Basic premise is an anarchist movement on alien planet got very powerful, and eventually struck a deal with the governments of the planet. Send us to the moon. We will eek out a life on the moon, removed from you and your economic system. The main planet is primarily capitalist, with one Soviet Union analog Nation. There's a balancing act between act, no one can admit the anarchists are successful, none of the anarchists can admit that the planet has a significantly higher standard of living. The MC is the first person to visit the planet in (iirc) a century. The moon is a desert, mostly barren, very hard life, but made bearable by their collectivist system and mutual aid, the planet is a paradise ecologically, and for the MC, made unbearable by their system.
Spoiler below. My spoiler tags don't work. Upside down text instead. Read on at your own risk, I'll keep the spoilers to a minimum/about the same level as the above:
¿llǝɥ uᴉ ǝᴉp noʎ uǝɥʍ oƃ noʎ op ǝɹǝɥM ˙ǝɹǝɥ ǝᴉp oʇ ʇuɐʍ ʇou op I ˙llǝɥ sᴉ sᴉɥ┴
For anyone interested it's also part of a larger sci fi universe that a lot of the author's other works take place in. Basically lots of humanoid species that have made their own societies and histories are all descended from the same forerunner species a la Halo lore.
I still haven't managed to get around to any of the others. I started rocannons world, I think it's called, but I didn't get far into it before life got in the way.
The Left Hand of Darkness. Takes place an inordinate amount of time after Dispossessed, but was written before it. Really cool exploration into gender in a complex androgynous society where a monarchist nation is in conflict with an authoritarian-communist nation, told from the perspective of a Terran (Earthling).
I purposefully made my example not function to demonstrate how it's constructed. If done without the quotation marks, and the ::: spoiler is on its own line, it should work and show up in your app.
::: spoiler Spoiler Test! (Click me)
Ultra sneaksies textings be here >.>
:::
Here's what it looks like before posting on my end:
Ahh, that explains it. Eternity was my preferred app as well, but the developer unfortunately abandoned it a year ago, and it hasn't received an update since, making it incompatible with newer versions of Lemmy.
You may want to switch to a different app that's actively developed. I personally switched to Summit since it has some of the best mod tools in an app, but there's a lot of other good ones too, like Blorp or Voyager.
Oh that blows! I didn't realize. I've been putting off looking into others, I really like this one. It's infinity equivalent was my preferred reddit app, too.
> peak population before the collapse was 9 billion
> we‘re on track to reach 9 billion in about 10 years
> we’re currently racing to hit reaching various climate tipping points
Tipping points are the new thing to argue about. Now that we've reached the 1.5 C limit that we kept saying we should avoid (used to be 1 C), we'll argue if each tipping point is really a tipping point, or maybe it's a rough area and we'll be okay if it goes over just a bit. It's amazing that we've known scientifically of the danger, from speculation in the 1800s of heating over centuries via all the coal being burned, to the 1950s documentaries how we might be doing damage to the environment, then more and more confirmation as we got better at seeing it, alarms in the 70s and 80s that we need to stop. We might be the stupidest species on the planet.
Most people have very little agency to change things, as even if they spend time and money they don't have on getting their personal impact to zero, and nearly everyone else does the same, it won't make much difference. There are a handful of people with so much money and influence that they could significantly change things, though, but who only care about further enriching themselves. It's only really that handful of people who are behaving stupidly. The majority of people did not actively decide to create a system that gives the most power to the kind of person with that specific personality trait.
A few rich assholes being extra stupid does not absolve anyone that could do better themselves but not doing it. The meat Industrie is one of the worst polluters and people eat fucking steak while waiting for regulation to fix it. Who will regulate something away that everyone does? Show some signals to the politics that you actually mean it
Steak? Maybe hamburger, if you can still afford that regularly. There are plenty of people who have stopped voluntarily for whatever reasons, others who have due to the cost. Not a fan of victim blaming for those who, as the person you replied to said, were born into this mess. Which is honestly most everyone, and few can dig themselves completely out.
But you are right about doing what you can. Everyone should try to change where they can. Most just have limits on that. Meanwhile the wealthy continue, not really caring what we do as those signals don't even get out of the noise. I can preach about doing the right things while also being apathetic about the results. Do it for yourself, not because it will change the world.
The Hainish cycle slaps so fuckin hard. God please don't ever let anyone ruin it by trying to adapt any of it to screen. I saw what the younger Miyazaki did to Earthsea.
