The Ocean of Dreams: Science Fiction, History and Space Exploration
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00:00
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:20
Hi everyone, thank you so much for coming. This is my second year at Republika and I'm always very excited to see an almost full room for science fiction, which ten years ago would never have happened. My name is Eden, I'll be turning 30 in just two weeks, and when I started reading science fiction
00:40
it was a niche occupation. It was something that not to exaggerate too much, I wasn't ridiculed for, but people gave me weird looks. It was always popular to read one or two books, you know, The Great, Dune, or Star Wars, stuff like that, but actually delving in was something that, when I was growing up, especially where I'm from
01:00
in Israel, was kind of an oddity. And today, you're here. And I get this amazing stage to talk about some of my greatest passions, and for that I cannot thank you enough because it wouldn't have happened without you guys. So, the title of my talk is The Ocean of Dreams, and the subtitle is what history, science fiction, and the ocean can teach us about
01:21
space. So, that subtitle is terrible because it doesn't tell you anything, and we need to unpack some of the terms that are here. Unlike last year, when I promised not to do theoretical stuff, and then I did theoretical stuff for 80% of my talk, I will actually not do theoretical stuff this time, and we'll just spend
01:40
five minutes defining history, science fiction, and the ocean, and then we can get right to it. So, the biggest one. What is history? It seems like a ridiculous question, right? Everybody knows what history is. But when we try and look at it, whether professionally or personally, we discover that history is much more complicated than what is taught to us
02:00
in high school. It's not just what the powerful people have done, or what countries did to maximize their power. It's also basically everything, right? From the trade of wine, to how animals migrate from country to country, to how war affects migrants, to basically everything
02:20
that ever existed before prehistory, before the written language was invented. Why history today? Why am I opening this talk with history? Just to make something clear, I am very much a skeptic about learn the past to know the future. I don't think that's true. I don't think that's possible. But we
02:40
can take from history models, ideas that people have already implemented, how they failed, how they succeeded, and why they did either. We can try and take these models and not repeat the mistakes, and try to duplicate the successes. Science fiction.
03:00
What is science fiction? So it's made up of two worlds, science and fiction, but this term is deprecated. It shouldn't even be used anymore. The proper term nowadays is speculative fiction. Because science, while still very much a part of science fiction, is kind of taking a back seat today as we move forward and forward into these strange times that we find
03:21
ourselves in. I would hope that most people that sit here have already been disillusioned from the promise that science will save us. Science, like everything else that we create, is a tool. And it is up to us to use it in certain ways. And without those paths forward, there will be no good to come
03:41
of science. And that's where fiction comes in. Fiction is the science of imagining other ways in which reality could be. Whether it is the past, the present, or the future. It is asking the question and answering it at the same time. How could my life be different?
04:01
How could the lives of others be different? How do humans live in ways which I cannot even imagine? Put together, science fiction or speculative fiction, is the science of thinking of new ways in which the future will be. How will it be different from what we know? How will it manifest changes
04:20
in our lives? And the last one is the ocean. The ocean is supposedly the simplest of these terms, but it is also quite complicated. On one hand, it's a geographical concept. It's a body of water big enough to be classified as an ocean. But it is so much more than that. It is a space for
04:40
colonialism. It is a space for exploitation. It is a space for war. And it is also a space for discovery and great wealth and unimaginable accomplishments that nowadays beggar the mind. Just think about that Portuguese or German or Dutch or Spanish or English or Chinese or Japanese standing in front of this massive expanse of
05:04
water and imagining the other side. It's almost no wonder that the first iterations of science fiction in Europe came during the Age of Discoveries. As they were thinking about how lives could be different on the other side of the ocean, they were in fact practicing science fiction.
05:24
So one of the most blatant examples of that is this engraving. It's actually from the 19th century. It appears in a book by, and I'm sorry that I'm butchering the French, Nicolas Camille Flamieux. He was an astronomer. His wife was also an astronomer by the way, Gabriele Flamieux, and they together
05:44
looked at Jupiter and Mars and other planets in our solar system. And this engraving encapsulates how they thought the Renaissance and medieval thought saw the world. So you have that person there in the bottom left corner and he is exiting the sphere of the known, right?
06:04
Into the unknown. Now this is terribly anachronistic, and looking at medieval times like this would be a mistake, but it captures that sense of wonder that has always infiltrated human thoughts when thinking about the ocean, about exploration. Obviously this is a very naive way to see it, a fact which I will now
06:24
break down and show you how it's not naive. How exploration is never just the thrill of the new, the thrill of the novel, but an attempt to define ourselves, to define the other, and to basically rule the world around us. So what I will be doing is examining three models from history
06:44
and how they mirror what we might be seeing in the future when we come to explore space. Before we dive in, last theoretical statement. Space is the new ocean. It's not a question of if we will go to space.
