On Neal Stephenson's Seveneves

Neal Stephenson's Seveneves (2015) is just massive and hard to synthesize into a blog post, but I had to do it to help myself work through its themes. If you're interested  in reading it and don't want a SPOILER, stop! There are a number of twists and turns that I had to work through, and some of the surprises are worth working through on your own.

The plot's basic premise is that the moon explodes into 7 large chunks. In fact, that's the very first line of the book. Running a variety of experiments, scientists learn that planet Earth has roughly 2 years before these large chunks eventually become small bolides that will rain on the earth for several thousand years. Time starts again at Zero, when the moon explodes. During the two years of preparations for the end of the world pre-Zero, humanity "casts lots" to send "arks," not unlike Noah's, into orbit. These Arks contain humans selected by the casting of lots. Those selected and a lot of digital genetics stored on hard drives will be  the genetic material to start a new planet Earth. In essence, they're saving the species by sending the best and brightest from each community. You can imagine how sour the politics could get here with the Casting of the Lots, though.

The novel can be broken down into 3 basic parts: 1) Zero and the  two years leading up to Zero; 2) The Hard Rain, and within this time we have the Arks, the Break, and the Big Ride; and 3) 5000 years later.

The novel imagines a scenario in which the world ends and we have sufficient lead time to prepare, but it really succeeds in envisioning what re-building the Earth might look like and what humans are capable of to make that happen. But what stands out is that Seveneves illustrates how natural and deeply ingrained humanity's tendency toward division really is. From the start, the instinct to form factions rather than coming together is powerful. There are the Arkies (those selected to be on the Arks, during the Casting of Lots) versus the GPop (the General Population of Space Station workers, necessary technical personnel on the Space Station that was already in orbit prior to the moon exploding).

Then there is the Big Break that separates the factions. The Arkies send a contingent to Mars never to be seen again while the GPop brings a comet back--the water from the comet is potable when filtered, can be used to grow crops, and the hydrogen when split from the oxygen makes for propellant for the spacecraft. But it's a huge endeavor with all dying on the mission except for one.

Later, we have the Sooners/Indigens versus the Spacers, the Diggers versus the Spacers, and then the Pingers. The Spacers are those that went to space and comprise the the GPop and Arkies who spent the 5000 years after the Hard Rain first living in the valley of a huge asteroid where they re-build and then plot to repopulate the Earth. The Diggers are a group of miners, who at Zero, buried themselves sufficiently deep in the Earth to survive the Hard Rain, much to the surprise of the Spacers. The Sooners are the first Spacers to inhabit the new Earth that has been terraformed with comets. The Pingers evolved from those stuck in a submarine at Zero.

If wolves became poodles in only a matter of a few generations, you can how imagine how the Pingers adapted/evolved underwater and how the Spacers and the Diggers differ not just in philosophy and mannerisms but also even physically. At this point, keeping with the theme of our natural division, it shouldn't surprise to know that the Diggers think the Spacers unwelcome cowards for having left the planet.

The Spacers are divided between Blue and Red. Red's good at creating their own narrative, propaganda if you will, while Blue are the technocrats, the engineers. They seek knowledge, but aren't as good at politics.

The Blue and Red are larger factions of an entire society divided based upon the  Seven Eves. The Seven Eves are the last human beings left in Space after the Hard Rain. There are actually 8 women, but one is already in menopause. Men don't do as well in space--take up too much oxygen, more vulnerable to radiation, and most end up doing the risky jobs because they realize their oxygen intake is taxing the air filtration system in Space, so that's why there are none left during the first council of the Seven Eves. One of these Seves Eves is a geneticist and the other six work with her to form their progeny, picking out the characteristics of their offspring, who swear allegiance to their race; in essence, their Eve. Julia, or JBF, is the president of the United States at Zero and it's "her idea" to build the Arks and "her idea" to go to Mars--she's full of division, politics, smooth talking, and the ability to influence. Clearly a Red. There's Ivy, the captain of the Space Station and technically left in charge after the previous Space dictator dies getting the comet with the new Space Constitution. Ivy seeks knowledge and so do her progeny. A Blue. Dinah's father is the first Digger and her boyfriend the one of those who died getting the comet, so Dinah makes her progeny heroic. There's Aida, She pronounces Aida's Curse at the first council of the Seven Eves in which it was decided how to proceed with the genetic information available. The curse is that the Seven Eves and their progeny will always be divided and Aida develops a number of sub-races designed to counter the strengths of the other races. Aida's quite competitive. One of the more interesting Aidan sub-races is the Neoander--a neolithic Neanderthal--that comes from her learning that most Europeans still have some Neanderthal blood in them, which is good because they have big brains and are big and strong... And so on...