Kim Stanley Robinson's visions of future liberatory society are great too, Le Guin was his friend and mentor and it shows, but he can't write character very well while she certainly could.
How utterly vain to measure the future of all life on this planet to the success of one shitty species. Do you think algae gives a shit if the planet warms by a few degrees? Do you think lichen is at risk of dying? Fungi? Bacteria? Fucking tardigrades?!
Man made climate change is fucking peanuts compared to a giant meteor hitting the planet, which has happened multiple times. Hell, we could set off every nuke ever produced and it would still be miniscule compared to a meteor impact. Life continued, life will continue. The world won't be grey, it will still be green.
We aren't even the dominate species on this planet. We like to think we are because we're "enlightened", but by nearly every conceivable metric, we are a footnote. We haven't been around that long, geologically speaking. Ants alone outnumber us 2.5 million to one. Our collective biomass, breeding cycles, and environmental resistance is pathetic compared to things like krill. And all that is still just in the Animalia kingdom. You start talking about plants and fungi, and humans are even more pathetic.
There are more trees on earth than there are stars in our galaxy. Let me repeat that, THERE ARE MORE TREES ON EARTH THAN THERE ARE STARS IN OUR GALAXY. Try to wrap your head around that. There are 3 TRILLION trees on this planet, and that's just trees! They aren't even the dominant plant species on land; grass takes that honor. And all the trees and grass and bushes and shrubs all bow to the great fungal mycelium network; the extents of which we are only just beginning to discover.
So no. We will not kill the planet. It's laughable to think we could. We can certainly make it uninhabitable for ourselves and take a lot of other species out with us, but life as a whole will continue without us.
Venus and earth are twins. Our planets contain roughly the same amount of Carbon. Life got a foothold here and converted a huge amount of CO2 into O2, so it could use the carbon. It accidentally stored a majority of the carbon in the earth (by making things that couldn't be eaten yet), where it can't return to the atmosphere.
The surface of Venus is 867°F. Mostly because of the runaway greenhouse effect due to all the CO2
The earth can very easily get to a temperature baseline where all complex life can no longer survive because of human made climate change. We're literally unpacking carbon that took dozens to hundreds of millions of years to store. You're peddling some new age "enlightened" version of the Gaia myth, that earth is a self-balancing system or spirit and the impact that humans can have is limited because the vengeful spirit will take revenge before we can cause real harm. That's complete bullshit, we can release a planet genociding level of carbon before the effects from said release could kill us.
You don't think Venus being 28% closer to the sun and having a miniscule magnetic field (less than 0.01% of Earth's) might be the bigger factors to consider when comparing the differences between their climates?
I think it has much more to do with having an atmosphere that is almost entirely a greenhouse gas, and having so much of it the surface pressure is 92 times higher than Earth's. Mercury is even closer than Venus but not as hot because it doesn't have a thick atmosphere to hold the energy.
I think (and I have no research to back this up, just gut feelings) that humans would destabilize themselves as the global temperature rises. It takes a Holocene to allow humanity to flourish this much. As we enter the Anthropocene humans will push the climate to the point that weather systems will destabilize, agriculture will not be able to produce enough food to support the current systems of governance, political instability and war will follow. There is a chance that total nuclear war will kill of most animal life and a lot of plant life. I don't think humanity will be able to sustain carbon output to the tipping point of runaway greenhouse effect, not because they can't, but because they're too unstable to maintain the output. The output only happens because there is enough political stability to allow it, and once the climate destabilizes enough, that stability would be gone.
Just a theory tho, yours might be right. Who knows? Not you. Gaia myth or not, the planet and life on it is remarkably resilient
Our discoveries and developments in mathematics, physics, philosophy, arts, etc.
I can't weigh these against the animal kingdom and not think we did something special as a species. I get that on a planetary scale we are but a mere blip, and all our discoveries will likely be rediscovered in some other form thousands of millenia later by a successor species.... but they also might not.
I have a hard time separating human contributions to our understanding of life and the universe, and the uniqueness of us on this planet. No other species has inflicted as much damage and suffering as we have.... and yet no other have reached the same heights as we have and may never not either
I just get upset when I see dystopian concepts that are like "The world turned to ash. All land was a vast desert, completely devoid of life." because that's just fucking absurd. Look, we are fucking up the planet for us and a lot of other species. We are capable of a lot of destruction and ruin. But we aren't even close to advanced enough to wipe out all life. Even if we were to bathe the planet in radiation, life adapts, life survives. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is a flourishing nature preserve; there is fungus growing next to the damn elephant foot!
