Vernor Vinge est l'invité du site Wired. L'interview peut être écoutée mais elle est également retranscrite dans son intégralité. Il y est question de la Singularité, de la conquête spatiale ou encore de son dernier livre, Children of the Sky.
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| Wired: Another thing in that lecture that really struck me is that you seemed fairly optimistic about the potential for human civilization to rebuild itself following a complete collapse. I’d always imagined that since we’ve already extracted all the easily obtainable oil and coal and so on that would be very difficult. Could you talk about the issues with that? Vinge: That’s a really important point, how difficult it is to come back from a civilizational collapse? I’m going to say some optimistic things here, and I don’t mean them to trivialize what happens if you had a civilizational collapse. I mean, if we had a civilizational collapse, even a fairly mild one, you and I would almost certainly be dead. And a serious collapse that involved most of the people dying would obviously do that to most of the human race. It’s just absolutely ghastly. On the other hand, I think that coming back would actually be a very big surprise. The difference between us and us, say, 10,000 years ago … there are obvious differences, like the level of our technology. But there’s another, more important difference, and that is, we know it can be done. I think the human race wandered around for tens of thousands of years sort of bouncing from one stupid, mean-spirited solution to another, because we had no idea what could be done. Now, one aspect that you brought up was how we’ve mined all the easily accessible stuff. I disagree with that, with one exception — fossil fuels. I agree when it comes to fossil fuels. But almost every other resource — well, actually, I should also say that if we had a really bad collapse and managed to destroy the ecosphere, that’s another resource that would be hard to get back. But the stuff that we mine otherwise, we have concentrated that. I imagine that ruins of cities are richer ore fields than most of the natural ore fields that we have used historically. And not only at the level of ore, but at the level of all sorts of technological things. Just pre-built steel beams in large cities are all over the place, and they’re quite hard to make. If you really got knocked back a long way, they’re quite hard to make. With higher sorts of technology, it becomes more and more debatable whether it would still be working, but it’s obvious that a lot of bulk technology is just there for the picking up. And this would make things go very, very fast when combined with the notion that we’d know what’s going on. Depending on how far we got knocked back, we’d have lots of detailed knowledge, even humans that remembered what things were like. Although technology built from scratch by people who not only had no idea about technology but no idea that it could even be done, in a world where there were no ruined cities…. Yeah, that would be something that would be very problematical to happen in any near-term sort of way. I had a very interesting chat with [science fiction author] David Weber a few years ago. We were wandering around the American Library Association dealer’s floor, chatting about this exact issue, and I found that actually David Weber had a point of view that I have come to subscribe to, which is even more optimistic. His assertion was that human population could be a long time coming back, just because of human biology, but he felt that if we did not get wiped out, if there were humans left afterward, that there would be areas on Earth at 1800 to 1900 levels of technology within one human lifetime of the crash, and I’ve thought about that a lot, and I can see how it fits with the rest of the argument that I was peddling but that I didn’t have quite that much optimism for. Now, having said all that, I am afraid that it might lead some people to the conclusion that I’m saying, “Oh, there will be a bad day or two, but don’t worry about those disasters, you know, we’ll muddle through and be back as good as new before you can say ‘Jack Robinson,’” and I am not saying that. First of all, there are disasters that could kill everybody, and there’s also just the level of destruction that we are talking about, and the level of human tragedy, and the tragedy for the earth. Looking at the universe as a whole, furthermore, it is entirely plausible that there are disasters that nobody ever climbs out of. And so I would say that I am just as concerned about disasters as anyone. I have this region of the problem that I am more optimistic about than some people, but overall, avoiding existential threats is at the top of my to-do list. |
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