Sci-Fi Intermission
How We Survive
Marketplace
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 10 November 2021
⏱️ 20 minutes
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Summary
Our favorite place to look for climate solutions: Science fiction. In fact, sci-fi (and its sub-genre, cli-fi) is what got us thinking about adaptation in the first place.
Cli-fi can get a little bleak — weather turns deadly; earth becomes uninhabitable; humans flee to space. And while it’s entertaining to imagine the worst-case scenarios, the best of the writing is hopeful. It allows us to dream up solutions that don’t involve billionaires, rockets or climate-changing satellite stations.
This week, Molly sits down with climate fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson to discuss his most recent book, “The Ministry for the Future,” which almost reads as a blueprint for saving the planet.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So I have warned you several times this season that I am a pretty big sci-fi nerd. |
| 0:05.7 | Books, comics, movies, TV shows, the bigger and more dramatic and more imaginative, the better, |
| 0:12.0 | and sometimes yes, stupid eye candy but actually |
| 0:16.3 | SciFi is what got me thinking about climate solutions in the first place. Now a |
| 0:22.1 | lot of people think that sci-fi is about predicting, |
| 0:24.4 | catastrophizing about the future and you know sometimes it is especially when it |
| 0:30.6 | takes on the topic of climate. You recall what you said about how |
| 0:34.4 | polar melting might disrupt the North Atlantic current. |
| 0:37.6 | Yes. |
| 0:38.6 | When I think it's happening. |
| 0:41.8 | Cli-Fi, as it's sometimes known, can get a little bleak. |
| 0:45.6 | What can we do? |
| 0:47.3 | Save as many as you can. |
| 0:50.5 | In day after tomorrow, abrupt change basically destroys the northern hemisphere. |
| 0:55.2 | We can control our weather. |
| 0:57.2 | In Snowpiercer and Geostorm, humanity's attempts to manipulate the weather in order to survive, |
| 1:02.3 | backfire spectacularly. |
| 1:04.0 | Potential for catastrophic weather events |
| 1:05.7 | on a global scale. |
| 1:07.4 | A geostorm. |
| 1:11.0 | Dune, both the original books, the movie, and the most recent version, |
| 1:15.2 | imagines a world that used to be lush and full of life and now is a desert. |
... |
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