#frank schatzing

[secretchordstyx]

900 pages for our sadgirl to realize that we live to love each other. not to kill.

[sunlightfeeling]

Der Schwarm / The Swarm: Episode 8 (2023)

Kimura Takuya as Mifune Aito

handsum

[almostdefinitelydying]

How to communicate with aliens

“’a message from an alien life-form that can help us discover how it thinks.' She placed her hand over a stack of plastic files. ‘I've outlined the basis of our approach in these packs. But if any of you thinks this is going to be easy, I'm going to have to disillusion you. 

No doubt you'll have been wrestling with the question as to what kind of creature could be sending us the seven plagues. I guess you're familiar with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Alien, Independence Day, The Abyss, Contact and so on, and you'll probably be expecting either monsters or saints. Take the ending of Close Encounters. 

A superior intelligence descends from space to lead the worthy to a better, brighter future. For lots of people, that's a comforting thought, but doesn't it remind you of something? Exactly! There's a strong religious current beneath the surface of these movies. To some extent, the same could be said about SETI. 

The trouble is, it blinds us to how radically different an alien intelligence is likely to be.' Crowe gave them time to digest what she was saying. She'd thought long and hard about the best way to approach the project, and she knew that she wouldn't make progress until the myths had been debunked. 

‘My point is that science fiction never engages with the true alienness of non-human civilisations. Sci-fi's extra-terrestrials are grotesquely exaggerated projections of human hopes and fears. 

The aliens in Close Encounters symbolise our longing for a lost Eden. They're essentially angels, and that's their function: a few chosen people are guided to the light. Of course, no one's interested in whether these aliens have their own culture. They only exist to serve basic religious notions. Everything about them is human, because that's how humans would like aliens to be. Even their appearance - glowing white light and what have you - has been choreographed to suit us. 

The same goes for the aliens in Independence Day. They're not really alien, in so far as they just live up to our notions of evil. The movies don't allow their aliens to be genuinely different. Good and evil are human concepts, and stories that try to do without them seldom catch on. It's hard for us to accept that our values aren't shared by other civilisations, but it's a problem we face all the time. Every human culture finds aliens on its doorstep - or just across the border. 

To communicate with an alien intelligence, we have to understand that. It's more than likely that we won't have any common values; and if our senses aren't compatible, we may not be able to communicate in any conventional way.' 

Crowe handed the stack of files to Johanson, who was sitting next to her, and asked him to pass them round the room. 

‘If we want to think seriously about communicating with an alien civilisation, we can begin by imagining a state run by ants. Although ants are highly organised, they're not truly intelligent, but for the purpose of the exercise, let's imagine they are. In effect, we'd be dealing with a collective intelligence that sees nothing wrong with feasting on injured members of its species, that goes to war but doesn't understand our concept of peace, that sets no store by individual reproduction, and that treats the harvesting and consumption of excrement as a kind of sacred ceremony. We'd be trying to communicate with a collective intelligence that works in a completely different way from our own. But it works! Let's take this a step further. Suppose for a moment that we don't recognise alien intelligence, even when it comes our way. Leon, for instance, runs all kinds of tests because he wants to find out if dolphins are intelligent, but will he ever know for sure? Conversely, what would an alien intelligence think about us? The yrr are attacking us, but do they credit us with intelligence? Do you see what I'm driving at? We're not going to get any closer to understanding the yrr until we've dispensed with the idea that our system of values is the be-all and end-all of the universe. 

We have to cut ourselves down to size - to what we really are: just one among an infinite number of possible species, with no special claim to being anything more.'

Schatzing, Frank. The Swarm: A Novel of the Deep

[kitapcumlelerim]

Kitap adı: SÜRÜ

Orijinal adı: Der Schwarm

Yazar: Frank Schatzing

Yayınevi: Pegasus 

Sayfa: 850

İlk Baskı: 2004

Tür: BilimKurgu, Aksiyon

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http://kitaplardansayfalar.blogspot.com.tr/2017/01/frank-schatzing-suru.html

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[secretchordstyx]

ngl when the trisolarans invade earth, the yrr (collective amoeba with genetic memory going back as far as 200 million years) would straight chill downstairs in the water. and then when the trisolarans get their heads too far up their asses, the yrr would probably terrorize them long enough to make them wanna go back to their planet-with-three-suns 😂

[secretchordstyx]

dont know how much overlap shatzing and liu had when they were preparing and publishing their books (publication of the books in their original tongue are four years apart), but it’s fascinating how over the years, we’ve repeatedly seen alienesque enemies who only get to beat our collective ass bc they’re collectivist and we’re not. like. the amoebas have genetic memory going back two hundred million years and can work together to take down humanity. meanwhile i cant remember what i ate for breakfast by the time im eating dinner 😂

[secretchordstyx]

the amoebas are out to get humanity. the swarm is legitimately hilarious, and quite frankly, terrifying

[secretchordstyx]

me when the scifi horror takes five hundred pages to tell me that there’s another intelligent species on earth that evolved parallel to mankind and is hellbent on wiping people out cuz they keep polluting the ocean 😱