Anti-Copernicus (V)

Continuing from here a piece on Adam Roberts' E-published work Anti-Copernicus.

Sun

When Adam sent me this text he described it as sort of a borderline environmentalist fable, except not really. Is it environmentalist? There's no simple answer because of conflicts over what “environmentalist” means, but it's possible to clarify those meanings by considering the different ways in which the story might or might not be. My own understanding of what environmentalism is about is idiosyncratic, so I'm going to have to summarize it in a few paragraphs.

Modern environmentalism has two main branches of concern: ecosystems (habitat and wildlife preservation, sustainability, endangered species, climate change, etc.) and pollution (persistent bioaccumulative toxics, radioactive wastes, industrial chemical releases, untreated sewerage, smog, etc.) Clearly there is some overlap. But at base, when people talk about environmentalism, I think that they're generally talking about damage to ecosystems or damage to human health from pollution. I'm leaving out resource depletion concerns as such because if the resources in question are renewable, that's an ecosystem concern, and if they're not, the usual next step is to say that they should be replaced with renewable ones.

So, what are ecosystems about? Mostly, they are centered on the Sun. The best way that I've found for thinking about ecosystems is that they are complicated ways to trap solar energy and use it to maintain biomass. The solar energy coming to the Earth is limited and approximately constant for any particular geography. The more efficient the ecosystem is at using solar energy, the larger a biomass the area can support. Biomass, in turn, makes everything that we live on: air, water, food.

Why do I write that they're “mostly” centered on the Sun? Because science is really overwhelmingly Copernican in that not everything has a single center. The ecosystems in abyssal hydrothermal vents are based around geothermal energy, which comes partially from primordial heat of the Earth's accretion and partially from radioactive decay. And of course life in tidal pools depends in part on tidal energy, which is mostly from the Moon. But most of the other forms of energy in the environment, like wind and hydropower, come from the Sun indirectly.

What makes an ecosystem efficient? I'm simplifying tremendously, of course, but it's largely a matter of whether specialist species have coevolved in the area. The longer an ecosystem goes on in more or less the same state, the more time that evolution has to produce species that occupy complicated ecological niches and trap solar energy that would otherwise not be used. Disturb the ecosystem seriously and the specialist species die and generalist species remain or move in. But they can't maintain the same ecosystem efficiency as before. I remember a particularly ignorant poster, back in the days of Usenet, who declared that human damage to ecosystems didn't matter because if you took wild land and turned it into a city block, it was still habitat for nonhuman animals – as if generalist scavengers like crows and rats could replace a functioning climax ecosystem.

So human economics, the allocation of scarce resources, is really a subset of a more important ecosystem economics. There are various chemical substances that can limit biomass if they aren't present, but the most important limited resource is solar energy. But it has to be solar energy that's used, and the way that it's used is by being filtered through a vast, evolved information system – the information held within both gene and population distributions – that is adapted to local conditions. This information system passes around all of the local resources that it can hold incessantly among its living components. Human damage to the ecosystem through land use, over-extraction, bioaccumulative toxins, or climate change either destroys part of the information system or changes conditions so that it no longer applies. Over-extraction may also mean that too much biomass/energy is being appropriated for human use out of the system, as with some kinds of farming.

Getting back to the story now, is Anti-Copernicus an ecological story? There doesn't appear to be anything ecological going on that I can recognize with the dark energy. It's not directly used by anything, not passed around within a system. It's not a sustainability story, because there isn't a resource produced by the system that is being overused; there isn't a mechanism by which the universe removes or detoxifies dark energy that is being overloaded. Within the story, the universe seems to simply have a limit on the amount of dark energy generated within it during a big bang/big crunch cycle, and below this limit the universe going back to a big crunch again and restarts the cycle, above it it expands forever. It appears to be an ecological story because of the basic idea that “you're communally approaching a limit over which you should not go”, but … not really. Things that you communally or individually should not do, yet do anyways, are a staple of all kinds of admonitory stories, including the Biblical myths referenced in several places in the text, and this isn't really a specifically environmental concept.

So I'll go back to the other main branch of environmentalism. Is this a pollution story? Here the argument looks a lot clearer. There is dark energy, an unwanted byproduct of human activity -- thinking, in this case. We're heedlessly putting more or more of it out into the environment as our population grows, and over the long term it's going to destroy the universe's ability to support life.

But there are subtle differences that make this not quite work for me as an environmentalist story either. The pollution in this case is a necessary part of our existence as human beings, since we can't stop thinking. It's not the result of our tool use or our built environment. That's not necessarily a problem: all organisms produce waste of some kind, and many organisms have evolved the ability to produce poisons that work in the environment specifically to kill other life. So pollution is something that ecosystems naturally have to deal with. Ecosystems have evolved ways to deal with pollution of this type, though, and detoxify or re-use it. There's no way that the universe in this story has to deal with the dark energy.

What the story reminds me of most, in an environmental sense, is the Proterozoic Eon when cyanobacteria were producing the free oxygen that now exists in the Earth's atmosphere. I can imagine one implausibly intelligent cyanobacteria telling another that “If we keep producing this much waste oyxgen, we'll overwhelm the banded iron formations on the ocean floor. We need to reduce our numbers before all the dissolved iron is used up, or there'll be a mass extinction.”

It's a good analogy, but following it along, the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere was also when eukaryotes appeared, another form of life. A pollution-related catastrophe on Earth (by a volcano that put too much ash in the atmosphere, say, or perhaps a worldwide radioactive isotope release from some kind of dirty bomb) can't normally destroy the whole ground of being. Life just starts evolving again to meet the new conditions. That is no comfort for species (like us) that are either destroyed in the extinction event, or that depended on particular ecological conditions that are now gone.

