The Transhuman Comedy

This week's entry in the series is based on "The Scout," by Colin Swift, cover #536 on this page.

Lini halted her steed and drank from her water tube. Four Archeaopteryx wheeled overhead, but obviously in a courtship flight. They hadn't found the missing pilgrim. A wasted hour in the midday rays of Beta Comae Berenices. Ride around Swift Hill and then back to the settlement--

Cols lifted its sleek blue head and peered beady-eyed to the right. Its nostrils snuffled the air and it made a caw-caw-caw-cawwwk sound deep in its throat.

Lini turned her head. "Boy, what do you see?" Her gaze roved the hard packed sand with colors swirled like a marble cake. Her gray plastic baroquehelmet swept a magnetic field through her occipital lobe and subtracted out the heat shimmer. A rippling black shape lay eight hundred meters away on the next slope and she realized the black ripple was the pilgrim's robe in the breeze. The pilgrim lay motionless, face up, on a stratum of sand red-brown like dried blood.

Labels: SCI FI Weekly gallery images, Sf

One thing I do most Mondays is check Sci Fi Weekly and, as a form of Sf-writing calisthenics, write a few paragraphs inspired by the week's Featured Artist image. 2007's images are archived here. The image for this week's edition (#535, 23 July 2007) is "Battlehorse Scylla" by Kevin M. Rooke:

Kevem brought the Scylla around for final descent. While his augmented muscle memory brought her down his gaze wandered to the monitors' view of Io. God knows why anyone would want to live on this motherless Irishman of a world. Sure the view of Jupiter was breathtaking, poised as it was over the hills north of the settlement, and the atmo machines spat out enough oxygen to form thin cirrus clouds and dye indigo the black zenith. The landscape's colors, a palette of yellows, oranges, and reds, looked like no other place in the solar system.

Then the Scylla touched and the engines ratcheted down. Silence descended, save for the ping of gammas picked up by the outside radiation detectors. Kevem squeezed into the rad suit and slid the compressor mask over his face. The straps tightened themselves over his ears.

Time to cycle the airlock. The outer hatch opened and Kevem winced. The mask never fully cut the stench. All the sulfur-reducing bacteria and metal sulfide ovens couldn't keep Io from stinking of marsh gas and putrid farts. Hurry up, get paid, get the local stevedores to offload the cargo, toss back some drinks and a doxy (and pay extra to make sure both were filtered of sulfur), then haul ass.

Labels: SCI FI Weekly gallery images, Sf

Reason's hit and run blog recently posted about National Review conservatives' phobia of Muslim birthrates. (Don't worry, I have far better things to do than read the New Republic or National Review). You've read the sound bites, e.g., Mark Steyn's "the future belongs to those who show up," deployed like infantry squares against the cavalry charges of political correctness, Muslim terrorism, and Mexican illegal immigration.

Relax--the "demography is destiny" people are out to lunch. Here's why.

1. Global birth rates are dropping. Let me repeat that for people who haven't realized Paul Ehrlich has been full of shit for decades. Global birth rates are dropping. The United Nations Population Division (that's right, the UN, America's third oldest enemy behind France and the Mahometans of the Barbary Coast) predicts global population to be from about 7-10 billion in 2050, with a median estimate of 9 billion for 2070 and beyond. The fertility rate (number of children born per woman) is below 2.5 and dropping in Mexico (2.39) and below 2.1, the steady-state level, in both China (1.75) and Iran (1.71)!

2. "Demography is destiny" is the desiccated husk of a metaphor from the dying industrial age. Once upon a time economic and military might emerged from the assembly line and conscription, but even then, the ability to manipulate information was a force multiplier--consider how its bureaucracy and school system gave Prussia under Frederick the Great (pop. 5-10 million) an army superior to that of vastly more populous, but poorer and less centralized, Russia.

But now, both wealth and the ability to convert it to military advantage are a matter of knowledge and communication, and not the bashing of bulk materials or the bludgeoning of conscripts. As I've told Curtis, one bullet in the right place at the right moment can do more to achieve victory than a million bullets fired blindly. (This photo served North Vietnam better than anything the NVA did in combat). The US victories against the Iraqi Army in 1991 and 2003 were won by superior knowledge, to which our fancy firepower was a servant. The US stalemate in Iraq from 2003-2007, conversely, emerged from inferior knowledge, specifically our failures to understand Iraqi language, culture, and social networks.

Not to encourage complacency--the US's position as the world's sole superpower isn't ordained by God--but let's be serious for a moment. Would the Caliphate Navy and Air Force be able to achieve enough air/sea superiority to land an invasion force on US soil? Would the Fuerza Occupada de Aztlan be able to suppress an anglo insurrection in Texas and California? China, India, and Europe look to be the only states capable of competing with the US in the information age. Hmm, someone should blog about that....

Labels: 5GW, Eight Futures, global population, information age