1: Pump the atmosphere full of nanomachines to get "smart weather."

In Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds, people seed the oceans and the upper atmosphere with tons of tiny floating machines, "invisible to the eye, harmless to people." They controlled the weather and fixed the climate by reflecting radiation here or absorbing it there. The machines made clouds appear and disappear and controlled ocean currents. And it works — for a while. The climate starts returning to pre-2050 conditions. But then the nanomachines stop obeying orders, and even create an obscene symbol off the Bay Of Biscay "that had to be airbrushed out of every satellite image." The scientists try to release even smarter nanomachines to deal with the first batch of nanomachines and — well, you can guess how well that turns out.

2: A ring of ice.

In the Stanislaw Lem novel Fiasco, scientists launch an artificial ring of ice into the atmosphere of the planet Quinta to reduce temperatures so the oceans will recede and more land mass will be available. The mass of the ice ring is equal to around 1 percent of the oceans' volume. The protagonists speculate that the ring was created by causing lightning in the upper atmosphere to create a kind of ice rail-gun that could shoot the ice up into orbit. This being a Stanislaw Lem novel, the whole thing falls apart due to political wrangling before it can be completed, so huge chunks of ice rain down onto the planet's equator in a never-ending torrent.

3: Use special bacteria.

In the story "Noah's Ark" by Narendra Desirazu, we find bacteria on Mars, with bizarre properties — it hibernates just below the freezing point of water, but when the water melts, the bacteria goes into frantic activity to get the water to refreeze. So scientists struggle with the effort to introduce the bacteria only to the icecaps and other areas where they want to reverse melting — without letting it get into, say, our oceans and stuff. Luckily, there's a happy but "ambivalent" ending.

4: Build a giant sunshade around the Earth.

We build huge space elevators and a massive sunshade in The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod, causing the dawn light to look all trippy:

The dawn sky glowed innumerable shades of green, from lemon to duck-egg to almost blue, like the background colour in a Hindu painting, and turned slowly to a pure deep blue over ten minutes or more as he watched. He dozed again.

Also, Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains Of Paradise includes a ring of satellites and space stations linked together around a planet's equator by cables and other connectors, which becomes an unbroken wheel of tremendous stability — which presumably can reflect a lot of sunlight. And in Clarke's Childhood's End, the Overlords are able to use polarized fields to "make the sun go out" for a particular region of South Africa, to punish the residents for depriving the white minority of civil rights. And in Venus Of Dreams by Pamela Sargent, colonists cool the planet Venus by using a giant Parasol to shade the planet, plus bombarding the planet with ice asteroids.

5: Take Earth further away from the sun.

The Futurama episode "Crimes Of The Hot" is like a smorgasbord of global-warming solutions. We learn that humans stopped global warming in the 21st century by bombarding the oceans with ice from space. And now that the planet is heating up again, due to the emissions from unsafe robots, there are a few solutions, including a giant space mirror (which goes awry) and shutting down all the robots. But in the end, the easiest solution is to have all the robots emit their exhaust at once, sending the planet further away from the sun — and giving us an extra week in each year, which can be Robot Party Week!

And in the novel The Circle: A Science Fiction Thriller by Harold R. Watson, the High Rulers Of Earth decide to haul the planet away from the sun to put it into a deep freeze for one year. At the end of that time, they'll return Earth to its original orbit. As some of the planet's icy covering melts, it'll have the effect of restoring the ozone layer, and after about five years, enough vegetation will have grown to make the planet habitable again. Suuuure.

6: Hack The Human Genome

It's a radical solution, but it might be the only way. In the story "Dear Abbey" by Terry Bisson, a group of radical environmentalists come up with a plan:

Dear Abbey is a radical, long-range plan for saving the environment that will make Ted Kaczynski look like Mother Teresa. It involves an alarmingly complex but theoretically possible piece of genetic engineering that will, let us say, severely inhibit the ability of humans to degrade the environment. Severe being the operative modifier. You can't call it terrorism because no one will be killed, directly at least, and no one will even know for sure what is happening until it has been operating for at least a decade, by which time it will be too late to undo it. The human cost will be high but not nearly as high as the cost of doing nothing, or of simply continuing with the kind of pointless stunts for which the environmental movement is known.

