The End of Eternity

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

Here is a slightly more philosophical question. I know this is a primarily political community but please do bear with me if you like. What would happen if we could arbitrarily and without hindrances travel back and forth in time, to whichever "point" in time we wanted, and change past and future events in a way that would prevent the occurrence of all sorts of evils, harms, and unfortunate circumstances? And what if we could calculate precisely which possible scenario and which combination of circumstances is the most favourable, and then make it happen flawlessly without a glitch? Wouldn't that bring universal prosperity to all humankind, happiness, lack of diseases, lack of poverty, jealousy, and even erase all unfortunate incidents? Sounds like the perfect utopia, doesn't it?

...Or does it? Really? Let's look at it from the other side. How would this unimpeded prosperity reflect on mankind as a society? Wouldn't our desire to constantly seek for new ways of dealing with difficult circumstances fade out and become rudimentary? Wouldn't we become spoiled brats and begin to take eternal happiness for granted? And the total lack of evil? Wouldn't we quit looking for further development, wouldn't we close into ourselves, and stop dreaming, because we've decided that we have achieved everything that could be achieved; wouldn't we stop looking up to the stars and asking ourselves with genuine curiosity, "but what is out there, beyond"?

When you are climbing a steep slope and overcoming all sorts of obstacles, your muscles and lungs become stronger. Your body and spirit gets tougher. You get used to new challenges and nothing can scare you. Even if your feet are covered in bruises and cuts, and your toes are hurting from the constant tripping in sharp stones, you would eventually reach the summit - stronger and more confident than ever. And there, what awaits you is a stunning view: a whole new horizon opens in front of you, and beyond it - more and more new peaks that you crave to conquer. And so you embark on the next journey. And the next. Because that is how we are made - we simply cannot stay put in one place for too long...

And so, even if Fate, or Destiny, or Chance, or God, or however you understand it, throws even the deadliest rival on your way, an intruder from outside, with equal or bigger powers than yours, someone who wants to stomp over you on their way to whatever goals they are pursuing... you would be already prepared to withstand this challenge and defend yourself.

But let's get back to the previously described utopia. The presumably "perfect" society. If you are a complacent, but feeble ignoramus, unaware of the realities out there, and a useless parasite on the fabric of Space-Time who is so self-assured of their invincibility and untouchableness (sic?)... wouldn't that invader run over you with a single leap on your smug face, and wipe you out of history forever?

And, all that said, here is another question. Who has the right to decide which of the multiple possible "histories" is the most "just" one, which scenario is the most "acceptable" and should be carried out at the expense of all the rest? Who has selected them to make those decisions, and what are the criteria for that choice? Maybe saving the maximum number of human lives and achieving the maximum amount of happiness-es is the ultimate factor when meddling into mankind's destinies? But then...what should we say to all those people who would have to be sacrificed in the name of the greater good, and the "bigger happiness" as a whole? Don't they matter too? Is the Whole more important than the Individual? But without the Individual, what would the Whole really look like?

I know this sounds like an endless ramble, too irrelevant to the political issues that we usually discuss here. But I couldn't help sharing it. These questions arise while reading The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov. I read it in one breath, one afternoon a few days ago. And the questions still remain. But among them, maybe the most important one:

How capable is the love for one single person of turning your whole world upside down, breaking your deeply inbred convictions to pieces, changing everything you've ever believed, and turning things to the 180 and to the inside, where you look into yourself and start asking, "is this me, and is this the society I want to live in"? And how prepared you would be to destroy the whole world, and possibly a near infinite number of worlds just like yours, just because you have come to believe that somewhere out there, beyond the visible and unreachable distant Future, there in the Hidden Centuries when you would have been gone for aeons, there lies the key to the survival of the entire Humankind. But would you be ready to trust this love completely and unreservedly, and entrust your destiny and that of billions upon billions of other Worlds and Times along with their inhabitants? And thus - till the end of Eternity?

Without further useless ado, I strongly recommend this book. I hope you would be able to find your answers.

