[HN Gopher] It Awaits Your Experiments
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It Awaits Your Experiments
Author : pavel_lishin
Score : 110 points
Date : 2025-05-13 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.rifters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.rifters.com)
| jkingsman wrote:
| It took me a moment to realize, even after the mention of
| Echopraxia, that this was Peter Watts.
|
| If you enjoy hard to very-hard science fiction, I strongly
| recommend the first book of his series, Blindsight. I thoroughly
| loved the read and bounced right back to the beginning for a
| second read with the context I'd gained on the first one. It's an
| absolute firehose of concepts; reminded me a bit of Accelerando
| by Charles Stross but a little less pleased with its own
| geekiness. The best summary I could give would be a meditation on
| consciousness set against a first-contact backdrop.
| subscribed wrote:
| I think the Blindsight is the best sci-fi book for me.
| Absolutely gripping and novel.
|
| And what I found particularly interesting, the afterword is
| about as interesting and engaging as the book.
|
| It's such a gem of a book.
| otikik wrote:
| I wonder how he's feeling about Chinese rooms these days.
| ImaCake wrote:
| He blogs a lot on the OP link. I would imagine he has a few
| words about LLMs in there.
|
| One of his older works explores the risks of software similar
| to LLMs but a little more advanced.
| Boogie_Man wrote:
| This may be well known, but I'm posting it because I didn't
| know: "very-hard" science fiction in this context means
| extremely plausible science fiction, as opposed to extremely
| speculative science fiction. The author explains how these
| fantastic things exist in a way which is realistic.
|
| Originally, I thought it meant "very hard to understand" i.e.
| very technically complicated
| ZpJuUuNaQ5 wrote:
| >extremely plausible science fiction
|
| >I thought it meant "very hard to understand"
|
| For a mere mortal like myself, those definitions aren't
| mutually exclusive. I think I tried reading "Blindsight" a
| long time ago but never got past a few dozen pages. Maybe I
| should give it a try again someday.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| Blindsight is known to be a slog for a lot of people
| including myself.
|
| I love sci-fi, I love challenging ideas, and I really liked
| the concepts explored in Blindsight - except that I learned
| those concepts through summaries and selective reading.
| jkingsman wrote:
| Yes, there were definitely parts where I felt maybe I was
| picking up on a vibe or a hint, and later realized that
| was now a structural part of the story without which I
| would be quite lost.
|
| I found this INCREDIBLY FULL OF SPOILERS explanation of
| fundamental plot points to be helpful in confirming or
| summarizing some things I missed[0].
|
| [0]: ---EXTREME SPOILER WARNING-- https://old.reddit.com/
| r/printSF/comments/4p6zqj/understandi...
| Boogie_Man wrote:
| I'm certified dumb as a box of rocks 19 Wonderlic and I was
| able to follow most of it without issue or pause. It's
| possible that it's a bell curve and I'm too dumb to realize
| I was missing things. Hard to say.
| jkingsman wrote:
| Plausible oftentimes, I would say, but more that there are
| reliable, consistent systems at work that may or may not be
| explained, but that are definitely used. Very little "magic"
| or hand waving, but at the least the implication that there
| is an understandable system at work at some level.
| mordechai9000 wrote:
| To me, "hard science fiction" evokes the old school writers
| like Arthur C. Clarke who would explore ideas with a slide
| rule or a calculator when planning a story. Even if he had
| to use a little hand waving and some unobtainium to make
| Ringworld work.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Maybe the neatest part of that with Ringworld is when
| fans proved that the theoretical structure itself is
| orbitally unstable... which he then came up with
| explanations for and used as a major plot point in a
| follow-up book.
| Loughla wrote:
| Larry Niven wrote ringworld and the follow ups, not
| Clarke. Clarke wrote the Rama series.
| Scarblac wrote:
| The way I see it is that hard science is _about_ the new
| science and its effects on people, so it has to make the
| science believable somehow.
|
| Whereas soft science fiction has a futuristic setting but
| isn't primarily about that.
| ngangaga wrote:
| I would characterize "hard" sci fi as "consistent" or
| "coherent", not necessarily "plausible".
| swayvil wrote:
| How about very comprehensible science fiction?
|
| Because science first and foremost strives for
| comprehensibility in its discussion of strange things.
|
| Which is exactly why we borrow it for fiction.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Astonishing book which I reread regularly. Echopraxia has grown
| on me upon further reading - initially I focused on the seeming
| promise of action and plot, vs ideas and concepts.
|
| His Starfish book however has the most realistic, plausible,
| feasible, likely AI doomsday scenario though - published as it
| was 26 years ago and without AI being the focus for majority of
| the book.
| duskwuff wrote:
| "Checkers or chess?"
|
| But yes. Especially when you boil it down to the essentials:
| humans take an AI built to perform one task and press it into
| duty for another, much more impactful task which it was
| completely unsuited for.
