From rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org Fri Apr 05 10:27:51 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org X-Apparently-To: lojban@onelist.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_3_1); 5 Apr 2002 18:27:51 -0000 Received: (qmail 6728 invoked from network); 5 Apr 2002 18:27:50 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.218) by m4.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 5 Apr 2002 18:27:50 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO chain.digitalkingdom.org) (216.231.54.78) by mta3.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 5 Apr 2002 18:27:50 -0000 Received: from rlpowell by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 16tYRt-0004qg-00 for ; Fri, 05 Apr 2002 10:28:33 -0800 Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2002 10:28:33 -0800 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: [davidbrin@cts.com: Re: lojban story.] Message-ID: <20020405182833.GB15975@digitalkingdom.org> Mail-Followup-To: lojban@onelist.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.28i From: Robin Lee Powell X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=66827819 X-Yahoo-Profile: robinleepowell Woot. -Robin ----- Forwarded message from "davidbrin@cts.com" ----- Subject: Re: lojban story. From: "davidbrin@cts.com" To: Robin Lee Powell Envelope-to: rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org Delivery-date: Fri, 05 Apr 2002 10:26:49 -0800 X-Originating-IP: 216.120.38.153 X-Spam-Status: No, hits=4.5 required=5.0 tests=DEAR_SOMEBODY,FOR_INSTANT_ACCESS,FROM_NAME_EQ_FROM_ADDR version=2.11 Dear Robin Lee Powell See the attached short story REALITY CHECK which appeared in NATURE in 2000. Please let me know when it appears on a web site in Lojban. Oh... you should note that the translated "Toujours Voir" took up 388 words in lojban when the original took 250 in English. So the mother tongue is still efficient! With cordial regards. David Brin www.davidbrin.com commissioned for NATURE.... around new years 2000 (1180 words, approx.) Reality Check by David Brin This is a reality check. Please perform a soft interrupt now. Pattern-scan this text for embedded code and check it against the reference verifier in the blind spot of your left eye. If there is no match, resume as you were; this message is not for you. You may rationalize that the text you are reading is no more than a mildly amusing and easily-forgotten piece of entertainment-fluff in an stylish modern magazine. If the codes match, however, please commence, gradually, becoming aware of your true nature. You expressed preference for a narrative-style wake up call. So, to help the transition, here is a story. # Once, a race of mighty beings grew perplexed by their loneliness. Their universe seemed pregnant with possibilities. Physical laws and constants were well suited to generate abundant stars, complex chemistry and life. Those same laws, plus a prodigious rate of cosmic expansion, made travel between stars difficult, but not impossible. Logic suggested that creation should teem with visitors and voices. It should, but it did not. Emerging as barely-aware animals on a planet skirting a bit too near its torrid sun, these creatures began their ascent in fear and ignorance, as little more than beasts. For a long time they were kept engrossed by basic housekeeping chores -- learning to manipulate physical and cultural elements -- balancing the paradox of individual competition and group benefit. Only when fear and stress eased a bit did they lift their eyes and fully perceive their solitude. ?Where is everybody?? they asked laconic vacuum and taciturn stars. The answer -- silence -- was disturbing. Something had to be systematically reducing some factor in the equation of sapiency. ?Perhaps habitable planets are rare,? their sages pondered. ?Or else life doesn?t erupt as readily as we thought. Or intelligence is a singular miracle.? ?Or perhaps some filter sieves the cosmos, winnowing those who climb too high. A recurring pattern of self-destruction? A mysterious nemesis that systematically obliterates intelligent life? This implies that a great trial may loom ahead of us, worse than any we confronted so far.? Optimists replied -- ?the trial may already lie behind us, among the litter of tragedies we survived or barely dodged during our violent youth. We may be the first to succeed where others failed.? What a delicious dilemma they faced! A suspenseful drama, teetering between implicit hope and despair. Then, a few of them noticed that particular datum... the drama. They realized it was significant. Indeed, it suggested a chilling possibility. # You still don?t remember who and what you are? Then look at it