But the potentially catastrophic buildup of dark energy in Anti-Copernicus is supposed to have no direct effect on humans until the universe keeps expanding rather than contracting again. The human species would probably be long gone by then in any case, or if it were still around, might last longer in the continually expanding universe than one beginning to contract. So we wouldn't really be destroying ourselves – we'd be destroying the ground of being for all future life. It's this element of SF escalation that turns this from what I think of as an environmentalist story into something else. Something that's surely about overpopulation, but in a more religious kind of story-type – there's one sequence where Ange imagines the horror of an afterlife where the multitudes of dead don't allow anyone oblivion. That's a rather picky interpretation, though, and someone else who wanted to think of this as an environmentalist story could without being wrong.

One last bit: there are many species that use a kind of waste that they're immune to as the aforementioned poison for other life, giving them an evolutionary advantage. For instance, dead leaves from trees kill other plants that might compete with the trees for sun or soil nutrients. In Anti-Copernicus, humans are apparently immune to the negative effects of a high concentration of dark energy, perhaps since they're evolved in those conditions. (But those conditions wouldn't occur until intelligent life did, and by that time there wouldn't there already be a lot of humans in comparison with the one-per-planet rule elsewhere? Yes, I'm looking at this too closely.) But the dark energy is fatal to other intelligent life within a fairly short time interval. So the dark energy from the multitude of humans is like dead leaves from trees, crowding potential competitors out. That might be the environmental story within the story.

Anti-Copernicus (IV)

Continuing from here a piece on Adam Roberts' E-published work Anti-Copernicus.

Venus

“The petri dish is foaming with bacteria, has gobbled the disc of nutrient jelly to a sliver, and is still consuming it, although starvation must necessarily follow. When she was younger, before her marriage, Ange had been quite active in a Netherlands-based Ehrlich group, agitating for much more aggressive population control.”- Anti-Copernicus

That's half of a quote, really. The other half will come in the Mars section below. Venus and Mars traditionally go together.

Remember when I said that everyone thinks they know how the population story turns out? Well, in reality, no one really knows how it turns out. Concerns of this kind are, I think, best divided into two overlapping areas: how high will the population get, and can that population be sustained without damaging the ecosystems that it depends on and thereby leading to mass deaths. These are “overpopulation” and “sustainability” respectively. As long as the death rate doesn't go up due to some catastrophe or ecological crash, and lifespans don't get extended much (it seems very unlikely that they will), overpopulation is mostly a matter of births: how many do people have, and how late in life do they have them. Sustainability depends on how people live, so it's pretty much determined for a given population level by a mixture of culture, technology, and politics unless people bump up against some kind of hard limit on resources needed for that population level and can't do anything. No world society has yet bumped up against a hard limit, so we don't really know what this looks like. I pretty much believe in Amartya Sen's work, which says that famines so far have been political, not resource-constrained. Even the collapses of island societies that Jared Diamond writes about in his excellent book Collapse are political, if you look at them closely.

Anti-Copernicus is mostly about overpopulation, so I won't write much more about sustainability. For overpopulation, the United Nations' current best guess is 9.3 billion people in 2050. However, there has been a decline in the population growth rate, and the United Nations predicts 10.1 billion in 2100. Declining fertility is supposed to be linked to the Demographic transition, and high standards of living generally, although there's a paper in Nature that claims that this will reverse itself back to what looks to me like replacement levels. There's no point in my quoting a number of wiki pages at you at this point: the environmental work that I do is mostly about pollution and global climate change, and I don't have any special expertise in the actual field(s) of study involved in overpopulation.

However. I do know about SF, and SF's general attitude towards overpopulation is all wrong. This may be the most problematic area in the text. The first warning sign is Ange's membership in an Ehrlich group. Ehrlich groups still exist, in an attenuated form, and I suppose it's conceivable they'd still exist in Ange's time. But it's rather like saying that she was a Yippie, or a Situationist, or part of a Maoist group. People are still very concerned about overpopulation, but Ehrlich's approach is considered to be antiquated where it isn't considered to be discredited, the heir to eugenics. At least in the U.S, towards the turn of the century, work against overpopulation is mostly about feminism.

The accepted conventional wisdom among people who care about overpopulation is, as far as I can tell, that what's important is how much power women have. Raising children is a whole lot of work. It starts with the aptly named labor, and continues with nursing and a multitude of home chores, and with basic education, all of them typed in Western societies (and most non-Western ones, as far as I know) as women's work. Now that child mortality has gone down to the point where people don't have to have a lot of children so that some will survive, the ability to have a lot of children depends on one's ability to fob off this work unpaid to someone, and (in richer societies) for women to choose having more children over more leisure time. The more power that women have to decide on when they'll get pregnant and how many children they'll have, and the more that their labor has to be accounted for in monetary terms, the fewer children people tend to have. Therefore, the main concern is really patriarchy. Population control is centered on women, not in the simple they-produce-babies sense, but in the sense that if they have power the natural incentives not to have many children are quite strong enough. Cultural imperialism makes talk about natural incentives problematic, of course.

I'm not sure how much it's useful to write about Ehrlich at this juncture. It's sort of a shame that anyone is still concerned with his work on population and famine in a world where Amartya Sen exists. As of a roundtable in 2008, he seems to be saying mostly unobjectionable things about the importance of women's rights, although he seems to slip back naturally into a genderless, central-incentive approach: “You could simply raise the taxes very high on people who have beyond two children.” But the policies he advocated in the past, in his book The Population Bomb, were really very bad: various kinds of coercive regulation, sterilants added to staple foods if only more biological research on them could be done, denial of food aid to countries that didn't control their populations. Big science fiction ideas, in other words. I'm inclined to think that The Population Bomb may be a significant part of SF's problem; it was one of the first “futurist” books that I remember of the kind that SF fans of the era fondly liked, and SF authors and fans may dimly remember it when they haven't been exposed to much else. Ehrlich was later involved in U.S. anti-immigration groups, and that strain of thought led to a quite recent and damaging blowup in the U.S. Sierra Club.

