Re: How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse

[Mirimir <mirimir AT riseup.net>]

On 07/27/2018 06:04 AM, John Newman wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 10:58:31PM -0400, Steve Kinney wrote:

<SNIP>

>> I like Douglas Rushkoff, or his work at least:  I make a point of
>> reading everything of his I can get my hands on.  He seems to have
>> mastered the art of presenting information in a context that never quite
>> crosses the line to offend Liberal and Oligarch sensibilities, but the
>> data itself tends to convey an inherently radical message to anyone with
>> more than half a brain & clue.  He has often been been the first to
>> bring the most useful and interesting "new stuff" to (nearly) mass
>> market audiences.  Students of propaganda should not miss the Rushkoff
>> canon.
> 
> I think Kurzweil and most of the other "futurists" out there are
> really just shity wannabe sci-fi writers. Cory Doctorow excluded
> perhaps, he can actually write at least, and hasn't staked his name
> and career on predictions of some sort of technological ex machina
> that will save humanity from its own over-indulgence and inability
> to think in the long term.

Cory Doctorow is cool, and all, but his fiction is ~lame. I like the
ideology pretty much, but the writing just doesn't grab me. But then,
I'm rather into action porn, so hey.

Anyway, I'm reminded of Old Bill Burroughs' stuff about the rich
planning to escape Earth on nuclear-pulse-driven ships. He didn't flesh
it out, but it basically involved planetary-scale destruction.

Now of course, the g-forces involved would have killed everyone in the
ships. But consider Vinge's ships, combining bobble tech with nuclear
pulse propulsion. Bobbles, for those who don't know Vinge's stuff, are
spherical stasis fields. Inside the bobble, time stops for some set
external time. So from the outside, bobbles are perfect spherical
mirrors. To everything, including acceleration. And you can have a
complex structure, with configurations of bobbles nested within bobbles.
So basically, the ship periodically drops a nuclear device, bobbles and
rides the shock wave, and then de-bobbles and repeats. And there's no
limit to the size of the nuclear devices. Could be the entire planet :(