I was on this panel at the con yesterday, and while we were all civil and polite, I think my fellow panelists, and a few members of the audience, were left feeling a bit peevish. It was the “What Does God Need With a Starship?” panel, and here’s the description.
From the Christ-like figure of Superman to the metaphysical adventures of the Enterprise, fantasy and science fiction have long explored religious and philosophical questions. What is it about SFF that touches our spirituality?
It was fun. I was the odd person out of the group, I think, because I disagree with everything.
The first question came from the moderator, and it played right into my hands, because it was the first thing I would have asked: what the heck is this “spirituality” thing? We got a couple of answers from the other panelists: one was that spirituality is a container for their “love of all people”, which is a wonderful thing to feel, but I had to point out that that’s humanism. God and the supernatural are redundant there. Another answer was that it was a feeling of “connectedness to all things” — well, great. Except that this universe is the domain of science, not religion.
I also pointed out that religion has a tendency to steal credit: there is a lot of good science fiction that explores philosophy and ethics, and that religious people like to turn around and claim that that is “religion”: nope. It’s philosophy and ethics. That you assume all discussion of morality is grounded in god-belief doesn’t make it so.
The other panelists had their revenge, though, and there was a long bit where they were cooing over those wonderful Narnia books by C.S. Lewis, an author I thoroughly detest, and because I’m obnoxious but not that obnoxious I had to chew on my tongue for a while. I did at least state that the open allusions to Christian mythology were not a feature, they were a bug, and they interfered with my ability to trust anything in the books. Crappy fictional plot holes are not rescued by coupling them to crappy religious plot holes.
One discussion that was unresolved but was interesting was the role of science fiction in demythologizing religion — how it could act as a gateway for people with a religious upbringing to explore new ideas and possibly adopt a less restrictive faith. I then learned that there is a whole genre of Christian science fiction which is supposed to go the other way: it draws in secular people and plants the seeds of faith. I’d never even heard of the latter category — I guess CS Lewis did some of that, but he’s the only one I know of — so I don’t think it was very successful, in my case.
I am not done being annoying, though. My next panel today is “Our Place in Space” at 2:00.
What are the dreams and practicalities of colonizing space? How might humanity reach beyond our planet? We’ll discuss the science of human spaceflight in reality and fiction.
My position is that we humans will not be colonizing space, ever. We might build robots that will, though.
Wait, there was a panel on sci-fi vs spirituality/religion where C.S. Lewis was brought up and you talked about Narnia? What about the Space trilogy! (ok I guess there would have been much more contention on your part there…)
No. I wanted it to stop. I wasn’t about to shovel another heap of dreck on the dumpster fire.
I’m going to disagree with you partially in that I don’t think that science fiction or especially fantasy making references to religion is a problem. Cultural references and references to earlier work are good things in literature. Tolkien made it work, at least some of the time. No, the problem with the Narnia books, IMHO, was that they just weren’t very good books. They were written to serve the religion rather than the religious element supporting the books’ themes.
No, we agree. As long as religion is part of culture, SF should discuss it.
My first mention of a SF book in the panel was Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow. It’s a really good book, but it’s utterly saturated with Jesuitical Catholicism.
And yeah, Lewis is a crap writer who’s given a pass by all of his Christian fans because he so thoroughly panders to Christianity. Several people mentioned that Christian SF was as bad as Christian Rock — it’s not that it incorporates Christian themes, it’s that the story or the music are made subservient to an overwhelming christianness.
Oh, great, plastic shaman syndrome raises it head, because you just have to have appropriation without context in there.
What if robots cloned humans on another planet? Are the odds just too low of finding a suitable planet? Is terraforming out of the question?
Etchison @6: A big problem with finding planets suitable for us to colonise, is that our own planet has only been suitable for us to live on for something like 10% of its existence. Not only do you have to find a planet the right size and whatnot in the habitable zone of a reasonably well-behaved star, you have to find it at a stage of development (not quite the right word, but my word-thing is failing me right now) where it will support human life for a while.
The other big problem is getting colonists there, of course; and that isn’t as simple as building a boat and sailing across the Atlantic or Pacific.