07:02
It is a question of when. It is inevitable. It is inevitable because we are humans and that urge in us to pioneer, that urge in us to jump into the ocean is far too strong to resist and it is inevitable because this earth is no longer enough. Even if you look at the most basic effects,
07:22
which is the goal for population, time is running out. Even if we find some scientific way to prolong fossil fuel and all that other stuff, we simply keep going. So keep that in mind. It's not if these things happen, it's when they happen and how they will happen. So our first model
07:43
is Portugal on the left. Portugal was one of the first nations to not only explore the new world, which obviously wasn't new, it was just new to them, and colonialize it. In this case, we're not talking about the new world, we're talking about Africa. And this is a map from the 15th century.
08:01
Look how much space that little fort takes at the bottom of it. That's not a mistake. It's not that they were crazy and didn't know how to make maps. It's that maps were a communicative device. It's not just how to get to somewhere, it's what that place is. And the fact that this fort takes up so much space should tell you how important it is, how crucial it was
08:21
to the perception of the world. The world for these kind of settlements was Feitoria, which is like a combination of fortress and factory and trading post. And what they did with these fortresses is a very old trick. They found a bottleneck and they closed it. They said, if you want to go to the ocean, you have to go
08:41
through us. And that's the oldest trick in the book. Humans have been doing that since 6000 BC. It's called hydraulic tyranny. I sit on the top of the river, you sit at the bottom, and I tell you, if you want water, if you want to live, you must swell fealty to me, and then I will give you the resource. In Portugal's case, the resource was trade. Access to the ocean.
09:01
Why is this relevant? How does this bring us to space? Right now, there is a person out there who I won't name because he's not a public person, who really wants the US to declare the moon landing site as a heritage site. The problem is that in the UN
09:21
Charter, a country must own a place, must declare ownership in order to make it a heritage site. And no one wants the US to declare ownership over that site. The simple reason is if they own it, they can develop it. And if they can develop it, they can build their own version of the Portuguese fortress on the moon. Does that sound like science fiction? Well, yeah, that's
09:44
the point of the talk. But it's also something that is very, very easy to accomplish. It's not that hard for one of the greatest nations in the world, right? They've already been there, they've already been there a few times, they have the resources. Why is that a problem? Even in the times of the Cold War, where speculation was going on about what the
10:01
Soviet Union was attempting, the idea of a moon base is the ultimate bottleneck. If I sit on the moon and I have missiles there, you don't get to go to space unless you pay me. In fealty, in prestige, in money. I basically hold the entire world as my bottleneck. The moon is at some point, especially if I have
10:21
missiles, is in range of the entire globe. Right? So no one wants the US to be the first, no one wants anyone to be the first. And even if there is an international initiative, of course some countries that aren't in the international community will be excluded. So you can see this first sign how history rhymes.
10:42
Right? The same fear of Portuguese power creating a bottleneck is the same fear of US or international power creating a space bottleneck. Our next model comes to us from England. By the way, I'm sorry that these pictures are pixelated, it's really hard to get these in high res, because these are organizations that don't exist anymore.
11:02
The East India Trading Company is a company that was founded by 60 or so of the English middle class in the 17th century to handle trade for the British empire in the East Indies and in India eventually. Why did the government give them a charter? They gave them a complete monopoly
11:21
over trade. Because then the government outsources the risk. If you think that outsourcing is a new invention, it's not. It outsources the risk to the private sector. A ship goes down, no one tries to overthrow parliament, they go to the board for this company and they complain. And that board says we're a private interest and they can kind of wash them away. If the queen sends an armada and that armada drowns,
11:44
the queen risks losing her authority, parliament risks being replaced. So the government outsources the risk for a share of the profit, and the company takes all of the risk and gets a share of the profit that otherwise they would never have
12:00
been able to access. Who is today's East India Trading Company? Elon Musk's SpaceX. NASA has outsourced its path to space to the private sector. NASA no longer launches shuttles. Elon Musk will own and operate the US, the world's largest economy. Their path
12:24
to space will be handled by the private sector. And already we can see the same model as the East India Trading Company. Elon Musk had an accident a few years ago, right? When a NASA shuttle explodes, people say, shut down NASA. Or impeach the president. How did they not see this terrible disaster coming?
