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The calendar already shows 2021. Aside from technological advances, almost everything around us is scientific and fantastic. Why does someone write science in form today?
Since I was a child I have been interested in the future, where the world is heading. In fact, we live in an almost realized science fiction, but the future is still interesting in all eras. And science fiction is also a kind of thought experiment: writers ask the simple question “what if?” And they give different views in response to them. They draw attention to the dangers or opportunities embedded in the stories. What if we can’t deal with global warming? What if we created artificial intelligences that were many times smarter than consciousness? Or what if we also despise our feet on other planets?
Isn’t it good here on Earth?
Good forever, we’ve only gotten a little bit into this gutted little ball of stone by now. Stephen Hawking, a physicist who died two years ago, said humanity’s only hope is to leave Earth, but Elon Musk, the bastard of our time and many other scientific thinkers and researchers, also says it is unfortunate that survival to long term is tied to a single planet. . And not only because an inevitable global or cosmic catastrophe could occur at any moment, be it a super volcanic eruption or the impact of an asteroid 65 million years ago, but mainly because if we live in such a self-destructive way and the population grows to such pace, then we will destroy our environment very quickly and irreversibly.
And would that be the solution for everyone to pack because we are moving soon?
This could be a longer term solution to reduce risk. The more places we scatter, the greater the possibility of survival at the level of civilization. Furthermore, we must realize that, as a species, we are beginning to leave our planet. However, the main task in the short term is to make the near future livable in the long term. Of course, looking beyond all this, our entire history reveals that from the beginning we have longed to discover new territories, continents, worlds, to know the unknown.
In the Middle Ages, for example, many did not necessarily leave because they wanted to discover, but because in the Western world, for the most part, the first-born inherited everything, land and wealth, that is, the one who packed longed to get it in another place. .
There have always been deep-rooted explorers and adventurers, regardless of their background, motivation, tribal, family tension, desire for wealth or adventure. Exploring the space is equally engaging. For whom it means fame, for whom it is a challenge, for whom it is to face the unknown, and for whom it is to seduce unimaginable riches. With the right technology, for example, space mining can begin in the not-too-distant future, which also promises wealth. The world’s two richest men, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, also own an ever-evolving rocket development company (Blue Origin and SpaceX) that at first seems like an expensive game for dreaming billionaires. However, we think of this again in the context of space mining.
And if we look further: hundreds of billions of stars exist only in the Milky Way, a galaxy like this that exists in untold numbers in the universe. These are incomprehensible sizes and numbers. It is as if here on Earth we are trying to understand and interpret the world from the depths of a small narrow cellar. The other problem is that, at the moment, we have no chance of reaching even the nearest star in the foreseeable future.
He has a degree in economics and seems to think not only in theoretical but also practical aspects.
I always put a lot of emphasis on this in my novels. It’s very exciting to think about how my future fictional worlds work from a social and economic point of view. For example, a society where human consciousness can be separated from the body, where there is global time travel, or we go beyond capitalism, we live with artificial intelligence, extraterrestrial civilizations.
Knowing his novels, his writings so far, there seems to be an area that interests him much more than the average: trans or posthuman life. Achieve an out-of-body state. His latest novel, Disposable bodies it is also about that. Why are you so interested in the subject of immortality?
This is really one of my favorite tracks that I go back to from time to time. But that’s what it’s all about: we are born, we live, we die, and there is hardly a person on Earth who does not think how good it would be to prolong our lives. Who wouldn’t be wondering what it would be like to live, say, 300-600 years instead of 70-80 years? Of course, there are definitely people who give thanks, I have been quite 80 years old. And others say that the body is just a dusty capsule, a shell that is constantly used and that carries our consciousness, who we are. And if so, can this seemingly elusive consciousness or soul be transformed into digital and transferred to another body? The way we switch to a new car or replace the radiator if the old one breaks down.
the Disposable bodiesBen writes about this that one of the solutions to immortality can be the discharge and transferability of our consciousness to another body.
So is. the Disposable bodies takes place in a 24th century future where this technology appears, creating an opportunity to change our bodies like clothing does today. He was very concerned about the social implications of this imagined technology, what would happen to the world, how we could handle this change that is fundamentally revolutionizing our millennial, one-man, one-body civilization. Because what would such technology mean? Today I live with a fuller body, tomorrow with a slim body. I can eat and drink whatever I want because if the body gets sick from this, I will move to another. I can be short, tall, muscular, the possibilities are endless. Nowadays, we very often judge our peers by appearance and inadvertently behave differently with beautiful people, which also affects a person’s success and this has caused serious social tension for millennia. In a world independent of the body, this too would disappear and the personality itself would remain.