As for terraforming, if you’ve got enough energy and resources to get a terraforming crew to another stellar system, even a next-door one, why bother? Just make a megastructure, a Banksian orbital or cluster of O’Neill cylinders or whatever, in your home system, it’ll be a lot easier.
I would love to read a testimonial from a former atheist who was converted to christianity because of christian science fiction.
As a point of anecdata, when I read the Narnia series, I didn’t notice the Christianness of it because I wasn’t raised with any religion. The “obvious” referents are anything but if you weren’t brought up with all that foofaraw. I’m not saying there aren’t any referents, just that if you haven’t read the holy books, they’re not part of your immediate thought when reading about a lion-worshipping land of strange creatures.
Are they good books? Good enough for a 10yearold, as I was then. Objectively good? If such a thing exists, it’s probably not so. But they’re useless as Christian indoctrination unless you’ve already got the context to recognise it.
@7 NelC-
I always felt that if a species had the resources and technology… plus the cultural maturity to get past the self-annihilation… to travel across the utterly hostile vastness of space for thousands of years just to spend thousands of more years trying to change an hostile biosphere, then they would also have the resources and technology to turn their own solar system/ planet into a paradise and thus they would have no need to do it in the first place.
I think the solution to the Fermi Paradox is a simple, “It all seemed like a real pain in the ass, to be honest.”
“My position is that we humans will not be colonizing space, ever.”
So humans will be gone at the next planet-wide extinction event, which could happen any time?
How do you define space? Off the earth? Outside the earth-moon system? Outside our solar system?
Will there be videos of these online?
Will human beings ever colonize space?
Well, it depends what you mean.
Will human beings ever leave Earth by the million to live elsewhere? No. Virtually everyone born on Earth will die on Earth, now and in the future.
Will we ever have self-sustaining colonies on the Moon and Mars? Yes, very likely. Why? (a) The challenge and (b) once the challenge phase is over, the colonists will want to stay because it’s their home. When? Between 100 and 500 years from now.
Will we ever colonize another star system? If interstellar travel (robotic or human) ever becomes practical (a big “if”, of course), then yes, I believe it’s likely that eventually, perhaps thousands of years from now, we will set out to plant a colony in another star system. Why? Again, because human beings love a challenge, and again, it won’t be a mass migration.
Never is a very, very long time.
As always, the assumption is that we don’t screw things up here on Earth before these things become technologically possible.
hotspurphd @11: Yep. It sucks, but death sucks universally, whether it’s a localised personal extinction event or a mass extinction event. Homo sapiens will not endure forever, anyway; we’ll either be replaced by our descendants, in whatever form they’ll take; or we’ll die out without leaving descendants, and our successors, if there are any, will get to dream about leaving the fragile Earth behind in their turn.
On Narnia: Ana Mardoll has been doing a deconstructive reading of the various Narnia books on her blog for a while, with heavy use of quotes – it is amazing just how bad those books really are. Even when I read them young I knew there was some sloppiness, but that series has really highlighted just how incredibly lazy C.S. Lewis is as a writer and how unbelievably bad he is at understanding anything other than white Christian men.
Yes. While I am far more optimistic when it comes to space exploration and colonization than PZ, I would tend to agree with him that it’s very unlikely an off-world colony on Mars or the Moon would help avert our extinction should an extinction-level event happen on Earth – at least not in the next few hundred years at least, perhaps even longer.
On the plus side, human beings have never been in a better position to withstand what would probably have been extinction events in the past than we are today, nor more capable of rebuilding society in its aftermath. So the list of possible extinction-level events is growing shorter all the time.
For example, odds are that we’re already past the point where an asteroid strike will wipe us out. We have already detected the vast majority of the most dangerous near Earth asteroids, and we will almost certainly detect any Earth-killing asteroid on a collision course years before it would hit – long enough to deflect it with the technology we already have. Likewise, a virulent pandemic (think Ebola + Spanish Flu) could kill billions, but now we know a lot more about deal with deadly viruses and pandemics, we are better equipped to avoid that kind of mass extinction too.
Sure, there’s always a chance of something like a supernova going off in our part of the Galaxy, or the Sun going completely haywire, or a rogue wandering planet ripping Earth out of orbit, but these things are nowhere near likely enough to give impetus to a space colonization effort. Indeed, most of them would wipe us out no matter where we are in the Solar System.
