J. E. Landau

I recently read The Gernsback Continuum by William Gibson, which tells the tale of a photographer whose work documenting the utopian streamline moderne architecture of the American Southwest lead him to hallucinate visions of the future as imagined from the 30s: shiny chrome spires, people in togas, and strange fascistic overtones to it all. The photographer is horrified by it all, and he is advised to retreat into watching pornography and engaging himself with mundane things to re-ground himself in the present.

I don’t think that Gernsback is really about retro-futurism so much as it is a critique of the totalizing science fiction visions of that era (especially when viewed in the context of his work defining the anti-establishment cyberpunk genre) but it is interesting to think about what the future looked like when viewed from the past.

2001: A Space Odyssey, both the film and the book, is another example of this sort of retro-futurism. A lot of the problems they assumed would be relatively simple, like establishing major colonies in space and developing sapient AI, have yet to be solved in real life by the middle of the 2020s, let alone in 2001, and the world depicted definitely has the chrome shine you’d expect from something emerging from the Gernsback Continuum.

But there’s another kind of science fiction future, which looks out to the maximal distance and the very, very far future. The science communicator Isaac Arthur did a video series called Civilizations at the End of Time, that talks about what the future could look like, according to our current understanding of physics.

It describes civilizations collapsing all the matter they can find into black holes, to generate power to run computing substrate that they power their civilization off of. It talks about the inefficiencies of even Dyson swarms, which capture all the light of a star, and instead considers isentropic computing that can run forever without requiring additional power. It talks about cooling civilization down to the barest fraction of a degree above absolute zero to make computing as efficient as possible, and running sextillions of digital minds off a black hole that emits less power than an incandescent lightbulb, to survive as long as possible in the slow heat death of the universe.

It’s a vision of what could be done at the very limits of what science currently says is possible. There are other science fiction authors who have done similar things. Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee Sequence includes the manipulation of cosmic strings at the end of time, for one, and Liu Cixin’s writing often explores such concepts when it’s within the realm of known science at all.

But it does make me wonder, what is the historical version of these grand visions? What’s the greatest imaginable point for science in the 1800s? In the 1700s? The 1200s?

The only story I can think of that covers this topic in detail is Ted Chiang’s Tower of Babylon, which I am quite fond of. The novel talks about ancient bronze age people building a tower to heaven. It goes better than in the bible, but it’s interesting to think of that as a logical endpoint of the technological and scientific thoughts they had available.

The historical work of the alchemists might be an example of this. They tried to use the sciences they understood then, as in the Aristotelian system of four elements (more-or-less) to convert lead into gold, although they understood that they did not know enough to do it. In Agrippa’s On Occult Philosophy, there’s some discussions about there being a “silver essence” that is conserved, and which can be extracted from silver and put into other things and then reconstituted into silver, which is agonizingly close to our modern understanding, but the writings also identify the different metals with different base elements- so mercury is water-like, gold is fire-like, and so on. The video game Opus Magnum somewhat explores a version of an advanced application of this technology, where the microscale manipulation of elemental atoms can be used to do things like turn lead into gold.

It is also interesting to note that the medieval alchemists assigned spiritual significance to their work (although they did not, it should be noted, believe that the transmutations they planned to do were purely spiritual). This is analogous in my mind to the ways that people mythologize the colonization of space, creation of dyson swarms, uploading of minds, etc. and I think that they tap into similar occult strains, even if they come from a different worldview.

One difficulty for looking at historical visions of the far future is that medieval people did not have the same understanding of the future as we do today, as evidenced in the book Medieval Futures, which is a collection of essays from historians. It exhaustively describes how in the medieval age, the future was not seen as perpetual, but very temporary, because of the expected imminent biblical apocalypse which would remake the world. So, when asking most people about the distant future, there would be no technological progress up to some singularity point or megaproject, but instead an outside force erasing the current civilization and replacing it with a perfected one. There is no natural progress, although there may be speculation about what the kingdom of God will bring.

The belief in advancing technology is more recent than medieval, but that doesn’t mean that ancient people did not think about science fictional concepts. For example, the ancient Greeks had the play True History which discussed space travel while Hero of Alexandria worked on various automatons and technological tricks.

I can imagine some sort of Ptolemaic space odyssey, where astronauts fly to the celestial shells in winged machines and drill holes in them, seeking to move to the land of God. Perhaps, like in Chiang’s story, they could drill all they wanted and just come out the other side, or perhaps they could really arrive there, and meet up with God. I think it would be an interesting premise for a story, and although a quick search did not give any results, I would not be surprised if it has already been done.

One of the issues with trying to extrapolate far futures from premodern thinking is that a lot of premodern thought was cyclical and based on the seasons. For a medieval peasant, life would not change very much in a single generation, and the idea that the future would be massively different from the past would likely have been foreign to the average person in that time, although perhaps not for people in the upper classes. Hindu cosmology discusses the history of the universe in terms of extremely long cycles, millions of years long, where virtue and vice wax and wane.

To someone with that worldview, it is hard to imagine more than another cycle, and this sort of thinking is also found in Western thought. Take Tau Zero by Poul Anderson, a 1970 novel that reflects the cosmic views of that era. In Tau Zero, a group of space explorers end up flying so fast that the entire lifetime of the universe passes, and they find themselves at the big crunch, where the universe collapses in on itself and reforms anew—a cyclical cosmology even in modern science fiction.

Past visions of the world, whether Ptolemaic cosmology or 2001, could not predict the future because it is impossible to predict what new scientific developments will be uncovered. Certainly, Arthur C. Clarke might have been able to think about the world of 2001 and see that the enthusiasm for space travel (limited as it was even in his own time) wouldn’t last forever, but he certainly could not have predicted that we would invent such advanced computers or that teleroperated robots would make sending human explorers to space even more politically complicated. Similarly, for one of the Babylonians in Ted Chiang’s story, it would be impossible to jump straight ahead to end-of-time civilizations orbiting black holes trillions of years in the future, because their world did not include any of the parts that made up that idea.

Similarly, I don’t think that we can accurately predict what will be possible in the future. While there are things that might seem impossible to us, like time travel, faster-than-light spacecraft, or telepathy seem to be ruled out by what science has discovered so far, it is possible that there are more rules of which we are not yet aware. Similarly, many of the things that we believe are possible may be proven impossible.

But I do think that it is possible for a science fiction author to try and peek over the horizon, and take a blind stab in the dark. We have a lot of theories in physics that are neither substantiated nor debunked, and they could be good fodder for science fiction (if you’re willing to wade through the math!) and there are lots of things that most of science believes is impossible but a few theorists disagree about, such as hyperturing computation that could do things computers shouldn’t be able to or tricks involving negative mass in physics that could allow for a lot of magic tricks. Larry Niven had magnetic monopoles, which are neither banned nor known to exist as example of this, and they were important to his writing.

Of course, doing so means that you are doomed to be dated, but so is everything else. Either you make up your own future science and maybe get really lucky and turn out to be right or just (more likely) add some unique flavor to your setting. Either way, you are almost certainly doomed to enter someone’s ghostly past version of the future.