Ask, and Understand

I didn't watch the recent man vs. machine series on Jeopardy! this past week, so all the information I'm getting about how IBM's Watson crushed its human competitors has been filtered through other sources - but that's okay. The most fundamental thing that we should take from this is that clear-language interaction with computers - something that's been a staple of science fiction for decades - has taken a huge step toward reality, despite speedbumps such as answering "Toronto" in a Final Jeopardy category about United States cities. Watson wasn't fooled by the wordplay and the back-and-forth; it was able to to pierce through the doubletalk and understand what was being asked of it.

That bears repeating: a computer program that understands something. There are plenty of people who think that this is just a dim shadow of what's waiting for us in the very near future. As potentially world-shaking as the Singularity could be, supposing that we ever agree on how to define the damn thing and then it actually happens, that's not one of the implications of Watson's victory that I've been thinking about much.

Specifically, the social implications of people having access to individual question-answerer programs. What if, in ten years, every smartphone literally is a smart phone, and comes equipped with a descendant of Watson that can answer any question you ask of it so long as it has sufficient time to poke around for answers on the internet? Considering the pace of development over the last ten years, I would not be surprised for the phones of 2021 to function as oracles as well.

But what does this do to people? Consider the modern day - how often do you encounter stories of people driving themselves into ditches, or into farmers' fields, or into an illegal turn across multiple lanes of traffic because their GPS told them to, and they obeyed it without question? Let's be honest... critical thinking isn't exactly part of the school curriculum in North America at least, and there are plenty of people out there who don't know how to think think. People have always wanted easy answers. What's going to happen when it's as easy as asking your phone when you've got a burning question, and uncritically accepting whatever it flings back at you as the truth?

One thing I'll always remember about school is that research is difficult. It's hard to find good and appropriate sources, to sort through those sources, to figure out what material you need and to identify biases in the text and distill it down so you can answer the question in front of you. For me, the research phase of an essay took weeks - and that was even without waiting for worthwhile sources to get there through interlibrary loan. Consider how many people would leap at the opportunity to skip all that effort - hell, it's practically what we see now, with some students shamelessly cribbing from Wikipedia articles, or going whole hog and buying essays from mills. Who cares about understanding the answer, so long as you have it?

Understanding is the key. An answered question is worthless unless you know what the answer means. As our computers become more and more sophisticated and capable of interacting with us on more meaningful levels, we need to take care that we avoid falling into the trap of complacency - of working toward a world where our computers understand its workings better than we do.

The Rule of the "Best," Ruled By Prestige

We like to believe that the aristocracy is a thing of the past, that in the modern world people ascend to the high strata of government and society based on merit and skill and not blood, and that any one of us can grow up to be the President someday, so long as you're a natural-born American citizen - because, let's face it, "you can be anything you want to be, even Secretary-General of the United Nations" doesn't quite have the same resonance for a kid. Maybe, in some limited respects, it's even true.

Ultimately, it doesn't make a difference. Whether we have an aristocracy of blood, an aristocracy of wealth, or an aristocracy of talent, human nature means they will all act in broadly similar ways - whether it's enriching themselves at the expense of the ordinary people, doing favors for their friends even if society as a whole would be harmed as a result - witness Prime Minister Stephen Harper's championing of a renewed Bill C-61, something the big American entertainment conglomerates love - and generally acting as if their own interests are of more value than the interests of society.

Next month's G20 summit, taking place right here in downtown Toronto, is putting this all into stark perspective for me. I'll admit that the summit organizers are at least dimly aware of and thus somewhat responsive to the city that will be hosting their meeting - witness the relocation of the "free speech zone," itself a wonderfully democratic innovation, from the residential Trinity-Bellwoods Park on Queen Street West to Queen's Park.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that because the world leaders, or the organization coordinating their meeting, are so wedded to "traditional" ways of getting things done, the people of Toronto are going to have a sneak peek at what a police state looks like. From what I've heard there will be three-meter-high fencing downtown, security screenings for pedestrians and drivers entering the downtown core, cameras everywhere, and $1-billion in security spread between Toronto and the G8 summit in Huntsville. Where, I have to ask, is the justification for all this? In what universe is it acceptable to throw down the locks on a city for no other apparent reason than that cities are always where conferences happen?

In the past, aristocrats were always about appearances. They had to be, because otherwise no one would know who was in charge and who was lesser, and who could run a kingdom like that? Take, say, Louis XIV of France. In that painting on Wikipedia he looks, to me, like a laughable fop - that's what three hundred years of fashion shift will do, and I have little reason to hold monarchs in any esteem - but at the time, what he was wearing was stylin'. Mainly because he was wearing it. Today, it's somewhat different - the business suit is a remarkable leveller - but only somewhat. Prestige is still important, and prestige is one of the few reasonable explanations I can think of as to why the federal government would choose to hold the G20 summit in downtown Toronto rather than something more easily secured, like Exhibition Place or a military base.