I enjoyed the Narnia books when I was a kid, and even though my family went to church most Sundays, I completely missed the Christian allegories that drove the plot, and my parents (fortunately) had no interest in pointing them out for me.
That finally changed when I finally read the Last Battle as a teenager, finding the crucifixion/resurrection allegory way too heavy handed and nonsensical, to the point they completely ruined the whole Narnia experience for me. I don’t believe I have read any of them since.
” God and the supernatural are redundant there. Another answer was that it was a feeling of “connectedness to all things” — well, great. Except that this universe is the domain of science, not religion.”
Well, it is a domain that observably contains religion at any rate.
I have no idea what spiritual is supposed to mean any more. I used to just take it for granted but never thought about what it might mean. Now it just twists without a real definition becoming some kind of riddle pun. If the “mind” consciousness thinker is something that arises out of the interaction of all the “parts” of our nerves systems and does not exist separate from all the parts and that interaction it is that interaction. Therefore that is where spirits exist and what spirit is, it just keeps twisting around like that trying to fit in with all the other ways people mean it to be, it just does that for fun though and has little importance. I really hate taking that idea so dam seriously as many do it brings out the Imp in me.
Relating to the idea of colonizing space as typically meant like in Star Trek is unlikely until someone discovers magical space-time travel, warp drive and instant communication it will just be a fantasy magical story device.
I also am increasingly find it very difficult to see any real motivation for Alien space invaders. If you can get here from someplace 100s of light years away why?
The only thing I am aware of that is not present in-between there and here in abundance is us.
uncle frogy
My own working definition of “spirituality” is, “Diffuse, undirected religiousity”.
–
CaitieCat:
I was raised Baptist, and still missed the Xian trappings.
I was
Just.
That.
Dim.
:)
–
” God and the supernatural are redundant there. Another answer was that it was a feeling of “connectedness to all things” — well, great. Except that this universe is the domain of science, not religion.”
I don’t know why that 19 got published as it is, because that was only meant to be the first sentence of a longer piece. My apologies.
To continue then, while I certainly agree that there is no “spiritual” dimension to our universe you don’t need to postulate something extra and outside of materialism to recognize that everything on the planet is interconnected on a purely physical level. We all live in a perfectly physical ocean of air and we exchange atoms of it with atoms that have recently been inside other people every time we breath.
I don’t think that requires any spiritual “woo” to be fairly obvious.
I once read that, statistically, we each have in our lungs at any one time atoms that were once inside every other being that has ever lived. I haven’t checked the math on that but it seems reasonable, but feel free to show me I’m wrong as I well could be.
Of course, being connected is not the same as being identical. I am not you, nor are you me, but neither are we completely separate. Rather we are, it seems to me, more like nodes in a network. (Our brains contain many of these networks and computer science these days is concerned with imitating such networks in hardware.)
Light too is a physical phenomenon as is sound. We use both to connect with each other as well as the rest of the world. So in a sense we are connected physically to the whole of the observable universe, but not to the universe as a whole because we know that there are portions of our universe that we cannot ever be connected to by any physical means.
So I don’t think we need to posit any kind of extra-material medium to say that at least every bit of life on our planet is interconnected. But of course the spiritualists
do posit such an extra-material connection for which there is no evidence whatsoever.
Interestingly (well to me at any rate) the word “spiritual” comes from a root meaning to breath, a purely physical phenomenon. In the biblical Genesis account God, supposedly made a statue of clay and brought it to life by breathing on it, again a purely physical process.
I don’t think terraforming would necessarily be harder than building space structures capable of long term colonization. Terraforming would probably take much longer though. I think it could be potentially accomplished on a planet with similar enough conditions to earth that we could just release a bunch of our tough microbes there and wait a million years or so for enough life to form to make it habitable.
It would still be dangerous, mind you, but it’s a kickstarter. Once it had at least a breathable atmosphere, we could get some small colonies and direct the evolution more closely.
Don’t be ruining my dream, PZed!
