The 7 Best Optimistic Hard Sci-Fi Short Stories
Sci-fi stories as the shortcut to interesting ideas. Including pieces from Neal Stephenson's Project Hieroglyph and works from Ted Chiang and Max in Tegmark.
Sci-fi short stories are great because they condense the content of a story to the most important and interesting part—the ideas. The subgenre of sci-fi, called hard science fiction, is characterized by a concern for scientific accuracy and logic and is often written by trained scientists.
If you haven't read these, I tried my best not to spoil the plots.
Project Hieroglyph
The following three short stories originated from Project Hieroglyph, by the Center for Science and the Imagination and a global collective of writers and researchers.
What science fiction stories—and the symbols that they engender—can do better than almost anything else is to provide not just an idea for some specific technical innovation but also to supply a coherent picture of that innovation being integrated into a society, into an economy, and into people's lives. Often, this is the missing element that scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and entrepreneurs need in order to actually take the first real steps toward realizing some novel idea.
Stephenson presented the project and the motivation behind his piece at the 2012 google X conference.
1. Atmosphæra Incognita
The story is about an eccentric billionaire trying to build a 20-miles high tower. This idea dates back multiple centuries to the story of the tower of Babylon (i.e., biblical sci-fi?).
For perspective, the envisioned tower would be 24 times as tall as the 830-meter Burj Khalifa and 3.6 times higher than Mt. Everest.
The story includes various engineering challenges that the tower builders must solve, including rebooting the steel industry and developing computer-assisted strategies to counter expansions and contractions due to extreme temperatures and the impact of jet streams. For the latter challenge, its engineers equipped the tower with jet engines. In the epilogue, Stephenson credits this idea to Jeff Bezos.
I love this story because it describes the creation of a monument. A hypothesis I have is that more monuments of progress could mitigate the general decline of optimism. One outlier here and a temporary example is the $42 Million 10,000-Year Clock built by the Jet Stream construction inventor Jeff Bezos.
2. Periapsis
James Cambias writes about two teenagers/young adults competing for admission to a city and elite community on Deimos, a moon of Mars. Since reading Atlas shrugged and learning about Galt's Gulch. I've been fascinated by the concept of communities comprised of smart and ambitious individuals.
Deimos was the Big Time, like Jakarta or Mexico City. It was the gateway to Mars, the launch point for the outer system, and even supplied volatiles to Luna and the Lagranges. The Deimos Community had its fingers in everything that went on from Low Earth Orbit out to the Kuiper Belt. Smart, ambitious, and attractive people flowed toward Deimos. Everybody wanted to be there. It wasn't just to get rich—it was to be part of the scene, to be where the cool stuff was happening. To be there. The Deimos Community picked a population target of two million and enforced it. The only way new people joined was when there was a deficit between births and deaths. Hardly anyone ever left voluntarily. Most years only a few places opened up. The Community filled them by inviting scientists, artists, or other talented people to join. Sometimes they'd auction off a couple of slots, which just made Deimos that much richer.
This first part of the story also reminded me of the Thiel Fellowship admissions process. Later sections paint a grand vision of future prototyping capabilities and space entrepreneurship. Lastly, it vividly displays that children can innovate. More about the story here.
3. The Man Who Sold the Stars
An ambitious, iconoclastic entepreneur perfects technologies for robotic mining of asteroids, comets, and other celestial bodies, and uses his immense profits to fund research to find nearby Earth-like planets. Will he achieve his ultimate goal of voyaging to another star?
A fascinating depiction of the future of asteroid mining and longevity science. The protagonist begins his career as a software engineer. Years later, he comes up with a plan to mine asteroids but runs into legal trouble due to outdated regulations and laws. Once he established his asteroid mining and spaceflight empire, he and his girlfriend invest in costly longevity science treatments surpassing many lifetimes.
It paints the picture of a new era of close to infinite lives and a new industrial revolution in space. You can read more about Gregory Benford’s story here.
Stories of Your Life and Others
4. Understand
The protagonist in this story is administered an experimental drug to heal his brain damage but experiences the unintended side effect of exponentially improving intelligence and motor skills.
Later in the short story, the protagonist describes his development of a new language with the properties of mathematical interoperability and a field co-expressiveness:
Existing linguistic theory is useless; I'll reevaluate basic logic to determine the suitable atomic components for my language. This language will support a dialect coexpressive with all of mathematics, so that any equation I write will have a linguistic equivalent.
However, mathematics will be only a small part of the language, not the whole; unlike Leibniz, I recognize symbolic logic's limits. Other dialects I have planned will be coexpressive with my notations for aesthetics and cognition. [...]. After I've translated all that I know into this language, the patterns I seek should become evident.
It ultimately leads the protagonist to new realizations and a Meta conscious. Chang writes:
With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. [...]. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.
A related phenomenon described here is linguistic relativity, the theory that acquired language affects one's worldview or cognition and, thus, that people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language. Two common examples are color theory (blue and green together) and directionality (only using relative directions instead of absolute directions).
The story also features fascinating accounts of nanotechnology-enabled brain-computer interface enhancements, which the protagonist develops as he determines his brain's processing power insufficient. You can read it here.
This short story might be the least realistic of all. Evolutionary biology tells us that the brain is already extremely "maxed out". It already consumes ~20-60% of our body's energy.
5. Catching Crumbs From The Table
The story was first published under the title “The Evolution of Human Science” as a featured article in Nature.
Although intriguing, this short story is similarly conceptually wrong. In the story, human science and academic journals are mainly in the business of Hermeneutics (interpreting historical texts), while superhuman AI is creating all new scientific contributions. As explained in other articles about the structure of knowledge, there is nothing too complex for the human mind to understand (via abstractions and cognitive augmentation).
To believe there is, is to believe in the supernatural.
6. Twin Sparrows (in AI 2041)
This short story is from the book AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by Chen Qiufan (former president of Google China) and Kai-Fu Lee. The book is an excellent read because, after every story, there is an analysis of the described technologies. "Twin Sparrows" explores the future of AI education, as Intelligent teaching systems camouflaged as virtual cartoonlike avatars help twin Korean orphans realize their potential while going throw a sibling rivalry. The story makes a strong point about the value of highly aligned and intimate personal AI assistants imagining what it would be like to get highly personalized coaching and advice in a matter of seconds wherever we go.
The short story collection has some other good pieces that are worth reading.
7. The Tale of the Omega Team (in Life 3.0)
Max Tegmark published this story as the prelude to his book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. It describes how a team of AI scientists discovered and used an advanced AI to take over the world and build an intelligent teaching system to help humans learn:
"Given any person's knowledge and abilities, Prometheus could determine the fastest way for them to learn any new subject in a manner that kept them highly engaged and motivated to continue and produce the corresponding optimized videos, reading materials, exercises, and other learning tools. […] by leveraging Prometheus' movie-making talents, the video segments would truly engage, providing powerful metaphors that you would relate to, leaving you craving to learn more.
Let me know if I forgot anything, i.e., have a recommendation similar to these books and short stories :)