More 'prophetic'(?) extracts from Earth...

 I just finished re-editing (and hence re-reading) EARTH for the first time in 20 years. (Dang that young feller could write...)  I did tidy up errors in the not-so-great file sent to me by Penguin, when I got the rights back, under the 1976 Copyright Act.... but I resisted any temptation to alter my 50 year projections to the year 2038. 

Why? Because EARTH is almost always on every list of Top Ten Novels That Predicted the Future. (It had web pages before there was a Web, or browsers, that I had to mock up myself in 1988. Other themes included: generational conflict over privacy. Floods of climate refugees. Melting glaciers and rising seas. Plus heat waves... and a mother planet that (some characters believe) is finally getting fed up. Plus many other predictive 'hits.'

Anyway, I decided that inserting updates that conform closer to the world of 2023 would be cheating. Hence, my big predictive mistakes are also there! You'll find several.

Anyway, while Open Road prepares for the novel's re-release - with a gorgeous new cover! -- in December or January -- I'll be posting some of those 'predictive hits' here... or just passages that I think you might enjoy. So, let's get started!

The first excerpt from Earth is copied in below... one of the semi-poetical extracts or views into the world of 2038. Much as John Brunner did in his wonderful, still totally relevant classic Stand on Zanzibar. 

This passage also has a video reading I posted to Youtube. In fact, you could read along as I recite it!

====

A dust wafts through the hills and valleys of Iceland.

The people of the island nation sweep it from their porches. They wipe it from their windows. And they try not to scowl when tourists exclaim, pointing in delight at the red and orange twilight glow cast by suspended topsoil, scattering the setting sun. Stalwart Northmen originally settled the land, whose rough democracy lasted longer than any other. For most of twelve centuries their descendants disproved the lie that says liberty must always be lost to aristocrats or demagogues.

It was a noble and distinguished heritage. And yet, the founders’ principal legacy to their descendants was not that freedom, but the dust.

Whose fault was it? Would it be fair to blame ninth century settlers, who knew nothing of science or ecological management? In the press of daily life, with a family to feed, what man of such times could have foreseen that his beloved sheep were gradually destroying the very land he planned leaving to his children? Deterioration was so gradual that it went unnoticed, except in the inevitable tales of oldsters, who could be counted on to claim the hillsides had been much greener in their day.

Was there ever a time when grandparents didn’t speak so?

It took a breakthrough ... a new way of thinking ... for a much later generation to step back at last and see what had happened year after year, century after century, to the denuded land ... a slow but steady rape by degrees.

But by then it appeared already too late.

Dust over Iceland (SeaWiFS Project)

A dust drifts through the hills and valleys of Iceland. The people of the island nation do more than simply sweep it from their porches. They show it to their children and tell them it is life floating in ghost- like hazes down the mountain slopes. It is their land.

Families adopt an acre here, a hectare there. Some have been tending the same patch since early in the twentieth century, devoting weekends to watering and shoring up some stretch of heath or gorse or scrub pine.

Pilots on commuter flights routinely open their windows and toss grass seeds over the rocky landscape, in hopes a few will find purchase.

Towns and cities reclaim the produce of their toilets, collecting sewage as if it were a precious resource. As it is. For after treatment, the soil of the night goes straight to the barren slopes, to succor surviving trees against the bitter wind.

A dust colors the clouds above the seas of Iceland.

At the island’s southern fringe, a cluster of new volcanoes spills fresh lava into the sea, sending steam spirals curling upward. Tourists gawp at the spectacle and speak in envy of the Icelanders’ “growing” land. But when natives look to the sky, they see a haze of diminishment that could not be replaced by anything as simple or vulgar as mere magma.

A dusty wind blows away the hills of Iceland. At sea, a few plankton benefit, temporarily, from the unexpected nurturance. Then, as they are wont to do, they die and their carcasses rain as sediment upon the patient ocean bottom. In time the layers will creep underground, to melt and glow and eventually burst forth again, to bring another island to life.

Short-term calamities are nothing to the master recycling system. In the end, it reuses even dust.

====

Oh heck, here's another... a snippet extract by one of the characters - in New Zealand - when he learns that a micro black hole might swallow the planet in a couple of years...

====

"You know,” George Hutton said slowly, still contemplating the peaceful view outside, “back when the American and Russian empires used to face each other at the brink of nuclear war, this was where people in the Northern Hemisphere dreamed about fleeing to. Were you aware of that, Lustig? Every time there was a crisis, airlines suddenly overbooked with “vacation” trips to New Zealand. People must have thought this the ideal spot to ride out a holocaust. 

