Space Cops

Be cool, be cool, space cops, be cool.

Portal 2 reference—the Space Core is a quotable little guy. Wanted to do an SF post, but it ended up turning out to be mostly reality check...about SF. So that's cool too.

• So the New York Times had an essay contest (for adults...?), for readers to defend the ethics of eating meat, since it's bad to kill animals and use land and water for grazing. Except, of course, that it isn't. But even considering their incoherent premise, the one that won was about in vitro meat, which, uh, is cheating—I don't consider an essay eligible to win if it completely sidesteps the important question raised by the essay prompt. Also, in vitro meat is barely even a novelty act at the moment, and since it makes extruded chicken slurry look like filet mignon, that condition is likely to persist.
  
  Besides, how come nobody said, as is the appropriate response, "'Ethical'? What are you, stupid? Humans are members of this ecosystem. Our niche is apex predator. It's no more unethical to act according to our ecological niche than it is to reproduce sexually."
  
  Oh wait, the Times' own Maureen Dowd thinks that is unethical. So I don't know what I was thinking.
• I have discussed the argument, offered by Libertarians on a number of issues they don't understand, that "you own your body". It's risibly bad—who's this "you" that owns "your body"? Body-self dualism is bad metaphysics.
  
  Worse, though, is when they formulate it as "you own yourself". Uh, what? Body-self dualism may be bad, but self-self dualism? Really? There is no place in our property concepts for owner and chattel to be one and the same. As well say you enslave yourself—which, not coincidentally, is what they're generally arguing in favor of doing.
  
  I bring it up here because it's often invoked by Transhumanists, who seem to be about fifty-fifty stupid leftists and stupid Libertarians.
• And yes, leftist Transhumanism is stupid, at least if the leftism in question is even vaguely egalitarian. If we do ever marry biology with technology and make people super-smart and nigh immortal, you think it'll get done to everyone? That's cute. How?
  
  Forgive me if I put this bluntly, but I want to be able to outsmart the rich if I have to, and I want them to die when I guillotine them. You can be cringingly servile, with your naive trust in their benevolence, if you want to.
• Also, seriously, why bother augmenting yourself with technology? The one thing—seriously, there's just one—that a computer can do better than you is math, and we are not noticeably hampered by our current input methods.
  
  As for everything else, why would you bother surgically (or hypodermically) installing hardware on your actual body, and risking all the attendant complications, when you can just carry a handheld with virtually every app you'll ever need, plus a phone and a camera that might well give you augmented reality displays and probably IR goggles and binoculars to boot? For things that require specialized hardware or physical capabilities, modular utility garments, ranging from specialized gloves to full-blown powered-armor and spacesuits.
  
  Get with the Upper Paleolithic: we don't adapt our bodies anymore, we adapt our tech. Cramming the tech into the body is counter-productive.
  
  Transhumanists are really just playing out their fetishes, I think; let's just say the works of Sorayama Hajime are disproportionately represented in their "private" collections. And, well, futurists, the Transhumanists among them, are an elite—a niche elite, but an elite. And the elite is perennially prone to Gnosticism, and Gnosticism is obsessed with bringing the body under its control. Because the body, and its needs and capabilities, is the area where the elite is not special.
• This account of a writer's travails adapting a Heinlein book to the screen, reveals, I think, something about the current plight of visual-medium science fiction. Namely—given two directors tried to cut the thing—Hollywood hates spaceships.
  
  I don't see why. Hollywood loves artsy-fartsy little loft apartments and mahogany-paneled boardrooms. They love mad scientist labs and military staging areas. Is a spaceship interior that different from those? And as for exteriors, spaceships are easy to CGI. They don't change shape as they move. They don't have to squash and stretch upon contact with surfaces. You just rotate them and slide them toward a vanishing point, and add engine glows.
• So David Brin thinks we should restore optimism to science fiction. Well and good—but understand, Brin, your optimism is my dystopia. Also vice-versa. On the other hand, read the interview: Mr. "Star Wars Is Fascist" thinks "the worst drug addiction of our age" is "a self-induced high called self-righteous indignation". Yeah, shove it up your ass, Brin, certain people aren't allowed to say certain things. Do I complain about crotchety unpublished SF writers of a philosophical bent who run obscure geek-culture blogs and play a lot of Skyrim?
  
  Also, given that Brin is significantly to the left of John Scalzi, which is to say he careens on a waterslide past Heinlein into Ayn Rand country in terms of partisan hackery, he doesn't get to complain about "the dismally insipid 'left-right political axis.'" Yes, Brin, if only we could see past our petty partisan politics and think in lockstep with you.
  
  He also says Paul Ehrlich's worries are "on-target". If by that you mean they are intended as an attack, namely on the peoples of the Third World, their personal autonomy, and ultimately their very lives, then yes. If you mean they are accurate, well, let's just be polite, and point out that astrophysics has no more to do with economics or anthropology than entomology does. Ehrlich has rather famously lost his bet with Julian Simon, vis-à-vis resource scarcity caused by overpopulation...and he still hasn't paid up. He's not just a liar, he's a welcher.
• While anime is generally a lot better about space-stuff than Hollywood—they do at least know about orbit elevators—their aliens are virtually always "not even bothering with the rubber forehead". Other than Outlaw Star, and the Ctarl-Ctarl are rather too humanlike even there, I can't think of an anime with aliens that aren't either humans with forehead tattoos, or Godzilla-type monsters. I don't know why they have such trouble with it—also why, apart from Gintama, which is shit, they've never seen the parallels between the Black Ships and a First Contact situation.
  
  On the other hand, they very frequently manage to get a lot closer to realism in "Transhuman" futures, by the simple expedient of not pretending it'd actually change anything. Maybe it's because of Buddhism, but they don't pretend for a second that cyber- or gene-enhancements, or greatly extending lifespans, would affect the fundamental facts (most of them unpleasant) of human life. As I said before, people in Xenosaga can go into computer simulations and retrieve goods into the real world, and they use the Collective Unconscious as a warp-drive, but they also have to work as part-time waitresses to pay for it.