12:44
When Elon Musk's shuttle explodes, his stocks go down, he has to do a press conference, he has to handle it. The government outsourced the risk of space travel to the private sector. Again, this kind of rhyming. Time will tell whether Elon Musk lives out the
13:03
prophecy of exploitation and violence that the East India Trading Company had as its history. I hope not, but you never know. My last model, everybody's favorite people, the Vikings. The Vikings had a very interesting model, unlike what TV would tell you. The Vikings had a mixed
13:23
model. On one end, each captain, it's not actually a captain, it's a chieftain, was in charge of their own vessel. They bought the armor for their troops, they bought the vessel itself, and they did all that because they ran out of space in their own area. There was a global cooling, land in
13:43
Denmark in that area got sparser and sparser, and smaller chieftains had to be evicted. But they didn't always work alone. When there was great plunder or a great enemy guarding that plunder, they knew how to band together into fleets. And those fleets were operated on the simple mechanism of
14:03
shared profit. We pool our resources, each one of these individual captains, for the promise of greater gain. And we split it amongst ourselves, and then our troops split it amongst themselves. Now, this is the only model that is not even in the future. This has already happened. Space has already been
14:23
explored using the Viking model. Just not in real life. In games. What you see here, and this is where I get my notes out because there's all sorts of technical terms. What did I do with my notes? Okay, no notes. This is the bloodbath of E5R5B,
14:43
which is the largest space battle to have ever taken place in a game called Eve Online. What you're seeing here is the result of a mistake. There's a station in hotly contested territory, and every few months, you need to pay a tax to keep that station.
15:03
Someone forgot. They claim there was a bug in the game, others say they simply forgot, and that station went to the public domain. Immediately, the two largest blocks in the game, and I'm not making these names up, one of them is the Clusterfuck Alliance, and R3 which is the Russian alliance, they had like the Mega Alliance, and the other one
15:22
is N3 and all sorts of other coalitions, descended on the system with all of their fleets. The battle lasted 21 real-time hours, which were expanded in-game so that the servers could handle the amount of calculations to 30-odd something.
15:43
75 Titan-class ships were destroyed. These are these guys. Massive ships, and every single ship here, every single item you see on this map is player-owned. None of this is AI. This is all players, and every single ship here is owned either by a group of individuals or individuals.
16:03
The real world damages from this battle is $300,000 that were lost in damages to ships. You calculate it by the fact that I can buy with dollars in-game currency, you do an average of how much each ship costs, you go back, and you get $300,000.
16:23
And economists were asked whether this is real money, and they kind of looked at the interview and said, there is no such thing as real money. All money is real or unreal to the same degree. So, this model of entrepreneurship, of collected gain to offset collected loss has already taken place.
16:46
Now, are we doomed to just repeat our past mistakes? This model has already happened. Are we doomed to repeat the previous two models? There's a solution. I should have sent a poet. A quote from Carl Sagan's Contact,
17:00
an amazing book, an amazing movie, I urge you to read it. Science fiction can offer us alternative models to these three models which, I assume you agree with me, are not the best case scenario. And what I'd like to do in the five plus minutes that I have left is go over recommended models. At the end
17:20
there's a really cool slide with an illustration of me, but forget that. At the corner there's contact info. If any of you want follow-ups, more books, just email me, just Twitter me. There's plenty more from where this came from. So the first two books, the first one is Too Like the Lightning
17:40
by Ada Palmer. It was released last year. Full disclosure, I hated this book until the last 50 pages. But it's worth it. In it she describes a utopian, dystopian society, I won't spoil the ending, because that's the whole point of the book, in which all of our problems have been solved, but everything is still
18:00
pretty much terrible. Because they're still humans, right? And space has been relegated only to those that have passion for it. They're not exploring it, they plan on colonizing and terraforming Mars. They don't do it for profit. They do it because each and every
18:20
one of them has a dream of humanity in the stars. And that group society is called utopians. So they took out all the businessmen, they took out all the venture, they took out all the private sector, and they brought in people who don't mind getting paid crappy salaries in order to go to space.
18:40
By the way, that's also already happened, it's called NASA. People who don't mind getting paid crappy salaries to go to space. The second book is much weirder. M. John Harrison has basically been deconstructing science fiction for the past 40 years or so. In 1974, he wrote the Centauri device, which basically upended everything that we knew about space opera.
19:01
And in it, space travel is not the great liberator. It's not where humanity goes to become better. It's where humanity goes to mirror every single meaningless struggle that we've had here on Earth. Communists, anarchists, capitalists, socialists, libertarians, everyone is going at it. The Centauri device is not really a new model, it's just kind of a warning sign.
