Thursday, September 9, 2021

This is Not a Drill

 A woman from church has been in the ER for three days waiting for a hospital.  My wife is teaching in a middle school, and the number of kids out with COVID is increasing.

The surging is not Idaho reactionaryism about masks.  Idaho new cases 7-day average is 1007US 7-day average is 148,538.  For Idaho, that is .0006 cases per capita; for U.S., .0005 cases per capita.  U.S. deaths 7-day average is 1537 or 4.68x10?^-6 per capita; Idaho: 8 deaths 7-day average, 4.47x10^6 per capita.

This is not the Black Death, but it beginning to look like Solaria in Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun might be the sensible future.  The scattered population lives on 100 square mile parcels, are largely cared for by robots, and communicate largely via Zoom (okay, 2-way TV).  Fear of disease means that they only meet for mating.  Each of us scattered even on 50 acre plots with all our needs delivered by Amazon is looking better and better.

3 comments:

  1. I think Asimov missed a trick.

    Solarians would have had medical robots, at least one per person, and those robots would have been perfectly capable of extracting a sperm sample ready to ship to a prospective mate.

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    1. I think Asimov could have worried that this might exceed the tolerated sexual morality of the time. Extracting an egg would have been a task; extracting the other required cells not so difficult.

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  2. I remember reading that book. As I recall the teachers in that society who were actually humans, were directly creating the fear of being in the actual presence of others in the children. The children at the start wanted human contact but were gradually weaned off of it until they could all live comfortably with robots and only TV images of other people. If this mask thing continues I can see similarities today.

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