Comments

[stewstewstewdio.livejournal.com]

Let's look at it from the other side. How would this unimpeded prosperity reflect on mankind as a society? Wouldn't our desire to constantly seek for new ways of dealing with difficult circumstances fade out and become rudimentary? Wouldn't we become spoiled brats and begin to take eternal happiness for granted? And the total lack of evil? Wouldn't we quit looking for further development, wouldn't we close into ourselves, and stop dreaming, because we've decided that we have achieved everything that could be achieved; wouldn't we stop looking up to the stars and asking ourselves with genuine curiosity, "but what is out there, beyond"?

Welcome to the reality of the American vision of itself.

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid this sort of mentality is not specifically tied to any one nationality. It is probably universal, more emphasised in one place than another but still prevalent almost anywhere.

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

John Holbo has a long blog post (http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dead_right.html) about the tendency for exactly this in a review of a book by conservative David Frum:

Surely Frum is at most guilty of insufficiently vigorous advocacy of prosperity. He can’t be expressly advocating the lack thereof. Oddly, there are various strong hints that he is. Example:

Contemporary conservatives still value that old American character. William Bennett in his lectures reads admiringly from an account of the Donner party written by a survivor that tells the story in spare, stoic style. He puts the letter down and asks incredulously, “Where did those people go?” But if you believe that early Americans possessed a fortitude that present-day Americans lack, and if you think the loss is an important one, then you have to think hard about why that fortitude disappeared. Merely exhorting Americans to show more fortitude is going to have about as much effect on them as a lecture from the student council president on school spirit. Reorganizing the method by which they select and finance their schools won’t do it either, and neither will the line-item veto, or discharge petitions, or entrusting Congress with the power to deny individual NEA grants, or court decisions strinking down any and all acts of politically correct tyranny emanating from the offices of America’s deans of students — worthwhile though each and every one of those things may be. It is socials that form character, as another conservative hero, Alexis de Tocqueville, demonstrated, and if our characters are now less virtuous than formerly, we must identify in what way our social conditions have changed in order to understand why.

Of course there have been hundreds of such changes – never mind since the Donner party’s day, just since 1945 … But the expansion of government is the only one we can do anything about.

All of these changes have had the same effect: the emancipation of the individual appetite from restrictions imposed on it by limited resources, or religious dread, or community disapproval, or the risk of disease or personal catastophe.

(p. 202-3)

Words fail me; links not much better. The Donner party? Where did all these people go?
....
Frum is not thinking about what he’s saying. Because what he is saying more or less instantaneously implies an indefinitely large cloud of things he really — really, really — doesn’t think.

We are at this point very near the heart of what Frum styles his ‘conservative philosophy’. But at the heart of it is a sort of proto-cognitive itch; a sensibility, or feeling, or subconscious reflex.
....
We all like watching movies about rugged tough guys (well, most of us: I do). But — write this on a 3 x 5 card and consult as necessary — it is absurd to advocate that the government intentionally impose hardship on the people, against their will, for the sake of toughening them up.

Holbo goes on to examine how monstrous this “logic” really would be if you took it seriously.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Frank Herbert did this in God-Emperor of Dune, an all-powerful tyrant establishes millennia of peace and prosperity but does so by making Hitler and Stalin look like anarchists. This being Dune it can only end badly and does.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

There's some truth to this. Take my society for example. It's been in a permanent state of crisis for decades. It has toughened people, though made them more cynical. But they have no illusions. The world is a tough place and they know it. And they've devised all sorts of ways of dealing with difficulties, some of them might even appear shocking to you.

Even today there's a centuries old tradition, and even in urban places, that people would pack jars of winter supplies (mostly marinated vegetables) for the winter. Even after the invasion of trade centers and malls where fresh food is being sold in large quantities at relatively low prices. But people still pack those jars of "Turshia":



And that was just one example. The list could go on forever.

(Btw turshia + rakia = AWESOMENESS).

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

Yummmm, pickled peppers and cauliflower!

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

You'll eat your fingers!

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Imagine a couple of old ladies making a bonfire between your block and the next one, and baking some peppers that they'll later store in the cellar for the winter.



This is an authentic BG device, called Chushkopek (pepper-roaster).

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

Somehow you have made me hungry again. We may be philosophising and all that, but ultimately you'll always make us feel hungry. (This is art). Look what you have done!