We learn 5000 years later that what was going on in the Arks and the Space Station is being filmed by cameras capturing 3 angles of every conversation and every decision being made. The footage of which, studied and analyzed, with dissertations written about specific moments, becomes the Spacers' Epic. All of the Races quote their Eves as Gospel. Another crucial side effect of the Epic is what becomes known as Tad's mistake. Tad was a blogger and heavily trolling and screeding on social media. It must be noted that there is a Spacebook. Tad blogs all of the events, questioning some of the technical decisions being made at the time of the Break. He has quite a following, and even convinces his fellow Arkies to cannibalism when they get desperate. He live Tweets eating his own leg. But meanwhile all we see him doing during this time in the Epic is trolling and looking at space porno. Despite his purported scientific expertise, which some of his followers take as gospel, he makes no contribution and just trolls. I'm sure most of us have some Facebook friends like that, making no other tangible contribution to humanity other than trolling, from their sample size of 1. Tad's mistake is alive and well.

One thing is clear and Stephenson elucidates it very well: The future is robots. And robots will be how we re-build planet Earth, at least in Stephenson's imagining. But it's going on now. More and more of us will have our jobs taken not by immigrants and foreign factories, but robots. It's neat to see what they're capable of...but at what cost?  It will be a question of philosophical import for the next few centuries at least...Another fascinating concept Stephenson introduces is Amistics, which is the propensity of cultures to either embrace or scorn technologies, sometimes seemingly in an arbitrary way, like why do the Amish uses roller skates but not cars?

Stephenson hits a few other really important and poignant philosophical and technical questions: An essential part of science is what has become known in this era somewhat poignantly as "Wargaming," which is the idea that, given a scenario, you can play out (like a video game) every possibility to come up with a statistical model, a bell curve, of every possible outcome. What's unique about the end of the world is that you don't have time to run a program for every possible scenario. There's a character, Dr. Harris, a thinly veiled Neal deGrasse Tyson, who, when pressed for info on what will happen, says: "We can't run this experiment a 1000 times to see the range of different outcomes. We can only run it once. The human mind has trouble with situations like that. We see patterns where they don't exist, we find meaning in randomness." This great line alludes to one of my sourest complaints about people unfamiliar with science. And herein lies a great danger for our future. Everything these people with myopic vision of themselves and the world see is framed in a data set of one. An n of 1 confuses people--making them feel that what they experience is all that exists, that it must be gospel. Of course, seeing the world this way is unscientific, it's irrational, but it's also just plain dangerous, and explains the great rise of extremism and the proliferation of hardliners having a disproportionate percentage of voice in our national and international discussions. Though only a tiny theme in a novel with much bigger implications, I'm glad Stephenson presents this concept of the "n of 1" and shows the fallacies of thinking too unilaterally. We're really killing ourselves with the extremism and you can see the bad effects imagined in this speculation of what the end of the world and its re-building will look like.

In the end, what Stephenson shows is how humans react to calamity, the potential to end the world: with war, with entrenched belief systems that cause hyper-reactionary responses like intolerance and violence. To the cynic, maybe that's not surprising. However, despite the propensity for unfounded beliefs and sometimes violence, we see that humans are also capable of profound loyalty and friendship. We see the Diggers and the Pingers' ability to hang on, the Spacers' propensity to build a new world. Humans are guided by a Purpose or what they purport to be a Purpose. Something bigger than themselves, bigger than the stupid wars, the politics and all the other bullshit we have to go through to be who we are.

Seveneves is a trip. And I'm glad I rode out the 800 pages. Great stuff. Not just sci-fi or speculative fiction--what it has is great characters in who you can really see the human condition. How it was, is, and probably will be.