Skip to main content

Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke



In the future we'll work less and less thanks to automation which will leave us more and more time for entertainment. Most of the routine jobs will be done by machines which leaves us to do the thinking. Thanks to the machines we'll have more time to sport and we'll manage to watch three hours of TV a day. Factories will produce enough goods so that the basic necessities of life are cheap. We'll all be able to travel to any other place in the world in less than one day. It's the golden age of mankind and also the start of our childhood as we spend more and more time playing and watching games.

Arthur C. Clarke's vision from 1953 seems prophetic today. Sadly, we now watch an average of four hours of TV a day while most people don't do any sport at all. And not everyone is at our western level of prosperity. Most people can hardly pay their rent.

In Clarke's book this golden age of mankind is delivered by a species called the Overlords. One day they came and they put us at a great level of prosperity. Of course, there's always a catch. The Overlords are in control of our world and can everything they want thanks to their superior technology. The big question is of course: why are they helping us? The responses to the Overlords are mixed, they did provide us everything we need... except for freedom. Besides that there's also a great reduction in our science and art. What's the use in searching for anti-gravity devices when the Overlords have already invented it? I personally find this hard to believe, I'd imagine that this would just cause the opposite effect. If they can build it, it proves that physics allows us to do it so we can build it too! But in times where the majority of people sport and watch TV most of the time I'm not surprised to see that there's not much time left to do research.

The book follows multiple characters through the ages. It starts directly after the alien landing with the UN governor who is our only contact with the Overlords. He's curious about the Overlords goals and sets out to find these out. The second part moves us fifty years in time and follows Rupert Boyce as he and his wife are in the golden age of mankind. Yet they're not entirely happy, Rupert wants to create art, not sit in front of a TV all day. They set off to join a small community who wants to restore our science and art progress to the times before the aliens interfered. The book concludes as mankind meets its final destiny.

Reading the first part I was enjoying a great book. Sadly, the book starts to fall towards the end. Clarke excuses himself in the foreword for his use of paranormal activities which seemed acceptable at the times. It's never a good sign if an author apologizes for his book. And it's hard to believe that an alien species having superior intelligence would be interested in it. Rupert Boyce himself is convinced that no scientist should believe in it and I fully agree with him. Mankinds destination is also a tough pill to swallow. We all accept our faith without a fight? Seriously?

Maybe we have to see the book in own time. The paranormal might have been more acceptable back then. The link to colonialism also isn't far off. The British were invading the entire world bringing peace and their 'superior' lifestyle through the use of their technology and military power. Is it better to impose your culture on others providing them a better life at the cost of their freedom? The book doesn't answer it but it's giving us food for thought.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

EvoLisa - Comparing two images: performance tuning

It looks like the program is rather slow. Using DotTrace , I took a look at where the bottleneck is. The method that calculates the 'fitnesse', how closely the created image resembles the original image, is where most of the time goes to. Can we improve that? So what happens in this function? We compare each pixel of both images to compare their ARGB values. The better they match, the better the result! How can be compare this? First, I tried using the naive approach: compare each pixel using a bitmaps GetPixel(x, y) . Do that however, and you'll quickly see how excruciatingly slow that is. Especially considering that even with an image of 333x333 you're already comparing a million pixels each time you compare two images! So, instead I tried using a 'FastBitmap'. It's a project I found which wraps the Bitmap and provides much faster Get and SetPixel performance. Using this instead, the performance went up by an order of magnitude! But we can still do be
Post a Comment
Read more

EvoLisa - My own version

It's an old idea by now, can we recreate the Mona Lisa with fifty polygons by using random changes? The idea and original implementation by Roger Johansson can be found here . So, how does it work? You start with an source image. Then you create an empty image. We keep on doing small changes to this image. In my case this is one of these changes: Recolor our polygon Change the position of one of the polygon points Add or remove a new point to our polygon Add or remove a new polygon Switch two polygons After each action, we take a look and check if the newly changed image looks more like the original image by comparing each pixel. If it is, we continue using this one. If it's not, we discard the changes. Looks like a fun project! So I built my own version from scratch eight years ago, reusing some of the same ideas. Here's my result using the Mona Lisa: Mona Lisa with 50 polygons: You can see that it's the Mona Lisa but the details around the eyes and mou
1 comment
Read more

You can leave your hat on

You always think that these things only happen to others. You may even think that they should have used better protection. And then one day you get this mail in your box from your guild leader: Hi there, I dont know if this email will arrive, but I will try anyway. I saw that your chars came online today. They are selling all your gear and equipment and they are not answering on guild chat. I think you are being hacked. Suddenly it's not someone else who has been hacked. It's you! So I quickly took a  look in my second mailbox account and yes: someone merged my account to a battle.net account. My account has been frozen for half a year so someone must have hacked it and have reactivated it. Next thing I did was checking my characters and my armory page looked like this: Kind of them to put on my Christmas hat, it's the season!. Everything that a vendor will accept is sold however. After seeing that picture I  really started to worry. They reactivated my accou
1 comment
Read more