Peter Watts Is an Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays

by Peter Watts

  What’s that you say? Too difficult? Can’t switch to an oil-free economy overnight? Okay, here’s something that’s effective, simple, and as convenient as a visit to the nearest outpatient clinic: stop breeding. Every child you squeeze out is a Godzilla-sized carbon bootprint stretching into the future—and after all, isn’t 7.6 billion of us enough? Are your genes really that special? If even half the men on the planet got vasectomies, I bet we could buy ourselves a century—and as an added bonus, child-free people not only tend to have higher disposable income than the sprogged, they’re also statistically happier.

  Sadly, though, far too many people think their genes really are that special. It’s not impossible to override our genetic imperatives—hell, I got a vasectomy on a dare when I was thirty, and have never regretted it for a moment—but too many regard the Free Breed as some kind of inalienable Human right.

  So the next time you read some finger-wagging diatribe about how it’s science fiction’s job to offer solutions, keep in mind: we already have solutions in abundance. What these people are really demanding is that we give them easy solutions, soft solutions, solutions that save the planet without requiring them to sacrifice anything. The kind of “solutions” demanded by spoiled children who’ve never troubled themselves with imagining necessary sacrifice, and who don’t want to start now.

  In fact, I would argue that there’s a fundamental weakness in the very idea that technological solutions—SF-inspired or otherwise—will ever get us out of the hole we continue to dig for ourselves. That weakness was first codified, ironically enough, in the coal-burning factories of the 19th Century. An economist named William Stanley Jevons observed that as the efficiency of coal-fueled machinery increased, less coal was needed to do the same amount of work—and yet coal consumption did not decline, but skyrocketed. Turns out that when something gets cheaper, or more efficient, we just end up using so much more of the stuff that the savings disappear under a wave of increased consumption.

  They call it the “Jevons Paradox”, and it applies to pretty much any human resource. Halve the price of computer memory, we’ll increase demand by a factor of four. Increase solar efficiency by ten times, we’ll suck back twenty times as much of the stuff. And you just know that if we resort to geoengineering to buy time—use stratospheric sulfates to compensate for ongoing carbon emissions, for example—people will just be that much less inclined to cut those emissions any time soon. We are not wired for restraint; let us off the leash, and we will devour whatever is available.

  New technology is unlikely to fix the problem, because the problem is not technological. The problem is Human Nature, and the only technology that can fix that is genetic. If we can figure out some way to rewire Human Nature, right down in the brain stem, we might yet have a chance.

  There you go. Yet another solution for the Happy Enders, if they’re serious about wanting them.

  Perhaps we can save Human civilization if we stop being Human.

  The Cylon Solution

  Nowa Fantastyka Oct 2013

  Ten years ago I attended a talk by David Brin, at Worldcon. Brin had blurbed my novel Starfish; to say I was favorably disposed towards the man would be an understatement. And yet I found myself increasingly skeptical as he spoke out in favor of ubiquitous surveillance: the “Transparent Society,” he called it, and It Was Good. The camera would point both ways, cops and politicians just as subject to our scrutiny as we were to theirs. People are primates, Brin reminded us; our leaders are Alphas. Trying to ban government surveillance would be like poking a silverback gorilla with a stick. “But just maybe,” he allowed, “they’ll let us look back.”

  Dude, thought I, do you have the first fucking clue how silverbacks react to eye contact?

  It wasn’t just a bad analogy. It wasn’t analogy at all; it was literal, and it was wrong. Alpha primates regard looking back as a challenge, a threat. Anyone who’s been beaten up for recording video of police beating people up knows this; anyone whose cellphone has been smashed, or returned with the SIM card mysteriously erased. Document animal abuse in any of the US states with so-called “Ag-gag” laws on their books and you’re not only breaking the law, you’re a “domestic terrorist.”

  Chelsea Manning looked back; she’ll be in jail for decades. Edward Snowden looked back and has been running ever since. All he did to put that target on his back was confirm something most of us have suspected for years: those silverbacks are recording every move we make online.

  Look back? Don’t make me laugh.

  Can we stop them from watching us, at least? Keep our private data at home, stay away from LinkedIn or Facebook, keep your vital data local and offline?

  Sure. Of course, you may have to kiss ebooks goodbye. Amazon reserves the right to reach down into your Kindle and wipe it clean any time it feels the urge (they did it a few years back—to Orwell’s 1984, ironically). You’ll have to do without graphics and multimedia and word processing, too: both Adobe and Microsoft are phasing out local software in favor of cloud-based “subscription” models. Even the American Association for the Advancement of Science—an organization that really should know better—has recently switched to a “browser-based” journal feed that can’t be accessed offline. We used to own our books, our magazines, the games we played. Now we can only rent them.