Whether or not it's a desire to avoid a "loss of face" that would occur if the G20 was held somewhere reasonable and not a major metropolis, or something else entirely, I can only speculate. It doesn't matter, though. The aristocrats will almost always get their way.

Peace Above Earth

The greatest dangers, I think, are those that sneak in through the back door when you're not looking, and move so slowly that you can't really see them at all until they strike. Climate change, for example, may turn out to be one of these; the scientific community has been talking about the danger for decades, but it's only been in the last few years that the general public has begun to pick up that awareness.

One potential threat that's still a long way out, but which deserves consideration nonetheless, is the long-term danger of orbital warfare. I touched on this subject back in May, when I criticized the laissez-faire attitude George Friedman displayed toward it in his "The Next 100 Years." I was reminded of the necessity of addressing that threat early by an article in yesterday's Toronto Star, which discussed the possible future viability of space-based solar power.

If you're unfamiliar, space-based solar power is a system in which orbiting solar generating stations gather and wirelessly transmit electricity to Earth-based receivers. The concept has been around for a while - its first great heyday was the early 1970s, when the oil embargo made the prospect of non-fossil power attractive, and gamers of my generation may remember the Microwave Power Plant from 1993's SimCity 2000, which worked in this way but had the failure mode that errant bursts of wireless power might vaporize parts of your city.¹ Fortunately, in reality this is about as likely as a nuclear power plant exploding like a nuclear bomb.

One very attractive aspect of space-based solar power is that, once the satellites have been built and launched, they produce zero-carbon electricity. Multiple solar power satellites in orbit would do wonders for a planet struggling to increase or retain its standard of living even as attempts to do that further destabilize the ecosystem. The Star reported that Japan is working on its own "moon shot" initiative of launching a 1,000-megawatt solar power satellite within the next thirty years.

The problem, though, is what happens when they're up there. Satellites are uniquely vulnerable platforms. In a world with no active orbital cleanup, debris will accumulate and the threat of a Kessler Syndrome will remain ever-present. Furthermore, they're vulnerable to attack as well. One kinetic missile could turn a solar power satellite into a million constellations of shrapnel. This is exactly what happened in the historical background of Transhuman Space - the Transpacific Socialist Alliance was highly dependent on solar power satellites for its electrical generation, and in its short war with China effectively all of those installations were destroyed.

The incipient importance of orbit makes the idea of a war fought there ludicrous. Orbital fighting would not have the "cleanliness" of modern warfare - it would resemble more H.G. Wells' nuclear weapons, no more powerful than conventional explosives but which continued exploding for days. If governments become wise to this before it's too late, the best thing in my mind would be for attacks against orbital infrastructure to be treated the same as attacks using weapons of mass destruction.

Because, really, that's exactly what enough debris will do in orbit. It just won't happen all at once. We have our opportunity for a fresh start in space, to improve the whole world with the resources we can find there, but we can't do it recklessly or we won't have it at all.

¹ On the other hand, it has the second-lowest cost per megawatt of any power plant in the game, behind only Fusion.

For Safety's Sake

Once upon a time, Western society was enterprising and bold. Back in those days, when life was difficult and full of privation, ordinary men and women went across thrashing oceans and vast continents in pursuit of a better life, regardless of the risks or dangers that stood in their way. We are the beneficiaries of that indomitable spirit.

Now look what we've done with it.

The Toronto Star ran an article today wherein Christopher Hume criticized the number of potential tourist attractions in Toronto that are closed to the public due to "safety concerns" - chief among these being the observation decks in City Hall and Commerce Court East. Both have been shuttered for decades for what strike me as poor reasons.

Both the City Hall and Commerce Court observation areas apparently have open areas - I can't tell for myself, as they've both been shuttered for decades - and the people in charge are treating this as some sort of insuperable obstacle that will forever stand between the public and the fulfillment of its quest to get a better view. I can see what they mean; after all, there's no such thing as an open observation area anywhere in the world. All bridges are completely enclosed For Your Convenience, and open-air skyscraper observation decks simply don't exist anywhere in the world. Nor can they possibly be retrofitted to increase safety.

wait a minute...