That timeline is not out of the question if you assume a trend line that started with our harnessing of fossil fuels continuing unbroken into the future for another 100 to 500 years. To my mind that’s a pretty huge assumption, that global climate change, peak oil, and all the other challenges facing us won’t be able to interrupt that trend in half a millennium. We lost the secret to making cement for 300 years after the Roman Empire collapsed. I’m not feeling all that sanguine about the stability of our current global politico-economic system.
Everybody’s obsessed with human colonization of space.
If we can’t put one self-sufficient terrarium of bugs in space that lives for say 30 years without help, then we’ve got no business even discussing human colonies.
Pardon, what I mean is that real ecosystems are built from the bottom up, while our whole vision of space seems determined to build life from the top down.
Start with the expensive fragile slow-reproducing apes in cans and then figure out what just they need. Then to hell with every microbe, slime, plant and invertebrate on Earth whose importance we haven’t even accounted for.
Add me to group of readers who completely missed the Christ analogy in Narnia when I was a kid. I actually found the whole story delightfully “pagan” when I was 11.
As far as Christian SF/F goes, I really liked T.A. Barron as kid and uh… yeeeaaaah. Oh, also Madeleine L’Engle has a pretty obvious Christian bent. As an adult I’d rather reread L’Engle than Barron; her stuff’s aged less horribly I guess (still not good but we’re talking a matter of degree here). And then you’ve got Orson Scott Butthole, of course, though I suppose he’s not QUITE as frequently overt about it in his novels.
(Why YES, I DID absolutely love the Narnia books as a kid and also thought the Space trilogy was pretty alright and OH MY but did my parents love to give me books on Tolkein’s Christianity and how he was super-chums with C.S. Lewis)
I kind of have to agree with PZ’w last post on colonization: having a science station in Mars’s vicinity (on the Martian surface, in orbit, or on a moon) would be incredibly handy in terms of science — not having a light speed delay, for one. And, sure, you can study how to make it more sustainable*. But we’ve had science stations in the Antarctic for decades and they’ve expanded but people haven’t talked much about ‘terraforming’** it for wide-scale settlement. (I imagine it’s both because of treaties that keep mining out, and because there’s a limited number of people who actually want to live in Antartica.)
Well, that and no one at NASA wants to be the person who releases microbes on Mars and makes it impossible to look for traces of organics/past life. (The bacteria and archea themselves might be distinctive enough as ‘we know this species came from Earth’, but remains and things might not. I’m not a biologist, so I play cautious.)
* And probably should; every kilogram you can source from Mars is a kilogram you don’t have to haul from Earth.
** On purpose, that is. Lots of talk about what will happen as a byproduct of climate change.
“My position is that we humans will not be colonizing space, ever. We might build robots that will, though.”
I fully concur – aside from the obvious reality that we are, in fact, ‘colonizing space’ simply by virtue of having evolved on a planet that has managed to stay hospitable for some 4 billion years allowing ridiculously complex things like us and our many preposterous social contraptions we pretend enhances our long-term survival within a natural environment anywhere near a sustainable equilibrium. There is no doubt in my mind that wherever intelligence of our kind sprouts anywhere in the universe, the perils of over-population and over-indulgence on consuming the limited resources and living space on a given world inevitably means that such naturally-sprouted ‘intelligence’ such as we are condemned to falter as a global civilization, while whatever technological achievements they are able to attain in the form of autonomous self-replicating systems (see von Neumann machines) would be far better equipped to handle a wrecked and overheated world, and find an entire planetary system perfectly serviceable for raw materials and energy to persist far beyond what fragile naturally-evolved organic critters could possibly withstand.
Said before, I’m sure, but worth repeating: Let’s think about building nests elsewhere when we’ve learned to stop shitting in the one we have. We can’t even seem to do that. But I guess scifi nonsense trumps reality every time.
“We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean”. Time to look for new beaches to leave turds and empty beer cans on.
As I said in my original comment, the assumption is that there is no major interruption in the continued advancement of technological progress during that time. Of course, we will undoubtedly face some very significant challenges and any serious colonization effort of Mars or the Moon clearly depends on us overcoming those challenges.
The preservation of knowledge is contingent on the number of information sources and how widely the information is disseminated, and there is no comparison between situation at the fall of the Roman Empire and today. Even if we were brought to the very brink of extinction, the odds are very good that if enough people survive to recover, that knowledge will be recovered far more quickly than 1,500 years ago.