“And that didn’t change with the Rio Treaties, did it? Big War went away, but then came the cancer plague, greenhouse heat, spreading deserts ... and lots of little wars of course, over an oasis here, a river there. 

“All the time though, we Kiwis still felt lucky. Our rains didn’t abandon us. Our fisheries didn’t die. 

"Only now..."

 ====

I set aside a bunch of these to share with you all, across the next few weeks.

Here's hoping the best of the predictions will still come true... and not the worst ones.

Science, Predictions and Possibilities

Every tenth posting or so, I take care of a pile of small/cool items. Here's one you are sure to like: Scientific American interviews me in their Too Hard For Science? series. "David Brin on - Raising Animals to Human Levels of Intelligence. If we cannot find aliens in the stars, we might create new "alien" intelligences on Earth. But it won't be easy, technically, politically or ethically.

Spread the word: all of my Uplift books now available on Kindle! as well as Nook and Sony Reader.

I confess to having a few visual fetishes. One of them is bridges...I love bridges. Even "ugly" utilitarian ones have a kind of beauty, so long as they express the compelling elegance of physical equations and our ever improving materials. But some inspire and even leave one awestruck. Perhaps that is why bridges are among the things that human beings always create with panache and (almost) always with skill. (The other being weapons; we seem to be best at both connecting and separating from each other.) See some of the latest bridge concepts: Imagining bridges of the future.

Meanwhile.... We're catching up to (or bypassing) the future -- in sci fi movie timelines. Clockwork Orange was set in 1995, my post-apocalyptic novel The Postman in 2013, Soylent Green in 2022. Below that chart, a Trilogy Meter -- rating 1st, 2nd & 3rd movies in famed SF series. I mostly agree in every case! He captures "2nd movie syndrome." He's too kind to Jedi, Trek3 (blech), Alien3 (beyond evil), & Khan was great! But generally right.

=== Predictions Registry Time? ===

Predictive hit in my novel EARTH p. 164 "How about fighting the greenhouse effect by sending up dust to block sunlight like those volcanoes made the chill snap of '09." About this snippet-quotation, a fan writes: "Oh sure, new planets, the web, secrecy radicalism, your dead-on technology, but HOW did you know in '89 that '09 volcano dust'd do a cold snap in 2010?!"

Aw, that's nuthin' See p.206 of The Transparent Society! Far creepier! (More below.)

Oh, and now this: ”Researchers at the University of Arizona, analyzed grains that the Stardust probe scooped up from Comet Wild 2's coma on a close flyby in 2004, sending the samples to Earth in a capsule two years later. After studying the comet dust using electron microscopy and X-ray analysis, the researchers found minerals that formed in the presence of liquid water.” Suggesting the comet’s nucleus underwent a period with liquid in its interior... as suggested in my novel HEART OF THE COMET. (Based on my doctoral thesis.) Melted in the early cloud by decaying Aluminum26. Trillions of such test tubes might have made... life?

Another Predictions Registry Item:In 2010 I said we'll be sorry someday for investing too much in so-called Just In Time production and inventory methods. Now the entire world economy is suffering because events in Japan have rocked delicate "efficient" supply chains. See: “Disasters show flaws in just-in-time production, 'Earliest impact will be felt with high-cost, low-weight products'.

Now add the fact that hundreds of thousands in the afflicted area had charged cell phones they could not use, when they needed them most, because of the lack of P2P text passing capability. (Some probably died because of it, trapped in buildings with their phones in their hands.) Another area I have been railing about since before 9/11, grabbing lapels in Washington, Silicon Valley, with the most trivial fix that would make our civilization far more resilient and robust. Alas.

And don't get me started about the need to re-start Yucca Mountain.

(Come see a wiki that has been set up by some meticulous fans, attempting to track my own near-future forecasts, ranking a success-failure rate, especially when it comes to my near-future novel EARTH (1989): new helpers are welcome to join in updating the site and keeping me honest!)


=== Perceptions! ===


Great commercial. Actually, it's a mini movie!

And the survey says: 44% of Americans perceive natural disasters as signs of Biblical end times -- acts of a vengeful God. (Or karma?) Worrisome! Though I take such surveys with salt. (In fact, many people can "think several impossible contradictions before breakfast.) Ask one way and they'll say the Earth is billions of years old. Ask another and they will speak up for how dinosaurs JUST missed getting on the ark. Still moronic, but don't dismiss your neighbors as SIMPLISTICALLY simpleminded.

