The World Set Free
The World Set Free is a novel written in 1913 and published in 1914 by H. G. Wells. The book is based on a prediction of a more destructive and uncontrollable sort of weapon than the world has yet seen. It had appeared first in serialised form with a different ending as A Prophetic Trilogy, consisting of three books: A Trap to Catch the Sun, The Last War in the World and The World Set Free.
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What Hacker News says
- You might like H.G. Wells’s utopia “The World Set Free.”
It’s as relevant now as it was when it was written.
- Sure we do. Go read H.G. Wells "The World Set Free". It's pre WWII, covers these exact topics, and could have been written yesterday. When it was written none of the problems were new.
The book is a utopia, written in the hope that, with unlimited energy (and therefore, unlimited means of production), government upheaval would finally let us transition to a post-scarcity society.
Humanity has had the technology necessary to do that since the 1950s, but instead focused on things like using more fossil fuels, weaponizing food, spreading disease and ignorance, expanding poverty, etc. Both parties in the US have consistently supported all of the above for my entire life.
We're seeing an acceleration of those things under the current administration.
Hopefully, we'll get decent leadership soon. We're still a democracy.
- Here's a back-tingles moment: the SLAM, with its open reactor - sans its H-bombs - is in principle almost exactly H.G. Wells' "Atomic Bombs"[1] from his The World Set Free. Radiation-jetting objects that bounce all over the place, blasting everything.
That novel has a good claim to inventing the nuclear bomb, at least the concept of it. Leó Szilárd, after reading the novel in 1932[2], talked about the possibility of a chain reaction[3] bomb with the BWO, which would later, after a long and predictably political road, lead to the Einstein-Roosevelt letter.
Wells is one of those writers whose nickel-paperback reputation hides what a peerless visionary he was, even as a largely self-educated layman.
[1] His phrasing! "Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century, than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible ... but they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands"
Holy balls, that is still every single bit as relevant today.
[2] 21 years post publish!!
[3] Rather than the "radiant elements" used in Well's atomic bombs. Wells in 1901 had been reading the work of William Ramsay, Ernest Rutherford, and Frederick Soddy. Wells realized that although the decay (of the time) was slow, the total amount was insanely gigantic, converting the entire mass into energy. So he posited a future material that decomposed all at once. If you had a fist-sized hunk of Francium, that you got somehow, you'd get similar effects . . assuming you had a time-freezey casing to keep it from just spontaneously nuking your everything.
- Also relevant: “The World Set Free” by H.G. Wells (1913). It continues to stand the test of time, and addresses exactly the same issues as Schneier is discussing, but without the information systems approach (and proposes a different solution).
One thing the Schneier seems to be missing vs. Wells is that we’re entering an age of unlimited energy production, and therefore unlimited natural resources. Wells has a blind spot around environmental issues, but I think he’s closer to the mark on resource scarcity than current thinking.
Anyway, Schneier actually has some interesting insights not covered by The World Set Free, which is refreshing.
- > In order to hit the 2050 target, we therefore need to be using about 1500 TWh per year — 1% of current global energy consumption.
It's infuriating that rather than increasing the cost of energy by 1%, we decided to destroy the entire planet.
It's even more infuriating now that I've read H.G. Well's "The World Set Free.", which was written in 1913, and covers the same topics as this article, but with a more savvy take on current day energy politics.
The problems it focuses on haven't been addressed, and we're living the worst case scenario the book posits. (The better case scenario the book focuses on is a global collapse of government due to full scale nuclear war in the early days of atomic weaponry.)
- The World Set Free - HG Wells
(I wanted to put in the Shape of Things to Come but it doesn't quite make the cut)
