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Oh come on, it's a nice book and I enjoyed reading it but his physics are pure bullshit and his game theory is based on pop psychology.
by stormking 5y ago
Oh come on, it's a nice book and I enjoyed reading it but his physics are pure bullshit and his game theory is based on pop psychology.
- goatlover 5y agoIt's fiction, not a science book. I'm responding to the claim that an author can't depict something akin to transcendence or very advanced technology. Both of which are fictional, at least as far as we know. Arthur C Clarke has also written stuff along those lines.
- stormking 5y agoI was referring to "managed to provide some very interesting answers regarding the nature of the cosmic dark forest and higher dimensional space". No, he was not because his ideas about "the nature of the cosmic dark forest" - allthough having at least some internal consistency - lack any foundation in actual science and his ideas about "higher dimensional space" were pure nonsense. They were not "answers" but plot devices.
- goatlover 5y agoDo you suppose ascended beings and advanced alien technology are scientific as opposed to plot devices? It's all fictional. Star Trek, Star Gate, Dune, Battlestar Galactica, even plenty of things in the Expanse (Epstein drive, protomolecule tech). Interesting answers means expanding on the rules and story in the fictional universe to provide explanations for mysteries the author(s) set up. It doesn't mean providing a hard scientific explanation for something that supposed to be beyond our scientific knowledge. Who took out the protomolecule builders and why? Leviathan Falls will likely provide some answers. Same with Death's End giving more details about the Dark Forest. It's an exploration of an idea, not a documentary. Imagine criticizing Dune because the spice and sand worms aren't based on actual biology.
- stormking 5y ago"Interesting answers means expanded on the rules and story in the fictional universe to provide explanations for mysteries the author(s) set up." That's the root cause of our disagreement. I simply call that a good story. On the other hand, to me a book gives "interesting answers" to something if it has something meaningful to say about reality, not just the fictional universe. In Dune, that would be true for politics and religion but not for sandworm biology.
- stormking 5y agoThat's why the only books that have something meaningful to say about aliens are Solaris and Blindsight. In case of the fermi paradoxon, I'd add the first two books of Baxter's Manifold series where he offers two distinct explanations, the first one being "it's not a paradox at all, we're truly the first" and "some natural process is killing them off before they can colonize the galaxy".
- goatlover 5y agoSolaris is focused around a planetary ocean that's sentient in some manner too alien for humans to understand. That's how Lem sets up the story, because he likes to explore failures to communicate and what it would mean to encounter the truly alien. But it is his setup, and not the result of an actual alien encounter. We don't know whether it would be similarly impossible to communicate with aliens. Maybe Sagan and the SETI folks assume correctly that it is possible.
- stormking 5y agoBoth authors assume that what we call "intelligence" and "sentience" is deeply influenced by the environment our species evolved in (plus a billion happenstances) and that therefore any dream of meaningful communication with extraterrestrials is a naive dream. Now, we don't know if they're right because, as you pointed out, we never met actual aliens. But that doesn't change the fact that their assumptions is based on actual science. Klingon mating rituals, on the other hand, are not.
- Causality1 5y agoYeah, even reading the synopsis gives you that "this author is really bad at math" feeling.