Does "Farmer in the Sky" break your suspension of disbelief?
il...@rcn.com
is so wealthy that a 14-year old can own a helicopter and take class
trips to Antarctica, so powerful that it is terraforming Jupiter's
moons, yet it is *starving*? The amount of energy available to human
race in "Farmer in the Sky" is staggering -- at least one order of
magnitude greater than in real life today, and possibly two orders. If
human race had that much energy AND had a shortage of food[1], we'd be
desalinizing Mediterranean to irrigate Sahara, building skyscraper-
size greenhouses, and practicing aquaculture on vast scale. We would
NOT be terraforming Ganymede so that few plucky farmers could thumb
their noses at Earth. The incongruency was obvious to me even when I
was supposedly that book's intended demographic.
Countless critics had laughed at Golden Age SF stories where Buck
Rogers flits from star to star, then pulls a suitcase-size radio out
of a cupboard, or laments that nobody had invented a navigation
computer small enough to fit in a spaceship. But in all fairness,
these Golden Age writers had no reason to expect miniaturized
electronics. Heinlein however SHOULD have realized the absurdity of
"Farmer in the Sky" premise. Do you suppose he really did not see it,
or saw it but refused to let logic get in the way of a pioneer story?
In fact, this kind of technological mismatch *that author should have
seen* was fairly common during Golden Age, and it always irritated me.
At the beginning of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" Manny mentions (to
illustrate generally spartan conditions, IIRC) that "there was not a
single power door on Luna [after it has been settled for two
generations]". Given the technological sophistication needed to
maintain cities on the Moon, power doors should be a trivial expense
-- not to mention necessary, in case of pressure failures. Again, even
as a teenager I thought it stuck out like a sore thumb.
[1] And were relatively unified, as it seems to be in the book
Dimensional Traveler
Almost like they didn't grok that advances in one field creates spinoffs
that advance other fields. Like they don't realize that building a better
rocket engine requires improving metalurgy, advances in chemistry, better
control systems, etc.
--
"What Kind of perv rememembers the scenes where she's clothed???" -
Anim8rFSK, 8/23/08
Dorothy J Heydt
<il...@rcn.com> wrote:
>It broke mine when I read it -- and I was a teenager then. The society
>is so wealthy that a 14-year old can own a helicopter and take class
>trips to Antarctica, so powerful that it is terraforming Jupiter's
>moons, yet it is *starving*?
One of the factors in the backstory is that the Chinese, and
other Asians, are reproducing faster than the food supply. Even
with yeast vats and things.
The amount of energy available to human
>race in "Farmer in the Sky" is staggering -- at least one order of
>magnitude greater than in real life today, and possibly two orders. If
>human race had that much energy AND had a shortage of food[1], we'd be
>desalinizing Mediterranean to irrigate Sahara, building skyscraper-
>size greenhouses, and practicing aquaculture on vast scale.
Entirely possible that they are doing so, without Heinlein's
having mentioned it, and the population is STILL outstripping the
food supply.
We would
>NOT be terraforming Ganymede so that few plucky farmers could thumb
>their noses at Earth. The incongruency was obvious to me even when I
>was supposedly that book's intended demographic.
Well, as somebody points out in one of the later chapters, the
Ganymede and other colonies are not so much to siphon off extra
population, or to provide surplus food for shipment back to
Earth, but to insure that the human race survives, somewhere, in
case of Malthusian war on Earth.
>
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djh...@kithrup.com
James Nicoll
>is so wealthy that a 14-year old can own a helicopter and take class
>trips to Antarctica, so powerful that it is terraforming Jupiter's
>moons, yet it is *starving*? The amount of energy available to human
>race in "Farmer in the Sky" is staggering -- at least one order of
>magnitude greater than in real life today, and possibly two orders. If
>human race had that much energy AND had a shortage of food[1], we'd be
>desalinizing Mediterranean to irrigate Sahara, building skyscraper-
>size greenhouses, and practicing aquaculture on vast scale. We would
>NOT be terraforming Ganymede so that few plucky farmers could thumb
>their noses at Earth. The incongruency was obvious to me even when I
>was supposedly that book's intended demographic.
RAH actually gives numbers for the energy used to eg melt
Ganymede and it is indeed stupendous.
--
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll (For all your "The problem with
defending the English language [...]" T-shirt, cup and tote-bag needs)
djinn
He also made a point that there weren't enough people going to
Ganymede to make a dent in the Earth's population, and that Ganymede
couldn't grow enough food to feed the Earth.
So maybe that wasn't the point of the story?
Gene
216509...@q30g2000prq.googlegroups.com:
> The incongruency was obvious to me even when I
> was supposedly that book's intended demographic.
It didn't make sense to me then but I didn't expect it to make sense. This is
exactly my attitude to contemporary science fiction-I don't expect it to make
sense, and usually it doesn't.
Gene
207.115.33.102:
> It didn't make sense to me then but I didn't expect it to make sense. This
is
> exactly my attitude to contemporary science fiction-I don't expect it to
make
> sense, and usually it doesn't.
I think implausibilitys in modern scifi often slip under the radar because
they make use of the new deemed-to-be-plausible gimmicks instead of the old,
reviled and discredited gimmicks. For instance, people happily accept
nanobots which are vastly smaller than bacteria but work with marvelous
efficiency in a manner which generally seems to involve violating the laws of
thermodynamics and do their magical stuff in unspecified ways. This people
happily swallow because there is a real R&D program for nanonbots, just as
there was a real R&D program for rockets back in the Golden Age. Another
example of more-or-less magic is uploading. These sorts of things are the new
totems, made with fresh dried lizard innards, unlike the old, discredited
totems of subspace FTL or psi powers.
il...@rcn.com
> Ganymede to make a dent in the Earth's population, and that Ganymede
> couldn't grow enough food to feed the Earth.
True, but my complaint was that given these premises, terraforming
Ganymede in order to create a "human race backup" is not something
people WOULD BE DOING. Certainly not at the expense involved. It
requires (on the part of terraformers and administrators, not on the
part of settlers) the combination of long-term vision and fatalism
which simply does not occur in human beings.
ncw...@hotmail.com
> On Nov 17, 11:17 am, il...@rcn.com wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > It broke mine when I read it -- and I was a teenager then. The society
> > is so wealthy that a 14-year old can own a helicopter and take class
> > trips to Antarctica, so powerful that it is terraforming Jupiter's
> > moons, yet it is *starving*? The amount of energy available to human
> > race in "Farmer in the Sky" is staggering -- at least one order of
> > magnitude greater than in real life today, and possibly two orders. If
> > human race had that much energy AND had a shortage of food[1], we'd be
> > desalinizing Mediterranean to irrigate Sahara, building skyscraper-
> > size greenhouses, and practicing aquaculture on vast scale. We would
> > NOT be terraforming Ganymede so that few plucky farmers could thumb
> > their noses at Earth. The incongruency was obvious to me even when I
> > was supposedly that book's intended demographic.
<snip>
> He also made a point that there weren't enough people going to
> Ganymede to make a dent in the Earth's population, and that Ganymede
> couldn't grow enough food to feed the Earth.
> So maybe that wasn't the point of the story?
He also made the point in the book that, no matter how much you
increase food production, population growth will expand to consume it
(i.e. an extreme Malthusian case).
What really jarred my SoD when I read this story was the deus-ex-
machina discovery of alien artifacts at the end of the book that just
happened to still work and be usable to save the day. To me, it
seemed to go against the whole thesis of the book that the colonists
solved their own problems with ignenuity and courage. Looking back,
I'd say that this was a classic case of an author who had painted
himself into a corner and resorted to an ending of "with one bound,
jack was free".
Cheers,
Nigel.
James Nicoll
Gene <ge...@chewbacca.org> wrote:
>ust as
>there was a real R&D program for rockets back in the Golden Age.
Back in the early Golden Age, a fair amount of the rocket
research was carried out by motivated amateurs and some of them
were the very people who later wrote SF (Or in the case of Willy
Ley, wrote very little SF but did hang around the periphery of
SF). In fact, the history of SF came very close to being altered
by one particular rocket test, in which a once well-known fan
named William Sykora came reasonably close to blowing himself
and Donald Wollheim to smithereens.
There's a similar scene in ROCKET TO THE MORGUE, which
has a number of thinly disguised SF figures in it. That test
may not be based on the Sykora/Wollheim thing and may indicate
that in fact there were a lot of badly thought out rocket tests
back in the day.
The rocketry manual I got from my father (who built
and launched his own rockets in the 1940s and 1950s) began
IIRC with How to Build Your Test Bunker. Remember to sandbag
the roof so experimentors are not skewered by plummeting
rockets...
il...@rcn.com
> Ganymede and other colonies are not so much to siphon off extra
> population, or to provide surplus food for shipment back to
> Earth, but to insure that the human race survives, somewhere, in
> case of Malthusian war on Earth.
What's the point? Unless there is some meaningful way to keep family
sizes down on Ganymede -- and Heinlein was emphatic about colonists
haveing many children, -- Ganymede will be just as overcrowded within
a few generations.
Now that I think of it, Heinlein seemed to take for granted that
humans never learn -- they will always breed to the limit of their
environment, and then will always ruin it, -- and every time it
happens, the smart capable individualists (e.g. Hainlein characters)
will escape and go on to the next location. In "Time Enough for Love"
it happens again and again, and Heinlein seemed to imply it is a good
thing -- but for me it looked as grim and pointless as the inevitable
doom of Motie Cycles.
Louann Miller
@reader1.panix.com:
> In fact, the history of SF came very close to being altered
> by one particular rocket test, in which a once well-known fan
> named William Sykora came reasonably close to blowing himself
> and Donald Wollheim to smithereens.