19:24
Be careful that if you don't change who you are, going to space won't do it for you. You'll only export your own problems to a wider and more grandiose canvas. I won't end on a pessimistic note, don't worry. The other two books, Ancillary Justice, which is almost
19:43
a cliché to recommend at this point, it won all sorts of awards. Ancillary Justice, and it has two other books after it, brilliant space opera, which asks the question what if the female gender became the main core of the gender binary? So instead of defaulting to he,
20:03
we default to she. But it also asks what will space and the distances between us do to us? What happens when I live 100 light years away from the closest planet? How do cultures break down? What will ideas, how will they metamorphose
20:23
when we go to space with such long distances? It also has a very compelling story about AI and all sorts of other stuff I really, really recommend. I can't do it justice on this stage. And everybody here who knows me knows that there's no talk of mine complete without recommending Ursula Le Guin. And I'm not going to recommend one book. I'm going to recommend The Heinish Cycle,
20:43
which is a series of books written from 1966 to 2002. This is just one example, Worlds of Exile and Illusion, it's one of the first ones. And the reason I chose Ursula is not only because I love her and she's my favorite author, but also because The Heinish Empire is an empire based on knowledge. Her idea
21:03
is that in space, because of those breakdowns of culture and ideas that I just spoke about, those who rule will be those able to consistently preserve knowledge across spaces, right? So if I'm 100 light years away from you, let's say, and I say communism, by the time this idea reaches you,
21:23
you hear capitalism. Not because you're willingly misunderstanding me, but because it has to trade so many hands. So the empire that rules is the empire that is able to take communism from my mouth and accurately display it to you. And preserve human knowledge. And that's what The Heinish Empire does. Now, is that what I think will happen in space? Human history teaches us
21:43
that probably not. Then again, there are examples where the preservation of knowledge was what gave organizations power. For example, the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church's main product, before they got really big in the 14th century, was language. It was preserving a language that all of Europe could speak.
22:03
Preserving the routes of communication. Now think that it's not France to Greece. Now think that it's Seoul to Alpha Centauri, right? Seoul to Sagittarius. Who will be in charge of maintaining that language? And what sort of power will they have?
22:22
So, now comes my cool illustration. I just had this commissioned. It's going to be a business card, but this is the important part. So just to summarize while you take this terrible thing in, what is my point? Why is it important that you actually go and read these books?
22:43
Science fiction is not, like science, something that solves problems by itself. It's not that you read these books and suddenly you'll all become radical warriors for a better space exploration. But these books will give you ideas. They will give you tools to move
23:02
on and maybe, maybe when the time comes for your children's children and my children's children's children to occupy, explore, colonize, terraform and shape near space, far space, planetary space, nonplanetary space. We might just be able to dodge
23:22
one or two mistakes. Don't dodge them all. I don't believe in utopia. But maybe we can create a better, slightly better version of where we are right now and where we're going. Thank you so much for listening.
23:45
Thank you very much to Eden Kappamins. We have time for, I think, one or two questions. We have like four minutes, so if anybody wants to pose a question now, it's time.
24:06
Yeah, over there. And by the way, afterwards, if you want to come up to me and speak privately, I'll be here. I'm not going anywhere. Please feel free to do so. So, I wanted to ask regarding all those books, especially Ursula Le Guin, some people say that there's a new
24:22
genre being formed right now regarding science fiction. Have you met with solarpunk and what it does to the knowledge and just economy of knowledge? That's a great question. So, solarpunk is a bit larger than science fiction. So, let me just explain what solarpunk is. Cyberpunk is something
24:42
that most of us probably have heard. William Gibson, 80s women in latex hacking corporations and stuff like that. Solarpunk says that those aren't the real rebels. The real rebels are those that bypass rain systems, bypass power, make their own solar power, make their own machines, kind of an offshoot from the maker movement. And it has also
25:02
science fiction roots. The problem with solarpunk is that it's too late. Cooperations have already talked about the right of repair, the right of augmentation. That's almost nearly impossible with every single product we own. I can't augment this computer. Even if I know how to take it apart, Apple have made sure that I can't augment it.
25:22
So, it was an idea that was important and very relevant ten years ago. And as much as I'd love to believe in the aesthetic and the style, I feel like solarpunk will be very short-lived. Maybe I'm wrong. What I like about it in the context of space is that it works very well with the single entrepreneurship and ownership model.
25:42
Right? Because it talks about people vamping their own spaceships, making their own paths. So, I think it might be relevant as an idea, but I don't see it becoming a movement like cyberpunk did. Anyone else? Cool. So, as I said, I'll be over here.
26:00
Feel free to walk up to me. Thank you so much once again.
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