Fallen angels
Science Fiction satire/adventure published in 1991 novel by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn. Near future/alternate future in which anti-technology forces control Earth, while a struggling colony survives in orbital space and on the Moon. Science fiction fans on Earth work to save downed astronauts.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
9mentions
9people
2010–2026years
22% recommend67% neutral11% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Ok, I'll put it out there... Fallen Angels by Niven and Pournelle.
- Fallen Angels by Niven et al. It's a bit light-hearted though.
- If memory serves, they have a notable mention in the Niven-Pournelle novel _Fallen Angels_.
- This person seemed like someone with a lot of axes to grind, and on investigation they co-wrote one of the worst science fiction books I've ever read ('Fallen Angels').
- It reminds me of the attitude of the totalitarian party in charge of the US in Larry Niven's Fallen Angels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(Niven,_Pournell...
- There are any number of articles which give examples of how the popular press got it wrong on a scientific topic. If your conjecture is correct, then the submitter did a grave disservice by dropping a link to a 1950s article without any context. How do you conclude it wasn't an example of climate change denialism, meant to muddy the waters and instill confusion, or a case of simple trolling?
"Concern that the natural cycles were taking us toward a new ice age was quite common in the 60's and '70's, and reasonably justified"
Concern by whom? Among the scientific papers of the 1960s and 1970s, the majority view was for global warming. Quoting from http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf , "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus"; "The survey [of papers from 1965 through 1979] identified only seven articles indicating cooling compared to 42 indicating warming. Those seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the citations." This is why I mentioned there were only a 'handful of scientific articles which postulate a coming Ice Age'. Thus, that stance in the scientific literature was uncommon.
Among some of the popular press, there certainly were articles by Newsweek and Time on the possibility of a new ice age. (Or in SF, Larry Niven wrote "Fallen Angels" (1991) on the premise that anthropogenic warming was actually preventing an ice age from coming.) Then again, some of the recent popular press also had a lot of articles about the 2012 phenomenon, based on reaching the end of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar - "The Crazy Years" of Heinlein. On the gripping hand, science popularizers like Issac Asimov understood the global warming topic correctly back in the 1970s.
Regarding 'the messy uncertainty of the real science', what you've said applies to everything the popular press reports. When the NY reports on the situation in Ukraine, they leave out a lot of the messy details. The same when Sports Illustrated reports on a doping scandal, or the WSJ about a recent merger, or the latest weather prediction in the local paper. It's odd that you think people treat science reporting as the final, conclusive word on a topic. I don't agree.
I believe the rest of your comment pivots into your views on nuclear power. This is not related to the Harpers piece or the presumed reasons for why this link was posted on HN, and I decline to follow up on it.