Thank goodness you weren't there, James.
(thinks)
You weren't, were you?
cryptoguy
> il...@rcn.com wrote:
> Almost like they didn't grok that advances in one field creates spinoffs
> that advance other fields. Like they don't realize that building a better
> rocket engine requires improving metalurgy, advances in chemistry, better
> control systems, etc.
While I didn't like Guns of the South much, one point I gave
Turtledove
kudos on was catching some of this. When the southerners try to
duplicate
the guns they received, they find they can't even duplicate the alloys
used
in their construction.
Peter Trei
James Nicoll
Not unless I get my hands on a time machine at some point.
I've never had a serious rocket-related mishap unless you
count a fairly negative reaction when my father caught us making
match-head tinfoil rockets.
Martha Adams
news:gfs2l5$clk$1...@reader1.panix.com...
The above thread is interesting, especially its connection between
human and motie economic cycles. However, I don't see what this
"suspension of belief" stuff is good for. In my view, you read a
story to see what the author wrote and to peer between the lines
back to what the author thought. Seems to me, "belief" is another
topic, where the primary topic may be, did the author do a good
piece of work? And Heinlein generally did, if his personal politics
and viewpointed tended in his later works, to stand out a little too
much.
When Heinlein worked out his motie society, was he expressing an
opinion? I thought so. I thought he was saying something that
needed saying, and nothing I've seen in recent decades disproves
what he said. When he made the human social structure almost
medieval, was he expressing an opinion? Of course he was, next
after providing the reader with a simple and consistent social
structure so that he could get on with the story. But I am not so
clear on what Heinlein says there. I'm ok on that.
Titeotwawki -- mha [rasfw 2008 Nov 17]
cryptoguy
> When Heinlein worked out his motie society, was he expressing an
> opinion?
ITYM Niven/Pournelle
Peter Trei
il...@rcn.com
> opinion? I thought so. I thought he was saying something that
> needed saying, and nothing I've seen in recent decades disproves
> what he said.
"Mote in the God's Eye" is by Niven and Pournelle, not Heinlein. And I
do not see your point. For humans, Motie-style and most certainly not
inevitable. Whenever standard of living rises, people have less
children, ALWAYS. Population of First World countries is shrinking --
not mindlessly rising like in "Farmer in the Sky", let alone
"Mote" (an notice that HUMANS in "Mote" had birth control and stable
population).
What Heinlein was saying in "Farmer in the Sky" was that Malthusian
population explosion is unavoidable. It is not something that "needed
saying" -- it is plain WRONG.
> When he made the human social structure almost
> medieval, was he expressing an opinion?
Aside from it is "they", not "he, yes. Niven and Pournelle's opinion
was that societies based on personal loyalty and hereditary claim to
power, yet with high technology are possible. They never said such
societies are inevitable, or desirable.
il...@rcn.com
> For humans, Motie-style CYCLES ARE most certainly not inevitable.
Mike Dworetsky
news:cb0199f7-d342-478e...@c22g2000prc.googlegroups.com...
> Typo:
>
>> For humans, Motie-style CYCLES ARE most certainly not inevitable.
ISTR the Motie problem (one of them, anyways) was that they could not or
would not practice any form of birth control (and they lied to the human
ambassadors about this).
ANyways, taking the very long view, we don't really know if humans would
repeat something like Motie cycles or not. We would like to think we would
avoid that trap....but maybe even humans cannot.
--
Mike Dworetsky
(Remove pants sp*mbl*ck to reply)
il...@rcn.com
>
> ISTR the Motie problem (one of them, anyways) was that they could not or
> would not practice any form of birth control (and they lied to the human
> ambassadors about this).
>
> ANyways, taking the very long view, we don't really know if humans would
> repeat something like Motie cycles or not. We would like to think we would
> avoid that trap....but maybe even humans cannot.
Perhaps -- but not in the simplistic way Malthus and Heinlein
envisioned.
Bill Patterson
> In article <Xns9B5941C0E2B03genewardsmithsbcg...@207.115.33.102>,
>
> Gene �<g...@chewbacca.org> wrote:
> >ust as
> >there was a real R&D program for rockets back in the Golden Age.
>
> � � � � Back in the early Golden Age, a fair amount of the rocket
> research was carried out by motivated amateurs and some of them
> were the very people who later wrote SF (Or in the case of Willy
> Ley, wrote very little SF but did hang around the periphery of
> SF). In fact, the history of SF came very close to being altered
> by one particular rocket test, in which a once well-known fan
> named William Sykora came reasonably close to blowing himself
> and Donald Wollheim to smithereens.
>
> � � � � There's a similar scene in ROCKET TO THE MORGUE, which
> has a number of thinly disguised SF figures in it. That test
> may not be based on the Sykora/Wollheim thing and may indicate
> that in fact there were a lot of badly thought out rocket tests
> back in the day.
>
> � � � � The rocketry manual I got from my father (who built
> and launched his own rockets in the 1940s and 1950s) began
> IIRC with How to Build Your Test Bunker. Remember to sandbag
> the roof so experimentors are not skewered by plummeting
> rockets...
> defending the English language [...]" T-shirt, cup and tote-bag needs)
IIRC the trench test in Rocket to the Morgue was based on an actual
trench test Jack Parsons took various members of the Manana Literary
Society to in 1940. Although I can't lay hands on reference material,
my recollection is Jack Williamson talked about that in his memoir,
Wonder's Child. The early history of the GalCIT group, discussed in
many places, was quite hair-raising.
Some years ago I vaguely recall that a film of Sykora on an amateur
rocket test was shown at as sf convention. At any rate, I don't think
Rocket to the Morgue was based on Sykora's experiences.
Bill Patterson
> "James Nicoll" <jdnic...@panix.com> wrote in message
>
> news:gfs2l5$clk$1...@reader1.panix.com...
>
>
>
>
>
> > In article <NfSdnV3ZRYM1GrzUnZ2dnUVZ_v7in...@giganews.com>,
> > Louann Miller �<louan...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >>jdnic...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote in news:gfrsa5$adf$1
> >>@reader1.panix.com:
>
> >>> In fact, the history of SF came very close to being altered
> >>> by one particular rocket test, in which a once well-known fan
> >>> named William Sykora came reasonably close to blowing himself
> >>> and Donald Wollheim to smithereens.
>
> >>Thank goodness you weren't there, James.
>
> >>(thinks)
>
> >>You weren't, were you?
>
> > Not unless I get my hands on a time machine at some point.
>
> > I've never had a serious rocket-related mishap unless you
> > count a fairly negative reaction when my father caught us making
> > match-head tinfoil rockets.
> > --
> >http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
> > defending the English language [...]" T-shirt, cup and tote-bag needs)
>
> The above thread is interesting, especially its connection between
> human and motie economic cycles. �However, I don't see what this
> "suspension of belief" stuff is good for. �In my view, you read a
> story to see what the author wrote and to peer between the lines
> back to what the author thought. �Seems to me, "belief" is another
> topic, where the primary topic may be, did the author do a good
> piece of work? �And Heinlein generally did, if his personal politics
> and viewpointed tended in his later works, to stand out a little too
> much.
>
> When Heinlein worked out his motie society, was he expressing an
> opinion? �I thought so. �I thought he was saying something that
> needed saying, and nothing I've seen in recent decades disproves
> what he said. �When he made the human social structure almost
> medieval, was he expressing an opinion? �Of course he was, next
> after providing the reader with a simple and consistent social
> structure so that he could get on with the story. �But I am not so
> clear on what Heinlein says there. �I'm ok on that.
>
>
> - Show quoted text -
I think Motie society must have been based on the same general
(Malthusian) theory Heinlein was semi-introducing in Farmer In the
Sky. Niven and Pournelle arranged the physical circumstances so that
there was no technological escape from the Malthusian trap and then
continued iterating. The theory Heinlein was working with seems
ultimately descended from that late-19th century academic work whose
title I cannot remember with exactness -- something about the Impact
of the Frontier. The frontier was the escape from the Rousseauvian
condemnation of the Cities; Heinlein was extending the endless
frontier as the escape from the Malthusian trap (this was before
temporary technological escapes from Malthus were identified). I
don't think he had read Charles Galton Darwin's The Next Million Years
as early as 1949, but it's the same kind of futurological thinking at
work.
Wayne Throop
: What Heinlein was saying in "Farmer in the Sky" was that Malthusian
: population explosion is unavoidable. It is not something that "needed
: saying" -- it is plain WRONG.
True, though I think not totally obvious then. As to the issue of how
a society with total conversion technology, and energy and technology
enough to field torchships, could have a food shortage, I expect he didn't
think energy could be traded straight up for food. That the amount of
arable land limited food production, and that then-modern methods would
be near the best that could be done. And further, if overuse depleted
the arable land, things would get worse, not better.
I know, I know, iirc, FitS had synthetic soy or yeast products also.
And hydroponics, and the fact that the Ganemedians were creating new
arable land, and so on and so forth. But I think the point remains. Or
"guess" rather than point, I suppose. The Ganemedians could make make
arable land faster than they were consuming it, because their population
wouldn't (yet) consume it faster than it could be created.
Bottom line, yes, it's a flaw. A big one. But I don't think it's as
horrid as a modern perspective leads one to think. Shrug.
As Bugs Bunny said when he found a huge party in a train car, many times
too large to actually *fit* inside said train car, "I don't ask questions,
I just have *fun*!". The same applies to lots of SF, much as one might
like to overlook it.