I don't want to focus too much on a single word in the text. But Ange seems to be following a Zero Population Growth (Ehrlich's first group) kind of line; she refers to her “rationally chosen childlessness”. If rationality is defined as taking actions that seem likely to lead to a desired result, then personal childlessness isn't a rational response to overpopulation. Overpopulation is a social problem, and no likely amount of volunteerism from upper-middle class people (because that's what Ange is) is going to have any effect on it. Political action is rational, but politics depends on communication with people: what does a voluntarily childless person really have to say to a parent? Their daily concerns are very different, and people who want children are naturally suspicious of people who don't seem to want them at all saying that they should restrain themselves. Of course this decision, and Ange's decision in the text, is not really made on the basis of pure rationality.

At any rate, it's not that Ange is being held up by the text as an exemplar of the ideal activist. On the contrary, it's made quite clear that she's a personally rather chilly person whose politics are guided by her personality. Maybe she's supposed to have gravitated towards a tiny splinter group that isn't representative of majority concerns in her future society at all. The problem is that the rhetoric of what I'd consider to be a more mainstream extrapolation from current concerns doesn't seem to be familiar to her, to crop up in her internal monologues. She, and the text, seem to think of overpopulation as an abstracted “people having children” rather than “some people having children for particular reasons”. I could more easily believe that she was a member of a (Margaret) Atwoodite group, say. That would bring feminism more obviously into an already crowded work. But for a work concerned with overpopulation among humans, it kind of has to be there. Feminism is at the center.

Feminism is still present in the work, of course. Ange is skilled, independent, not waiting for a man to tell her what to do. And she isn't a heroine-iized character made to be unusual and remarkable because she has these qualities; her crewmate Ostriker is presented as being somewhat annoying, but really has them too. This is nowhere near the usual SF attitude in stories about overpopulation. About which, more later.

Anti-Copernicus (III)

Continuing from here a piece on Adam Roberts' E-published work Anti-Copernicus.

Mercury

“It was all very unsatisfying.

Ange did not find it so, however. On the contrary she found the offkilter non-symmetry of the whole thing actually rather pleasing; pleasing in an aesthetic sense.”-- Anti-Copernicus

Since Mercury is a planet named after a god of language, this is the best place to write about the work's aesthetic qualities. I could write about a number of aesthetic features of the text, such as the way that double quotes are avoided everywhere, blurring speech and thought and telepathic communication and omniscient narrative into a single, immediate but slightly reserved distance. But I may as well focus on the aesthetic concerns brought up within the text itself. The aesthetic concerns within Anti-Copernicus are concerns about story shape. If the piece has an aesthetic effect beyond its science fictional one of presenting us with a decentering idea, I see it in an ironic set of layers around story shape: promising, playing out, denying.

The book begins with a chapter called “The Mighty Adam”. The elemental habitat of humanity is in Western mythology the Garden – the center, from which we are displaced with the necessity of toiling for bread – which is what the Adam reference in the chapter title is supposed to be about, according to the second paragraph of the text. (“Let’s call this first, solitary atom Adam. It is all that exists. [...]—just it, alone in its spacetime Eden.”)

When a text has an in-written authorial interpretation, that is the center around which our idiosyncratic readings orbit. So here we are told in so many words that this is a text concerned with archetypal, primitive Biblical imagery and mythology, but that metaphor is used in the context of three paragraphs all about scientific cosmology. A contradiction, in other words. A throwing off balance.

“First Contact” introduces Ange and a mood of absurdity. Ange was going to be sent to the presumed center of action of the story, the First Contact mission, but she wasn't. We're following a viewpoint character who could have been special, but instead watches events on TV just like us. But it's an anxious absurdity. Here's a part of first contact with the aliens:

Fingers are a mode of madness—and toes! Toes? Toes!

What do you mean? Do you mean you don’t possess fingers and toes? That the sight of them distresses you? Do you have flippers, or tentacles, or do you manipulate your environment with forcefields directly manoeuvred by your minds? We can wear mittens, if you like. If it distresses you. We can wear shoes on our feet and boxing-gloves on our hands! Not that we wish to box with you ... we have no belligerent feelings towards you at all!

This is straightforwardly rather funny; I think of the expectations for a serious, diplomatic Star Trek first contact confounded by the aliens' giddy ramble, the human representatives, under pressure to respond quickly, blurting out more than they meant to say. But even setting SF paranoia aside, it would be deeply worrying to have an entity that goes on like this anywhere nearby. The aliens deny any intent to hurt people, but an accident with an FTL drive could be quite damaging enough.

But Ange hasn't been chosen for the mission, so she goes on an ordinary one. And during that she hears that the aliens seem to have just gone away. Her two crewmates talk about why they would have left, one of them saying that there must be some reason, the other saying that the universe doesn't always give us coherent reasons. And Ange thinks this:

She believed (and this belief was as close to religion as she came) that the universe was not structured according to the logic of the human mind, despite the fact—ironically enough, perhaps—that the human mind is unavoidably part of the cosmos. The billions of buzzing homo sapiens brains craved pattern, structure and resolution; they saw the beauty of a story arc in every rainbow’s bend. The cosmos liked structure too, of course; but of a much less complicated, or perhaps it would be truer to say a much more monotonously replicated, kind. Hydrogen and helium everywhere in varying alternated clumps; the inverse-square-law everywhere in every direction. Everything existent, nothing mattering. And above all the cosmos had no sense of story whatsoever.

And Ange doesn't find this unsatisfying. This is where the quote that I started this section with goes, about her liking the off-kilter non-symmetry of it in an aesthetic sense.

