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rybosworldyesterday at 1:15 PM4 repliesview on HN

A bit of an off-topic observation:

Banks might not have focused on the hard sci-fi aspects but I have a difficult time imagining a more likely future for humanity than something like the culture civilization.


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Ekarosyesterday at 1:21 PM

As cynic I would imagine eventual collapse to be more likely. Probably slow degradation back to some sort of semi-advanced agricultural society. Say kinda post-apocalyptic world(without proper apocalypse) with larger societal structures still existing. Slow degradation of industrial output until some balance level is reached.

Probably not best sci-fi universe one can come up to. Or most selling one.

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tialaramexyesterday at 4:05 PM

The Culture can't happen. It requires Faster Than Light spaceships and that's not a thing in our universe. Also, and I know it's not what you meant, but in Banks' fiction "State of the Art" is specifically a novella about a Culture visit to Earth in the 1970s. They're not us.

Egan's "The Amalgam" is an SF society which could in principle descend in part from some future humanity, and I suppose if you like Banks' setting for its utopianism you'd be satisfied with the Amalgam. Its citizens tend to live long, full lives in which they're definitely mostly concerned with the upper parts of Maslow's pyramid and their practical needs are fulfilled as a matter of course in most cases.

I must say, to the extent we have any future at all, I think probably of Egan's "Dream Apes". An Orangutan-like self-engineered future humanity who have arranged that there are no apex predators above them, there's an abundance of resources for their relatively modest population, and they just chill, believing that if there is something out there it's not their concern. Of course in the story the Dream Apes are all annihilated by a cataclysmic event which destroys Earth, but hey, it's pretty quick.

wat10000yesterday at 9:48 PM

The part where superintelligent computers keep humans around as pets in a powerful and happy civilization is plausible. The part where there’s hyperdrive and energy grids and fields and effectors, less so.

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