Letters to the Editor
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A mixed bag
Freeman Dyson's views won't be popular here at Salon. I expect his statements to provoke strong reactions, which will run 5 to 1 against. Of course he is full of shit about a lot of things. Like EVERYONE, he is wrong about half the time. And in particular, I find his point of view--that we humans will think our way out of our problems--to be offensive and simple-minded, but very much a part and parcel of his own greatest generation ethos. All of those people think that way. They, along with their silent generation pissboys, are completely insufferable, really.
But the thing about the autistic friend, who lacks the capacity for empathy, and imagining what an autistic religion would be like. That's interesting thinking.
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How much for one Dyson Sphere?
Visionaries and geniuses are often impractical and not connected with the real world in any but the most tenuous ways. Consequences are not on his agenda, fantastical play thinking is, and quite frankly, that world has already been developed by artist Roger Dean in the seventies.
Can anyone see a potential problem witha tree that grows tens times as fast and produces fuel which it sends down a secondary piping root system that will be conveniently hooked up to our automobile or furnace? How are the oil companies going to like that? Nevermind the practical problems, where is the money in that?
Never mind the trading of millions of years of natural genetic development ofor new improved patented forms that we create in the short term with only short term goals of profit and production. What happens to legacy code? Who owns like that is modified and why?
Conditioning and chemistry are already used to control people and much of that is not for any benefit and now we are to add the prospect of genetic manipulation and control and not expect it to be used for the detrement of the people? Look at the emphasis placed on youth and looks and how can this not be a primary area for genetic sales teams hawking retro viri promising customers the body of a 20 year old? People will want and will have designer people.
It shall be far more madness than we already have.
How many planets would it take to make a Dyson Sphere?
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Not my favorite physicist.
I have huge respect for physicists over the "mushy sciences," as Robert Heinlein would say. But the ones who are the best thinkers are those who've broken new ground and who are forced to think very hard about reality to make any progress. Dyson's work seems to be mostly mathematical ruminations, like unification of mathematically equivalent representations ( similar to the unification of the Shroedenger's quantum differential equation with the matrix interpretation. was that Dirac? I forget. )
But he's right in that we can't predict the future, and most dire predictions turn out to be a wash.
His daughter, Bill Gate's favorite futurist, is one of the more puddin-headed big thinkers I've ever read, so perhaps Freeman is the same way.
Brilliant people can be puddin-headed. I knew several people in school who could manage difficult mathematics, but who would theorize in a promiscuously associative orgy of illogical ideas.
I hope Dr. Dyson is 100% correct, but the strength and scope of the global warming evidence says he's probably wrong, quite wrong.
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I'm suprised
I didn't think I'd like this guy at all, judging from the headline but I think he said just what I've been thinking all along. Instead using the issue of global warming as a means of one group asserting it's "rightousness", we need to decide together how we are going to accomodate ourselves to the new climate. On this and other issues I find Dyson a realist. Things are going to happen that we can't do much about, let's make the best out of what we have.
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Rejection of empirical data, no perspective, sloppy thinking -- Presidential appointee?
I'll take a rosy, myopic, spacey philosopher's disconnected musings over empiracal data any day. And he's also right about technology coming to save us at the last moment--just when the ecological niches around the globe are beginning to collapse, when ocean levels rise to flood the basements of the Lower East Side, and countries are waging desperate wars over the last 10 million barrels of oil---the smarty pants MIT types will come up with a mircale thingie (poop powered hover trucks? rad new phones?) to save us.
And that "thingie" may even be, as Stephen Hawking suggests, colonizing other planets. How cool would that be. Hello, Oort Cloud. I call top bunk in the terraform barracks on Zoltron 7.
Oh you liberal salonsters and salonstrixes fretting, writing in your cloth bound journals "I gave up plastic water bottles today, but I'm still worried, what will happen to independent films with great hair if everyone is without oil, stranded, starving, spooing the goop from each others' skulls?"
Your first problem is your living in the present, and you have no faith in an Anglo-Christian God that is so mysterious and powerful he's playing it cool by not revealing himself yesterday, today or tomorrow.
Trust Dyson, the Back the Future Professor of 2007, between God, miracle technologies and the Market, things are going to be just fine.
Besides, the future (three years) is a long long ways away.
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Food for Thought
Although I too am troubled by the glibness with which Dyson approaches our relationship with the natural world, as previous letter writers have very ably noted, I've got to say that it was one of the more enjoyable interviews I've read in some time. It was kind of like a Cohen Brothers' film ... you never know quite where things are headed and a lot of ground is covered. It occurs to me just now that his approach to the interactions/repercussions of science/technology with the real world is much like the autistic girl's he discusses. It must be an old habit from physics studies wherein everything takes place in a vaccuum to keep results tidy. At least he concedes, almost as an aside, in several instances that what he proposes could be dangerous. The phrase he used almost struck me as Vonnegut-like -- without the satire. Where does one even start to address the ludicrousness of his f-up-the-world-with-your-own-GMO-hobby-kit idea, except to say that if there is anything to reincarnation I hope his future parents keep him away from the petri dishes. Personally, I'm a lot more comfortable ethically with modifying human beings than imposing modifications on the rest of creation. So, here's an elegant solution to energy and food problems which Dyson, when he comes around to my way of thinking (perhaps next life time), might like. Using a personal home modification kit, people can enable themselves to digest cellulose and produce biofuel pee and wood-pellet-stove-burning pellet poop. Of course, it could be extremely dangerous, but think of the upside, and another technology will surely come along to deal with any problems. (But, seriously, has our experience watching Jurassic Parks I-XV taught us nothing?) And, lastly, I found his faith in the power of computers and the Internet charming and quaint in light of the Myanmar regime's decision to shutdown the Internet there. I pray he misses (hopefully between lifetimes) such a future episode here in the U.S.