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

That's me, yep. I'm such a glutton.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The result would be a tremendous disaster because nobody would be able to agree on the idea of utopia and in the end produce multiple distinct deinotopias. To change history would be a very risky business, it would only take the absence of one horseshoe nail to prevent one great horror but then the course of history could easily lead to others.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Or in the poetic form:

For want of a nail a shoe was lost.
For want of the shoe a horse was lost.
For want of a horse a messenger was lost.
For want of a messenger a battle lost.
For want of a battle an army slain, for want of an army death does reign.
And all for want of a horseshoe nail.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

The butterfly effect.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yup. Some might incline to this trope: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong but all I see with that is: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButterflyOfDoom as there's virtually no way to alter history from a point we'd recognize that would minimize the horrors of the last century. The degree and form the horrors take can change, not the horrors themselves.

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

But in the book, there is a specialist who can calculate all the possible scenarios and choose one that would avert any possible bad consequences. I mean it's the perfect situation where no war would happen, no deaths, no pain, only joy. =)

Of course that means that a number of people would never be born this way, in this altered Reality... And that is the problem. This is not good news for them, but the excuse that is being used is that on the other hand millions of deaths would be prevented. Slippery slope.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Such people including people like Stephen Hawking and other extremely intelligent people who suffered lifelong from disease. Reality is a harsh, arbitrary, and mechanistic place and the best endings can only be bittersweet. I began my alternate history timeline with a point of divergence that I rather liked from an ideological standpoint and from a greater success for one of the historical figures I most admire I've gotten by the 1970s a nuclear WWII, the decline and fall of fascism and the rise of the communists, a humankind which has no problem with sterilization as a penalty for crime and where hatred of Jews is still banal because there was no Holocaust while WWII had the moral ambiguity of WWI and was fought against an alliance of smart evil bastards.

And this is what I got out of trying that same idea, start with something that seems impossible to go wrong and then it's the http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButterflyOfDoom.

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

"And what if we could calculate precisely which possible scenario and which combination of circumstances is the most favourable, and then make it happen flawlessly without a glitch? Wouldn't that bring universal prosperity to all humankind"

I see no reason why the best possible scenario would necessarily lead to universal prosperity. By going back in time, you got rid of all the diseases and prevented all earthquakes, floods, droughts, car accidents, child abusers, ...

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Didn't they deliberately curb any attempts for space progress? I don't remember the book very well but if memory serves, the moment someone made a discovery that would stimulate space flights, they instantly came back and erased it. Eventually it turned out mankind never left Earth and its vicinity. And in the meantime many alien civilizations thrived across the stars and occupied all the nice corners of the universe and we were condemned to solitary existence on our island, under the threat of dying out a natural death as a species.

But then the people from the far-far-future appeared and.... oh wait. Enough with the spoilers!

Short-version conclusion: expand or linger and die out. That's how most empires are being born. But the way they're born also hides the very reason for their eventual demise.

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

Yes, they thought that space flight is a waste of time and people should not waste their resource and should stay focused on life on Earth. Some parallels to modern times can be found...

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

The first Asimov thing i ever read was The Gravitational Death of the Universe or something like that. Well, it wasn't fiction but popular science, but it made me such a strong impression that it was prolly one of the reasons i got so enchanted by cosmology and astrophysics. He was way ahead of his time. And i'm seeing even today Hollywood is exploiting his ideas widely and making blockbusters like Minority Report, Adjustment Bureau, etc.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

The fault, dear [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Utopias are bound to fail because they rely on fundamentally imperfect and dystopian building blocks, humans.

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

Machines are so much better...

Vote Hal-3000!

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

You mean HAL 9000. =)

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

Yes, him/her/it!

Surely...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... you must be aware that the letters for HAL were chosen because the are each a letter shy of IBM.

[404.livejournal.com]

That must have been the non-murderous predecessors of the Hal-9000 series.

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

Everything turns deadly, eventually.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Aint that the truth.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

And what happened to HAL again?

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

Some imperfect human defeated him, duh.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

The imperfect human was the one who programmed him. HAL failure started at the ground level. What Bowman was doing was fixing a malfunctioning machine.

"Daisy...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... Daisy, give me your answer, do."

The song was provided by Bell Labs from their electronic voice synthesizer. My sister obtained a copy of it on vinyl during a visit to the Labs.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

We are already spoiled brats who take "happiness" (lack of danger, lack of needs) for granted. Humans are geniuses at inventing new "worst problem evar"s. If we can't think of anything, we turn to television for it.