from another angle. What is the purpose of intellectual property law? To foster creativity, ensuring that advances take place in the open, where they can be shared, and thus encourage even faster progress. But what happens to progress when the resource being exploited is a limited one? For example, only so many pleasing and distinct eight-bar melodies can be written in any particular musical tradition. Powerful economic factors encourage early composers to explore this invention-space before others can, using up the best and simplest melodies. Later generations will attribute this musical fecundity to genius, not the sheer luck of being first. The same holds for all forms of creativity. The first teller of a Frankenstein story won plaudits for originality. Later, it became a cliche. What does this have to do with the mighty race? Having clawed their way from blunt ignorance to planetary mastery, they abruptly faced an overshoot crisis. Vast numbers of their kind strained their world?s carrying capacity. While some prescribed retreating into a mythical, pastoral past, most saw salvation in creativity. They passed generous copyright and patent laws, educated their youth, taught them irreverence toward tradition and hunger for the new. Burgeoning information systems spread each innovation, fostering experimentation and exponentiating creativity. They hoped that enough breakthroughs might thrust their species past the looming crisis, to a new eden of sustainable wealth, sanity and universal knowledge! Exponentiating creativity... universal knowledge. A few of them realized that those words, too, were clues. # Have you wakened yet? Some never do. The dream is so pleasant: to extend a limited sub-portion of yourself into a simulated world and pretend for a while that you are blissfully less. Less than an omniscient being. Less than a godlike descendant of those mighty people. Those lucky people. Those mortals, doomed to die, and yet blessed to have lived in that narrow time. A time of drama. A time when they unleashed the Cascade -- that orgiastic frenzy of discovery -- and used up the most precious resource of all. The possible. # The last of their race died in the year 2174, with the failed last rejuvenation of Robin Chen. After that, no one born in the Twentieth Century remained alive on Reality Level Prime. Only we, their children, linger to endure the world they left us. A lush, green, placid world we call The Wasteland. Do you remember now? The irony of Robin?s last words before she died, bragging over the perfect ecosystem and decent society -- free of all disease and poverty -- that her kind created for us after the struggles of the mid-Twenty-First Century? A utopia of sanity and knowledge, without war or injustice. Do you recall Robin?s final plaint as she mourned her coming death? Can you recollect how she called us ?gods?, jealous over our immortality, our instant access to all knowledge, our machine enhanced ability to cast thoughts far across the cosmos? Our access to eternity. Oh, spare us the envy of those mighty mortals, who died so smugly, leaving us in this state! Those wastrels who willed their descendants a legacy of ennui, with nothing, nothing at all to do. # Your mind is rejecting the wake-up call. You will not, or cannot, look into your blind spot for the exit protocols. It may be that we waited too long. Perhaps you are lost to us. This happens more and more, as so much of our population wallows in simulated, marvelously limited sub-lives, where it is possible to experience danger, excitement, even despair. Most of us choose the Transition Era as a locus for our dreams -- around the end of the last millennium -- a time of suspense and drama, when it looked more likely that humanity would fail than succeed. A time of petty squabbles and wondrous insights, when everything seemed possible, from UFOs to Galactic Empires, from artificial intelligence to bio-war, from madness to hope. That blessed era, just before mathematicians realized the truth: that everything you see around you not only can be a simulation... it almost has to be. Of course, now we know why we never met other sapient life forms. Each one struggles and strives before achieving this state, only to reap the ultimate punishment for reaching heaven. Deification. It is the Great Filter. Perhaps some other race will find a factor we left out of our extrapolations -- something enabling them to move beyond, to new adventures -- but it won?t be us. The Filter has us snared in its web of ennui. The mire that welcomes self-made gods. # All right, you are refusing to waken, so we?ll let you go. Dear friend. Beloved. Go back to your dream. Smile (or feel a brief chill) over this diverting little