Anyone that thinks humans can wipe out ALL life either thinks WAY too highly of us, or wrongly believes that human life is the only metric that matters and considers uninhabitable for humans to mean uninhabitable for everything.
Yes we are changing the climate, but change doesn't inherently mean bad. It's certainly bad for us, but the planet doesn't care about us. Some places will turn into a desert, but some deserts are going to turn into grasslands and forests. Nobody talks about that part. The water cycle is not going to stop, it's just going to change where it goes. And it's only bad for us because we can't easily move our infrastructure and quickly adapt. You can't just up and move a whole city because the water ran out.
37 replies
Fiction. There is no help coming.
fuuuck what book is this again?
The dispossessed.
Genuinely incredibly read.
Basic premise is an anarchist movement on alien planet got very powerful, and eventually struck a deal with the governments of the planet. Send us to the moon. We will eek out a life on the moon, removed from you and your economic system. The main planet is primarily capitalist, with one Soviet Union analog Nation. There's a balancing act between act, no one can admit the anarchists are successful, none of the anarchists can admit that the planet has a significantly higher standard of living. The MC is the first person to visit the planet in (iirc) a century. The moon is a desert, mostly barren, very hard life, but made bearable by their collectivist system and mutual aid, the planet is a paradise ecologically, and for the MC, made unbearable by their system.
Spoiler below. My spoiler tags don't work. Upside down text instead. Read on at your own risk, I'll keep the spoilers to a minimum/about the same level as the above:
¿llǝɥ uᴉ ǝᴉp noʎ uǝɥʍ oƃ noʎ op ǝɹǝɥM ˙ǝɹǝɥ ǝᴉp oʇ ʇuɐʍ ʇou op I ˙llǝɥ sᴉ sᴉɥ┴
:pɐǝɹ ɹǝʌǝ ǝʌ,I sǝuᴉl lnɟɹǝʍod ʇsoɯ ǝɥʇ ɟo ǝuo sɹǝʌᴉlǝp pu∀ ˙llǝɥ sᴉ ʇǝuɐld sᴉɥʇ ʇɐɥʇ ɹǝɥ sllǝʇ puɐ 'uo ƃuᴉoƃ s,ʇɐɥʍ oʇ sɐ ɹopɐssɐqɯɐ ǝɥʇ oʇ ɥɔǝǝds sᴉɥ sǝʌᴉƃ ǝH ˙spuɐɥ (ʇsᴉlɐʇᴉdɐɔ) ƃuoɹʍ ǝɥʇ oʇuᴉ llɐɟ oʇ ɥɔɹɐǝsǝɹ ɔᴉɟᴉʇuǝᴉɔs sᴉɥ ɹoɟ puɐ 'ǝɟᴉl sᴉɥ ɹoɟ pᴉɐɹɟɐ sᴉ ǝɥ 'oʇuᴉ ʇǝƃ ʇ,uoʍ I suosɐǝɹ ʎɹǝlᴉods ʎɹǝʌ ɹoℲ ˙ʎssɐqɯǝ uɐɹɹǝʇ/ɥʇɹɐǝ ǝɥʇ uᴉ ɯnlʎsɐ ƃuᴉɯᴉɐlɔ ʎlǝʌᴉʇɔǝɟɟǝ ɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ uᴉɐɯ ǝɥʇ sɐɥ sᴉɥʇ ǝɹoɟǝq ʇsnɾ ʇᴉq ǝɥʇ
For anyone interested it's also part of a larger sci fi universe that a lot of the author's other works take place in. Basically lots of humanoid species that have made their own societies and histories are all descended from the same forerunner species a la Halo lore.
I still haven't managed to get around to any of the others. I started rocannons world, I think it's called, but I didn't get far into it before life got in the way.
Which do you suggest to go with next?
The Left Hand of Darkness. Takes place an inordinate amount of time after Dispossessed, but was written before it. Really cool exploration into gender in a complex androgynous society where a monarchist nation is in conflict with an authoritarian-communist nation, told from the perspective of a Terran (Earthling).
Alright, that's next on my list!
To do a spoiler tag write "::: spoiler This Is My Spoiler Title" on its own line (don't include the quotation marks)
Then put the text you want to hide below it, separated by white space (enter key pressed twice).
Then end the spoiler with another 3 colons, again separated by white space.
