SpaceX and Afrofuturism
My mentor and dear friend Larry Niven and I went to Elon Musk’s Spacex in Hawthorne yesterday, and had a wonderful time. I keep my Tech Geek sensibilities down to a low boil most of the time, but if walking through a Factory of the Future doesn’t stir your blood…well, you aren’t a science fiction fan.
I also yesterday was interviewed by a student studying Afrofuturism, who asked a series of terrific and probing questions, including “What is it?” and “Why is it important?”
Well…let me offer an answer based on current data. First:
- What is Afrofuturism? That’s simple enough. It is the science fiction, fantasy and speculative literature flowing from the African diaspora. That means concerning or created by the children of Africa, including those still connected to their traditions and nationalities.
- Why is it important? Well…consider that black people have been mostly excluded from American SF, except for a few peripheral roles. This started changing around the year 2000, but we have a long long way to go. This is important to black people for obvious reasons. But it is important to humanity because we are going to need ALL our talent and resources to solve the problems ahead.
For instance: if you believe that the current world population of almost eight billion people is problematic, that it cannot be sustained with current or reasonably projected systems and technology, then there are limited possibilities.
- Exodus. The notion that human beings will “flee to the stars” is a nice romantic notion, but while insuring the survival of the human genome, and exploration of new spaces is absolutely doable and probably SHOULD be done, it has zero to do with our current problems. I spoke to our guide, a SpaceX project manager, and he verified my suspicion: their current “Big Project” referred to affectionately as the “BFR” for reasons that will amuse anyone who remembers the game “Doom”) is the largest rocket currently being planned or designed ANYWHERE ON THE PLANET. And it is projected to carry 100 persons. Even assuming we build and sustain habitats for these people, it would take 10k launches to carry a million people to orbit, and that is an insignificant proportion of the population issue: at 10k a year launches, it would take a THOUSAND YEARS to move just one billion people off the planet.
- Move them to Mars? Hah. I worked with one of the men who handles telemetry for the Mars rover. And he said, soberly, that his experiences told him that there is NOTHING that could happen to Earth, nothing man or nature could do, to make Earth less inhabitable than Mars is at this moment. No, if we are going to survive, we have to deal with our issues HERE. First. Or our great-grandchildren will never see the stars.
- Well…what about reducing the population of Earth? Shall we notice that the last 70k years or so human beings have genetically and memetically selected the peoples who are about EXPANDING the population? Maxing out the grandchildren? Everything about us has been aimed at that, and turning that bus around will require time. Which means that a quite large chunk of people cannot even brainstorm about the problem. Add to this the very real question: WHO IS GETTING KICKED OFF THE RAFT? Or who is going to be asked to stop reproducing? Anyone who doesn’t see the specter of racially, tribally or eugenically-motivated genocide hasn’t paid attention to history.
- So what if the biosphere will collapse unless we can limit population, but we can’t limit it for technological, philosophical, or political reasons? Well…you’d better bet that if the technology exists, there will be people who plan to flee. And you can imagine that they will be the wealthiest and most connected, most “valuable” people on the planet. By their definitions, anyway.
Take any or all of those thoughts. Stir them up, and cross-breed them. There are a billion ugly scenarios, and maybe a million positive ones. We cannot leave the discussion to our grandchildren, because some problems require generations to solve. So at the least, the CONVERSATION must happen now. Anyone who cannot see a thousand movies, a million stories that can flow from the interaction of these notions simply isn’t dreaming.
Afrofuturism? Wellll…from the perspective of black folks, we had better believe that if we don’t cover our butts here no one else is going to. The George Pal film ‘When Worlds Collide” happily displayed an exodus with nothing but white people, and I never heard a single white critic or fan complain about this.
The larger reason? I believe that a problem created by the species can be solved by the species, but we need ALL our brains and hearts to look at this, not just a slice of the pie who think themselves superior. It will take all of us. We must dream together, or die together.
Yes, I think science fiction is that important. It allows us to examine possible futures before they arrive, and train us in the critical “what if?” thinking so integral to the larger “what is true?” and “who am I?” questions, the core of thought itself.
I can’t think of anything more important than survival. Can you?
Namaste
Steven Barnes