To me, this is a reflection of the metastatizing safety-consciousness of Western society, a society in which ever-greater "safety" has become its own reward. No price is too high, they say, in the name of safety. Should these attitudes endure in their present form, or continue to grow stronger, I'm greatly concerned about the shape of the future. I can't think of any better way for people to have their self-determination taken away by mechanical or digital assistants than to for it to be imposed from above in the name of safety.

How far, I wonder, would we be willing to take this? Is it possible that, in the future, someone walking along a sidewalk would be considered to be practicing an unsafe habit - presuming, that is, the sidewalks hadn't already been ripped up to discourage it? "Dangerous jobs" are often the first to be replaced by robotic labor, but should robotics continue to improve, how many jobs will come to be labelled as "dangerous" - and what will that do to society?

Life will never be safe. The world will always have sharp edges. As a society, it seems like we're doing all we can to pretend that's not the case, to sing happy songs that with enough sandpaper all the points will be smoothed into happy curves.

The only honest world is one in which your safety is not guaranteed.

Pas nécessairement un touriste

I've always been a generally mild-mannered sort. It may be that the experiences of elementary school and early high school taught me this, as the more I stood out the more likely I was to be the target of even more taunting, teasing, and worse from the local bullies. I've got a talent, it seems, for slipping beneath notice, and the only problem is that I have difficulty turning it off when I don't want to be noticed - say, at Worldcon parties and the like.

Nevertheless, sometimes it's useful. I don't like being the center of attention because in my experience, that means someone is probably laughing at me.

Right now I'm in Montreal, attending the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, but there's no way I'd travel all the way here only to spend all my time in the Palais des congrès. This is a city I've effectively spent no time in, a city full of photographs waiting to be taken.

It was a heartening realization that today, carrying around a camera and taking pictures of things does not necessarily label oneself a tourist. Twenty years ago, due to the expense of film and film development, the pool of recreational photographers was considerably smaller than it is today, and anyone snapping photos was more likely and not someone gathering up memories for their vacation album. Now, it seems as if every other person has their own Flickr page. Even I do, though I never use it.

What it means, though, is that in my mind, at least, I can go around taking pictures and - so long as I'm not thrust into a situation that calls for more than my extremely basic command of French - pass for some wandering Montrealer taking photos of the city, and not some Anglo Torontonian tourist. It was even more heartening when a pair of tourists asked me for directions to Lionel-Groulx metro station in French.

Photography is an enlightening hobby. For much of the time leading up to my trip here, I was looking forward to the opportunity to explore and photograph Montreal - particularly its subway network - every bit as much as the opportunity to attend Worldcon, if not more so. Edvardian over at Etherwing Studios said that it reflects a documentary spirit, which is pretty accurate. There are all these moments in time and space that deserve to be preserved, and I'm just doing my part. I'm not a tourist - I do the same thing here that I've always done in Toronto. I'm just an observer.

So long as I don't advertise myself, even with a camera I blend in. It's a comforting thought.

Yes, Virginia, People Really Are That Stupid

Despite my better judgement, I can't help but be just slightly nervous at the prospect of stepping on a plane in August. No matter how aware I am of how safe flying is, there will be a small part of my brain that recognizes there is a chance, however miniscule, that I'll never step off again; whether that chance is greater or lesser than, say, Earth being sterilized by a gamma-ray burst between now and then is open for debate.

Intellectually, though, I know there's no real danger. Realistically, I know that I'm in far more danger crossing the street at an intersection with the lights in my favor, and if the latest news is any indication, the driver that hit me would probably be texting.

The Toronto Star reported today on the findings of a Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study that found truckers driving while text-messaging were twenty-three times more likely to get into an accident than truckers with their full attention on the road. The study found that when the truckers took their eyes off the road to read a message, they did so for "nearly five seconds" - and when you're on the lanes at a hundred per, that's practically forever.

I've always heard it said that the reason teenagers are so liable to get into accidents is because of a sense of "youthful invincibility," that nothing bad could possibly happen to them because, you know, they're them and not someone else. The general implication, never said outright, was that that these attitudes went away with adulthood. At least, that's the implication I derived from it while growing up, but now, I can see that's just wishful thinking. I know that not only do I still feel the same way now as I did when I was 18, I'll probably still feel the same way I did when I was 18 - mentally, at least - when I'm 80.

It's not as if this situation was engineered by the study; plenty of people, far too many, do this sort of thing of their own accord. Talking on a cell phone while driving is so common now as to be wholly unremarkable. While bicycling along Queens Quay a few weeks ago, I was caught behind another cyclist wearing earbuds and no helmet, who was so oblivious she almost cut off a right-turning car. Texting while driving is only the latest manifestation of the go-go-go, always-on 24/7 culture that makes me refuse to get a cell phone in the first place, evidence of the degree to which we prize convenience and efficiency over as pedestrian a matter as safety.