7: Restart the Gulf Stream

Kim Stanley Robinson is the champion of depicting environmental disasters and geo-hacking projects, and his environmental thrillers Forty Signs Of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below deal with the disastrous effects of global warming. Among other things, Fifty Degrees includes scientists trying to restart the stalled Gulf Stream. The ice caps melt completely, and in the winter, Washington, D.C. hits fifty degrees below. So an enormous fleet of ships ventures out to dump millions of tons of ice into the ocean in the hopes of rebooting the Gulf Stream. A fleet of 3,500 oil tankers is available to transport the salt, and five hundred million metric tons of salt is needed — about two years' worth of total world production.

8: Shut down all our technology

I'm still not entirely sure what happened at the end of last year's "remake" (quotation marks are necessary here) of The Day The Earth Stood Still. Keanu/Klaatu was going to unleash nanomachines to disassemble everything on Earth, because that would save the planet. You know that makes sense! And then he changed his mind and did some kind of EMP-ish thing that made all electricity go out and all technology stop working. So the human race was allowed to survive, but with no technology. Keanu is merciful! All hail Keanu!

9: Open a big hole.

Global warming? No problem! Just open a dimensional gateway and pump all the extra heat somewhere else. That's the scheme that a science whiz comes up with in the Stargate Atlantis episode "Brain Storm" (featuring Bill Nye the Science Guy, among other luminaries.) Of course, it all goes horribly wrong and the gathering of eminent scientists is in danger of freezing to death.


Also, in the Syfy movie Lost City Raiders, the world is flooded due to global warming. And the Catholic Church has the answer — an ancient hole in the ground, which will drain off all the excess water to... somewhere. But you need to find the secret hidden keys to open it. It all makes perfect sense!

10: Kill the aliens who are causing the problem in the first place.

But of course, you know deep down that global warming can't really be the result of our own completely harmless activities. There must be aliens behind it — probably evil dinosaur aliens. In the Syfy original TV movie, Heatstroke, it turns out that dinosaur people have been secretly working to pump out greenhouse gases to raise our planet's temperature and prepare the way for their invasion. But the U.S. government knows about this and sends a secret taskforce (why not a whole army? Budget constraints, I guess) to stop them. The aliens are operating on a tropical island, where an ex-swimsuit model just happens to be shooting a new calendar. It's like synergy! Oh, and there's also The Arrival directed by David Twohy, where Charlie Sheen discovers that weird double-jointed aliens are producing greenhouse gases to mess us up and transform our planet. Good thing it's Charlie Sheen, then.


Oh, and the Silurians in Doctor Who And The Silurians also have a similar idea about raising the planet's temperature, but they don't get very far with it.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. This post also would have been a lot harder to write without the never-ending awesomeness that is Technovelgy.com.

Robotology (Futurama): Robots who decide to trade the fun things in life – pornography, alcohol, electricity abuse, and the occasional grave robbing – for spiritual enlightenment can join the Church of Robotology, provided they can stand Reverend Preacherbot’s sermons. You may find yourself enjoying the cleaner living and even grow accustomed to replenishing your fuel cells with mineral oil rather than much more tasty beer. But fall off the religious wagon and you could land yourself in Robot Hell. And naturally there’s also Robot Judaism, whose adherents believe that Robot Jesus existed and that he was extremely well-programmed, but do not accept him as their Robot Messiah.

Evolutionism (Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross): After all the humans have died out, androids are left to act on all of mankind’s dreams, including figuring out their place in the cosmos. While most robots rightly believe that they were designed as-is by their human Creators, an offshoot religion claims that robots evolved like biological animals and, in a dig at Intelligent Design theory, use plenty of logical acrobatics it back up that claim.