:::
And it should work :)
For some reason, the spoiler tags just don't work on my end. Either the normal colon based ones, or the >! Style. I don't know why.
I purposefully made my example not function to demonstrate how it's constructed. If done without the quotation marks, and the ::: spoiler is on its own line, it should work and show up in your app.
::: spoiler Spoiler Test! (Click me)
Ultra sneaksies textings be here >.>
:::
Here's what it looks like before posting on my end:
Second verse, same as the first. I use eternity, and the spoilers just straight up don't work for me :/
Ahh, that explains it. Eternity was my preferred app as well, but the developer unfortunately abandoned it a year ago, and it hasn't received an update since, making it incompatible with newer versions of Lemmy.
You may want to switch to a different app that's actively developed. I personally switched to Summit since it has some of the best mod tools in an app, but there's a lot of other good ones too, like Blorp or Voyager.
Oh that blows! I didn't realize. I've been putting off looking into others, I really like this one. It's infinity equivalent was my preferred reddit app, too.
You can read it here: The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
> peak population before the collapse was 9 billion
> we‘re on track to reach 9 billion in about 10 years
> we’re currently racing to hit reaching various climate tipping points
we’re fucked aren’t we
Tipping points are the new thing to argue about. Now that we've reached the 1.5 C limit that we kept saying we should avoid (used to be 1 C), we'll argue if each tipping point is really a tipping point, or maybe it's a rough area and we'll be okay if it goes over just a bit. It's amazing that we've known scientifically of the danger, from speculation in the 1800s of heating over centuries via all the coal being burned, to the 1950s documentaries how we might be doing damage to the environment, then more and more confirmation as we got better at seeing it, alarms in the 70s and 80s that we need to stop. We might be the stupidest species on the planet.
Most people have very little agency to change things, as even if they spend time and money they don't have on getting their personal impact to zero, and nearly everyone else does the same, it won't make much difference. There are a handful of people with so much money and influence that they could significantly change things, though, but who only care about further enriching themselves. It's only really that handful of people who are behaving stupidly. The majority of people did not actively decide to create a system that gives the most power to the kind of person with that specific personality trait.
A few rich assholes being extra stupid does not absolve anyone that could do better themselves but not doing it. The meat Industrie is one of the worst polluters and people eat fucking steak while waiting for regulation to fix it. Who will regulate something away that everyone does? Show some signals to the politics that you actually mean it
Steak? Maybe hamburger, if you can still afford that regularly. There are plenty of people who have stopped voluntarily for whatever reasons, others who have due to the cost. Not a fan of victim blaming for those who, as the person you replied to said, were born into this mess. Which is honestly most everyone, and few can dig themselves completely out.
But you are right about doing what you can. Everyone should try to change where they can. Most just have limits on that. Meanwhile the wealthy continue, not really caring what we do as those signals don't even get out of the noise. I can preach about doing the right things while also being apathetic about the results. Do it for yourself, not because it will change the world.
Yes we are
Such a great book, one of my favorites
I've been meaning to re-read it. I wish more science fiction could match it.
pEOpLe PrOdUCe mORe ReSoUrCeS tHaN theY conSuMe- dumb fucks who think those resources are infinite and producing them has no other costs
Native Americans produced more than they consumed, they manicured the forests around them to make themselves and the ecosystem thrive.
Then the British came..
You go write a better novel and deal with all the business of negotiating a publishing deal and make it onto a critical, well known success then
I feel you might have misinterpreted their post? I think they were reinforcing Le Guin's point.
The Hainish cycle slaps so fuckin hard. God please don't ever let anyone ruin it by trying to adapt any of it to screen. I saw what the younger Miyazaki did to Earthsea.
Kim Stanley Robinson's visions of future liberatory society are great too, Le Guin was his friend and mentor and it shows, but he can't write character very well while she certainly could.
The dispossessed is great probably my favorite book actually can't recommend it more.
I love ursulas writing
We're fucked yes, the planet is not.
How utterly vain to measure the future of all life on this planet to the success of one shitty species. Do you think algae gives a shit if the planet warms by a few degrees? Do you think lichen is at risk of dying? Fungi? Bacteria? Fucking tardigrades?!
Man made climate change is fucking peanuts compared to a giant meteor hitting the planet, which has happened multiple times. Hell, we could set off every nuke ever produced and it would still be miniscule compared to a meteor impact. Life continued, life will continue. The world won't be grey, it will still be green.