Wayne Throop thr...@sheol.org http://sheol.org/throopw
il...@rcn.com
> (Malthusian) theory Heinlein was semi-introducing in Farmer In the
> Sky. Niven and Pournelle arranged the physical circumstances so that
> there was no technological escape from the Malthusian trap and then
> continued iterating. The theory Heinlein was working with seems
> ultimately descended from that late-19th century academic work whose
> title I cannot remember with exactness -- something about the Impact
> of the Frontier. The frontier was the escape from the Rousseauvian
> condemnation of the Cities;
Besides, I think Heinlein was uncomfortable with the whole concept of
birth control. It barely exist in his books, and where birth control
does exist he strongly implies that societies (human or alien) which
practice it would get quickly overrun by those which do not.
Robbie
> It broke mine when I read it -- and I was a teenager then. The society
> is so wealthy that a 14-year old can own a helicopter and take class
> trips to Antarctica, so powerful that it is terraforming Jupiter's
> moons, yet it is *starving*?
*Huge Disclaimer*: I have not read "Farmer in the Sky", so I am replying
somewhat in ignorance.
That said, it does not sound like it would break my suspension of
disbelief. At least not now. As an idealistic teenager it might have,
but as an adult, it does not.
For example, look at things from the point of view of some starving kid
in Africa: Society is so wealthy that a 16 year old can own a car and
take trips to <city 50 miles away> just for an afternoon, so powerful
that it is building islands, yet I am *starving*?
Actually, you don't have to look at starving kids in Africa, you could
just look at a homeless bum. Any large city has lots of them.
The point is that on the scale of 1 to 100, with 1 being "have only one
eye left, four teeth, seven fingers, one foot and am about three hours
from dying of starvation" and 100 being "everything is awesome, I have
literally no complaints", you will always have humans at either extreme.
Sometimes you may have more at one end, and sometimes it may be more
balanced.
It may seem strange that humanity is starving while 14 year olds flit
around in helicopters, but as they say, truth is stranger than fiction.
For example, if in 1975 you wrote a science fiction story set around the
year 2000, where:
1) Nobody had set foot on the moon since 1972
2) NASA lost valuable data from the moon landings[1]
3) There was no civilization destroying event that contributed to 1 and 2
Who would believe it? You would have people posting on pre-usenet about
how it breaks their suspension of disbelief.
> Given the technological sophistication needed to maintain cities on
> the Moon, power doors should be a trivial expense
Given the amount of money spent getting there, maintaining data from the
lunar landings should be a trivial expense, yet we managed to lose some.
(Of course I haven't read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" either, so take
this with some salt.)
1: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2415393.htm and
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/one-small-step/2006/08/19/11554080735
19.html
Matthias Warkus
He rails against condoms at some length in TEfL, IIRC.
mawa
--
http://www.prellblog.de
William December Starr
jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) said:
> The rocketry manual I got from my father (who built
> and launched his own rockets in the 1940s and 1950s) began
> IIRC with How to Build Your Test Bunker. Remember to sandbag
> the roof so experimentors are not skewered by plummeting
> rockets...
Instead, they can be crushed by a collapsing roof.
-- wds
il...@rcn.com
> in Africa: Society is so wealthy that a 16 year old can own a car and
> take trips to <city 50 miles away> just for an afternoon, so powerful
> that it is building islands, yet I am *starving*?
>
> Actually, you don't have to look at starving kids in Africa, you could
> just look at a homeless bum. Any large city has lots of them.
>
> The point is that on the scale of 1 to 100, with 1 being "have only one
> eye left, four teeth, seven fingers, one foot and am about three hours
> from dying of starvation" and 100 being "everything is awesome, I have
> literally no complaints", you will always have humans at either extreme.
> Sometimes you may have more at one end, and sometimes it may be more
> balanced.
My point is that in FitS *everyone* is starving. Kids who have their
own helicopters eat yeast and are perpetually hungry.
> Given the amount of money spent getting there, maintaining data from the
> lunar landings should be a trivial expense, yet we managed to lose some.
> (Of course I haven't read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" either, so take
> this with some salt.)
The difference is that data from lunar landings is ultimately a
luxury. Nobody died because it was lost. Whereas food is a
*necessity*. I do not see a society which has enough resources to
terraform Ganymede actually doing it if they have to ration yeast. Not
until AFTER they solved their food problem. Or never, if they CAN NOT
solve it.
Power doors on the Moon are an intermediate case. They are not an
unyielding necessity like food, but without them you'll have a lot
more dead people than with them.
James Nicoll
<il...@rcn.com> wrote:
>
>Power doors on the Moon are an intermediate case. They are not an
>unyielding necessity like food, but without them you'll have a lot
>more dead people than with them.
Most of whom are prisoners or the descendents of prisoners.
--
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll (For all your "The problem with
Wayne Throop
: My point is that in FitS *everyone* is starving. Kids who have their
: own helicopters eat yeast and are perpetually hungry.
As I read those passages, he had the economic werewhithal to buy
more food. He just didn't have the ration points, and wasn't
starving enough to break the law.
Which is another aspect. The food shortage could have been
artificial, for whatever reason, possibly to make emigration
look good (assuming the "one basket" theory was popular among
the ruling class, for one possible reason... or the notion
of the "undeserving poor" for another).
James Nicoll
Except that without an external enemy, food shortages are
a good way to get riots.
Wayne Throop
: He rails against condoms at some length in TEfL, IIRC.
And against neutering cats in "tDiS".
Or at least, his character did. And remarked on the
complete futility and perversion of somebody choosing
themselves to be made sterile in FF. (At least, Hugh seemed
to me to be more upset at the loss of gametes than hormones.)
That's one reason I was quite surprised at the ending of Friday.
Mike Schilling
Because they're no fun, not because they're brith control.
Steven L.
> il...@rcn.com wrote:
>> It broke mine when I read it -- and I was a teenager then. The society
>> is so wealthy that a 14-year old can own a helicopter and take class
>> trips to Antarctica, so powerful that it is terraforming Jupiter's
>> race in "Farmer in the Sky" is staggering -- at least one order of
>> magnitude greater than in real life today, and possibly two orders. If
>> human race had that much energy AND had a shortage of food[1], we'd be
>> desalinizing Mediterranean to irrigate Sahara, building skyscraper-
>> size greenhouses, and practicing aquaculture on vast scale. We would
>> NOT be terraforming Ganymede so that few plucky farmers could thumb
>> their noses at Earth. The incongruency was obvious to me even when I
>> was supposedly that book's intended demographic.
>>
>> Rogers flits from star to star, then pulls a suitcase-size radio out
>> of a cupboard, or laments that nobody had invented a navigation
>> computer small enough to fit in a spaceship. But in all fairness,
>> these Golden Age writers had no reason to expect miniaturized
>> electronics. Heinlein however SHOULD have realized the absurdity of
>> "Farmer in the Sky" premise. Do you suppose he really did not see it,
>> or saw it but refused to let logic get in the way of a pioneer story?
>>
>> In fact, this kind of technological mismatch *that author should have
>> seen* was fairly common during Golden Age, and it always irritated me.
>> At the beginning of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" Manny mentions (to
>> illustrate generally spartan conditions, IIRC) that "there was not a
>> single power door on Luna [after it has been settled for two
>> generations]". Given the technological sophistication needed to
>> maintain cities on the Moon, power doors should be a trivial expense
>> as a teenager I thought it stuck out like a sore thumb.
>>
>> [1] And were relatively unified, as it seems to be in the book
>
> Almost like they didn't grok that advances in one field creates spinoffs
> that advance other fields. Like they don't realize that building a better
> rocket engine requires improving metalurgy, advances in chemistry, better
> control systems, etc.
Partly that's due to how they imagined rocketry would advance.
Invariably, in their stories, the rocket is constructed by one or a few
visionary scientists working pretty much alone (extrapolating from
Goddard or Tsiolkovsky). And because the scientist worked alone on that
one thing, spinoffs would be nonexistent. What they didn't foresee was
a giant government-financed, interdisciplinary, military-industrial
effort to launch humans into space. After all, in the 1930s, the huge
Federal efforts America made to win World War II (including the
Manhattan Project) hadn't happened yet.
By the Cold War, Americans became more used to the aerospace
achievements of a giant military-industrial complex.
Arthur C. Clarke certainly realized it (and depicted it in his
novelization of "2001: A Space Odyssey"). In fact, he offered that
model of aggressive space exploration as an alternative to war.
--
Steven L.
Email: sdli...@earthlinkNOSPAM.net
Remove the NOSPAM before replying to me.
James Nicoll
Steven L. <sdli...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>Partly that's due to how they imagined rocketry would advance.
>Invariably, in their stories, the rocket is constructed by one or a few
>visionary scientists working pretty much alone (extrapolating from
>Goddard or Tsiolkovsky). And because the scientist worked alone on that
>one thing, spinoffs would be nonexistent. What they didn't foresee was
>a giant government-financed, interdisciplinary, military-industrial
>effort to launch humans into space. After all, in the 1930s, the huge
>Federal efforts America made to win World War II (including the
>Manhattan Project) hadn't happened yet.
That's true but there had been other massive federal
efforts within recent memory back in the 1930s (as long as
we are not talking 1930 - 1933):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority
ObSF: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (No, really, I can make a case
that it's both SF and fantasy).
Louann Miller
> And against neutering cats in "tDiS".
> Or at least, his character did. And remarked on the
> complete futility and perversion of somebody choosing
> themselves to be made sterile in FF. (At least, Hugh seemed
> to me to be more upset at the loss of gametes than hormones.)
>
> That's one reason I was quite surprised at the ending of Friday.
Is it known why Heinlein's two-or-three marriages were all childless?
Against their will or on purpose, I mean.
Derek Lyons
>ObSF: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (No, really, I can make a case
>that it's both SF and fantasy).