  So it’s your choice: stay offline, where you’re deaf dumb and blind. Go online, where you’re naked. Nobody pretends that the cloud is even close to secure; I’ve lost track of the articles I’ve read lamenting the porous vulnerability of the web, only to turn around and say Of course we’re not going to retreat from the cloud—we live there now. It’s as though those charged with warning us of the dangers we face have also been charged with convincing us there’s nothing we can do about it, so we might as well give up and let the NSA into our bathrooms. (Or even worse, embrace the cameras. Have you seen that Coca-Cola ad cobbled together from bits of security camera footage? A dozen “private” moments between people with no idea they’re on camera, served up to sell fizzy sugar-water as though our hearts should be warmed by displays of universal surveillance. Orwell—brought to you by Hallmark.)

  Why aren’t we retreating from the cloud, exactly?

  Remember the premise of Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica: that the only way to win against high-tech opponents is to go retro, revert to a time when no computer was networked, when you ran starships by pulling levers and cranking valves. It was an exquisite narrative rationale for the anachronistic vibe endemic to everything from Alien to Firefly to Star Wars, that peeling-paint aesthetic that resonates in the gut even though it made no real sense until Moore gave it context.

  Now it’s more than that. Now it’s a strategy. Because now we know that the NSA has back doors installed into every edition of Windows from XP on up—but not into dusty old Win-95. And while giving up online access entirely is a bridge too far for most of us, there’s no reason we can’t keep our most private stuff on a standalone machine without network access.

  Bruce Schneier1 points out that if the spooks want you badly enough, they’ll get you. Even if you stay off the net entirely, they can always sit in a van down the street and read your lips with a laser through your bedroom window. But that would be too much bother for all but the most high-value targets. They’ll scoop up everything on all of us if it’s cheap and easy to do so; that’s why the internet is every spook’s best friend. But it takes time and effort to install a keystroke logger on someone’s home machine; even more to infect the thumb drive that might get plugged into a non-networked device somewhere down the line. Most of us are welcome to keep whatever privacy can’t be stripped away with a whisper and a search algorithm.

  That’s hardly an ethical stance, though. It’s pure cost/benefit. Wouldn’t it be nice for them if it wasn’t so hard to scoop up everything, if there were no TOR or PGP encryption or—hey, while we’re at it, wouldn’t it be nice if all data storage was cloud-based? The world’s moving in that
direction anyway, but wouldn’t it be nice if they could speed things up, weed out the luddites and malcontents who refused to face reality and get with the program?

  When I explain to someone why I’m not on Twitter, they look at me like I’m some old fart yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn. These days, refusal to join social networks2 is regarded as quaint and old-fashioned. Before too long, though, it might change from merely curmudgeonly to gauche; later still, from gauche to downright suspicious. What’s that guy afraid of, anyway? Why would he be so worried if he didn’t have something to hide?

  We all know the only people who go on about privacy issues are the ones who are up to no good . . .

  1 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-remain-secure-surveillance

  2 Yes, I’m on Facebook. I wouldn’t be, if I could monitor it without having to join the damn thing. Suffice to say it’s an unavoidable part of the whole being-a-writer thing.

  The Physics of Hope.

  Blog June 28 2016

  I never liked physics much.

  I’m not just talking about the math. I don’t like what modern physics tells us: that time is an illusion, for one thing. That we live in a reality where everything that ever was, and ever will be, always is: static timelines embedded in a “block universe” like threads in amber. I may remember scratching my head before writing this sentence, but that’s just one frozen slice of me with a bunch of frozen memories. An instant further along is another slice at t+1, with memories incrementally more advanced, and because it remembers the past it believes that it is moving through time. But in reality—seen from some higher-dimensioned overhead perspective—we exist on a tabletop where nothing changes, nothing moves, nothing goes away.

  I hate that vision. My gut rebels at the grim counterintuitive determinism of it. But I’m no physicist, and we all know how misleading gut feelings can be. I don’t like it, but what do I know? I know nothing.

  You can’t say that about Lee Smolin. Eminent theoretical physicist, co-founder of the world-renowned Perimeter Institute, author of the 2013 book Time Reborn. I’ve just read it. It gives me hope. It says my gut was right all along. We do exist from one moment to the next. This flow we perceive is no illusion. Time is real.

  It’s space that’s bullshit.

  Imagine the universe as a lattice of nodes; the only way to get from one place to another is to hop along the nodes between, like stepping-stones in a stream. The more dimensions the lattice has, the shorter the number of hops required to get between two points: Smolin invokes the analogy of a cell-phone network, which puts you just one step away from billions of “nearest neighbors.”

  It takes energy to keep those higher dimensions active, though. In the early, hot universe—right after the Big Bang—there was energy to spare; dimensions were abundant and everything was one cell-phone-hop away from everything else. “Space” didn’t really exist back then. As the universe cooled, those higher dimensions collapsed; the cell network shut down, flattening reality into a low-energy mode where only those few locations adjacent in three dimensions could be considered “nearest”. Now, to get anywhere else, you have to hop myriad low-dimensional nodes. You have to cross “space.”

  The point is, space is not a fundamental property of reality; it only emerged in the wake of that energy-starved collapse. This is the story Smolin is selling: There is no time-space continuum. There is only time.

  Physics is wrong.