Space colonisation won’t be much use in preserving the human race as we know it because living anyplace else besides Earth isn’t good for standard issue humans. Humans adapted to lving in space or on another planet probably would find living on Earth equally problematic. “Spacemanity” might be our descendants/cousins but they wouldn’t be us.
No matter how many times it’s repeated, it’s not a good argument. It’s a free society and people don’t have one track minds. What you’re suggesting is not only unrealistic, it’s unreasonable. Do you spend all your spare time and resources trying to solve the world’s environmental problems? If not? Why not?
In any case, if space colonization was draining valuable resources away from resolving our terrestrial problems then you might have a point, but it’s a barely even a drop in the bucket, and would still be a drop in the bucket even if a serious colonization effort was underway, and would likely involve technologies that will prove useful here on Earth anyway.
tacitus @34:
Free or not, you can dream whatever stupid dreams you want to. The problem is that the tracks most people’s minds occupy seem to be the dead-end ones. A truly successful intelligent species would dream of sustainability. After that, the rest is easy. Our species doesn’t do sustainability. Never has, and no sign it ever will. But sure, it’s a free society. Dream whatever you like.
Of course not. I’m human! All I’ve done is swear off driving and flying, and try to buy local. A tiny percentage of us (no, not me, in case that wasn’t clear) do actually strive to solve the problems, and watching the effect they have is both depressing and hilarious. Too many of us still consume like there’s no tomorrow, drive to the corner store, fly to the Bahamas, buy plastic-bottled water, buy crap that was grown thousands of miles away, say “never mind that boring crap, SPACE!!!”, etc.
It’s not space colonization that’s draining valuable resources, it’s our terminal stupidity. Talking about space colonization is a symptom, not the disease.
uncle frogy
For anyone interested in the deconstruction mentioned by Knabb in comment 16, have a link.
To be fair to Lewis on this point, he wasn’t the only writer of that era whose understanding was limited to white men. Asimov’s Foundation was published the year after The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and while I loved it as a kid, when I reread it for a book club a few years ago, I was amazed to find there was not one single female character in the entire book, and the only mention of women at all was about “wives and daughters.”
It’s not as though the scifi and fantasy genres was replete with feminist role models back in the 1950s.
As with so many other social conundrums, spirituality can be boiled down to a search for self-importance.
Colonizing beyond Earth is an act of desperation. It is an economic undertaking far beyond any billionaire’s vanity project. It ain’t gonna happen. The best you can hope for is a few laps around the moon on a tourist ride. I doubt that will happen either since the ticket price will be a little more than a trip to Wally World with the family.
Establishing a permanent base on the Moon is very likely to happen, eventually, because the permanently shaded craters near the poles provide close-to-ideal conditions for operating and maintaining telescopes and other astronomical instruments. Such a base is likely to be funded jointly by a number of governments, as is the current space station, possibly in partnership with some private interests.
Beyond that, who knows, but as I said, “never” is a very long time. I doubt a permanent base would turn into a colony anytime in the foreseeable future, but if it does happen, it will not be an act of desperation, it will be because it’s a challenge, and there will be no shortage of qualified volunteers willing to take it on.
Obligatory tvtropes link: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HijackedByJesus
I liked the Narnia books as a child, on the whole (aside from the Last Battle, which was an anticlimax anda quite disappointing conclusion to the series). I think they were the first conected series of books I’d ever read, too. I don’t recall noticing the Christian symbolism, but I do remember that some of the plot elements and things seemed a bit clumsy and tacked on and on reflection those bits tied in pretty closely with the most overt bits of Christian propaganda. I found it quite irritating that Susan was written out of the series with a “oh, and she was too cool for narnia so we’ll never see her again”. Lazy writing and crappy moralising.
@40
Nope.
Maybe there will be telescopes on the moon. There won’t be people. This is very expensive and romantic nonsense.
You don’t have to believe me. Just imagine yourself in front of a panel of congressional Republicans. Try to convince them how special your visions are and why they should fund it.
I’m not trying to be mean. It’s just that most people with your ideas tend to dismiss logistics and economics with a wave of the hand despite what we have seen, where we have been, and what we are currently undergoing. Your wishes and dreams won’t be a priority. Sorry.