--- Heh. Revenge - in a literary contrivance - can be way fun. My colleague John Shirley goes overboard. Still, a cute concept in his novel, The Other End. “Veteran horror writer Shirley (Cellars) swaps gory for glory in this inventive if politically heavy-handed left-wing answer to Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's evangelical Left Behind series. Child slavers, genocidal soldiers and corrupt statesmen have fourth-dimensional visions and abandon their wicked ways in the first part of the novel... but once the good guys ascend to a better place, most of the people left behind are Republicans, Scientologists, oil company CEOs and anyone "fundamentalist, hard-line, inflexible." By dispensing justice along party lines, Shirley limits his audience to a choir that won't mind 300 pages of very pretty preaching.”

Heh! Ever see the movie Dark Star, when the astronaut tries using phenomenology and Plato's cave to talk a bomb out of detonating? Now see this from xkcd.

While we're at it. Is humanity evolving into a superorganism? Australian scientist, environmentalist, author, and climate change activist Tim Flannery, in Here on Earth, argues that we are living in a immensely cooperative world, rather than in a survival-of-the-fittest, dog-eat-dog world. Alas, no mention of my own theme in EARTH.


=== Contacting Aliens (our kids and those other kinds) ===


Powerful electromagnets, it turns out, can do remarkable things to the brain -- in this case, prevent a volunteer from reciting "Humpty Dumpty." The carefully directed magnets temporarily disrupt the brain's speech centers; the volunteer can still sing the rhyme using different areas of the brain, but simply can't overcome a series of stammers when trying to merely recite it.

Who am I to argue with this study? Teens who spend more time reading were less likely to be depressed than those immersed in music, television or video games. (What…Spending hours staring at a screen shooting people doesn’t make you happy?) And what’s more upbeat than Science Fiction? Just don’t give them Sylvia Plath or Virginia Wolf...

Some of you will have heard of the "Bible Code" claiming that one can find all sorts of predictions about today's events encoded in the Bible. A skip code is a code where one starts at a particular letter (for the Bible, in Hebrew), and then skip ahead a specific number of characters to read the next letter in the secret message, and then keep skipping ahead by the same number of characters. Critics, however, applied the same technique to modern novels and found very similar "hidden messages". So, basically, in a rich enough body of text, you can find anything you want encoded there. For example, this link shows "predictions" of the assassination of various world leaders within the text of Moby Dick.

Read more about this at a site by this guy I know, wherein he goes on to hilariously show how his own “alien message” - written in the early nineties as a game, now has a cult following of people who not only call it a real alien message(!) but call him a hoaxter for claiming credit!

All of which is reminiscent of my own “message to aliens” - psychoanalyzing them for a dozen possible excuses for refusing to make contact. It gets pretty recursive when I suggest they sign into the Internet and discuss their issues, using their real names... since most people will just think they are humans pretending to be aliens! (Oh it goes round n’ round.... ooog.


== A Better Trend in Hollywood? ===

Why suddenly FOUR cool sci fi movies that intelligently mess with our heads rather than screaming at us with aliens or repeated remakes of dopey cliches? Four in just a year, and all successful!


=== SCIENCE! ===


Ultra modern super-toilet.

A DARPA study found that attaching a 9volt battery to your brain enhances your gaming ability. Passing a 2mAmp buzz through the skull doubles one's gaming reflexes. (No, touching the 9v battery to your tongue won't help...)

“Three parent” in vitro embryos? Scientists seek to implant embryos with material from three genetic parents -- tiny bit seems to help prevent genetic defects. Of course it is still a long way from inserting a better mitochondria "battery" to actually replacing damaged chromosomes... and then to patching then reviving Neanderthal DNA....

That'll do for now. Next time I give in to those who have been urging "David stop being so reticent and shy and tell us what you think about society and politics!"

At last.

Am I a good "predictor"?

I have continued to probe at the idea of Predictions Registries, in hope that it may eventually lead to some kind of accountability engine (or arena) that would help evaluate a very critical question that may determine the future of humanity and civilization... is there any way to identify which individuals tend to be right a lot - distinguishing them explicitly from those who mask with flashy legedermain the fact that they are often terribly wrong?

What possible service would be more valuable? It is a GENERAL concept, that could enhance every other human endeavor, from government to philanthropy. And yes, with profound potential commercial uses, as well. The first to invest in such a process might benefit profoundly. So why have people only nibbled at the edges?

(I believe this is closely related to the mypoia that has kept people from studying the fundamental common elements of markets, science, democracy and law, treating each of them as completely separate when, in fact, their basic processes have deep, common roots.)