| atombender wrote:
| The Freeze-Frame Revolution is also fantastic, along with the
| short stories, which collectively form the "Sunflower" cycle.
|
| Watts writes the smartest but also scariest science fiction.
| There's an aura of existential, Lovecraftean dread in all his
| writings that I find incredibly appealing. In the case of
| Sunflower, Watts is able to make the idea of floating through
| space for millions of years, unable to stop, into something
| genuinely upsetting. It's bleak, but also really well
| plotted.
|
| Not too long ago, Watts published a short story set right
| after Blindsight, "The Colonel". It's an excellent,
| standalone read.
| davidthewatson wrote:
| For those of you who read with glee of the author's work and it's
| launch in Toronto soon, the event is free and open to the public
| if you wanna flee to Toronto for fun or are already there. I hope
| this won't become an unlikely Superbloom given the subject.
|
| https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/coach-house-spring-group-launch-...
| Atreiden wrote:
| This is one of the coolest things I've read here in some time.
| This is the kind of insanity I can get behind.
|
| > The rest of us might think we achieve artistic immortality if
| our work lasts a century or three. Bok blows his nose at such
| puny ambitions. His work might get deciphered by Fermi aliens who
| finally make it to our neighborhood a billion years from now. It
| could be iterating right up until the sun swallows this planet
| whole.
|
| I got frisson reading this. I may have to read the author's
| novels, his writing style is compelling.
| The5thElephant wrote:
| Peter Watts is fantastic. Very different tone from a lot of
| other scifi, with some very clever and dark ideas.
| subscribed wrote:
| You can download several of his novels from his own website.
|
| Yeah, for free.
|
| And indeed, his style is like this. It's really hard to put the
| book down.
| sriram_malhar wrote:
| This (Xenotext v2) blew my mind. I'm astonished not just by how
| people can think like this, but the persistence of effort to get
| it to fruition.
|
| I have to read it a couple more times to savor this. What a
| delight!
| MinimalAction wrote:
| Amazing article! His writing style is unique and made me go down
| a rabbit hole of discovering his other works.
|
| I was unaware of this demagogue of a bacterium _Deinococcus
| radiodurans_. It survives levels of radiation that is designed to
| kill _all_ lifeforms. Wikipedia [0] lists this as a bacteria that
| supports panspermia -- that life originated elsewhere but spread
| through cosmic dust and was seeded on Earth eventually.
|
| Fun fact: _Thermococcus gammatolerans_ is known to be the one
| that tolerates the most toxic radiation.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans
| alnwlsn wrote:
| > only known organism to have ever lived on the Moon
|
| Anyone know what this is referring to? The only instance I know
| of was the Surveyor 3 camera, which was supposedly _Streptococcus
| mitis_ and even that situation is greatly contested.
| dekhn wrote:
| their description of deinococcus has several errors. For
| example, they claim it reproduces without DNA, which is not
| true.
| dejobaan wrote:
| Fantastic. While it's not quite at the level of Bok's work, an
| inevitable comparison is all of Tom7's projects (and in
| particular http://tom7.org/harder). I always love when this kind
| of stuff pops up onto HN. I feel that we're all interesting and
| experimental, and sometimes need a nudge to remember that people
| can do weird, neat stuff.
| flysand7 wrote:
| This reminds me of "I'm Humanity" by Yakushimaru Etsuko, which
| was also etched onto a DNA of a bacteria. I love that song.
|
| Also see https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2018/05/30/im-
| humanity...
| dekhn wrote:
| I have a phd in a related field and I can't understand exactly
| what is being said here. From what I can tell, the author claims
| a protein was engineered, where the protein sequence maps
| (through a chosen translation table) to a human text. But at the
| same time, the protein folds into a well-defined shape
| (predicted, then experimentally determined), and somehow also
| enciphers... another poem?
| duskwuff wrote:
| You've got the right idea. The "poem" ("any style of life / is
| prim...") is encoded as a DNA sequence. This DNA codes for a
| protein, whose amino acids can be read as English text as well
| ("the faery is rosy / of glow..."), and which causes the
| bacterium to glow red. Watts mentions this work in his book
| _Echopraxia_ as follows:
|
| "The sequence spells a message _and_ codes for a protein. The
| protein fluoresces _and_ contains a response. It's not
| contamination or lateral transfer. It's a _poem_. "
|
| There's a more verbose explanation in this interview of Bok:
|
| https://maisonneuve.org/article/2011/06/1/sls-interviews-chr...
| aaroninsf wrote:
| De rigeur trigger warning,
|
| Peter Watts' _Rifters_ books (hence the domain),
|
| are however full of memorable compelling ideas,
|
| totally un-recommendable,
|
| because they are also unedited indulgences by the author in his
| own sadomasochistic fantasies of sexual violence (specifically,
| to women), and they are in effect sexual torture-porn.
| swayvil wrote:
| Meh. Art guided by science is like flight guided by digging.
|
| Otoh science guided by art happens all the time.
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