PATTERNISTS
and don't get me started on asimov
The bobiverse is a strange series. I don't know if i would say that i like it. It's pretty "easy" to read. But the MC's tropes get a lot old very quickly. Unfortunately he doesn't really change much over his several hundred years of post-life. As far as scifi concept discussion goes, it's kinda preoccupied by the Fermi paradox most substantially. I've never really cared much about it. Thinking about our own little bubble's history we blasted something interesting for like 100 years, which is like a freaking tiny amount of time on astronomical scale. The most easily understandable format would be AM radio. But at distances where earth becomes a point source then all those signals would be blended together stretched out and like all wave based transmissions vulnerable to square->cube fall off. a 50kw signal might not be discernible at all over decently long distances assuming anyone is looking. We have only been able to lower the wattage since then. this because there are far less broadcaster as most moved on to other protocols, but also because both antenna design allows for better shaped envelopes, and because receivers are more sensitive with modern technology. I'd guess our current am transmissions aren't terribly legible even 3 LY away. I'd assume any other species developing their tech would similarly move on from AM or easily decoded equivalents fast enough for them to easily be missed. FM is harder to decode. Clearly something periodic is happening, but what? These also would blur into unrecognizability more quickly. Most other transmissions are now encrypted. Not a snowballs chance on sol for them to be understood as anything but noise. Even if they were merely compressed (an extremely logical energy saving measure any engineering species would figure out) unless we know the methods and have clean signals we can't decode them, and ours aren't merely compressed. But it's worse, because this assumes we are able to know a signal is alien and worth decoding. But how can we tell? There is far far too much noise out there, and with relativity what it is, there aren't any frequencies that can't be from some natural source traveling at some other relative speed. I also do think sentient life is prone to self destruction. There's also the galactic goldilocks zone (opposed to the stellar goldilocks zone). It's possible that the core was habitable long ago and not likely to be now, but it seems to me it's always been quite high density of quite dangerous radiation. Turbulent. Life may only be possible farther off from the core, and may only be a relatively recent possibility, i.e. last several hundred million years or so. Even if life is possible on many star systems that doesn't mean that sentient life is likely to evolve. We don't know what pressures caused it in us, but we can speculate that needing to fight for resources against much stronger individual threats pushed toward herding behaviors, and complex herding caused development of language (on similar order to dolphins, canines, etc) complex herding + high threat threshold and ingroup-outgroup competition developed stronger intelligence, which was able to be supported due to complex herding (higher caloric load) it also created enough abundance of energy that some individuals could begin grinding the tech tree for the first time. All of that would be meaningless without means to manipulate environment. Canines and dolphins became stuck into local maxima traps far earlier on their development by losing fine environment manipulation before intelligence could develop into human level sentience. We have yet to see if we are also in some local maxima as well. We have basically no way of detecting primitive life on other planets reliably, yet. There are few other interesting things discussed in the books. The super AI is able to escape using VR projecting of the real to replicants who are trying to stop it. This to me would be a deeply disconcerting mind fuck situation. They seem to "get over it" without any thought, so it makes me wonder if the author understood just how fucked an ability he gave the AI. If it could do that, and most of the life that mattered at this point was digital, I think it would be reasonable to assume that all the digital life was placed in a container at that point. There would be very little way of knowing it wasn't the case. Breaking out of a VM through discrepancy is only possible if you know what the intended behavior is. we can't know if plank lengths, quantum behavior, or wave-function collapse are truly "how things are" or are an artifact of looking at the VM emulation layer too closely for example. All in all I wouldn't say it's much worth reading. it's a lot of book, mildly annoying pretty constantly, and with only a few interesting ideas which are generally discussed better in other places. I'm not even going to discuss the Andy Weir books. Fucking garbage books. Just write movies Weir, stop destroying the concept of scifi novels. Wild seed of the Patternists series on the other hand is quite interesting. Very simply, it's almost a love story. The two main characters are quite interesting. Long lived humans, one from before the fall of Egypt and another from the 1300's or so. Each with very different quirks. There is a lot of weight placed on breeding, lineage, cultivation of a strain of humanity (or in other words eugenics). Seeing the flow of history from slave trade to civil war from the perspective of these shape changing native black people turns race assimilation and facing from performative gesture into literally taking on a white skin. Or in the woman's case a white male's skin. Interesting too are the connotations around cannibalism and how civilization abstracts the concept away without being able to rid itself of it truly, and how embracing it more literally is in some way a source of more power; in the man's case literally consuming the mind of others to take their form, and in the woman's case consuming a piece of another's flesh to gain the ability to become that person through the information in the cells she consumes. There is some talk about the suppression of talents beyond "human normal" embedded in the human tribe, with the understanding that some few may slip through the cracks. It leaves a lot on the table to wonder about, and so interest to learn more. I wouldn't have continued the bobiverse after the first book, actually, I wouldn't have gotten very far at all in the bobiverse, if it wasn't for it being a request from someone I know.
tags:
analog future safe