We aren't even the dominate species on this planet. We like to think we are because we're "enlightened", but by nearly every conceivable metric, we are a footnote. We haven't been around that long, geologically speaking. Ants alone outnumber us 2.5 million to one. Our collective biomass, breeding cycles, and environmental resistance is pathetic compared to things like krill. And all that is still just in the Animalia kingdom. You start talking about plants and fungi, and humans are even more pathetic.
There are more trees on earth than there are stars in our galaxy. Let me repeat that, THERE ARE MORE TREES ON EARTH THAN THERE ARE STARS IN OUR GALAXY. Try to wrap your head around that. There are 3 TRILLION trees on this planet, and that's just trees! They aren't even the dominant plant species on land; grass takes that honor. And all the trees and grass and bushes and shrubs all bow to the great fungal mycelium network; the extents of which we are only just beginning to discover.
So no. We will not kill the planet. It's laughable to think we could. We can certainly make it uninhabitable for ourselves and take a lot of other species out with us, but life as a whole will continue without us.
Venus and earth are twins. Our planets contain roughly the same amount of Carbon. Life got a foothold here and converted a huge amount of CO2 into O2, so it could use the carbon. It accidentally stored a majority of the carbon in the earth (by making things that couldn't be eaten yet), where it can't return to the atmosphere.
The surface of Venus is 867°F. Mostly because of the runaway greenhouse effect due to all the CO2
The earth can very easily get to a temperature baseline where all complex life can no longer survive because of human made climate change. We're literally unpacking carbon that took dozens to hundreds of millions of years to store. You're peddling some new age "enlightened" version of the Gaia myth, that earth is a self-balancing system or spirit and the impact that humans can have is limited because the vengeful spirit will take revenge before we can cause real harm. That's complete bullshit, we can release a planet genociding level of carbon before the effects from said release could kill us.
You don't think Venus being 28% closer to the sun and having a miniscule magnetic field (less than 0.01% of Earth's) might be the bigger factors to consider when comparing the differences between their climates?
I think it has much more to do with having an atmosphere that is almost entirely a greenhouse gas, and having so much of it the surface pressure is 92 times higher than Earth's. Mercury is even closer than Venus but not as hot because it doesn't have a thick atmosphere to hold the energy.
I think (and I have no research to back this up, just gut feelings) that humans would destabilize themselves as the global temperature rises. It takes a Holocene to allow humanity to flourish this much. As we enter the Anthropocene humans will push the climate to the point that weather systems will destabilize, agriculture will not be able to produce enough food to support the current systems of governance, political instability and war will follow. There is a chance that total nuclear war will kill of most animal life and a lot of plant life. I don't think humanity will be able to sustain carbon output to the tipping point of runaway greenhouse effect, not because they can't, but because they're too unstable to maintain the output. The output only happens because there is enough political stability to allow it, and once the climate destabilizes enough, that stability would be gone.
Just a theory tho, yours might be right. Who knows? Not you. Gaia myth or not, the planet and life on it is remarkably resilient
Our discoveries and developments in mathematics, physics, philosophy, arts, etc.
I can't weigh these against the animal kingdom and not think we did something special as a species. I get that on a planetary scale we are but a mere blip, and all our discoveries will likely be rediscovered in some other form thousands of millenia later by a successor species.... but they also might not.
I have a hard time separating human contributions to our understanding of life and the universe, and the uniqueness of us on this planet. No other species has inflicted as much damage and suffering as we have.... and yet no other have reached the same heights as we have and may never not either
I just get upset when I see dystopian concepts that are like "The world turned to ash. All land was a vast desert, completely devoid of life." because that's just fucking absurd. Look, we are fucking up the planet for us and a lot of other species. We are capable of a lot of destruction and ruin. But we aren't even close to advanced enough to wipe out all life. Even if we were to bathe the planet in radiation, life adapts, life survives. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is a flourishing nature preserve; there is fungus growing next to the damn elephant foot!
Anyone that thinks humans can wipe out ALL life either thinks WAY too highly of us, or wrongly believes that human life is the only metric that matters and considers uninhabitable for humans to mean uninhabitable for everything.
Yes we are changing the climate, but change doesn't inherently mean bad. It's certainly bad for us, but the planet doesn't care about us. Some places will turn into a desert, but some deserts are going to turn into grasslands and forests. Nobody talks about that part. The water cycle is not going to stop, it's just going to change where it goes. And it's only bad for us because we can't easily move our infrastructure and quickly adapt. You can't just up and move a whole city because the water ran out.