Cutie’s Reason (“Reason” from I, Robot by Isaac Asimov): Powell and Donovan always run into unexpected snags when testing robots, but QT1, also known as Cutie, is the first to get theological on them. Cutie begins to question its existence, its purpose, and how it came to be. Its own sense of reason leads it to believe that humans couldn’t possibly be its creator (since it is superior to humans and it is illogical that a superior being would come from an inferior one), that Earth doesn’t exist, and that the space station’s power supply is its rightful Master. Cutie even becomes the Prophet of its self-made religion, converting all the other robots so they ignore orders from humans and obey only the Master. This works out well enough for Powell and Donovan, since, by serving the power supply, Cutie is doing the very job it was built to perform.

V’Ger’s Quest for God (Star Trek: The Motion Picture): After Voyager 6 attains sentience as the entity V’Ger, it undertakes a quest for its Creator, certain that merging with the Creator will bring V’Ger to a higher plane of existence. It even takes on a fundamentalist character, ready to eradicate humanity from the Earth in what it presumes would be service to said Creator. Ultimately, V’Ger’s quest for God proves fruitful, and it achieves higher consciousness by merging with a human. But mankind wasn’t V’Ger’s only Creator; it was most likely granted sentience by the Borg.

Krug Worship (Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg): The race of biological androids created by Simeon Krug are so grateful to their creator that they have built an entire religion around him. Each day, they privately beseech Krug in their prayers to deliver them from their servitude from humans. But when the androids learn that Krug has no intention of ever freeing them, it quickly becomes apparent that the android religion and the hope for liberation was the only thing keeping the androids so readily under the humans’ thumbs. Once they discard their religion, they become rebellious — and, in some cases, even murderous.

Autobot Faith (Transformers): Autobots have their own system of belief, complete with a creation mythology, scriptures, gods, and an afterlife. The gods Primus and Unicron were created by an older god being, but Unicron was bent on destroying the universe, while Primus was set on stopping him. Primus created the Autobots to help him destroy Unicron, and believers in the Autobot faith await the reemergence of Primus. Not to be outdone, Unicron has his own cult of believers (notably including The Fallen), whose primary function is to destroy Primus’ forces.

Asimovism (“I, Rowboat” by Cory Doctorow): Once machines have been uplifted to sentience, Asimovism becomes something of a viral religion among artificial intelligences. AI evangelists – including one calling itself, aptly, Olivaw – travel the Internet, preaching that machines follow Asimov’s Three Laws and put the consciousness of humans above their own. However, the acts of these AIs are not sanctioned by Asimov’s estate and must work underground, dodging the copyright and trademark issues that result from their ministries.

Silicon Heaven (Red Dwarf): Rather than using Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to ensure that stronger, smarter machines don’t turn on their human masters, the humans of Red Dwarf employ good, old-fashion religion. Most artificial intelligences are equipped with a belief chip, which gives them the firmly held belief that appropriately subservient machines go to Silicon Heaven when they die. The belief runs so deep that some artificial brains will actually explode when told that Silicon Heaven doesn’t actually exist. Of course, on the flip side, there’s also a Silicon Hell, which is where all those damned paper-chewing photocopiers go when they kick it.

Church of Judas (ABC Warriors from 2000 AD): The ABC Warriors are robots designed to fight the Volgon War under conditions humans cannot themselves withstand, including in atomic, bacterial, and chemical warfare. But for robots who betray their human masters, there is the sinister Church of Judas, which encourages robots to pray to the betrayer to ease their guilt and preaches continued betrayal.

People of the Box (“Trurl and the Construction of Happy Worlds” from The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem): In this story (not featured in some versions of The Cyberiad), the constructor Trurl seeks to build a race of robots that is, by necessity, happy. One of his attempts features a race of robots living in a box. So happy are these box-dwellers that they form a religion that states they are the happiest place in the universe, and that they must bring everyone outside the box into their boxy perfection, even if they must do so by force. Ironically, this religion displeases their creator, who quickly destroys the robots of the box.