This I gotta see.
D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.
http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/
-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL
Derek Lyons
>It may seem strange that humanity is starving while 14 year olds flit
>around in helicopters, but as they say, truth is stranger than fiction.
>For example, if in 1975 you wrote a science fiction story set around the
>year 2000, where:
>1) Nobody had set foot on the moon since 1972
>2) NASA lost valuable data from the moon landings[1]
>3) There was no civilization destroying event that contributed to 1 and 2
>
>Who would believe it? You would have people posting on pre-usenet about
>how it breaks their suspension of disbelief.
Except there's one huge problem - it wouldn't occur to anyone but an
SF fan that item #1 was a problem in the first place... And SF fans
failed, and continue to fail, to realize that their belief that not
only should we go to the moon but continue to do so was a castle built
on air. It was, and is, an item of religious belief.
>> Given the technological sophistication needed to maintain cities on
>> the Moon, power doors should be a trivial expense
>
>Given the amount of money spent getting there, maintaining data from the
>lunar landings should be a trivial expense, yet we managed to lose some.
You've never made a mistake and lost or misplaced anything?
Derek Lyons
>: il...@rcn.com
>: My point is that in FitS *everyone* is starving. Kids who have their
>: own helicopters eat yeast and are perpetually hungry.
>
>As I read those passages, he had the economic werewhithal to buy
>more food. He just didn't have the ration points, and wasn't
>starving enough to break the law.
Nor do I recall any mention that he was hungry, or even starving.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop) wrote:
>
>> : il...@rcn.com
>> : My point is that in FitS *everyone* is starving. Kids who have their
>> : own helicopters eat yeast and are perpetually hungry.
>>
>> As I read those passages, he had the economic werewhithal to buy
>> more food. He just didn't have the ration points, and wasn't
>> starving enough to break the law.
>
> Nor do I recall any mention that he was hungry, or even starving.
No, I seem to remember it was more a matter of "bland". The artificial
foods were not as good as the real thing. They HAD ration books, yes
(something I suspect came from WWII), but I didn't think they had
trouble with getting ENOUGH to eat.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com
trag
> The difference is that data from lunar landings is ultimately a
> luxury. Nobody died because it was lost. Whereas food is a
> *necessity*. I do not see a society which has enough resources to
> terraform Ganymede actually doing it if they have to ration yeast. Not
> until AFTER they solved their food problem. Or never, if they CAN NOT
> solve it.
Energy is a necessity to our industrialized society and yet we've been
sitting on our hands for thirty years whereas if we had built ten
fission power plants per year, all of our (USA) electrical power needs
would be provided for and only the transportation system would remain
to convert to something. There's no physical nor technological
reason why we did not use our know-how to build those plants. The
obstacles are all social and political.
I have little trouble imagining that social and political forces have
resulted in a caloric food rationing program, even though it could be
solved and is actually unnecessary. For that matter I have little
trouble imagining that in the FITS society, there is actually plenty
of food in some parts of the world or in the whole world. Yet, the
transportation infrastructure is too poor to get larger quantities of
food to some segments of the population. So the world government
forces rationing at the lowest or near-lowest calorie level even
though large segments of the population could have more food without
depriving others. Because that's "fair" or "socially conscious" or
some such.
Heck, we've got this largish segment of our population who think that
higher energy prices will be a great thing because they'll force the
almighty conservation and totally ignore what it will do to the poor
and those in energy marginal jobs.
Heinlein suggested in other books with society-wide calorie rationing
that the system is neither rational nor actually carried out even-
handedly.
Gene
7e8296...@z6g2000pre.googlegroups.com:
> Heinlein was extending the endless
> frontier as the escape from the Malthusian trap (this was before
> temporary technological escapes from Malthus were identified).
The frontier increases as the square of the scale. Whereas unrestrained
population growth is exponential. So this must be a temporary solution also.
Dimensional Traveler
> jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:
>
>> ObSF: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (No, really, I can make a case
>> that it's both SF and fantasy).
>
> This I gotta see.
>
> D.
The fantasy part is easy. Any hetero male who saw Musetta Vander as a Siren
knows that. *grin*
--
"What Kind of perv rememembers the scenes where she's clothed???" -
Anim8rFSK, 8/23/08
Christopher Henrich
<ffef1998-c676-41e0...@n33g2000pri.googlegroups.com>,
il...@rcn.com wrote:
> > Well, as somebody points out in one of the later chapters, the
> > Ganymede and other colonies are not so much to siphon off extra
> > population, or to provide surplus food for shipment back to
> > Earth, but to insure that the human race survives, somewhere, in
> > case of Malthusian war on Earth.
>
> What's the point? Unless there is some meaningful way to keep family
> sizes down on Ganymede -- and Heinlein was emphatic about colonists
> haveing many children, -- Ganymede will be just as overcrowded within
> a few generations.
>
> Now that I think of it, Heinlein seemed to take for granted that
> humans never learn -- they will always breed to the limit of their
> environment, and then will always ruin it, -- and every time it
> happens, the smart capable individualists (e.g. Hainlein characters)
> will escape and go on to the next location. In "Time Enough for Love"
> it happens again and again, and Heinlein seemed to imply it is a good
> thing -- but for me it looked as grim and pointless as the inevitable
> doom of Motie Cycles.
I am reminded of "Letter to a Phoenix" by Fredric Brown.
--
Christopher J. Henrich
chen...@monmouth.com
http://www.mathinteract.com
James Nicoll
Derek Lyons <fair...@gmail.com> wrote:
>jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:
>
>>ObSF: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (No, really, I can make a case
>>that it's both SF and fantasy).
>
>This I gotta see.
SF (admittedly somewhat weak)
The whole plot is driven by the electrification of the
South. No grand plan to bring electricity to one of the poorer
parts of the US, no need for to build the dam that provides
our hero with a story to hook his buddies with. It's at least
SFnal as Hec Ramsey.
1: Consider this a prenote: a specific instance of how electrification
is changing the face of the South.
Fantasy: Tommy describes the devil (who he sold his soul
to) and later on, the guys run into someone who seems to match
the description. They are saved by [1] what appears to be the
direct intervvention of god in answer to a prayer.
lal_truckee
>>
> What Heinlein was saying in "Farmer in the Sky" was that Malthusian
> population explosion is unavoidable. It is not something that "needed
> saying" -- it is plain WRONG.
It wasn't "wrong" then, IIRC. Malthus was taken very seriously - don't
you remember the 1950s mantra "eat your dinner, babies are starving in
china?" Or maybe you weren't there then? And FWIW Malthus continued
strong for several decades.
Also of note: FitS is a juvie - intended to be an adventure story for
Boy Scout aged, ah, boys; not a reasoned exposition on Malthusian
theory. The Malthus stuff was just background arm waving to get the
protag to Jupiter so Heinlein could discuss pioneering and ecology -
don't forget his building the soil discussion, possibly the first
ecology any of us 1950s teens ever heard.
Derek Lyons
>il...@rcn.com wrote:
>>>
>> What Heinlein was saying in "Farmer in the Sky" was that Malthusian
>> population explosion is unavoidable. It is not something that "needed
>> saying" -- it is plain WRONG.
>
>It wasn't "wrong" then, IIRC. Malthus was taken very seriously - don't
>you remember the 1950s mantra "eat your dinner, babies are starving in
>china?"
Which had nothing to do with Malthus.
>Also of note: FitS is a juvie - intended to be an adventure story for
>Boy Scout aged, ah, boys; not a reasoned exposition on Malthusian
>theory. The Malthus stuff was just background arm waving to get the
>protag to Jupiter so Heinlein could discuss pioneering and ecology -
Ah - Heinlein couldn't have been discussing Malthus, he was busily
lecturing on something else that also appears in the book.
Derek Lyons
>On Nov 17, 2:13 pm, il...@rcn.com wrote:
>
>> The difference is that data from lunar landings is ultimately a
>> luxury. Nobody died because it was lost. Whereas food is a
>> *necessity*. I do not see a society which has enough resources to
>> terraform Ganymede actually doing it if they have to ration yeast. Not
>> until AFTER they solved their food problem. Or never, if they CAN NOT
>> solve it.
>
>Energy is a necessity to our industrialized society and yet we've been
>sitting on our hands for thirty years whereas if we had built ten
>fission power plants per year, all of our (USA) electrical power needs
>would be provided for and only the transportation system would remain
>to convert to something. There's no physical nor technological
>reason why we did not use our know-how to build those plants. The
>obstacles are all social and political.
Other than the obstacle of building plants a couple of orders of
magnitude larger than anything ever built, no - there's no physical or
technological limitation. Or the obstacle that nuclear power plants
are extremely poor at proving peaking power. Or the obstacle that
your fixed building rate means the plants have to grow ever larger
than their already difficult to reach size once you plateau the number
of plants at around thirty five to forty years.
Etc... etc...
il...@rcn.com
interstellar travel AND either endless habitable planets or
terraforming techniques on less-than-a-generation scale...
> > Heinlein was extending the endless
> > frontier as the escape from the Malthusian trap (this was before
> > temporary technological escapes from Malthus were identified).
>
> The frontier increases as the square of the scale. Whereas unrestrained
> population growth is exponential. So this must be a temporary solution also.
...the results are vividly described in "Mote in the God's
Eye" (quoting from memory):
"There will be a huge volume of Motie-controlled star systems. The
ones in the center would not be able to even reach the frontier --
they will turn on each other. Cycles will expand in size until
collapse comes at a stroke, to hundreds of planets simultaneously. I
suspect that standard technique will be to drop an asteroid into
enemy's star, and figure on resettling the planets when the flare dies
down. And frontier will continue to expand, leaving more and more
systems in the center."
