Scifi pessimists say – we’ll never be able to feed 8 billion people.
Scifi optimists invent algae which can fix nitrogen from the air, generate fertilizer, and live in a symbiotic relationship with roots of food plants in airborne greenhouses.
Scifi pessimists say – global warming will kill us all.
Scifi optimists invent CO2 scavenging algae which generate carbon nanotube filaments used for building space elevators.
Scifi pessimists say – the sunspots won’t come back and we’ll all freeze in another ice age.
Scifi optimists invent CO2 storage bins which absorb or release tons of CO2 every day for precision climate control.
Scifi pessimists say the ozone layer will disappear and we’ll all fry.
Scifi optimists invent airborne ozone replenishing units staffed by extremely attractive people.
It’s too bad there are so few scifi optimists.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Colum Paget // Mar 2, 2010 at 5:09 am
Sci-fi pessimists say there are no aliens, sci-fi optimists invent a thousand reasons why they are hidden.
But anyways, I agree SF needs it’s optimists, but it needs it’s pessimists too. Part of the reason SF is dying, is because people are insisting that ‘SF must be this’ and ‘SF must be that’. SF should be all things. It should scare the bejeezus out of us about what’s going to happen if the planet overheats on one hand, and show how we might avoid that fate on the other.
Given that you have listed a lot of inventive methods of avoiding some of the coming catastrophes here, shouldn’t you be writing? The ‘Shine’ anthology was crying out for this stuff, and there’s bound to be a ‘Shine II’.
2 Colum Paget // Mar 2, 2010 at 8:35 pm
I have since discovered you are writing…
Keep an eye on ‘Shine’ incase you ever do decide to go for publication in an anthology or something. They are looking for optimistic SF, and most people struggle to be optimistic, so there’s opportunities there!
Colum
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