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

I think that is the point Asimov was trying to make: we are already living in that dystopia. It is inside us.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That analysis of course assumes that "we" means First World liberal democracies. I don't think spoiled brats would even survive in the Hell that is the Congo right now, or in the poorer and more violent parts of the world. The whole problem with sci-fi has been that it assumes that the First World is the only future for the world, instead modern times has a few areas that are extremely technologically advanced and a tremendous majority of humankind where life remains nasty, squalid, brutal, and short. For them there's yet to be anything *but* dystopia.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Yes, that was the assumption. I actually thought about adding a whole lot more but had to go to work.

I was going to add that a population such as this is ripe for getting behind causes, both asinine (tea party) and noble.

Pastwatch

[russj.livejournal.com]

Another novel which examines the use of time-travel to conduct interventions is "Pastwatch" by Orson Scott Card.

I wrote a review of this book some time ago here
http://russj.livejournal.com/16276.html

In that book, an intervention was planned to oppose the practice of slavery. In the process, it was found that slavery was tolerated as a lesser evil, resulting from a previous 'time-travel intervention' which opposed the evil of human sacrifice.

Although I have to say that Asimov's novel is a better read--one of the all time sci-fi greats.

In Asimov's book, the numerous interventions conducted by Eternity to eliminate risk, resulted in the stagnation of the human race, compared to other competing civilizations.

Re: Pastwatch

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I was just wondering what to read.

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of a theory about UFOs. If we assume that UFOs are real, one possible explanation could be that they're not from another planet but from our distant future. And those creatures inside are us, but evolved after thousands of centuries. A sort of time travelers.

I'm just fantasizing! :)

I recall a story...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

One of my favorite time travel stories involves bringing a deadly butterfly back in time from the future. It is another spin on the butterfly effect.

I have not read the Asimov story, but I do appreciate his style.

If I had the ability to go back in time, I would do my best to try to change nothing. I realize that such an effort would be in vain.

Re: I recall a story...

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

There's no story like that, there is a story where a man goes back in time to hunt dinosaurs, steps on a butterfly, and winds up only changing the outcome of a Presidential election.

[yansirramus.livejournal.com]

Oh spare me!

When you are climbing a steep slope and overcoming all sorts of obstacles, your muscles and lungs become stronger. Your body and spirit gets tougher. You get used to new challenges and nothing can scare you. Even if your feet are covered in bruises and cuts, and your toes are hurting from the constant tripping in sharp stones, you would eventually reach the summit - stronger and more confident than ever. And there, what awaits you is a stunning view: a whole new horizon opens in front of you, and beyond it - more and more new peaks that you crave to conquer. And so you embark on the next journey.

Just the kind of sentimentality I'd expect out of someone who's never experienced true hardship. Hint: it might make you a stronger person, but it's still fucking awful. Hunger, misery, desperation, loss, death - why would we inflict these on anyone if we didn't have to? It may look terribly romantic in nineteenth-century period dramas, but you'd be singing a different tune if you were the one living it.

If you are a complacent, but feeble ignoramus, unaware of the realities out there, and a useless parasite on the fabric of Space-Time who is so self-assured of their invincibility and untouchableness (sic?)

Curiously enough, this sounds very like the state of being experienced by human infants. Strangely, we tend to idolise their 'innocence', not decry it. Could it be that we recognise a simpler, better state of being?

And the End of Eternity was an utterly conventional reflection of the cultural mores of its time - first, the ever-irritating trope of a competant man being led from his duty by a mysterious woman, and secondly, the idea that perpetual technological progress is the key to success, while maintaining the status quo leads to stagnation or worse. These days I'd bet that most of us would be delighted with the idea of hundreds or thousands of years of comfort and societal stability.

Basically - the ideas underlying your post are perhaps well-meant, but are basically nostalgic, unrealistic, romantic claptrap. And if we ever do develop the means to go back in time and fix the various 'problems' of humanity, we should bloody well do so - and make their lives as uneventful and contented as possible.

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

Wait, what makes you assume you know anything about me and what I have been through?

Yes I sprinkled some sentiment and maybe melancholy in this post - so what? Is there a problem, other than your dislike of the style?

Of course it's unrealistic. Did you not notice that we are talking about a science fiction hypothesis?