Pubkeybreaker
> On Nov 17, 1:10 pm, "Martha Adams" <mh...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > When Heinlein worked out his motie society, was he expressing an
> > opinion?
>
> ITYM Niven/Pournelle
>
> Peter Trei
"his motie society" means his version of a motie-like society.
Mike stone
"Robbie" <quro...@qumeerqu.qunetqu____s/qu//g> wrote in message
news:qurobytqu-C320F...@news.giganews.com...
>
> For example, look at things from the point of view of some starving kid
> in Africa: Society is so wealthy that a 16 year old can own a car and
> take trips to <city 50 miles away> just for an afternoon, so powerful
> that it is building islands, yet I am *starving*?
>
> Actually, you don't have to look at starving kids in Africa, you could
> just look at a homeless bum. Any large city has lots of them.
>
When I was a kid in the 1950s and 60s, you got lots of "space opera" stuff
in which at some point or other the hero had to take refuge (perhaps with
the Thieves' Guild or the Beggars' Union) in the slum quarter behind the
spaceport.
Sophisticates of the Mike Moorcock type used to mock such nonsense. How
absurd it was to think that a society with Galaxy-spanning technology would
still have people living in slums.
Yet that is virtually where we are, 21C supertech juxtaposed with medieval
squalor.
The bad sf has predicted the future better than the good.
--
Mike Stone - Peterborough, England
"Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of
Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work
strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby in the
reservoir, he turns to the cupboard, only to find the vodka bottle empty."
P G Wodehouse - Jill the Reckless
David Harmon
<loua...@yahoo.com> wrote,
The way I heard it, against their will.
Gene
@k24g2000pri.googlegroups.com:
>> The frontier increases as the square of the scale. Whereas unrestrained
>> population growth is exponential. So this must be a temporary solution
also.
>
> ...the results are vividly described in "Mote in the God's
> Eye" (quoting from memory):
>
> "There will be a huge volume of Motie-controlled star systems. The
> ones in the center would not be able to even reach the frontier --
> they will turn on each other. Cycles will expand in size until
> collapse comes at a stroke, to hundreds of planets simultaneously.
What the Moties need is a universe with a Friedmann cosmology with negative
curvature, and a less restrictive method of FTL. Now the frontier grows
(eventually) exponentially with scale, and the core becomes relatively small
compared to the frontier. The Malthusian disaster is still there, but is
relatively much less significant. Better yet, if you can go anywhere at once
with your FTL, the universe is infinite.
James Nicoll
The later Frank Herbert Dune novels (which does not imo include
his son's abominations) suggest one possible draw back to having access
to an infinite universe. Such a universe has access to you and given
enough exploration you may well get the attention of some enitity more
powerful than and somewhat hostile to you.
Mike Schilling
>
> What the Moties need is a universe with a Friedmann cosmology
"Will this war finally solve the Crazy Eddie problem?"
"The next two months will be crucial."
trag
> Other than the obstacle of building plants a couple of orders of
> magnitude larger than anything ever built, no - there's no physical or
> technological limitation.
Ten nuclear power plants of average size per year since 1978 would put
us where I stated. I don't know where you get the idea that they need
to be of unusual size. If the anti-nuclear weenies had not lied we
wouldn't produce any carbon emission in our electrical generation,
except for plants to provide for peaking power.
> Or the obstacle that nuclear power plants
> are extremely poor at proving peaking power. Or the obstacle that
> your fixed building rate means the plants have to grow ever larger
> than their already difficult to reach size once you plateau the number
> of plants at around thirty five to forty years.
Peaking power providers are indeed the only obstacle to going all
nuclear. I still don't know where you get your plants of unusual
size assumption.
Currently, 20% of USA electricity is supplied by 100 plants. Another
300 plants would take that number to 80%. Assuming the remaining 20%
comes from hydro or needed peak plants, our needs would fulfilled with
no need for POUS.
Mike Schilling
> The later Frank Herbert Dune novels (which does not imo include
> his son's abominations) suggest one possible draw back to having
> access to an infinite universe. Such a universe has access to you
> and
> given enough exploration you may well get the attention of some
> enitity more powerful than and somewhat hostile to you.
Exactly what Bleys Ahrens was afraid of.
Michael Stemper
>"Robbie" <quro...@qumeerqu.qunetqu____s/qu//g> wrote in message news:qurobytqu-C320F...@news.giganews.com...
>> For example, look at things from the point of view of some starving kid
>> in Africa: Society is so wealthy that a 16 year old can own a car and
>> take trips to <city 50 miles away> just for an afternoon, so powerful
>> that it is building islands, yet I am *starving*?
>When I was a kid in the 1950s and 60s, you got lots of "space opera" stuff
>in which at some point or other the hero had to take refuge (perhaps with
>the Thieves' Guild or the Beggars' Union) in the slum quarter behind the
>spaceport.
>
>Sophisticates of the Mike Moorcock type used to mock such nonsense. How
>absurd it was to think that a society with Galaxy-spanning technology would
>still have people living in slums.
I guess that I'm not that sort of sophisticate. (Probably goes with the
fact that I've only ever read one Moorcock that I found worthwhile.)
When my son was a sprat, and I was reading Heinlein's _Citizen of the
Galaxy_, I used this cover:
<http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0345342445.01.LZZZZZZZ.gif>
to start a (brief) discussion of economic inequality. It seemed (and
still seems) to me to be a highly realistic portrayal of how things
are likely to play out.
Except for the space travel bit.
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
91.2% of all statistics are made up by the person quoting them.
Quadibloc
> What Heinlein was saying in "Farmer in the Sky" was that Malthusian
> population explosion is unavoidable. It is not something that "needed
> saying" -- it is plain WRONG.
That is not at all clear.
Population is now growing at below replacement levels in North America
and Europe, but that is *because* it has collided with Malthusian
limits. High oil prices, high prices for housing, and high
unemployment rates are present.
If technology provides a *comfortable, happy environment* for humans,
then population growth will return to that found in the wealthy,
industrialized nations in the 1950s and 1960s, which was positive.
Even a slight positive population growth rate is *exponential* in
character.
The only falsification of Malthus that we're witnessing is that
instead of population growth slowing down because children are
starving to death, we're seeing population growth slowing down because
women have to go out and get jobs.
So Malthus' basic rule: population growth is exponential, and
continues until environmental limits impose intolerable stresses on
the creatures in the population still holds.
All that's changed is that our tolerance for stress has gone 'way
down, due to cultural factors.
As this is not true *in other cultures*, what happens next (and we
have historical experience to verify this) is replacement of the over-
civilized or 'decadent' culture with a 'barbarian' culture with a
faster population growth rate and a higher tolerance for stress. (Some
Chinese guy is mad at us, which is why we're living in interesting
times.)
John Savard
Michael Stemper
> The later Frank Herbert Dune novels (which does not imo include
>his son's abominations) suggest one possible draw back to having access
>to an infinite universe.
To be honest, I remember very little from the last three, other than
the Leto worm and an infinite sequence of Duncan Idahos. And I'm
good with that.
> Such a universe has access to you and given
>enough exploration you may well get the attention of some enitity more
>powerful than and somewhat hostile to you.
Fred Saberhagen did this as well, with his Berserker stories.
Paul Ciszek
In article <ffef1998-c676-41e0...@n33g2000pri.googlegroups.com>,
<il...@rcn.com> wrote:
>> Well, as somebody points out in one of the later chapters, the
>> Ganymede and other colonies are not so much to siphon off extra
>> population, or to provide surplus food for shipment back to
>> Earth, but to insure that the human race survives, somewhere, in
>> case of Malthusian war on Earth.
>
>What's the point? Unless there is some meaningful way to keep family
>sizes down on Ganymede -- and Heinlein was emphatic about colonists
>haveing many children, -- Ganymede will be just as overcrowded within
>a few generations.
Is Ganymede a strictly American concern? I can't recall if there were
any furriners represented among the colonials. But at that stage of
the colony, large families made sense; later, the family sizes would
shrink. Americans have followed that pattern before, so it is not an
unreasonable assumption.
BTW, what happened to the native populations of the solar system
colonies when space travel was interrupted by the theocracy? Or
does _Farmer in the Sky_ lie outside of that future history?
--
Please reply to: | "One of the hardest parts of my job is to
pciszek at panix dot com | connect Iraq to the War on Terror."
Autoreply is disabled | -- G. W. Bush, 9/7/2006
David DeLaney
>On Nov 17, 12:13 pm, il...@rcn.com wrote:
>> What Heinlein was saying in "Farmer in the Sky" was that Malthusian
>> population explosion is unavoidable. It is not something that "needed
>> saying" -- it is plain WRONG.
>
>That is not at all clear.
>
>Population is now growing at below replacement levels in North America
>and Europe, but that is *because* it has collided with Malthusian limits.
I do not believe that term means what you think it means. At all.
If Malthus were responsible for the lack of population growth in those
areas, there would NOT be widespread obesity. There would be widespread
starvation.
The reasons why that rate has slowed down have little or nothing to do with
Malthus' predictions that population growth would outstrip food supply.
>High oil prices, high prices for housing, and high
>unemployment rates are present.
... none of which have anything to do with Malthus either, and very little
to do with the lowered population growth rate. So I don't need to read any
more of your post.
If you had been looking at _Africa_, you might be able to make a better case
for your hypothesis. But no.
Dave
--
\/David DeLaney posting from d...@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.
Wayne Throop
: Peaking power providers are indeed the only obstacle to going all nuclear.
