{"id":5052,"date":"2015-10-06T14:18:09","date_gmt":"2015-10-06T14:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=5052"},"modified":"2015-10-06T14:18:56","modified_gmt":"2015-10-06T14:18:56","slug":"science-fiction-scarcity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2015\/10\/science-fiction-scarcity\/","title":{"rendered":"The Science Fiction of Scarcity – Article by Sarah Skwire"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"The<\/a>Sarah Skwire
\n<\/big><\/big><\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
October 6, 2015<\/big><\/span><\/div>\n
******************************<\/div>\n
\n

We Have Such Abundance That We Fantasize about Having Less.<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

We all know the scene. The urbane starship captain steps up to the console and requests, \u201cTea. Earl Grey. Hot.\u201d He waits a second or two until a steaming, perfectly brewed cup shimmers into existence.<\/p>\n

From medieval dreams of the Land of Cockaigne<\/a>, where roofs are shingled with pastries and roasted chickens fly into our waiting mouths, to the Big Rock Candy Mountain\u2019s<\/a> \u201ccigarette trees\u201d and \u201clemonade springs,\u201d to Star Trek\u2019s replicator, we have imagined the bright futures and the glorious new worlds that would give us instant abundance.<\/p>\n

The \u201cTea. Earl Grey. Hot\u201d type of scene is such a standby it even has its own parodies, where instant preference satisfaction is not exactly \u2026 satisfying.<\/p>\n

He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.<\/p>\n

The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject\u2019s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject\u2019s metabolism, and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject\u2019s brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. (Douglas Adams, Restaurant at the End of the Universe<\/a><\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If we didn\u2019t know what was supposed to happen, and if we didn\u2019t fully expect the future to fulfill our fantasies, and if we didn\u2019t have a certain amount of frustrated experience with modern machines that promise wonders but deliver things that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike them, the scene wouldn\u2019t be funny.<\/p>\n

But I find science fiction most compelling when it goes in the other direction \u2014 when instead of imagining the end of scarcity, it imagines the end of abundance. The movie Total Recall <\/em><\/a>imagines life on Mars, where even the air is rationed. The gritty reboot of the television series Battlestar Galactica<\/a><\/em> puts us in world where fewer than 50,000 humans have survived and escaped from an enemy attack. The survivors spend much of their time trying to subsist in space amid constant and growing shortages of food, water, fuel, ammunition, and pretty much everything else.<\/p>\n

In works like these \u2014 and yes, I know their imaginings are as romantic as the imaginings of Star Trek \u2014 we get to watch human beings pushed to their limits, using every bit of their ingenuity in order to survive. It was no accident, after all, that Gene Roddenberry <\/a>called space \u201cthe final frontier.\u201d<\/p>\n

The latest iteration of this kind of scarcity science fiction is Andy Weir\u2019s novel The Martian<\/a><\/em>, the movie version of which premiered October 2. I first learned about The Martian<\/em> through the XKCD webcomic strip<\/a> describing the plot as made out of \u201cthe scene in Apollo 13 where the guy says \u2018we have to figure out how to connect this<\/em> thing to this<\/em> thing using this<\/em> table of parts or the astronauts will all die.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

I was sold.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s no spoiler to say that this is precisely the plot of The Martian. <\/em>Astronaut Mark Watney is one of the first people to visit Mars. When the mission goes awry, his crew has to evacuate, and Mark is left behind. Everyone thinks he\u2019s dead.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s not, though, and the remainder of the book is caught up in the details of the scarcities he faces, his creative attempts to overcome them, and our nail-biting suspense over whether he can survive one more hour, one more day, and maybe long enough to be rescued. Mark describes his situation like this:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m stranded on Mars. I have no way to communicate with Hermes or Earth. Everyone thinks I\u2019m dead. I\u2019m in a Hab [the atmosphere-controlled habitat in which astronauts from his mission could live without wearing spacesuits] designed to last thirty-one days. If the oxygenator breaks down, I\u2019ll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I\u2019ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I\u2019ll just kind of explode. If none of these things happen, I\u2019ll eventually run out of food and starve to death.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mark\u2019s assessment of his situation, which ends with, \u201cI\u2019m f\u2014ed,\u201d appears on page 7 of the novel. We spend 360 more pages following his solitary attempts to science his way out of the problem. And if you\u2019re at all like me, you won\u2019t be able to put the book down until you find out what happens. Done well, the movie should convey that same nail-biting suspense.<\/p>\n

The Martian<\/em>, and scarcity science fiction in general, is a good reminder to all of us that the real miracle of the market is not the great individual with the great idea, bringing it to fruition and selling it to all of us. The real miracle of the market is that it reliably supplies us, every day, with all the necessities that Mark Watney has to work for so desperately. And it does that by allowing us to cooperate, and to broaden that cooperation beyond our immediate context, to the extended and anonymous world. That long-distance cooperation allows us to access so many different human skills, strengths, and abilities.<\/p>\n

With only himself to rely on, Mark (who is primarily a botanist) is painfully aware of the skills he lacks, skills he relied on in his crewmembers who specialize in chemistry, or engineering, or other sciences. While it becomes clear that his botany skills will be a crucial part of his survival, so are all these others, and without any possibility of cooperating, he has to go it alone. He\u2019s in the position of the folks who try to build a toaster entirely from scratch, or make a sandwich all on their own<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I loved reading The Martian<\/em>, and I can\u2019t wait to see the movie. Stories like this, and like Battlestar Galactica<\/em> and others, allow me to explore the limits of the human ability to survive. I\u2019m happy to visit those worlds and to entert<\/a>ain myself with their emotional and suspenseful visions of life on the narrowest of possible margins.<\/p>\n

But the world I want to live in is the one where cooperation, through the mechanisms of the market, brings us movies about scarcity and survival, while outside the movie theater we enjoy real-life abundance. And also, maybe one day, a replicator that will allow my own cup of \u201cTea. Earl Grey. Hot\u201d to shimmer miraculously into being.<\/p>\n

Sarah Skwire<\/a>\u00a0is a senior fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook\u00a0Writing with a Thesis<\/em><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education<\/a> and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License<\/a>, which requires that credit be given to the author.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sarah Skwire October 6, 2015 ****************************** We Have Such Abundance That We Fantasize about Having Less. *** We all know the scene. The urbane starship captain steps up to the console and requests, \u201cTea. Earl Grey. Hot.\u201d He waits a second or two until a steaming, perfectly brewed cup shimmers into existence. From medieval dreams of the Land of Cockaigne, where roofs are shingled with pastries and roasted chickens fly into our waiting mouths, to the Big Rock Candy Mountain\u2019s…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,662],"tags":[530,4357,4356,1290,583,4355,2207,529,1661,534,3288],"class_list":["post-5052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-science-2","tag-abundance","tag-andy-weir","tag-douglas-adams","tag-film","tag-mars","tag-martian","tag-sarah-skwire","tag-scarcity","tag-science-fiction","tag-star-trek","tag-survival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5052"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5054,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5052\/revisions\/5054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}