Subject: [[email-masked]: Re: lojban story.]

From: Robin Lee Powell <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2002 10:28:33 -0800

Woot.

-Robin

----- Forwarded message from "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]> -----

Subject: Re: lojban story.
From: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
To: Robin Lee Powell <[email-masked]>
Delivery-date: Fri, 05 Apr 2002 10:26:49 -0800

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. <by mid-lateOctober??> 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
[email-masked] [email-masked]

<[email-masked]> writes:
>On Wed, Apr 03, 2002 at 07:44:45PM -0800, [email-masked] 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/