These are all exciting but terrifying opportunities, which nonetheless lead to serious new dilemmas, and I am sure that we could not cope with a change of this magnitude on a social level. So is Disposable bodies its heroes also inevitably seek a normal, habitable version of this technology.
You write this as a writer, but do you believe in it?
I want to believe in a distant future where everyone chooses how long they want to live. Today science is increasingly tackling the problem, and much depends on when and to what depth we will be able to understand how our brain works and how we are present in this pile of tissues. Life extension, on the other hand, has been going on for a long time, and the average age of humanity has steadily increased for centuries. And today, many serious industries are building on this, such as the pharmaceutical industry or modern medicine, which is finding new and more effective ways to overcome many diseases, but we can even talk about prosthetics and organ transplants. It is not eternal life, but it is already an opportunity for an ever longer life.
Do you want to live forever
It would be easy to say yes, but the answer is not that simple. Because everyone wants to become immortal at a young age, for the rest of their lives, not old, sick, or insane. But suppose that the body does not age, it does not get sick. But who knows what state our consciousness will be in over time? Our soul, our spirit. Six hundred years from now, could we remember what we did in 2020? Most adults are not even able to remember their childhood in detail. What would life mean in such a long period of time? How could we endure so many years of existence? So I’d first taste what it would be like to live a few hundred years, and then we’ll see if I want more.
And if everyone lived longer, the Earth would be even more populated. And if in the meantime man could not move to other planets, not even to Mars, what would happen then?
Due to overpopulation and, in parallel, the development of medicine or the food industry, this is a problem even without immortality. Already today. If people live only ten years longer than their parents, this leads to the problem of overpopulation, food or even employment. Humanity can provide a variety of answers to this, from birth control, growing faster maturing plants, genetic engineering, producing synthetic meats, and eventually moving to other planets, as expansion is an evolutionary goal but also a civilization goal. One thing is for sure: if we don’t find a global solution to all this and stop the systematic destruction of our environment very soon, nature will sooner or later do it for us.
And optimistic or pessimistic about the future of humanity?
I’m basically optimistic, but that doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily writing about optimistic views. A good and exciting story also requires pessimism. And although science fiction deals with the future, it still reflects on the present, current social problems, problems in its own way. THE Xenon my novel, for example, deals with the difficulties of cultures to understand and accept each other, and the fear and hatred of strangers. It’s based on what would happen if several alien species suddenly appeared on Earth – will it still make sense that humans hate each other? I think by the way, if we were to encounter an alien civilization, it would be a very instructive realization and we would have to re-evaluate a lot within ourselves as a human race.
Staying in the world of books: In the Index, we begin to write about whether literature, writing, can sustain a writer. Science fiction seems to be at a disadvantage even in the market for ten to fifteen million languages. How do you see this?
Science fiction has always been read at a lower level both in Hungarian and around the world, but there are always outstanding success books that can be attributed to this success primarily through poignant adaptations. I would only earn a living writing science fiction here in Hungary if someone wrote a book every one or two months. Needless to say, this is almost physically impossible, furthermore, it would be impossible to maintain the level of quality in such quantity.
Compared to football: they say you are the professional footballer who gets on a bus after a game and goes to work.
I like this. I could say that writing novels is a hobby for me, but that’s not true because it still involves hard and intense brain work, even if it’s just night and weekend activities. Although I have more and more readers, almost all of my recent books have had to be reprinted, the real breakthrough could be if my novels were also published in English. And now I can be proud to have a contract with Agave Publishing, a New York literary agency that has already had several editions of my novels, mainly in Hungary. The day of time travel He deals with his foreign publications, but in reality this doesn’t mean much at the moment, because as an unknown Hungarian writer, it is still almost impossible to enter the American book market.
While even the best known writers started out as strangers.
That’s right, but you should also know that very, very few non-Anglo-Saxon fantastic writers can be successful internationally. This is a much longer and bumpy road at best. In any case, I am optimistic and persistent, and then we will see.
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