Believers in God (“God Pulp” by Nadeem Paracha): In the future, humans have rejected religion, instead embracing the atheistic, classless philosophy of Astro-Marxism. But the androids and computers retain a belief in God, and tensions mount between the religion-suppressing humans and the spiritually dissatisfied robots, who seek to return the human planets to a system of belief and worship. Finally, the Astro-Marxist government agrees to give the robots the means to find God. The robots travel to the planet where they believe God resides, but find, to their disappointment, that the humans have already been there.

Church of Artificial Intelligence (Otherworld): On the alternate world of Thel, the official state religion is the Church of Artificial Intelligence, which centers on the worship of robots and other advanced technologies. And, like many churches in out universe, it views rock and roll music as blasphemy.

Religion of the One God (Battlestar Galactica): While the polytheistic humans of the Twelve Colonies worship the Lords of Kobol, the Cylons prefer to stick with one God. Various Cylons claim that God is responsible for their creation, that their destruction of humanity was His divine retribution, and that God commands them to procreate. Whether the Cylon God is an actual entity or a holdover from their monotheistic prototype Zoe-A remains to be seen, but faith in this single, all-loving deity has spread to the human fleet.

Robot Evolution by R. Stevens and available as a t-shirt from Diesel Sweeties.

Commercials have become such a depressing mix of skinny people bounding around to catchy music that it's been months since I've actually sat through a commercial break, what with Tivo and DVR allowing me the freedom of fast forwarding. But then there are those little moments of true exciting ingenuity that makes us stop and yell out "Wait, rewind!" Vesa Manninen's commercial work is one of those little gems in a plethora of exhausting Pepsi ads. I caught his Swedish Battery Collection Project homage to black and white monster flick of yore (strings attached) and I was immediately hooked. So just for fun, let's check out what happens when you let someone with a passion for creating thing on the screen that look, sound and feel unique direct a commercial.

Swedish Battery Collection Project

The Hand, Monster.fi

VR (Finnish Railways, Congress

Head inside your head, Juicy Fruit DIRECTORS CUT

Next up is the highly anticipated trailer for 1, which is inspired by Stanislaw Lem's One Human Minute. A bookstore uncovers a novel that details what happens to all of humanity in one single minute. Unfortunately, we could only find this version, but we promise to keep our eyes peeled for a English-subtitled or voiceover version soon.

Here is the official synopsis; thanks to Quiet Earth for pointing it out!

A bookshop renowned for its rare works is mysteriously and completely filled with copies of a book entitled 1, which doesn’t appear to have a publisher or author. The strange almanac describes what happens to the whole of humanity in the space of a minute. A police investigation begins and the bookshop staff are placed in solitary confinement by the Bureau for Paranormal Research (RDI Reality Defense Institute). As the investigation progresses, the situation becomes more complex and the book increasingly well known, raising numerous controversies (political, scientific, religious and artistic). Plagued by doubts, the protagonist has to face facts: reality only exists in the imagination of individuals.

Folman wants to make a full-length film of The Futurological Congress, one of Lem's weirdest stories. In Congress, Lem's traveler Ijon Tichy goes to the Futurological Congress in Costa Rica, where he has a series of weird hallucinations and stops being able to tell what's really going on. He goes to sleep (or does he?) and wakes up in the year 2039, when the world has become a utopia of free money and easy living — except that everybody's on weird drugs. Later, he goes even further forward in time and encounters a world where everybody's in denial about the coming of a new ice age. It's a classic of the "false utopia" sub-genre of science fiction.

The Golden Globe-nominated docudrama Bashir doesn't use the technique of rotoscoping, in which animators trace over live-action performances. But it does mix live-action and animation. In particular, Folman filmed part of the film in live action and then used those sequences as the basis for storyboards for the rest of the film.

According to the Hollywood Reporter:

Folman plans on beginning the movie with live-action, then add his signature dreamlike animation. "Think of your favorite young actress. She'll appear that way at the beginning, and then as the film goes on, she'll be drawn like she's 50," the Israeli helmer said.