  According to Time Reborn, physics went astray at two points. The first was when it started confusing maps with the territories they described. Most physics equations are time-symmetric; they work as well backwards as forwards. They are timeless, these rules that do such a good job of describing our observations of reality; so, physicists thought, maybe reality is timeless too. When we first started drawing graphs of motion and mass on paper—each moment a fixed point along some static axis—we were being lulled into a block-universe mindset.

  Smolin describes the second wrong turn as “the Cosmological Fallacy”: an unwarranted extrapolation of the local to the universal. Physics studies systems in isolation; you’re not going to factor in the gravitational influences of the Virgo Supercluster when you’re calculating the trajectory of a bowling ball down the local lane, for example. You ignore trivial variables, you impose boundaries by necessity. You put physics in a box and leave certain universals—the laws of nature, for example—outside. Those laws reach into the box and work their magic, but you don’t have to explain them; they just are.

  Physics works really well in boxes. The problem arises when you extrapolate those boxy insights to the whole universe. There is no “outside” when you’re talking about all of existence, no other realm from which the timeless laws of nature can reach in and do their thing. Suddenly you’ve got to explain all that stuff that could be taken as axiomatic before. So you start fiddling around with branes and superstrings; you invoke an infinite number of parallel universes to increase the statistical odds that some of them would turn out the way ours did. If Smolin’s right, a lot of modern physics is an attempt to reimpose an outside on a universe that doesn’t have one. And because we’re trying to apply locally-derived insights onto a totality where they don’t apply, our models break.

  Smolin’s alternative sits so much easier in the gut—and, at the same time, seems even more radical. Everything affects everything else, he says; and that includes the laws of physics themselves. They are not timeless or immutable: they are affected by the rest of the universe, just as the universe is affected by them.

  They evolve, he says, over time.

  Everyone agrees that reality was in flux during the first moments after the Big Bang: universal laws and constants could have taken entirely different values than they did when the universe finally congealed into its present configuration. The strong and weak nuclear forces could have taken different values; the Gravitational Constant could have turned out negative instead of positive. Smolin suggests natural laws are still not set in stone, even now; rather, they result from a sort of ongoing plebiscite. How the universe reacts to X+Y comes down to a roll of the dice, weighted by past experience. Correlations, initially random, strengthen over time; if X+Y rolled mostly snake-eyes in the past it’ll be increasingly likely to do so in the future.

  Now we’re 15 billion years into the game. Those precedents have grown so weighty, the correlations so strong, that we mistake them for laws; when we see X+Y, we never observe any result but Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, transmuting a missile into a sperm whale or a bowl of petunias.)

  So much becomes possible, if this is true. Smolin’s concept of “Cosmological Natural Selection” for one, in which Darwinian processes apply to the universe at large—in which black holes, egg-like, spawn whole new realities, each governed by a different physics (those which maximize black-hole production outcompete those which don’t). Another mind-blowing implication is that if the universe were to encounter some combination of quantum events that had never happened before, it wouldn’t know what to do: it would have to roll the dice without any precedent weighting the outcome. (Something to keep in mind, now that we’re starting to play around with quantum computing in a big way.)

  We may even find our way to ftl, if I’m reading this right. After all, the lightspeed limit only applies to our impoverished four-dimensional spacetime. If you pumped up the energy in a given volume enough to reactivate all those dormant cell-phone dimensions, wouldn’t space just collapse again? Wouldn’t every node suddenly get closer to every other?

  Of course, all this hypothesizing leaves open the question of how the universe “remembers” what has gone before, and how it “guesses” what to do next. But is that any less absurd than a universe in which a cat is both dead and alive until something looks at it? A universe governed by timeless laws so astronomically unlikely that you have to invoke an infinite number of undetectable parallel universes just to boost the odds in your favor?


  At least Smolin’s theory is testable, which makes it more scientific than this multiverse that everyone else seems so invested in. Smolin and his allies seek to do to Einstein what Einstein did to Newton: expose the current model as a local approximation, good enough for most purposes but not truly descriptive of the deeper reality.

  And yet I’m not entirely convinced. Even with my poor grasp of physics (or more likely, because of it), aspects of this new worldview seem a bit off to me. Smolin openly derides multiverse models—but where then do the black-hole-spawned “baby universes” of Cosmological Selection end up? And while I can easily imagine two points, three nodes apart, on a 2D lattice, I don’t see how adding a third dimension brings them any closer together (although it certainly opens up access to a whole bunch of new nodes). Also, if the laws of nature are affected by the objects and processes they affect in turn, wouldn’t that feedback follow certain rules? Wouldn’t those rules bring determinism back into play, albeit with a couple of extra complications thrown in?

  These are most likely native criticisms. Doubtless Smolin could answer them easily; I’m probably just pushing his metaphors beyond their load-bearing limits. But perhaps the most important reason that I’m not convinced is because I so very dearly want to be. Current physics leaves no room for free will, no room even for the passage of time. Every moment we experience, every decision we think we make, is a lie. It’s not just that nothing happens the way we perceive it; in the block universe nothing happens, period.