Why does that stand in the way? Two obvious ways to go would be stored
energy technologies of various sorts, or to have some large background
load that's low priority and can be shed. (The two are not distinct,
of course; storing energy could be thought of as a large background load
that can be shed... with the bonus that you get energy back out.)
Wayne Throop thr...@sheol.org http://sheol.org/throopw
Wayne Throop
: The reasons why that rate has slowed down have little or nothing to do with
: Malthus' predictions that population growth would outstrip food supply.
Further, the notion advanced in the rest of Quadibloc's post, that wealth
leads to an *increse* of growth rate, seems contrary to my perception
of history, where the wealthiest families are (at least, tend to be)
the ones with only children, or no children, and tend to die out
over time. *Well* before "women had to work" became an issue at all.
Indeed, domestic servant families (afaict) and their social peers,
tended to have far larger famlies than their far wealthier clients.
The wimminfolk of which were definitely not forced to work.
Right along side that ancient pottery shard discovered in an archaological
dig into the oldest strata, inscribed with "the younger generation has
no respect, is totally undisciplined, and their music is just noise"
was one inscribed "the lower classes are outbreeding us!!!!".
Mike Schilling
> On Nov 17, 12:13 pm, il...@rcn.com wrote:
>
>> What Heinlein was saying in "Farmer in the Sky" was that Malthusian
>> population explosion is unavoidable. It is not something that "needed
>> saying" -- it is plain WRONG.
>
> That is not at all clear.
>
> Population is now growing at below replacement levels in North America
> and Europe, but that is *because* it has collided with Malthusian
> limits. High oil prices, high prices for housing, and high
> unemployment rates are present.
Where do you come you with this crap? Wealthier people have fewer children,
not more.
Brion K. Lienhart
Also seen in _Beauty_ by Sherri S. Tepper, vis "Fidapur". If everyone is
poor, the people in charge of distribution of relief have enormous power.
Quadibloc
> If Malthus were responsible for the lack of population growth in those
> areas, there would NOT be widespread obesity. There would be widespread
> starvation.
>
> The reasons why that rate has slowed down have little or nothing to do with
> Malthus' predictions that population growth would outstrip food supply.
If what Malthus predicted was that population would rise
uncontrollably until people starved, he was wrong. And indeed, that is
just about what he, himself, actually predicted in the works he wrote.
That doesn't mean, though, that the _general principle_ behind
Malthusianism can't be right, even if Malthus got the _details_ wrong.
So wealthy Americans, even after the demographic transition, still
bred fast enough so that population increased - slowly - when they
were content in the 1950s and 1960s. But when the country started
running out of land for suburban homes with two-car garages, this
(less than catastrophic) collision with environmental limits led to
the lower-than-replacement birth rate. Because some people weren't
getting married who *would have liked to have gotten married* had
circumstances been better.
So the general *principle* applies - population increases until it
hits something. It's just that the hit turns out to be really gentle
instead of really hard... at least in the case of the advanced Western
societies.
Indeed, people in other countries and cultures are not so...
delicate... as we are.
So not only was Malthus right, but Spengler may be right too.
John Savard
David Johnston
>It broke mine when I read it -- and I was a teenager then. The society
>is so wealthy that a 14-year old can own a helicopter and take class
>trips to Antarctica, so powerful that it is terraforming Jupiter's
>moons, yet it is *starving*? The amount of energy available to human
>race in "Farmer in the Sky" is staggering -- at least one order of
>magnitude greater than in real life today, and possibly two orders. If
At that time it was common to vastly overestimate population growth
and underestimate how many people it would take to occupy land.
cryptoguy
wrote:
Savard is factually wrong here.
The replacement fertility rate is around 2.1 (kids per average woman/
lifetime).
The only North American country with a rate below this is Canada.
US: 2.1 (US population continues to grow though, through
immigration)
300M people
Mexico 2.37
110M people
Canada 1.57
33 M people
(CIA figures)
In absolute current growth rate, the only major "Western" countries
which
are losing population are Japan and Germany. A number of former
eastern
bloc countries are losing people too - I suspect that former West
Germany
is still growing. Canada, Mexico, and the US are still increasing in
population.
The simple fact is that Malthus was wrong. John is *certainly* wrong
in
saying that western nations stopped having babies because we're poor.
We stopped because we are rich, in control of our lives, and have a
low
death rate. Otherwise, why is Mali, one of the world's poorest
countries,
the one with the highest birth rate, while Italy, among the worlds
richest, has one of the lowest?
It Does Not Compute, Mr. Savard.
Peter Trei
Quadibloc
> If the anti-nuclear weenies had not lied we
> wouldn't produce any carbon emission in our electrical generation,
> except for plants to provide for peaking power.
Assuming we don't dare produce any carbon, and that we don't have any
good energy storage technologies for the quantities of energy
involved, things are not hopeless.
We can just build enough nuclear power plants to provide power at peak
demand levels... and the excess power during off-peak load can be used
for making aluminum and making heavy water, instead of being wasted.
Also, it can make hydrogen to fuel our cars.
John Savard
Ericth...@gmail.com
wrote:
> In article <gfuv7l$h9...@reader1.panix.com>, James Nicoll writes:
> > The later Frank Herbert Dune novels (which does not imo include
> >his son's abominations) suggest one possible draw back to having access
> >to an infinite universe.
>
> To be honest, I remember very little from the last three, other than
> the Leto worm and an infinite sequence of Duncan Idahos. And I'm
> good with that.
>
> > Such a universe has access to you and given
> >enough exploration you may well get the attention of some enitity more
> >powerful than and somewhat hostile to you.
>
> Fred Saberhagen did this as well, with his Berserker stories.
Larry Niven also did this in "Ringworld", scaring the Kzin with
speculations about the dangerous races they may meet with a Quantum II
hyperdrive; Bandersnatchi with hands, or Grogs with legs, IIRC.
It's an interesting technological bent on the whole Lovecraftean
"things man was not ment to know" idea.
Eric Tolle
Ericth...@gmail.com
> True, though I think not totally obvious then. As to the issue of how
> a society with total conversion technology, and energy and technology
> enough to field torchships, could have a food shortage, I expect he didn't
> think energy could be traded straight up for food. That the amount of
> arable land limited food production, and that then-modern methods would
> be near the best that could be done. And further, if overuse depleted
> the arable land, things would get worse, not better.
It's worth noting that "Farmer in the Sky" was published five years
before the agricultural research that was later dubbed "TheGreen
Revolution" bore any results. Since a big part of the reason we could
feed our expanding population through the latter half of the 20thh
century was due to that revolution, Heinlein might be forgiven for
thinking that food production was essentially static.
And hell, the Green Revolution is agriculture and biology, which SF
writers generally have only the vaguest notion of as 'women's
work". ;')
Eric Tolle
Stephen Graham
> It's worth noting that "Farmer in the Sky" was published five years
> before the agricultural research that was later dubbed "TheGreen
> Revolution" bore any results. Since a big part of the reason we could
> feed our expanding population through the latter half of the 20thh
> century was due to that revolution, Heinlein might be forgiven for
> thinking that food production was essentially static.
A significant component of the Green Revolution was exporting developed
world agricultural techniques to other regions. That is, the techniques
that had significantly increased agricultural productivity in the United
States over the preceding century and that Heinlein should have been at
least marginally aware of.
The cultivars associated with the Green Revolution were an additional
benefit that allowed the reduction in agricultural workforce that we've
seen world-wide.
Stephen Graham
> So wealthy Americans, even after the demographic transition, still
> bred fast enough so that population increased - slowly - when they
> were content in the 1950s and 1960s. But when the country started
> running out of land for suburban homes with two-car garages, this
> (less than catastrophic) collision with environmental limits led to
> the lower-than-replacement birth rate. Because some people weren't
> getting married who *would have liked to have gotten married* had
> circumstances been better.
You know, John, if you ever want to find out the actual information on
this, the US Census Bureau produces these nifty reports. A relevant one
is the Demographic Trends in the 20th Century, which can be found here:
http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/censr-4.pdf
Broadly, what it shows is that total fertility rate and household size
have trended downwards over the last couple of decades. At the same
time, home ownership has trended upwards. There is, in fact, an inverse
correlation between home ownership and birth rates in the 20th century.
In summary, your supposition is incorrect.
Bill Higgins
> On Nov 17, 1:10 pm, "Martha Adams" <mh...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> When Heinlein worked out his motie society, was he expressing an
>> opinion?
>
> ITYM Niven/Pournelle
Interestingly, Heinlein read the manuscript of *The Mote in God's Eye*, and
sent Pournelle a detailed critique of the novel.
You can buy their correspondence for two bucks. See
<http://www.heinleinarchives.net/upload/index.php?_a=viewProd&productId=376>.
--
Bill Higgins | Me: "I can't get used to color oscilloscopes.
Fermilab | They just look weird."
Internet: | Mark Leeper: "Wait until you see the new
hig...@fnal.gov | High Definition Oscilloscopes with surroundsound.
| It's like being right there on the F(t)=0 line."
Juho Julkunen
dc9e8f...@c22g2000prc.googlegroups.com>, treif...@gmail.com
says...
> The simple fact is that Malthus was wrong. John is *certainly* wrong
> in
> saying that western nations stopped having babies because we're poor.
> We stopped because we are rich, in control of our lives, and have a
> low
> death rate. Otherwise, why is Mali, one of the world's poorest
> countries,
> the one with the highest birth rate, while Italy, among the worlds
> richest, has one of the lowest?
Also one of the world's most Catholic countries, which might be of
interest for the proponents of the "Catholics will outbreed us" view.
--
Juho Julkunen
cryptoguy
> : d...@gatekeeper.vic.com (David DeLaney)
> : The reasons why that rate has slowed down have little or nothing to do with
> : Malthus' predictions that population growth would outstrip food supply.
