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rfmcdonald(Originally posted on the Futurists list at yahoogroups.com on 26 May 2002. Changes have been introduced.)
Lately, I've been thinking about the role of Earth--a near-future Earth, actually, if you define "near" as the next few millennia.
One thing I've noticed is that a lot of television shows tend to future humans competing alongside assorted alien cultures as approximate equals, as people who should be consulted as more-or-less equals in particular areas of science, like genetics. The television show Earth: Final Conflict, for instance, has experts in the human biological sciences being treated as experts, and humans in general being considered honoured partners (even if not quite mature enough to handle interplanetary travel, but never mind that). Other series often introduce the humans of Earth into a mess of galactic politics and suddenly, using very marginal resources, carving a renowned name for themselves in said mess. Even in Babylon 5, where the Earth-Minbari War accidentally started by an adventurous Earth government would have ended in the extermination of homo sapiens sapiens but for Minbari mercy, Earth ended up remaining a power of note despite being thoroughly defeated.
All these stories seem exceptionally optimistic to me. We can get an idea how unrealistic by examining the figures bandied about, of energies necessary to produce working wormholes, of the costs needed to generate these energies, but we often don't really understand it, or don't want to. A society that can do that is as far ahead of us (as defined here, briefly, as "we post-industrial societies, from Honolulu to Seoul to Prague to Dublin") as, well, we are ahead of most of the Third World.
Granted, the Third World does contain nuclei of fairly advanced development, in some sectors--there's India's middle class of 200 million, there's Russia's universally literate population, there's China's economic miracle, there's the nuclear weapons and fission power plants of all three countries and more besides. If the analogy holds true, then in a hypothetical multispecies interstellar society it would still be possible for Earth and humans to have some moderately high profile, even at the cost of an unstable domestic situation.
Then again, there are plenty of Third World countries which don't. Depending on everything from relative populations to geographic location to available resources, we could be anything from a Thailand or Venezuela (moderately developed with a potential for further growth that might not be fullfilled) to Indonesia or Pakistan (important mainly for their potentials to make things locally go quite bad) to Morocco or Central America (conservative and technologically primitive places, useful despite their poverty as local allies, and sources of unwanted--though needed--migrants) to a Lesotho or Zambia (who cares?).
Regardless of just where Earth fell in the over-vast category of the Third World, this classification implies things. Technology transfers--everything from relativistic starships to advanced nanotechnology to stargates--might be impossible. The West stops the export of nuclear technologies, or potential dual-use biochemical industrial ware, to the Third World; why not prevent, say, a rogue planet like us wielding relativistic missiles?
Even assuming such technologies were available to us Earthlings, there's the question of actually buying it. Whatever currency is used by any wider galactic civilization, I doubt that Earth would have it or any large amount of it, any more than pre-colonial Ghana or Vietnam in relation to their European colonizers. Minerals are easy enough to find or replicate, given enough energy and time. There are curios specific to Earth, now, art treasures and music and the like, but the world music scene is a small fraction of the wider music-buying market in the West and I doubt that people would like exporting their cultural treasures (the Mona Lisa, Tolstoy's handwritten letters?) to finance the terraforming of Mars.
This consideration, incidentally, brings me to the question of colonies. What reason do we have to assume, say, that even if there are shirtsleeve-habitable worlds out there--or even worlds in our own Solar System--that we have got title to them? Assuming a galactic civilization that likes keeping frontiers stable, there's no reason to think that even if Tirane existed, the 82 Eridanites would cede that world to us given as how we needed its resources and its land area as a population valve. I turn to the Gulf War and Iraq's failed annexation of Kuwait as further proof that an interstellar community determined to maintain the status quo. For that matter, there's the example of Laos: even though Laotians are ethnically quite similar to Thais and Laos had been administered as a Thai territory, in 1893 French pressure forced the modernizing Siamese monarchy to cede Laos to French Indochina.
Could Earth recover rapidly from being a marginal component? Perhaps, but cases of rapid turnaround like the Traveller RPG's successful wars of conquest waged by aggressive rising Earth against the vast but declining Vilani Ziru Sirka are rather rare. There are certainly cases where "barbarians" have conquered vast empires--Mongols in China, Germans in most of the European territories of the Roman Empire, Arabs in Egypt, the Levant, and Persia, and so on--but most often the barbarians ended up being assimilated into the cultures they conquered. And I don't think people like thinking of themselves as barbarians.
All this, of course, is just a science-fictional rumination. I suspect myself that this will never come to pass, simply because extraterrestrials are probably few and far between given the difficulty of generating complex life and the evitability of intelligence and language. Still, it's something science-fiction writers should consider.
