-we can honestly say that.
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And so they stamp out a useful problem-solving feature (self determination) in favor of an inefficiency. That will eventually get them crushed, in a suitably infinite Universe.

Quite possibly, although they seem to have found a way to get along among themselves without the principle of self-determination. One key thing to remember when thinking about aliens is that they may have alternate methods of solving problems that we haven't invented, or simply not experience problems we consider to be massive and in urgent need of solutions. Especially problems that revolve around attitudes, such as the ones that arise from disagreement between beings.

And maybe the Superhappies' communal weirdtopia does get crushed eventually. Still our bad luck to run into them before they incorporate a lethal number of flaws. Shit like that happens: colonial empires were unstable over the long term too, but that didn't mean they couldn't conquer anyone before things started to go wobbly.

[Junghalli]

I don't really want to get into a raging debate about this, but I hope I'll be forgiven if I regard Dyson statite swarms capable of absorbing substantial chunks of the output of a main sequence star as being "less hard" than, say, coilguns. Or Orion drives.

It's worth noting that even using just the easily exploitable asteroid belt you've got on the order of 3 X 10^18 tons of material to work with. A spacefaring civilization with complete control over one solar system should be able to build some very formidable defense systems even if planetary disassembly is ruled out.

I suspect, however, that you could find ways to handwave away the issue that would be less physics-breaking than FTL. At the very least, the magitech required to be able to invade a well defended system would be no worse than FTL, and inserting strategically placed bits of magitech to create the sort of universe you want is certainly not unprecedented in SF.

As I understand it, ordinary radio traffic doesn't propagate for more than a few light years before it becomes effectively indistinguishable from the background. You'd have to go deliberately out of your way to detect an alien species and start talking to them across interstellar distances, and there are reasons not to do that. So it's fairly plausible for scout ships to not notice each others' presence until they're all converging on the same star. Of course, in that case the scout/colony interaction between the three races will be repeated in massive parallel throughout the region of first contact, which makes the moral choices of the participants in any one contact largely irrelevant.

You can read a good summary of the detectability of various radio signals here. Broadband signals would be extremely difficult to detect at cosmic distances. Narrowband signals could possibly be detected at significant galactic distances (1-100 light years with a 4 meter radio telescope, bigger scopes could of course do much better - the Arecibo is around 300 meters and an advanced postscarcity civilization with solar system level resources could easily build scopes that dwarf it). However, this essay argues that an advanced civilization is likely to use digital signals that a SETI reciever would be unable to discern from its own internal noise. Unfortunately, I'm nowhere near knowledgeable enough about radio to comment meaningfully on its argument. However, if an advanced civilization desired to remain undetected it could easily limit its communications to things that would be unlikely to be picked up (broadband, optical, tightbeam, land lines). Restricted beams and land lines are much more energy efficient anyway, and there are reasons to imagine that a rational civilization (let alone a particularly paranoid one) might want to avoid announcing its existence and location to a galaxy potentially populated by totally unknown entities.

Space travel is a thornier issue. It by its nature tends to use a lot of energy, especially interstellar travel. Large starships decellerating by magsail braking, for instance, would put out radio emissions that could be detected for thousands of light years by what to an advanced civilization would probably be modest sized radio telescopes (single or double digit kilometers across). A civilization with robot labor and access to the resource of a solar system could rig up some scarily huge sensor arrays of all kinds - huge combined arrays massing billions of tons would be feasible, as might things like 1000 km thin-film O'Meara-Forward lenses, and these kinds of sensors would potentially be able to pick out energy emissions over very long ranges (by some calculations I did in principle you could detect single digit TW light sources in distant galaxies with a 1000 km Forward-O'Meara lens, but I suspect in reality signals that weak would be so attrociously washed out by brighter light sources that actual detection range would be much more limited).

This latter issue is something I'm wrestling hard with for my own uni at the moment (and I may start a thread on it soon), but in the mean time I here's some informative reading material on the subject.