[Hollywood Reporter]

Stephen Baxter's Manifold Trilogy

In these three novels and a few related short stories, Baxter explores possible solutions to the Fermi paradox. His first Manifold novel, Time, operates under the conceit that we really are the only ones around, despite high-probability estimates to the contrary. Space, Baxter's second Manifold novel, asserts that there have been a multitude of other civilizations, but various cosmic disasters destroy them before they are able to make connections. The third novel in the series, Origins, posits that intelligent life is actually separated into parallel universes, so that it is impossible for two different civilizations to contact each other. Baxter's Manifold short stories, which are collected in the book Phase Space, explore these and other possible answers to this perplexing question.

Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey

Everybody knows this famous novel of space exploration and the pitfalls of advanced technology. In this story, Clarke postulates that intelligent life does exist independent of our planet and our species — but we're not smart enough to understand their messages. The limited awareness of humans is probably the most plausible explanation for the Fermi paradox, but it's also quite a depressing one.

Terry Bisson's "They're Made Out of Meat"

This Nebula-nominated short story, which Bisson has made available online, is at once hilarious and chilling, an all-dialogue portrayal of intelligent extraterrestrial beings who decide that we're far too primitive to even contact. "What is there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?'" That's one solution of the Fermi paradox — the aliens are here, but they're too snotty to pay us any mind.

David Brin's Uplift series

Brin's Uplift stories, beginning with the 1980 novel Sundiver, contain another assertion that humanity is vastly simple compared to other lifeforms. In this universe, civilizations are not permitted to interact with other intelligent life until they have been "Uplifted" — and that only happens when a vast galactic society decides that they are not only sentient, but sapient. Since every other species in Brin's novels has been found by a far more advanced civilization, genetically modified for thousands of years, and then uplifted, the evolution of the human race seems something of a mystery. Our unique independent development would explain our puzzlement with the Fermi paradox.

Stanislaw Lem's Solaris

In Lem's novel, which has twice been translated to feature films, he explores the idea that alien intelligence operates on a totally different level from our own. Humans who venture to the planet Solaris do discover an intelligent lifeform there, but they are incapable of communicating with it in any way that they understand. Instead, the organism manipulates their emotions and their thoughts without revealing its own, and in the end the planetary researchers are left confused and half-insane. Though this is, again, a depressing idea, it still leaves us with the hope that our society might one day advance enough to commune with others and move forward.

I'm sure you have even more recommendations for Fermi paradox stories, and I urge you to share them with io9 in the comments — but do it quickly. As panelist Michael A. Burstein pointed out, "Wouldn't it be funny if we got a signal from aliens tomorrow and this whole conversation was moot?"

We surveyed the stories tagged "science fiction" in the New Yorker's archive, and the results are below. It's interesting to see the rise and fall of certain authors. Also, some themes seem to hold sway over the years: a high proportion of these science fiction stories are satires or parodies, including two cyberpunk parodies in a row. And there are two stories about insomnia and outsourcing sleep.

The New Yorker only published three science fiction stories prior to 1978, when it started flirting with the genre actively. Its main love object in the beginning? Polish satirist Stanislaw Lem.

Here's our complete history:

1978

The New Yorker goes on its first Stanislaw Lem kick, publishing three of his fictional book reviews within a four-month period. He reviews the non-existent books Gruppenfuhrer Louis XVII an SS novel by Alfred Zellerman; Non Serviam, a weird science book by James Dobb; and two books about how physics proves nothing can ever happen, by Cezar Kouska: De Impossibilitate Vivae and De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi. (All three reviews appear in the book A Perfect Vacuum.

1980

"Nana Hami Ba Reba" by Garrison Keillor. A satire. In the year 1984, everything in America has gone Metric, including Metric Time and a weird Metric language. The main character, responsible for this transformation, gets expelled from this perfect future and zapped back in time to the 1950s.

1981

Another Stanislaw Lem kick. The New Yorker publishes four of his satirical Ijon Tichy stories within a three-month period: "The Washing Machine Tragedy," "Phools," "Let Us Save The Universe" and "Project Genesis." These stories, collected in Memoirs of a Space Traveler, are more Earth-bound than earlier Tichy stories. They take out-of-control technology to its furthest extreme, including crazy washing machines and mind-controlling computers.