>
> Further, the notion advanced in the rest of Quadibloc's post, that wealth
> leads to an *increse* of growth rate, seems contrary to my perception
> of history, where the wealthiest families are (at least, tend to be)
> the ones with only children, or no children, and tend to die out
> over time. *Well* before "women had to work" became an issue at all.
> Indeed, domestic servant families (afaict) and their social peers,
> tended to have far larger famlies than their far wealthier clients.
> The wimminfolk of which were definitely not forced to work.
I've been working through a very long history of Britain recently.
This is, in fact, incorrect.
In the days before contraception became available and effective,
women at the top of the social hierarchy actually had *more*
children than their poorer sisters. The reason is wet-nursing.
A woman who is nursing is much less likely to conceive;
one who lets her baby be fed by another will resume
ovulating much sooner.
Poor women, who breast fed their children, tended to
have them spaced much further apart than woman who
put their babies out to wet nurses.
Read some history. There was even one queen
(Philippa of Hainault) who had 17 kids.
Check
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_monarchs
Peter Trei
randy.m...@gmail.com
> On Nov 17, 12:13 pm, il...@rcn.com wrote:
>
> > What Heinlein was saying in "Farmer in the Sky" was that Malthusian
> > population explosion is unavoidable. It is not something that "needed
> > saying" -- it is plain WRONG.
>
> That is not at all clear.
>
> Population is now growing at below replacement levels in North America
> and Europe, but that is *because* it has collided with Malthusian
> limits. High oil prices, high prices for housing, and high
> unemployment rates are present.
>
> If technology provides a *comfortable, happy environment* for humans,
> then population growth will return to that found in the wealthy,
> industrialized nations in the 1950s and 1960s, which was positive.
> Even a slight positive population growth rate is *exponential* in
> character.
Hold on!
You're talking about natural increase as opposed to immigration,
right? Spain's population has grown from 40 to nearly 46 million since
the late 1990s on the strength of immigration, but you seem to be
talking about the baby boom.
It's worth noting that the baby boom and consequent high natural
increase was the product of a fairly irreproducible set of cultural,
economic, and political factors. It wasn't felt universally--the baby
boom was much stronger in the Anglophone and Francophone societies of
the industrialized world than elsewhere--and it followed a sustained
period of below cohort fertility in the 1920s and the 1930s.
Will this pattern change? Maybe. Then again, maybe not: Other
societies with different cultural and political backgrounds and at
different levels of economic
development--Russia, Algeria, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, China--
seem to be heading straight for below-replacement cohort fertility, in
most of these cases for seriously below-replacement cohort fertility.
In many cases this corresponds to the development of an affluent
consumer society, since (say) rural Sichuan has a higher period
fertility rate than (say) Shanghai.
All the best,
Randy
Mike Schilling
> On Mon, 17 Nov 2008, cryptoguy wrote:
>
>> On Nov 17, 1:10 pm, "Martha Adams" <mh...@verizon.net> wrote:
>>
>>> When Heinlein worked out his motie society, was he expressing an
>>> opinion?
>>
>> ITYM Niven/Pournelle
>
> Interestingly, Heinlein read the manuscript of *The Mote in God's
> Eye*, and sent Pournelle a detailed critique of the novel.
>
> You can buy their correspondence for two bucks. See
> http://www.heinleinarchives.net/upload/index.php?_a=viewProd&productId=376.
Gentlemen don't read each other's letters.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
wrote:
>Will this pattern change? Maybe. Then again, maybe not: Other
>societies with different cultural and political backgrounds and at
>different levels of economic
> development--Russia, Algeria, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, China--
>seem to be heading straight for below-replacement cohort fertility, in
>most of these cases for seriously below-replacement cohort fertility.
>In many cases this corresponds to the development of an affluent
>consumer society, since (say) rural Sichuan has a higher period
>fertility rate than (say) Shanghai.
Which is interesting in another regard -- Shanghai has the highest
female-to-male ratio in China. It's where young women go looking for
work, so as to not wind up farmers' wives. Rural Chinese men are
short millions of marriagiable women as a result of the one-child
policy, which led to female infanticide, and female babies being
abandoned to orphanages that then adopted them out to Westerners; the
shortage is bad enough that in northeastern China they've been known
to kidnap North Korean women. At the same time, Shanghai has a
surplus of females, millions of them, working as shopgirls and
secretaries.
I have no idea how these facts relate, I'm just throwing them out
there as an additional data point or two.
--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
The final issue of the Hugo-nominated webzine Helix
is now at http://www.helixsf.com
mimus
It's not like the Vatican isn't upset by that.
Heh.
(They have the same grudge against American Catholics, which is one reason
why they've been pushing the Illegals Invasion and Second Amnesty.)
--
"You are either insane or a fool."
"I am a sanitary inspector."
< _Maske: Thaery_
ncw...@hotmail.com
> On Nov 17, 11:17 am, thro...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop) wrote:
>
> > True, though I think not totally obvious then. As to the issue of how
> > a society with total conversion technology, and energy and technology
> > enough to field torchships, could have a food shortage, I expect he didn't
> > think energy could be traded straight up for food. That the amount of
> > arable land limited food production, and that then-modern methods would
> > be near the best that could be done. And further, if overuse depleted
> > the arable land, things would get worse, not better.
>
> It's worth noting that "Farmer in the Sky" was published five years
> before the agricultural research that was later dubbed "TheGreen
> Revolution" bore any results. Since a big part of the reason we could
> feed our expanding population through the latter half of the 20thh
> century was due to that revolution, Heinlein might be forgiven for
> thinking that food production was essentially static.
>
It's also worth noting that it was written near the start of the post-
WWII baby boom, so it was probably far from obvious that increasing
standards of living would drive down the rate of population growth in
developed countries.
Cheers,
Nigel.
Quadibloc
> Energy is a necessity to our industrialized society and yet we've been
> sitting on our hands for thirty years whereas if we had built ten
> fission power plants per year, all of our (USA) electrical power needs
> would be provided for and only the transportation system would remain
> to convert to something. There's no physical nor technological
> reason why we did not use our know-how to build those plants. The
> obstacles are all social and political.
Indeed. This happened, though it is hard to believe.
But today, with global warming a threat, and with oil dependency
aiding terrorism...
it will _really_ be unbelievable if these obstacles are not swept
aside within a few years.
Of course, for there to be motive to overcome them, energy limits
would have to pinch - and as long as fossil fuels remain available,
because the *obvious proof* of global warming, that won't come until
it's too late, hasn't yet arrived tlhat may not happen. So major
destructive weather shifts that we are (or, rather, will be) helpless
to prevent are not impossible at all.
Maybe finally the anti-nuclear nutcases will stop being popular?
Rather than what seems like the likelier outcome after a global
disaster... a dark age during which science and technology are
prohibited?
John Savard
Brenda Clough
>
> Which is interesting in another regard -- Shanghai has the highest
> female-to-male ratio in China. It's where young women go looking for
> work, so as to not wind up farmers' wives. Rural Chinese men are
> short millions of marriagiable women as a result of the one-child
> policy, which led to female infanticide, and female babies being
> abandoned to orphanages that then adopted them out to Westerners; the
> shortage is bad enough that in northeastern China they've been known
> to kidnap North Korean women. At the same time, Shanghai has a
> surplus of females, millions of them, working as shopgirls and
> secretaries.
>
>
>
>
When we were there I was worried that Diana would excite what Sherlock
Holmes calls an unhealthy interest. (The tight-tight athletic shorts
arrogantly emblazoned with the college name on the butt would do it.)
Luckily she is head and shoulders taller than most Chinese, and could
deck anybody who bothered her.
Brenda
--
---------
Brenda W. Clough
http://www.sff.net/people/Brenda/
My novel REVISE THE WORLD is now appearing at
www.bookviewcafe.com
Derek Lyons
>BTW, what happened to the native populations of the solar system
>colonies when space travel was interrupted by the theocracy? Or
>does _Farmer in the Sky_ lie outside of that future history?
Yes, FITS is it's own continuity. But that's a damm good question and
not anwered, that I recall, by RAH.
D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.
http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/
-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL
Quadibloc
> it followed a sustained
> period of below cohort fertility in the 1920s and the 1930s.
The 1930s were the time of the Great Depression.
And after 1973, there were the effects of the oil embargo and
subsequent huge increases in oil prices by the OPEC monopoly.
An affluent consumer society, unlike a peasant farmer society, will
indeed have lower fertilty, and will reach below-replacement fertility
more easily.
My claim is that Malthus was right - if you move the goalposts. That
is, below replacement fertility, even for affluent societies, only
comes about if people are feeling a... slight pinch... of
environmental or economic constraints. This is a lot different from
widespread famine, so one can say that Malthus was wrong, too.
But my concern isn't whether or not Malthus wins a bet with someone.
My concern is whether or not the principle he discovered is still
useful for understanding human behavior, even with a changed domain of
applicability.
I think it is still true that contented societies will tend to
increase their population...
until they reach a population density, relative to available
resources, that produces discomfort and discontent, sufficient to
interfere with moral objections to such actions as theft and
aggression.
Mild annoyance, unlike abject misery, though, only motivates people to
such aggressions as they think they can get away with. So, rather than
a new world war, how about a period of *real* neocolonialism?
John Savard
Derek Lyons
>On Nov 17, 11:35 pm, fairwa...@gmail.com (Derek Lyons) wrote:
>
>> Other than the obstacle of building plants a couple of orders of
>> magnitude larger than anything ever built, no - there's no physical or
>> technological limitation.
>
>Ten nuclear power plants of average size per year since 1978 would put
>us where I stated.