Gareth Rees commented, on “Earth”, that:

The trouble with taking Anti-Copernicanism as your theme is that nearly all fiction (and especially science fiction) is already Anti-Copernican: the hero or heroine really is at the centre of the fictional universe; the events of the universe really are set up just so that they can save the day.

This is true. But possibly because Adam Roberts is a historian and critic of SF as well as a writer, the story is set up to (nearly) metafictionally address these very expectations.

So where is this going, aesthetically? This seems to be going into Stanislaw Lem territory. A large part of the feeling of real science that I get from Lem's work is his explicit insistence that scientific questions usually don't have answers, that the story centered on a particular character is going to end without the reader ever getting the closure of finding out what really happened. It's what many of his major books are based around – Solaris, His Master's Voice, The Investigation, The Chain of Chance (to use the English names). Len undermines himself a bit by giving hypotheses at the end of each work that are a bit too good, so believable that it feels like cheating. But people do create convincing hypotheses without really knowing what's going on.

So that's where the reader – or, at least, me – thinks the work is going at this point. The asymmetric story, the denial of an easy wrap-up, the refusal to center everything on the character in a genre-typical way. I've written about this before. As a general aesthetic for SF, it's one of my favorites – my aesthetic theory, such as it is, being somewhere near Umberto Eco's Opera Operta (The Open Work) rather than his later criticism.

Is that what we get? As Ange's journey goes on, her ship suffers from a series of accidents: one of the crew dies of a recreational drug overdose, a micrometeorite damages the trip and takes off the other crewmember's foot, and ... wait a minute:

At this Ostriker began to weep. I feel faint, she said. Oh my foot! My poor foot! How will I do without a foot? My toes! My foot.

Her toes? Where have I seen that before? The uneasiness for the reader with this implicit aesthetics is starting to take form: things are circling back. And indeed they do. Ostriker dies via another accident, and Ange, alone on the ship, realizes that it is heavily damaged and that she's probably going to die. Ange reinforces the theme:

If I live, she decided, and get home again I will write a work of philosophy, explaining how Copernicus revolutionised our living and dying as well as our cosmology. All those Greek tragedies, all that Shakespeherian to-do about death, the distinguished thing—it all belonged to that Pre-Copernican delusion of our importance. Only an important being can have a significant death! An unimportant entity dies, as she was doing (there was little point in denying it), stupidly, belatedly, unexpectedly, in a downbeat banal accidental way. The modern mode of it.

And then, totally without justification – or if there is one, I missed it – the alien that she lost the chance to talk to at the beginning mysteriously crashes into or contacts her ship. At first I thought it might be a hallucination, but there is all sorts of confirming physical evidence, then and after: a neat circular hole in her ship, the alien ship's detection on many other people's sensors. And the alien answers all of the significant questions of the story for her and us. And then, because people detected the alien ship, a ship is sent that rescues Ange. She lives after all. It's a neat wrap.

Why would the story raise the expectation of a certain kind of aesthetic, talk about it, and then withdraw it in favor of a different one? Well, of course I don't know, I can only give a reading. It could be something as simple as: in Adam Roberts' books characters don't tend to get what they want; Ange wants an off-kilter story, therefore she doesn't get one. It could be the requirements of commercial publishing. But I think – and here perhaps I should read Eco's Interpretation and Overinterpretation – that it has something to do with those toes.

Why do the aliens go on about toes in the first place? Well, here's what the surviving alien out of the original three tells Ange, about their reaction to being near so much dark energy produced by the multitudes of human intelligences:

It has destroyed my two companions.[...] We were giddy. We were intoxicated by the glory and seediness and splendour of it all. When they died I took my craft away, but my own consciousness has been ... poisoned, I suppose you might say ... as well. So I have come back. I might as well expire here as anywhere. Here at the heart of the cosmos.

So the giddy ramble wasn't the aliens' natural state, it was a state of being intoxicated and dying. That's a lot more grim than that amusing exchange appeared at first read. Why toes? Well, traditionally, a child uses fingers and toes to count. The intoxicated aliens are saying that fingers and toes are a mode of madness because they're boggled by our numbers. When Ostriker mourns the loss of her toes later, it's symbolically – for each of us is a civilization, according to the aliens – us mourning the human losses that we're going to take if things go on as they are.

What's the opposite of a story with an unknown ending? A story where, from the start, you know how it's going to turn out. This text is centered around overpopulation. That, I think, is the reason that this aesthetic is raised, celebrated, and then rejected. We all think that we know how the overpopulation story turns out.

Is this sometimes rather funny story really that grim? No, it isn't: Ange's final decision to have a child has its own evident irony, but is optimistic for all that. But the reversal of aesthetics is part of the unsettling that the story seeks to cause. The aliens in the story are concerned that because of human-generated dark energy, the universe won't close its big bang/big crunch cycle, will expand forever and end in entropy. Meanwhile the reader may be conscious that the story has, ironically, done the reverse.

Anti-Copernicus (II)

Continuing from here a piece on Adam Roberts' E-published work Anti-Copernicus.

Moon

Adam sent me this text through Email, as a .docx Office 2007 file. When I first read it, it looked fine. When I read it a second time – the read I'm doing now for this piece -- it had changed. I was using a newer iMac, and OpenOffice instead of NeoOffice, and a strange corruption had set in. There was now a gap after every apostrophe. Spaces between paragraphs had de-spaced, changing the page count that I remember from the original 32 to 21 pages. The file hadn't even gone through a save-and-restore sequence, but it appeared wholly different.

A book doesn't read the same with a different font, with different cover art, different margins. These things normally do not change for a particular instance of a book; they are physically stable. E-publishing brings out a Lovecraftian lunar madness, a mutation of form that depends on the (programs used by the) observer, not the observed. Books that are published purely electronically may well become unreadable in time, just like so many electronic records have whose formats become disused.

