About The Book
In its 4.5 billion–year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way. Can we survive it? How?
My Thoughts
As a prognostication or a speculative work, it is an utter and complete failure. However, as a time capsule of the tech-bro optimism of 2013 before the world at large was aware of what a steaming pile of feudalist garbage the tech industry saw itself (and its champions like Melon Husk) as, it broadly succeeds.
The opening 2/5 of the book are a succinct, and mostly decent recitation of extinction events in the history of the planet, interspersed with some seriously out there hopeful musing on the future of humanity as a space-faring race. There are definitely some weird digressions sprinkled in even this section though; such as Muslims being responsible for the Crusades, and quarantines obviously being bad and stupid Regardless of the American experience of half-assed quarantine for some people for a little while, places like Asturias managed to become COVID free in three weeks of lockdown, and had actually not had a transmissive case in 21 days before lockdown was lifted and people from less assiduous locations (Madrid for instance) flooded into the province, bringing COVID back to Asturias after it was eradicated. .
The rest of the book is taken up with the standard mental gymnastics that every urban defender has to go through to imagine a city that can feed and provision itself, instead of admitting that cities have never (and will never) produce their own primary industry inputs. Cities are fundamentally opposed to primary industry. It’s sort of the point of a city that you take all the people not invovled in primary industriesThe primary industries are, canonically, farming, fishing, mining, and forestry and concentrate them in one place that doesn’t do any of those things so that they can produce Culture. Every attempt to “reimagine a green city” seems to forget that the very point of a city is to not be green. It is a factory for producing cultural artifacts and nothing else.
Veering from dumb solarpunk cities to even dumber geoengineering, the book turns into a mass of qualifiers, without a single sentence in the last third that doesn’t contain one of: possibility, may, might, untested, hopes, concept, possible, could eventually , and my personal favorite “may be centuries away”.
I can see this book being partially responsible for Melon Husk becoming obsessed with the idea of getting people to Mars in order to be the savior of the human race in future text books. Indeed, Newitz specifically goads him into such a move. On page 244, she writes “Once we have a relatively cheap way of getting into orbit, and a thriving commercial space industry partly located on the Moon, there will be a financial incentive to build a space elevator—or more than one. It may begin with funding from governments, or with a space-obsessed entrepreneur who decides to invest an enormous amount of money in a “long-term vision”…” If that isn’t Musk-bait, I don’t know what is.
Minus 5 stars for being the kind of book Melon Husk thinks is insightful and smart. Plus 1 star for not fumbling a brief history of extinction events too badly.