Lately, I've been thinking about the role of Earth--a near-future Earth, actually, if you define "near" as the next few millennia.
One thing I've noticed is that a lot of television shows tend to future humans competing alongside assorted alien cultures as approximate equals, as people who should be consulted as more-or-less equals in particular areas of science, like genetics. The television show Earth: Final Conflict, for instance, has experts in the human biological sciences being treated as experts, and humans in general being considered honoured partners (even if not quite mature enough to handle interplanetary travel, but never mind that). Other series often introduce the humans of Earth into a mess of galactic politics and suddenly, using very marginal resources, carving a renowned name for themselves in said mess. Even in Babylon 5, where the Earth-Minbari War accidentally started by an adventurous Earth government would have ended in the extermination of homo sapiens sapiens but for Minbari mercy, Earth ended up remaining a power of note despite being thoroughly defeated.
All these stories seem exceptionally optimistic to me. We can get an idea how unrealistic by examining the figures bandied about, of energies necessary to produce working wormholes, of the costs needed to generate these energies, but we often don't really understand it, or don't want to. A society that can do that is as far ahead of us (as defined here, briefly, as "we post-industrial societies, from Honolulu to Seoul to Prague to Dublin") as, well, we are ahead of most of the Third World.
Granted, the Third World does contain nuclei of fairly advanced development, in some sectors--there's India's middle class of 200 million, there's Russia's universally literate population, there's China's economic miracle, there's the nuclear weapons and fission power plants of all three countries and more besides. If the analogy holds true, then in a hypothetical multispecies interstellar society it would still be possible for Earth and humans to have some moderately high profile, even at the cost of an unstable domestic situation.
Then again, there are plenty of Third World countries which don't. Depending on everything from relative populations to geographic location to available resources, we could be anything from a Thailand or Venezuela (moderately developed with a potential for further growth that might not be fullfilled) to Indonesia or Pakistan (important mainly for their potentials to make things locally go quite bad) to Morocco or Central America (conservative and technologically primitive places, useful despite their poverty as local allies, and sources of unwanted--though needed--migrants) to a Lesotho or Zambia (who cares?).
Regardless of just where Earth fell in the over-vast category of the Third World, this classification implies things. Technology transfers--everything from relativistic starships to advanced nanotechnology to stargates--might be impossible. The West stops the export of nuclear technologies, or potential dual-use biochemical industrial ware, to the Third World; why not prevent, say, a rogue planet like us wielding relativistic missiles?
Even assuming such technologies were available to us Earthlings, there's the question of actually buying it. Whatever currency is used by any wider galactic civilization, I doubt that Earth would have it or any large amount of it, any more than pre-colonial Ghana or Vietnam in relation to their European colonizers. Minerals are easy enough to find or replicate, given enough energy and time. There are curios specific to Earth, now, art treasures and music and the like, but the world music scene is a small fraction of the wider music-buying market in the West and I doubt that people would like exporting their cultural treasures (the Mona Lisa, Tolstoy's handwritten letters?) to finance the terraforming of Mars.
This consideration, incidentally, brings me to the question of colonies. What reason do we have to assume, say, that even if there are shirtsleeve-habitable worlds out there--or even worlds in our own Solar System--that we have got title to them? Assuming a galactic civilization that likes keeping frontiers stable, there's no reason to think that even if Tirane existed, the 82 Eridanites would cede that world to us given as how we needed its resources and its land area as a population valve. I turn to the Gulf War and Iraq's failed annexation of Kuwait as further proof that an interstellar community determined to maintain the status quo. For that matter, there's the example of Laos: even though Laotians are ethnically quite similar to Thais and Laos had been administered as a Thai territory, in 1893 French pressure forced the modernizing Siamese monarchy to cede Laos to French Indochina.
Could Earth recover rapidly from being a marginal component? Perhaps, but cases of rapid turnaround like the Traveller RPG's successful wars of conquest waged by aggressive rising Earth against the vast but declining Vilani Ziru Sirka are rather rare. There are certainly cases where "barbarians" have conquered vast empires--Mongols in China, Germans in most of the European territories of the Roman Empire, Arabs in Egypt, the Levant, and Persia, and so on--but most often the barbarians ended up being assimilated into the cultures they conquered. And I don't think people like thinking of themselves as barbarians.
All this, of course, is just a science-fictional rumination. I suspect myself that this will never come to pass, simply because extraterrestrials are probably few and far between given the difficulty of generating complex life and the evitability of intelligence and language. Still, it's something science-fiction writers should consider.