But we don't have to wait for decades. I'd guess that within a month, or a day, someone is going to look at the sentence in Anti-Copernicus “At a café she decided to respect the e-acute and ordered herself a latté” and see strange, unreadable symbols whose meaning can only be gained through context. I hesitate to write much about it since it is so well known within the group of people likely to read this, but electronic text is firmly centered on English, more specifically on the 94 printable characters of ASCII. Even within the symbols in ASCII, people managed to somehow mess up the tab and the apostrophe. Going beyond English, even to any kind of accented character, puts you into a wasteland of varying implementations of Unicode.

I'm not trying to write yet another screed bemoaning the supposed death of printed books. The logic of electronic publishing is inescapeable. And in an environmental sense, there are obvious disadvantages to cutting down trees, bleaching wood pulp, shipping the product all over the world etc. Although, as Bruce Sterling pointed out in the Viridian list, bits are not metaphysical, abstract entities. They require hard drives, backup tapes, electricity. For you to read what I'm writing now, coal is being burned in a electric power plant somewhere. Still, since we're all connecting to the Internet and using some computing device near us anyways, the additional marginal cost of one E-published book must be fairly negligible.

But E-publishing is, again, currently in a Lovecraftian mode. “I'm seeing indescribable symbols that people were not meant to see!” and all that. The cultural imperialism that goes along with it, written into its most basic set of codes. Even its inevitabilitty.

As the text's readability suffers a strange decay, certain formal qualities become weirdly apparent, like lunar features not screened by atmosphere. How many words does a particular book contain? At the beginning of the book, no one knew, without an obsessive act of counting. Then when books began to be typeset, perhaps the typesetter knew. The publisher. The author, once authors used word processing software. When you get a file as an Office document, the reader knows. Tools → Word Count → there are 13,115 words in this work.

Science fiction, as a genre, has an obsession with word count. Possibly because of the Hugo Awards, possibly because at heart it was a magazine-based genre during certain formative years, with pay by the word and stories cut smaller or fixed-up larger as space allowed. It is the only genre to really care about the definition of the “novella” and “novelette”. If you look up these words on Wiki, the SF definitions are the only formalized ones, and they are formalized to word count. Therefore, this isn't a Dwarf novel as Adam jokes, or a mini-novel. A novelette, in SF, has a word count of between 7,500 and 17,499 words. This is therefore a novelette. The formal classification of this work is scientific. Anyone can see it. The book has lost its physical center, but its word count is a rock.

Anti-Copernicus (I)

“There was nothing special about her. She was as perfectly ordinary as anybody else in the world. And the world itself was perfectly unexceptional, ordinary, banal, in cosmic terms a Copernican un-wonder.”-- Anti-Copernicus

Anti-Copernicus is a short novel E-published by Adam Roberts. It's a work about where the center is. Since the center is in the Western tradition troped as an exceptional place, it's also about what is ordinary and what isn't.

I've chosen to write about Adam Roberts' novels within arbitrary formal structures – for this piece, that means I've written within sections labelled according to the spheres of the Ptolemaic system: Earth, Moon, Mercury and so on. But in the comical reversal that often accompanies formally structured attempts of this sort, I found myself writing more and more; Adam's shortest novel-like work will go with my longest blog post. So I'm just going to post the first section now, “Earth”, and follow with the rest later.

Earth

Anti-Copernicus, and Adam's own introductory post about it, mention dark energy and the Fermi Paradox. SF has this idea that it is a literature of ideas. The text doesn't mention, oddly enough, the Anthropic Principle.

I think that a plot summary is required. (And yes, these are spoilers.) Ange Mlinko is a space pilot, considered for a First Contact mission with the only aliens who humanity has yet encountered. Instead she gets sent on an ordinary commercial run. An ordinary space voyage for her, of course, is not ordinary for us the readers. During the course of her trip to Mars to deliver a cargo of barnacles, a series of accidents kill the two other crew members on board, and a in a final accident that threatens her own life, she meets one of the aliens after all.

The alien explains that all other intelligent life in the universe has one creature per species (or one hive mind per species, but in any case only one intelligence), and that the three aliens who banded together to contact Earth are not representatives, but each their entire species. They are aghast at the billions of humans living on Earth, because intelligence produces dark energy, and the tremendous amount of dark energy produced by humankind will over a long term destabilize the cycles of expansion and contraction of the universe, leading to continual expansion of the universe and its effective destruction as a support for life. Therefore Earth is really the center of the Universe, or at least a very special place unlike any other; the dark energy isn't and hasn't been produced in these quantities anywhere else. But it is a destructive center. The aliens die, overwhelmed by the effect of so many nearby intelligences, and Ange, a rather withdrawn person, decides after her near-death experience to have a child.

It's a satire, of course. But at the center are these ideas, which work through SF escalation to treat overpopulation as more than Earth-ecosystem-threatening -- as universe-threatening. Does this work as hard SF?

Having posed the question, I'll immediately qualify it. I was an astrophysics grad student ABD (all but dissertation) when I left that field to do environmental work. As a result, I'm weirdly overqualified to comment on this particular text. Hard SF is very difficult to do well for a reader with scientific training, or perhaps only I find it so. The only hard SF that I've found very convincing is Stanislaw Lem's, and, fitfully, Kim Stanley Robinson's (though his still has its gaffes, as with his Mars windmills that heat up the planet). With this text, I immediately thought that the “intelligence generates dark energy” idea was extremely doubtful. It relies on a lot of handwaving about the observer changing the observed that's part of a continuing misunderstanding of quantum behavior beloved by science popularizers, because after all it puts we the observers at the center through the fallacy of equivocation, treating “observer” used as a physics term of art as the same as “living, intelligent and perceiving creature”. In terms of biological science, too, I wondered how it was that these aliens were so verbally communicative, so fluent. Why would they have evolved the capacity for speech when there was literally no one else on each of their home planets to talk to? For that matter, how could they evolve at all, when their singular nature means that there's no population for variation and natural selection to work on?

