July 27, 2012
Poli-Sci-Fi
Joseph Young via (a cool new blog) Politcal Violence @ A Glance:
International politics is a tough thing to study. We can’t necessarily treat the interactions of states like a laboratory: perform a study, tweak, replicate, and then repeat. Yet, we want to explain the world, and sometimes even predict important outcomes.
For example, what should we do if a zombie hoard attacks? Dan Drezner has a plan informed by his experience as an international relations theorist.
Poliscifi, or the application of political science theories to science fiction, is more than just fun (it is fun, try it). Thought experiments have a long tradition in philosophy and allow us to overcome some of the problems associated with the difficulty of experimentation in international relations (field and laboratory experiments are gaining in prominence in the discipline, but that is for another post). After recently watching Falling Skies, Steven Spielberg’s dystopian alien invasion series [Spoiler Alert], I immediately began to poliscifi. What should we do if aliens showed up? What if they proved to be aggressive? What if we were horribly outgunned?
More here.
Posted by Henry Molofsky at 10:49 AM | Permalink
Comments
If aliens heard our radio chatter and decided to smother us before we escaped our crib, they wouldn't invade. We'd be wiped out by the interstellar answer to nuclear-tipped ICBM's, and never even understand what hit us or why. A blinding flash, or an unexplained 100% lethal disease, and our story just stops.
Posted by: Bruce | Jul 27, 2012 1:27:49 PM
Why destroy such a nice planet? Plague is the easiest and most efficient way to wipe out those pesky humans. With an incubation period of, say, six months, carried by an aerosol contagion, they could infect most of the planet in one year.
Posted by: John W. Redican | Jul 27, 2012 1:34:34 PM
Thinking about Aliens, writing about Aliens, arguing about what they look like, and what they're going to do when they get here, is mental masturbation, pure and simple. Don't we have enough going on here on Earth to keep you interested? I'm more fascinated by people like James Holmes. We can't even figure out why people like him go apeshit, and you want to talk about fucking aliens from outer space? Are you joking?
Posted by: CV | Jul 27, 2012 1:39:23 PM
Actually, giving attention to mass shootings such as that by James Holmes is also "mental masturbation". That sort of incident kills maybe a few dozen people per year in the USA.
But more than 13,000 people are murdered each year in the USA, and more than 35,000 by traffic accidents.
But an extinction-level event, though unlikely, could kill all 300 million people in the USA, and the world's full pop of 7 billion or so. So on the order of 10,000 times the death toll of transport and murder combined, or 10 million times the death toll of mass shootings.
By comparison, the risk of a civilization-ending asteroid impact or super-volcano is maybe 1/500,000 each year. I'd guess the risk of a nuclear war is closer to 1/100 each year, averaged across decades.
Re aliens, the "shell" of visible changes and radio waves announcing our technological leap is reaching an exponentially increasing number of stars with each decade.
Therefore, even if such events are very rare, we should still think about how to minimize the risk of them and/or deal with them if they occur, quite a bit more than we focus on rare small-scale dramas.
Posted by: Bruce | Jul 27, 2012 2:00:02 PM
Further to my comment, let's turn it around. Let's give the batman shootings a "deserves to be thought about" score of 1.
And let's say that, very roughly, we have a 50% chance of contact with aliens in the next million years. Otherwise we'll go with my numbers above (except traffic fatalities, I was off by a factor of 3, about 40,000 people die of them each year in the USA, a million worldwide).
How much mental effort should we spend?
Mass Shootings: 1
Airliner accidents: 3
Aliens: 5
Asteroids/Volcanoes/etc: 20
Non-gun murders: 100
All gun murders: 200
Traffic accidents: 3000
Nuclear war risk: 100,000
Posted by: Bruce | Jul 27, 2012 2:14:32 PM
I don't think the point of the post is aliens so much as understanding contemporary irregular war (ie, 99% of the wars we will fight in the near future, barring a total breakdown of international diplomacy).
For anyone interested in this highly interesting topic that doesn't mind some un-PC language, please check out anything by Gary "The War Nerd" Brecher. Here is a sample column:
http://exiledonline.com/wn-38-ira-vs-al-qaeda-i-was-wrong/
Posted by: DrunktankDan | Jul 27, 2012 6:23:03 PM
Interesting article and interesting responses. Conflict does make for appealing entertainments but I too wonder if it isn’t more important in the present historical moment to be able to imagine positive, mutually beneficial encounters not only with theoretical extraterrestrials but more importantly with national, cultural, racial, and religious aliens that we must now learn to incorporate peacefully in order to be a high-functioning low-stress global society.
The entertainment industry seems stuck in an outdated barbarian paradigm simply because violent conflict raises the adrenaline and sells more tickets. But such constant and long-term emphasis on violent interactions has a deleterious effect on the human imagination by promoting the warped expectation of violent conflict with ‘others’ and glorifying a false equation in which manhood (and nationhood) equals aggression and dominance rather than cooperation and peacefulness. We are reeling from the effect of a world-view in which material goods and physical force have been the dominant themes. We have a lot more interesting things to learn about interrelationships and the value and power of successful inter-accommodation. But we have to be able to imagine it.
Posted by: Christopher Holvenstot | Jul 28, 2012 7:03:02 AM
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