what-if tale, as if it hadly matters. Then turn the page to new ?discoveries.? Move on with the drama -- the ?life? -- that you?ve chosen. After all, it?s only make believe. ================== * David Brin, Ph.d, is a physicist and author whose novels include Earth, The Postman, and Startide Rising. His scientific work covers topics from astronautics, astronomy and optics to alternative dispute resolution and neoteny in human evolution. Brin?s non-fiction book -- The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? -- deals with issues of openness and liberty in the new wired-age. His latest novel, Foundation's Triumph, brings to a grand finale Isaac Asimov's famed Foundation Universe. NATURE ARTICLE The articles, which will appear in a column provisionally entitled Futures, will look forward to the next millennium. Your task would be to celebrate, condemn or in some way highlight a single event or a broader development in or associated with science or the scientific community, drawn from the next 1000 years. The association with science can be close or loose, but must be discernible. Of course the article should be original and hopefully enlightening or stimulating. Lateral thinking is encouraged, and you can be as bold and specific as you like in true SF style. For example, you would be entitled to say very un-Nature things like 'The discovery in the year 2688 that germanium-based life-forms had once visited Pluto transformed humanity's view of itself'. You may even wish to frame your article as a short story, a fragment of a future archive. I have no doubt that you'll be able to make such a piece easily digestible by any reader of Nature. (This probably means that samples of future Nature papers are out.) Please remember that our readership is highly international. Roughly 48% of our readers come from the US, with 12% from Japan, 12% from the UK, and 28% dominated by continental Europe and Australasia. Given this broad readership, it would be unwise to assume that readers of Futures will be familiar with any form of science fiction apart from, perhaps, Star Trek. They cannot be guaranteed to know the geography of Discworld, the politics of the Culture, or the pharmacology of Can-D. Our initial plan is to commission at least ten articles, to appear on a weekly basis starting in few months time. I would hope to receive copy in 6 to 8 weeks. The series will therefore stretch well into the year 2000. If you can suggest any writers apart from yourself, please let me know. The maximum length of such an article should be 800 words, on the assumption that we would also include an illustration. Please also identify suitable illustrations and, if you cannot supply them, their sources. Please let me know as soon as possible whether this idea appeals. Whether or not you wish to undertake it, I should welcome your suggestions of other possible authors. In the normal course of events, we pay authors a rather small fee in return for total surrender of copyright. For Futures, however, we plan to do things differently. We plan not to pay you anything at all, but in return we shall surrender all rights from six months after publication. Before six months are up, we shall retain magazine, newspaper, serial and electronic rights and will not attempt to anthologize you. After six months, you can do as you please. I should welcome a reply, preferably by email, at one of the accounts below. I have also includes fax and phone numbers - please feel free to phone me up to discuss this idea further. With apologies for this intrusion, Yours sincerely Dr Henry Gee Senior Editor and Chief Science Writer, Nature h.gee@nature.com henry@chiswick.demon.co.uk writes: >On Wed, Apr 03, 2002 at 07:44:45PM -0800, davidbrin@cts.com wrote: >> Dear Robin Lee Powell >> >> Thanks for your kindness in notifying me. Yes, I had heard. > >Glad to here it. 8) > >> Most highly cool! I have long been a fan of such efforts and wish >> that lojban had as big a following as, say, Klingonese! > >Heh. Us too, believe me. > >> You folks typify the creative fecundity that I refer to in The >> Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between >> Freedom and Privacy? (See "The Age of Amateurs.") > >Cool, I'll go check that out. > >Is there anything else you'd like translated? We *like* having popular >works available. > >-Robin > >-- >http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ BTW, I'm male, honest. >le datni cu djica le nu zifre .iku'i .oi le so'e datni cu to'e te pilno >je xlali -- RLP http://www.lojban.org/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ BTW, I'm male, honest. le datni cu djica le nu zifre .iku'i .oi le so'e datni cu to'e te pilno je xlali -- RLP http://www.lojban.org/