But this is a story, and unlike Kepler's Somnium (the first work of SF, possibly) the science ideas are in the service of the story, not the reverse. So the question is, do the scientific ideas help make the story work? In particular, a lot of the impact of the work is the reader's bogglement at the idea of each intelligence being a whole civilization, solitary and self-contained and rare. That seems unlikely, doesn't it? – the idea that our multiplicity is unique, and that makes the Earth unique. Shouldn't we trust our intuition that it's really unlikely that we live in a one-of-a-kind place?

It turns out, we shouldn't.

“The phrase "anthropic principle" first appeared in Brandon Carter's contribution to a 1973 Kraków symposium honouring Copernicus's 500th birthday. Carter, a theoretical astrophysicist, articulated the Anthropic Principle in reaction to the Copernican Principle, which states that humans do not occupy a privileged position in the Universe. As Carter said: "Although our situation is not necessarily central, it is inevitably privileged to some extent."

That's a quote from wikipedia. It's so apt that I'm I don't know whether Adam didn't encounter it, or chose not to include it, but in any event it's one of those rare cases in which an astrophysical concept will illuminate a story rather than serving as backdrop.

How to explain the Anthropic Principle? It says that an observer – in the sense of “living, intelligent creature”, this time – requires an environment that supports its existence, or there can be no observation. Why does the Universe have fundamental constants that support our kind of life? We don't know why, but we know that it has to – otherwise we couldn't be here to see it. Therefore, if there was some kind of random variation or multiplicity of universes with different fundamental constants, we would only see the universe that supports us, no matter how unlikely it was, or how long it took for that universe to appear. We can't appear and observe it until it comes into existence. What if the conditions that created life on Earth were incredibly unlikely? Well, we wouldn't know if they were, because we can only appear on Earth, even if it were the only such planet in the multiverse.

This is a strange, de-centering principle for scientists. We're used to thinking that if we have no information at all, the safest guess is that we're in the middle of a Gaussian bell-shaped distribution of some kind – many things look like bell-shaped curves, and it gets increasingly unlikely that you're out on one of the tails of one. But it doesn't work that way in this case. Would life be likely to appear on planets like ours? We can reason from our knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology that the same kind of processes that produced us would work elsewhere. What we can't do is just look around and say that we're more likely to be average than not. Scientists seem not to like the Anthropic Principle; they grumble about it being unfalsifiable, not really part of science at all, and it's rather stuffily been classed as part of philosophy.


I like the Anthropic Principle. When I was young it was one of the first things that I really got about astrophysics; a paper or conference presentation that someone had summarized claimed that since we saw some kind of astrophysical object nearby, it was likely that they were common. But you can't do that, I said, at least not in cases where the object could have some possible connection to life on Earth. Nearby supernovas? They create heavy elements which later became part of our planet, so if life requires an old supernova within a certain distance, then we will see one at the right distance, even if that's really rare. Large moons? Some people theorize that our moon was important for the emergence of life because of the tides that it creates, so, again, if what we needed was an unusually large moon for a planet of the size of the Earth, we'll see one, even if they almost never appear around other planets.

I remember my realization about the Anthropic Principle occurring when I was a freshman or sophomore in college, 17 or 18, which seems young and perhaps my memory is falsified to a later event from grad school, but at any rate what matters in something trivial like this is what I remember, not what really happened. Why am I bothering with telling this personal story now? Because a significant sub-thread in Anti-Copernicus is how supposedly rational decisions are really made on the basis of very basic biological drives. When I had my realization about the Anthropic Principle, I was in a serious relationship with a girl a couple of years older who'd already decided on astrophysics as her field. She was impressed that I'd seen something wrong with the paper that she hadn't. At the time I had no idea what area of physics I wanted to go into. I only knew that I didn't want to go into anything that could lead to weapons development. So... astrophysics seemed interesting enough, a safely theoretical field without the necessity of working for some defense contractor someday. My rational decision to go to grad school in astrophysics was probably more about the warm glow of admiration from my first sexual partner than anything else.

To get back to general matters. The odd thing about what Brandon Carter in the quote above describes as our inevitably privileged position in the Universe is that it acts rather like “privilege” does, as used casually in accusations on the Internet when someone is supposed to be writing out of social privilege of some kind. It's there, but we just can't see it. It's always been part of our environment, and we're so used to getting its benefits that they're part of our assumptions; we have difficulty imagining anything else. And unlike the various forms of social privilege, there really isn't anyone else we can compare life experiences with. A white, heterosexual, middle-class etc person can meet other people and begin to see that what they thought was normal is really a set of special benefits that they get that other people don't. No contact with aliens means that in a larger sense we can't do this; we are solitary despite our multiplicity. Maybe other intelligent life really is all singular while ours is multiple. It seems very unlikely to me, for various physics-chemistry-biology reasons. But we can't tell simply through introspection, because even if our kind of life is really rare, we'd be there to see ourselves. A radical distrust in our intuition is what's required by the Anthropic Principle.

And now back to SF. The whole point of SF being a literature of ideas is not that it's supposed to be ideas about geosynchronous satellites that people later actually invent. Well, some fans think that it is, but I don't. It's supposed to be about ideas that de-center you, make you rethink where you are in ways that more realistic literature can't, because reality as we know it doesn't furnish what we need to see our position of privilege. Hard SF is supposed to do that with scientific ideas, ideas that have force because, as far as we know, they're really true. That is what is essential to hard SF, not scientific plausibility in all of the story's supports.

So, does Anti-Copernicus work as hard SF?

I think it does.