All I can do is keep tossing out there items that seem relevant, hoping they may add up. Here are a few interesting sites I have found so far (one of them admittedly self-serving):

1. Marketocracy Data Services is a research company whose mission is to find the best investors in the world and then track, analyze, and evaluate their trading activity. (I'm going to get my son an account.) At www.marketocracy.com folks compete to become the best investors. For over 3 years they have tracked, analyzed, and evaluated their virtual trading activity and have accumulated a massive database; following over 10,000 stock positions at any one time and more than four million trades. Marketocracy constantly analyzes and ranks the stock picking ability of members using a complex algorithm that incorporates long and short-term performance, as well as an attribution analysis that accounts for market, sector, style, and trading contribution so that they can isolate comparative returns.

These guys appear to be the closest to the real thing so far. You could squint and imagine their software and approach being applied on a much broader scale to predictions across a huge range of topic areas, from politics to sports... and even to science. If I ever find time, I may try to contact them about this possibility. I can think of few endeavors that have greater potential for helping a society in flx, than to come up with methodologies for identifying people who are right a lot... and those who are too often wrong to deserve our credibility and trust

2. Then there's this: "Prediction Company is bringing two main forces to bear against this changing environment: world class technology and world class science. Our technology allows us to build fully automated trading systems which can handle huge amounts of data, react and make decisions based on that data and execute transactions based on those decisions - all in real time. Our science allows us to build accurate and consistent predictive models of markets and the behavior of financial instruments traded in those markets." http://www.predict.com/

Unfortunately, all is not as it seems, in a group's self-serving public statements. I have it from other sources that these guys followed an all-too familiar course, betting so heavily on their computer model's infallibility that they did not take into account any model's inevitable failure. Still, gotta envy their URL.

3. Someone recently pointed to the Technovelgy Site - a very cool attempt to cite technological predictions made in sci fi novels. This is nothing like the systematic approach to registering predictions that I am urging but it certainly is a step... though a glance at my own entry seems fairly skimpy, given that my novel Earth just had its 14th predictive "hit".

(Alert! Danger! Egomaniacal preening is about to begin!) Right off the bat I can think of plenty of other items that someone (ahem) might suggest to the site manager. (I think they also want to cite an actual passage from the book, making this process more complex and too time consuming even for an egotist like me, alas.) For example:

Subvocal user-computer interface shown in EARTH (1989) which NASA reports inventing in 2003.

Personality profiling (SUNDIVER) which is now a hot topic using PET scanning... though no one is using yet the inherently superior method of eye-tracking.

Uplift genetic engineering of animals (um....)

WOM or Write Only Memory (Brightness Reef) a recording device that is required to be carried on all ships or cars, that cannot be read until the owner releases the information, or for an extended time.

Predictions Registry (EARTH) hey, might as well get credit for this, too.

EMILYPOST viral politeness programs (EARTH) target rude internet users.

Information sieves (EARTH) - programs that sift the Net for content according to your tastes and priorities, learning as they go. They can either enhance productivity or be used to exclude all incoming information that might disagree with your favorite illusions. (Sound like Rush dittoheads?)

Illusion-breaker programs that pierce these sieves and force Net users to perceive news or opinions outside their tailor-made perception range. (EARTH)

Hostage Gas (The Uplift War) forces a population to voluntarily go to internment camps in order to get antidotes to a toxin.

Waldo Whale (Sundiver) lets a human swim like a dolphin or orca.

Waldo walker and tools (Startide Rising) allows dolphins to move and work outside of water.

Needle-Gym - A simulation-exercise room with needle floor ("NatuLife"). A million needles on the bottom of a tiny, closet-size "exercise room" rise and fall to simulate any ground or surface, from a street to forest trail, acting also like a treadmill, so that you can run and feel under your feet any surface that the computer shows you in your simulation goggles.

Tether space station. A station in two parts, separated by a 100 mile tether, will orbit the Earth in a way that aligns along a radius, deriving "gravity gradient" forces that let liquids settle and provides a sense of up and down. ("Tank Farm".)

A Womb with a View. Intra-utero teaching unit. Installed to help a fetus learn before birth and get a leg-up on other pre-pre preschoolers. ("Dr. Pak's Preschool")

Fabricows - cattle and other creatures that create gene-designed biomachinery in their wombs. Also complex synthetic chemicals instead of milk. Poor women might also do this, creating super-advanced organic entities the old fashioned way. ("Piecework").

GAZER or gravity laser (EARTH) uses singularity "mirrors" to tap the higher energy levels within the Earth and emit tuned, focused, coherent graviton beams.

I just dashed these off. Any others occur at a thought? Anybody care to compile and tell these guys? (I guess this topic thread can be continued here while we move on.) Hey, these days, below a certain level of fame, you gotta do your own $$#@! preening.