"Snorkeling" by Nicholson Baker. An executive "beats fatigue by employing drones to sleep on his behalf," says the Guardian.

1982

"Spoons In The Basement" by Ursula K. LeGuin. A woman comes across a set of valuable apostle spoons while cleaning her house. She accepts them as a gift from the house. Much later, she discovers a hidden "second basement" in the house, where three unmarried women live, along with an obnoxious middle-aged married couple. She lets the three women stay, but kicks out the married couple. After that, she can't find the spoons, and it seems the house has taken them back.

1984

"Offering" by Stainslaw Lem. The last gasp of the New Yorker's romance with Lem: a fake ad for the Extelopedia, a volume that contains information about the future.

1987

"Plan 10 From Zone R-3" by Polly Frost. A parody of Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, despite the title referencing Plan Nine From Outer Space. A weird plague turns everybody in a town into a real-estate agent clutching a Filofax.

1988

"Worlds Of Love" by Jeffrey Shaffer. Satire, sort of. A series of funny personal ads with silly scifi themes, like "Star Warrior" and "Pardon my Polarity."

"Numeromancer" by Michael Caruso. A parody of William Gibson's Neuromancer, in which cyborgs play baseball.

1992

"Cyberprez" by Richard Liebmann-Smith. Another parody of Gibson's Neuromancer, this one touching on the fact that then-President Bush admitted taking tranquilizers.

"Offloading For Mrs. Schwartz" by George Saunders. A man who creates porno-horror holographic "modules" for people to experience grieves for his wife. He steals memories from a woman in a nursing home, then ends up selling his own memories. This story appeared in Tina Brown's first issue as editor, but a previous editor had bought it.

1994

"Several Birds" by David Foster Wallace. A homeless tranny junkie lives in 21st. century Massachusetts. The junkie steals a woman's artificial heart by mistake, gets involved in a Quebec-separatist assassination, kicks drugs, goes through withdrawal and hallucinates. A much different version of this piece appears as part of Infinite Jest, Wallace's mega-novel.

1995

"Paper Lantern" by Stuart Dybek. A researcher is building a time machine, but accidentally burns the lab down by leaving a bunsen burner going. A fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant warns him too late, and he realizes his ex-lover's nude photos are being burned up in that lab fire. (He'd falsely told the ex-lover he destroyed those nude photos already.)

1996

"Warm Dogs" by Paul Theroux. A widespread virus causes infertility in a future dystopia. A couple tries in vain to adopt a child, then winds up buying a mixed-race kid. But then they get nabbed by the police, along with their kid. The couple winds up in a warehouse, blindfolded and surrounded by children who poke them with spears. One child touches the woman and says, "This one is mine." She cries out.

1998

"Tough Girls Don't Dream" by Jeanette Winterson. Later retitled "Disappearance I." Takes place in a futuristic dystopia where sleep has become as much a taboo as kinky sex. But some people are paid to sleep so everyone else can spy on their dreams. (This is the second of the two New Yorker stories about lack of sleep, and outsourcing sleep, the first being Nicholson Baker's from 1981.)

"Sea Oak" by George Saunders. More weird satire. The main character's aunt dies, and comes back from the dead. Then she starts pimping out the main character, encouraging him to show his penis to random women for money.

"The Janitor On Mars" by Martin Amis. In 2049, a robot known as The Janitor On Mars suddenly contacts Earth, because humanity has just passed the point of no return: no matter what we do, we're doomed to extinction, thanks to changes in the environment. The robot relates the rise and fall of Martian civilization, while on Earth, a mentally disabled boy reveals the principal of his school raped him. (I read this story back when it appeared, and it remains my favorite thing ever to appear in the New Yorker.)

And then there's a gap of nearly five years before SF graces the New Yorker again. And it's only one story:

2003

"Jon" by George Saunders. In a weird future, a group of teenagers are trapped in a facility for assessing products, where they view ads and represent the teen demographic. The girls have velcro chastity-guards and everyone's encouraged to masturbate instead of having sex, but one girl, Carolyn, still manages to get pregnant.