Riots

A large number of people whose blogs I read are writing about the British riots. I know nothing, really, about them, and my default idea on riots is that the Dead Kennedys pretty much said everything already in their song "Riot". (Chorus: "Riot- the unbeatable high / Riot- shoots your nerves to the sky / Riot- playing into their hands / Tomorrow you're homeless / Tonight it's a blast.") But I don't need to know about the riots themselves to know that some of what is being said about them on the left is pretty troubling, politically. And, of course, much more so on the right, but those people aren't worth my time.

But no one will take you seriously if you rely on the Dead Kennedys, so I went back and did what I always do when I think about social justice: re-read the Book of Amos. That is one strange, strange text, and it's foundational to how I think about social justice because some of its most evocative language was used for the U.S. Civil Rights movement. What does Amos say about riots? Or rather, what can I read him as saying about riots? Because of course I don't share any of the referents of the original context, really.

Well... Amos says that the great house shall be smashed to bits, and the little house to splinters. When retribution comes for social injustice, it's not going to be the rich people, or only the rich people, who suffer. The poor suffer even worse. (Dead Kennedys again: "But you get to the place / Where the real slavedrivers live / It's walled off by the riot squad / Aiming guns right at your head / So you turn right around / And play right into their hands / And set your own neighbourhood / Burning to the ground instead.") Here's Amos on people who hope for the day of justice:

Ah, you who wish
For the day of the Lord!
Why should you want
The day of the Lord?
It shall be darkness, not light!

--As if a man should run from a lion
And be attacked by a bear
Or if he got indoors,
Should lean his hand on the wall
And be bitten by a snake!
Surely the day of the Lord shall be
not light, but darkness,
Blackest night without a glimmer.

(translation from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures_, copyright 1985 by The Jewish Publication Society, ISBN 0-8276-0283-9)

Now, it used to be a staple of stupid leftist talk in the U.S. that some academic or media figure would say that people should have leftist solidarity and join in with rioters (I remember that particularly from an academic whose name I forget during the Washington, DC, Columbia Heights riot) or that rioters should or could act like a leftist rebellion (I remember Michael Moore pointing out where the real slavedrivers live on a map and saying that people should go there after the 1992 Los Angeles riots). I haven't seen anything like that this time. The condescension, hopeful assumption of partial responsibility for the riots (because rioters, after all, aren't ignored like leftists are), and fake solidarity is more subtle this time. Perhaps not even present in some cases. What are some of them?

I'll start with CR. CR is a person who used to comment on a blog we both read, The Valve, and who seems to me to have gotten a lot better, politically, since he started becoming a kind of advisor to student protestors. (I found, from my own student protest days, that it concentrates your mind on what you're really advocating tremendously when people are getting themselves arrested in demonstrations that you set up.) CR seems to have written mostly sensible things about the riots. However, CR also linked to a piece by Owen Hatherley that he found "excellent" and that I thought was pretty noxious. What does Hatherley say? Well, read it yourself, but in part:

Look at the looted, torched places, look at what they all have in common. Look at Bristol, a port where you could walk for miles and wonder where its working class had disappeared to, which seems to have been given over completely to post-hippy tourism, 'subversive' graffiti, students and shopping. Well, those invisible young, 'socially excluded' (how that mealy-mouthed phrase suddenly seems to acquired a certain truth) people arrived in the shiny new Cabot Circus mall and took what they wanted, what they couldn't afford, what they'd been told time and time again they were worthless without.

It's the hippies at fault! No, really, the post-hippies with their tame, scare-quoted subversive graffiti. And wow, the people who went to steal things during a riot would never have known to steal valuable, yet portable objects unless "they'd been told time and time again they were worthless without" them. You see, those chavs can't even *loot* things without being informed by the media-industrial complex in some cultural-criticism fashion that they should desire certain objects to maintain their self-image. Of course, all objects -- even gold bars! -- only have socially-mediated value in contemporary societies, so this isn't exactly new. No one would have blinked if rioters had stolen gold bars. Yet since the shops didn't have gold bars lying around, and did have expensive sneakers or radios or whatever, all of a sudden the rioters are responding to messages about how their worth depends on material objects when they steal them.

I'll move on from there to a post-hippy, Andrew Rilstone (well, really I'd describe him as a classic SF geek, but I'm not sure how that translates into Britishese). His article about the earlier Tesco riot was the best I'd read about it, really. Here's what he writes:

certainly, there were lots of forum comments in the evening post, and on twitter, saying that the people who lived on the croft, the people who objected to tescos, the people who think that chris chalkley's campaign of purposeful graffiti and street art was a good idea were street scum, rats, hippies, crusties, dole monkeys etc etc and that after the riots the next step was to drive us out of the area

just be careful what you wish for, that's all

To make clear one thing that I think is right about Rilstone's account, and bad about Hatherley's: I think that the left should really give up on authenticity via reflexive anti-middle-classism. Did austerity cause the riots? All right. Austerity is a policy pushed by upper class creeps, not by middle class post-hippies, not even really by middle class non-hippies. Hatherley criticises the smug, middle-class people who think that it's better in London than in Paris because London doesn't have banlieues. Well, it is better.
Are the people who care about that really the same people who decided that austerity was what was needed?

What other accounts of the riots did I encounter? Well, CR also links to an article by Michael Sayeau (yes, yes, I know). This article seems a lot more sensible to me. Where it starts to run into problems is here:

Leftists and liberals—of both the “public” and “student activist” stripes —have been incessantly asking themselves questions about the meaning of these riots and the pragmatics of handling them. Should those who have been defending the right to protest in the UK defend the rights of rioters who have looted electronics stores? Would distancing oneself from the rioters imply that previous claims of solidarity with the non-matriculating lower classes and the largely West Indian poor of Tottenham, Hackney, and elsewhere were only valid until the going got rough?