@33, timgueguen
They would still be our clade :-p
Matrim @43: So, you’re saying they’d still be fish? ;)
I missed all the Christian propaganda in the Narnia books too – even the lamb at the end of Dawn Treader – until I grew up. By that time I’d learned a bit about literary criticism, so the propaganda just looked like someone who couldn’t write very well. I actually have a reply to fan letter I wrote to C.S. Lewis when I was 9 …
Lewis was useless at languages, which is why he needed Tolkien to help him out. There’s a lot of veiled anti-Islam stuff in the Narnia books (like the Calormen), but irony is that both Tash (very like the Turkish for commerce ‘taș’) and Aslan (the Turkish word for ‘lion’) come directly from an Islamic culture.
I read a good S.F. short story once, though, about a Jesuit priest on a starship which had discovered the last messages of a civilisation that was about to be annihilated in a supernova (I can’t remember who wrote it). The civilisation that had been destroyed had been wonderful, peace-loving, prosperous, etc. The supernova was the one that they’d worked out was the ‘star’ which led the wise men to the stable … The story, of course, was one of the philosophical ones PZ mentions.
Sorry, but this is a very short term and parochial view of the issue. Nowhere have I said that we’re going to have a Moon base tomorrow, or even in my lifetime (sadly). Clearly, this will almost certainly have to be a multiinational effort, one in which the US may only be an equal or even minor party.
You’re also ignoring the fact that spaceflight is getting a lot cheaper. Launch costs for the shuttle were about $10,000 / pound. The new Falcon Heavy will be less than $1,000 / pound, and experts believe that $100 / pound is achievable. Again, not saying it’s going to happen tomorrow, but there is nothing romantic, or even very daring, about predicting that we will eventually achieve a goal that has long been considered technologically achievable and (increasingly) scientifically valuable.
I understand the skepticism, and I even understand those who say we shouldn’t, and I’m not judging those who say that — after all, I do keep saying that all this is contingent on things not going south in a serious way back here on Earth — but I have never understood the need to say something will “never happen” especially something that is actually achievable today, though at a prohibitive cost.
Never in 500 years? 1,000 years? Never in 10,000 years? See the problem?
Even if we have to divert every available resource to solving multiple global crises here on Earth for, say, the next 200 years, assuming we come through them with our civilization intact, we will have another 200 years of technological and scientific progress under our belt, and a portion of that will have been focused on the space industry to assist in monitoring whatever crises we are facing, if nothing else.
And yes, robotics will have improved too, and we may be in a position to build structures on the Moon without a single person there, but you’re forgetting one thing — human psychology. As I said way back in my first comment — people will want to go to the Moon and Mars, and people will want to settle on the Moon and Mars because of the challenge — yes, the “new frontier” Even if everything could be done remotely, cheaper, and more efficiently, people will go, because it’s there.
Is that romanticism? Yes, but predicting it will happen is not. It is merely a prediction based on projected long term technological trends, costs, scientific objectives, with a dash of human psychology thrown in.
Never in 500 years? 1,000 years? Never in 10,000 years? See the problem?<
Yes. Yes I do. In an economy with continually diminishing resources it seems hard to believe that we will come up with the scratch to afford travel very far beyond this thing we are highly adapted for living on. Do you wish to invoke some sort of technological magic at this point?
Well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree then. I am simply not that pessimistic. Do I believe any outcome is inevitable? No, but I believe the balance of probabilities are on my side.
@hotspurphd,
blockquote fail. Only the first sentence was hotspur’s.
@45 davidrichardson: the short story you’re talking about is The Star, by Arthur C. Clarke. It won a Hugo:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_(Clarke_short_story)
“… people haven’t talked much about ‘terraforming’ [Antarctica]…”
Here’s the thing: Our first terraforming “experiment” is already in progress on a global scale, whether people are talking about it or not. We have no idea how it’s going to turn out. If it turns out *very* badly we may end up colonizing space at lot sooner than we might otherwise have imagined
(… AND I figure that’s the ONLY way we end up colonizing space in any sense of the word; nobody’s going to move to space until/unless it ends up being better than the alternatives available. Hopefully, I will be long dead by that point.)