Yes, if your destination was the energy demands of 1978. But this
isn't 1978.
>Currently, 20% of USA electricity is supplied by 100 plants. Another
>300 plants would take that number to 80%. Assuming the remaining 20%
>comes from hydro or needed peak plants, our needs would fulfilled with
>no need for POUS.
Actually, 110 plants - which means your projections leave us well
behind the curve (sans POUS). Another problem is that, currently,
when a nuclear plant suts down for maintenance (which they do for
extended periods with annoying frequency) other sources are there to
make up the lack. In your projection, those sources aren't there and
sans POUS your projection leave us even further behind. And when your
number of plants plateau, as they will, and electric demand continues
to grow... Again, POUS.
Mike Schilling
>
> I think it is still true that contented societies will tend to
> increase their population...
And you're still wrong. Wealthier societies have fewer children, not
more.
Quadibloc
wrote:
> And you're still wrong. Wealthier societies have fewer children, not
> more.
I don't deny that.
Poorer societies have more children than wealthier societies, under
any given set of conditions.
So a poorer society will grow exponentially at a fast rate, until it
reaches starvation conditions, which prevent further population
growth.
A rich society, I claim, grows exponentially at a much slower rate,
until it reaches considerably milder problems, which then cause below-
replacement fertility.
I'm not saying the rich breed faster than the poor. Just that they,
too, breed fast enough to grow, unless they're experiencing problems.
John Savard
Quadibloc
> Actually, 110 plants - which means your projections leave us well
> behind the curve (sans POUS). Another problem is that, currently,
> when a nuclear plant suts down for maintenance (which they do for
> extended periods with annoying frequency) other sources are there to
> make up the lack. In your projection, those sources aren't there and
> sans POUS your projection leave us even further behind.
That's just a detail. Build twice as many nuclear power plants, and
the discrepancy is addressed.
John Savard
cryptoguy
> On Nov 19, 10:45 am, "Mike Schilling" <mscottschill...@hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > And you're still wrong. Wealthier societies have fewer children, not
> > more.
>
> I don't deny that.
>
> Poorer societies have more children than wealthier societies, under
> any given set of conditions.
>
> So a poorer society will grow exponentially at a fast rate, until it
> reaches starvation conditions, which prevent further population
> growth.
>
> A rich society, I claim, grows exponentially at a much slower rate,
> until it reaches considerably milder problems, which then cause below-
> replacement fertility.
Can you back that up with numbers? Or is it just a hypothesis?
Since wealthy societies tend to have very low growth, anything,
down to and including minor changes in social attitudes, can
swing the birth rate from positive to negative - it doesn't take
much.
You might want to look at this chart, which plots total fertility
rate vs gdp/person:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fertility_rate.jpg
Peter Trei
Jesper Lauridsen
> In article <2260ec58-b4ca-400b...@u29g2000pro.googlegroups.com>,
> <il...@rcn.com> wrote:
>>
>>Power doors on the Moon are an intermediate case. They are not an
>>unyielding necessity like food, but without them you'll have a lot
>>more dead people than with them.
>
> Most of whom are prisoners or the descendents of prisoners.
Australians In Spaaace!
Jesper Lauridsen
> trag <tr...@io.com> wrote:
>
>>On Nov 17, 11:35 pm, fairwa...@gmail.com (Derek Lyons) wrote:
>>
>>> Other than the obstacle of building plants a couple of orders of
>>> magnitude larger than anything ever built, no - there's no physical or
>>> technological limitation.
>>
>>Ten nuclear power plants of average size per year since 1978 would put
>>us where I stated.
>
> Yes, if your destination was the energy demands of 1978. But this
> isn't 1978.
>
>>Currently, 20% of USA electricity is supplied by 100 plants. Another
>>300 plants would take that number to 80%. Assuming the remaining 20%
>>comes from hydro or needed peak plants, our needs would fulfilled with
>>no need for POUS.
>
> Actually, 110 plants - which means your projections leave us well
> behind the curve (sans POUS).
10% is very far from the "couple of orders of magnitude larger" that
you postulated earlier.
> Another problem is that, currently,
> when a nuclear plant suts down for maintenance (which they do for
> extended periods with annoying frequency) other sources are there to
> make up the lack. In your projection, those sources aren't there
With more than 400 plants maintenance can be scheduled so the total
capacity remains constant. And the maintenance is included in the 20%
figure.
> and
> sans POUS your projection leave us even further behind. And when your
> number of plants plateau,
Why?
> as they will, and electric demand continues
> to grow... Again, POUS.
Under those conditions you're fucked no matter how you generate your
power.
Jesper Lauridsen
> Matthias Warkus wrote:
>>
>> He rails against condoms at some length in TEfL, IIRC.
>
> Because they're no fun, not because they're brith control.
For proper brit control you need bobbies.
Mike Schilling
>
> A rich society, I claim, grows exponentially at a much slower rate,
> until it reaches considerably milder problems, which then cause
> below-
> replacement fertility.
And what is your evidence that those milder problems don't amount to
"kids are a lot of trouble"?
Mike Van Pelt
<il...@rcn.com> wrote:
>It broke mine when I read it -- and I was a teenager then. The society
>is so wealthy that a 14-year old can own a helicopter and take class
>trips to Antarctica, so powerful that it is terraforming Jupiter's
>moons, yet it is *starving*?
Heinlein expected food shortages in the fairly near term.
In one of his essays in "Expanded Universe", predictions
of the future, he said "We'll all be getting hungry."
I think he neglects that, with enough energy and technology,
it should be possible to create food in unlimited quantities
from air, water, and carbon.
--
Mike Van Pelt | When a man believes that any stick will do,
mvp at calweb.com | he at once picks up a boomerang.
KE6BVH -- G.K. Chesterton
Jesper Lauridsen
> Bill Higgins wrote:
>>
>> Interestingly, Heinlein read the manuscript of *The Mote in God's
>> Eye*, and sent Pournelle a detailed critique of the novel.
>>
>> You can buy their correspondence for two bucks. See
>> http://www.heinleinarchives.net/upload/index.php?_a=viewProd&productId=376.
>
> Gentlemen don't read each other's letters.
All you need is to argue that Heinlein and Pournelle aren't gentlemen,
and you're in the clear.
Wayne Throop
Then how do they communicate with each other?
: Jesper Lauridsen <rors...@sorrystofanet.dk>
: All you need is to argue that Heinlein and Pournelle aren't gentlemen,
: and you're in the clear.
Which is a slam dunk, since the "their correspondence" upthread indicates
that they *were* reading each other's letters.
Wayne Throop thr...@sheol.org http://sheol.org/throopw
PR
> il...@rcn.com wrote:
>
> > What Heinlein was saying in "Farmer in the Sky" was that Malthusian
> > population explosion is unavoidable. It is not something that "needed
> > saying" -- it is plain WRONG.
>
> you remember the 1950s mantra "eat your dinner, babies are starving in
> china?" Or maybe you weren't there then? And FWIW Malthus continued
> strong for several decades.
>
> Also of note: FitS is a juvie - intended to be an adventure story for
> Boy Scout aged, ah, boys; not a reasoned exposition on Malthusian
> theory. The Malthus stuff was just background arm waving to get the
> protag to Jupiter so Heinlein could discuss pioneering and ecology -
> don't forget his building the soil discussion, possibly the first
> ecology any of us 1950s teens ever heard.
Wondered how long it would be before someone stated the obvious.
I think a lot of the folks having trouble with are just that - too
young to remember
the times. RAH was, if anything, utterly opposed to anyone forcing
Communism
down his throat. But unlike most people in that time, he didn't
particular
care a rat's behind if China or Russia wanted to live as Communists.
That was *their* choice.
And the U.S. was so very much more wealthy and had such a vastly
higher standard
of living that either the U.S.S.R or China, that the dichotomies in
the story actually
do make sense - again, for the time.
If you don't remember being taught that the Chinese could line up a
million people per day
and march them into the Ocean, and STILL have a radical population
increase- well - you
won't understand emotionally the assumed background in the story.
By the way, the Chinese are downright draconian in population
control.
What RAH would have objected to is twofold:
First a government with that much power over the people under its
control
Second- whenever a society starts decreasing in numbers, that society
inevitably
stops growing (physically, economically, socially, financially, etc.)
and starts
declining.
Those facts are perhaps great news for those who believe that people
are nothing more than a planetary disease. However, there are those
who disagree with that sentiment. :)
-Paul
trag
> Broadly, what it shows is that total fertility rate and household size
> have trended downwards over the last couple of decades. At the same
> time, home ownership has trended upwards. There is, in fact, an inverse
> correlation between home ownership and birth rates in the 20th century.
>
> In summary, your supposition is incorrect.
Unless folks want to have children while living in houses. So they
buy the houses, find that it requires two incomes to own a house their
parents could have bought on one income, and so delay having children
until it is too late to have children or too late to have more than
one or two children.
Factor in much much higher property taxes as well. The tax rate is
higher than it was. The rate is based off of property valuation which
is also higher. Housing has been appreciating much faster than
inflation consistently for umpteen years, and yet, is not factored
into the inflation index for some reason. When our house is paid off,
we'll have a tax bill as large as the mortgage was every year.
I would like more children. The economic realities of the last couple
of decades mean it is not going to happen.
Despite what the government numbers say, our standard of living is
lower. We have to work longer and harder to own the same things as
our parents and we have a lot less free time in which to enjoy them.
I guess we have a few computers and DVD players are consolation
prizes.
In my mind the only universal "family value" is actually having time
to spend with your family. I find it interesting that the Republicans
who tend to tout family values also tend to support labor policies
which will reduce the amount of time workers have to spend with their
families.