These are good questions, if there is any chance that they will actually be answered realistically. This is the problem of fake solidarity. The left, however defined, is addicted to claims that when students protest, it's really in solidarity with the working class. Or the poor, or at any rate someone other than the soon-to-be-middle-class students. Perhaps it's time to give up on speaking for other people and allow people real choices. Did some of the actual people who rioted actually show up at Sayeau's earlier demonstrations? Then certainly Sayeau should be in solidarity with them, if they weren't among those who committed crimes of violence; they were in solidarity with him. But, from the way in which they appear in this account as an unknown mass, without specific examples of people whom Sayeau knows, I don't think that they did. Why then is it so important for "leftists and liberals" to either defend the rioters or distance themselves? There's a relationship between two distinct groups of people there that seems much more important to those on one side than on the other.

Sayeau writes things that I agree with to a greater extent later on: if you dismantle the welfare state -- if you return to the capitalism of the 1930s -- then you should expect the horrors of the 1930s. That's what I take from my reading of Amos, in any case. The price is going to be paid, even though it's mostly going to be paid by poor people. And he's probably right that "the riots and their aftermath represent a painfully clear illustration of one of the most demonically perverse historical tendencies: that right-wing policies hurt ordinary people and in doing so promote support for right-wing policies." (Is he? Based on American precedents, I suspect that the aftermath of the riots will lead to police training in how not to cause incidents that spark riots. And that austerity of certain kinds may well be backed off on in response to social unrest. Whether the final result will be to promote the right-wing or not is still uncertain.)

I think that Ken McLeod addresses this whole issue more squarely.

The Grand Experiment was, of course, the postwar Keynes-Beveridge full-employment welfare state. Supported by the main parties of left and right, by the end of the sixties it was coming under attack from both flanks [...]

It seems obvious now that the postwar settlement had reached its limits by 1979. But I sometimes wonder if a more rational left than I was part of could have carried it forward, rather than helped to bring it down.

When leftists argue against austerity, they're implicitly arguing for the alternative to austerity, left-liberalism or left neo-liberalism. For Keynes, really, because the social-democratic alternative that doesn't come down to Keynes isn't really there any longer, as best as I can make out. Can there be student anti-austerity protests in favor of Keynesianism? If not, something about the left's myths is perhaps getting in the way. Or it isn't really austerity that's the problem.

P.S. (via Crooked Timber): Science!

Infrastructuralism

What would work best as a preventative to anthropogenic global climate change? According to most economists -- including, in particular for the purposes of this post, John Quiggin -- it's carbon taxes. I don't think so. For that matter, I don't think that any number of other favorite solutions have a good chance of working.

To make long argument short, I favor a model that goes something like this: people use whatever infrastructure is available. In a contemporary society, major infrastructure is essentially a command-and-control activity of government. Therefore what needs to happen is: a) scientists convince the public that change is needed, b) the public tells their governments that change is needed, c) governments issue orders to replace one kind of infrastructure with another. Emissions trading schemes and carbon taxes are basically market fetishism, because the vast majority of users of energy, including businesses, do not have the ability to choose differently enough within the existing infrastructure to make a difference. Demand elasticity only goes so far, and not far enough. Only if the cost of an ETS or carbon tax builds up enough to force a major rebuild of infrastructure would they work. But that is unlikely to happen, because a government in which people are feeling that much pressure from the ETS or carbon tax will respond to that pressure by revoking it.

And let's take the carbon tax argument to its limit. Quiggin writes that "The alternative solution is to make those responsible for carbon emissions pay a price, just as they do for goods and services of all kinds." What good or service are they paying for? Unless they are paying to replace carbon infrastructure with non-carbon, then what they are really paying for is ecosystem services. Imagine a situation in which global climate change goes on unchecked, but in which economists announce that the people doing the polluting have properly paid for their damages, in monetary terms, to other people. Is that really acceptable? No. Aside from the moral or ethical valuations involved, ecosystems can't really be replaced by money (i.e. human activity) just in physical terms.

Quiggin, in the linked blog post, writes that those who favor what is being called "direct action" in Australia do so primarily because they are either business-linked/conservative or because they are climate change deniers. I am neither of those, and wouldn't want to give aid or comfort to them. But it's my sense that this support of "direct action" on their part is purely instrumental, because they perceive that in their current politics it is least likely to lead to any action at all. You see this in the U.S. in the other direction, where measures against climate change were originally proposed to be regulatory, and so the right wing "favored" emissions trading schemes. When it looked like those might have a chance of actually being implemented, they went to pure denialism. So I don't think there's any point in disfavoring regulatory/command-and-control change just because they favor a do-nothing version.

Quiggin uses the usual invisible hand imagery of economics when he writes that "This problem raises a vast number of possible options, and the problem is to choose which will achieve the necessary reductions in emissions with the least possible disruption and economic cost. This is a difficult problem. [...]" Therefore, turn it over to the market (in the main) rather than the experts. But there is a large amount of fictitious economic activity that goes on, at least in the U.S., to camouflage the fact that major energy infrastructure is in fact an activity already decided by a few experts. Want to build a coal-burning electric power plant? In no sense is a "market" really involved. The government is involved from start to finish. How about a gasoline refinery? In fact, the major inputs to the system are government-controlled in all but name, with corporate ownership mostly being there for purposes of crony capitalism.

Someone might reply that the millions of decisions take place on the consumption side, with all of those light bulbs being replaced, car miles being driven to a greater or lesser extent, heaters being turned up or down, and small solar panels being put on roofs. None of that makes enough difference. If the electricity is being supplied by a coal-burning plant, people will use it somehow. If the roads have gasoline stations and infrastructure and no electric infrastructure, people will use up whatever gas is available, for the wider sense of "available" meaning "all that can be gotten out of the ground".

Conversion of our societies from carbon fuel to non-carbon is really a communal, global cost. Governments are how contemporary societies decide on and pay those kinds of costs. Trying to get the government to hand it off to the market is just the economist with a hammer thinking that everything looks like a nail.