If you'd asked me about this a few years ago, I'd have hoped that "texting while driving" would fall into the same domain of ridiculousness as "shaving while driving" or "applying lipstick while driving." Unfortunately, though, texting seems to be gaining more and more cultural acceptance by the day, even if I still have difficulty figuring out why everyone is so crazy for it - so you can send messages without having to talk. So what?

It's news like this that makes me wonder if low-level solipsism is a more common psychological condition than we think.

Have Mars Suit, Be Visible

This is a special time. Sometime next month, NASA's Human Space Flight Review Committee will announce its conclusions on whether NASA should pursue its spaceflight goals as they are currently planned. It may be that by September, ideas of a crewed Mars mission in 2030 will have been relegated to the same dustbin as the Apollo-tech Manned Venus Flyby¹ or the Delta Clipper. Until we know the shape of the future, though, there's plenty of speculation to be made on what challenges that mission may face.

Humans can't walk in shirtsleeves on the Red Planet, but neither would they wear off-the-shelf spacesuits either. Modern spacesuits, as found on the shuttles and the International Space Station, are meant for a very specific purpose - to maintain a comfortable pressure and insulate its wearer from temperature extremes, radiation dangers, and other environmental hazards present in the vacuum. They'd be perfectly functional on Luna, but Mars is not quite as harsh as that pitted, airless world. Most likely, a Mars expedition would take with it specialized Mars suits optimized for conditions on the Martian surface.

There are a few efforts currently underway to design a functional and effective Mars suit. In August 2004, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on one of them, the MarsSkin project, attempting to simulate Martian suit conditions on Earth. At the time its prototype suits were being tested in South Australia, and were "elasticised to counter the effects of the lower atmospheric pressure on Mars." This is most definitely the sort of research you want to do, and do right, before you leave home or you will look worse than Doug Quaid after he got sucked out the alien chamber in the Pyramid Mine.

There's one detail that could easily be overlooked in the shuffle of assembling an effective personal environment, though; the color. The MarsSkin suits photographed in the article are deep blue, close enough to black in shadow. Visibility is important everywhere, but the hostile environments we find throughout the solar system make it key. If a Martian traveller takes a fall and finds the suit's emergency beacon broken, say, a noticeable paint scheme could well be the difference between death and survival.

Popular depictions of Mars don't have much agreement. The first major Mars-focused movies I thought of, 1978's Capricorn One and 2000's Mission to Mars, use ordinary white spacesuits that would not look one bit out of place on the International Space Station. Red Planet, also from 2000, has its astronauts wear black suits - which could be an advantage in terms of heat retention - and 1990's Total Recall begins with a dream sequence where characters wear khaki suits with disturbingly fragile faceplates.²

For a while I thought MarsSkin was really on to something with their blue suits. After all, there's not much that's blue on Mars - all but, it seems, the sky. Although it appears salmon or butterscotch through the cameras of our probes there, the evidence I've found suggests that its true color is the same familiar blue as on Earth. This question won't be settled once and for all until people actually see it with their own eyes.

I brought the idea of this post up with a friend, and she didn't waste any time in coming up with a preferred color: green. And, you know what? I think she's right.

Its sky aside, Mars is red, thanks to the plentiful iron oxide dust. Not only are red and green close complementary colors, there is absolutely nothing on Mars that is green that would not have been brought there by humans. There are no Martian trees, no Martian grasslands, no Martian jungles. The smallest swatch of green in that rusted desert would be all the more starkly visible for its loneliness.

Should NASA's human spaceflight ambitions go ahead, and should humans walk on Mars in my lifetime or anyone else's, I think it would be best if the color they wore was green. Our presence there alone would make it appropriate - bringing living nature to a lifeless (according to current evidence) world.

¹ Although, James Nicoll had a rather sensible objection to this plan.

² 2009's Watchmen also had scenes on Mars, but Dr. Manhattan is above such petty requirements as "air."

Bloor Square in Waiting

Last month I wrote a few paragraphs about the precarious future of One Bloor East, a proposed multi-use skyscraper to be built on what was a developed corner and is now an empty, fenced-off field of dirt and gravel at the intersection of Yonge Street and Bloor Street. Today, the Toronto Star reported that the project is "on the brink," and while developer Bazis International claims the site is the "best address in the world," financial scandal may well prevent the tower from being built there.

What I have to wonder is - would this really be a bad thing? Towers are sprouting like sunflowers in Toronto these days, recession or no, and the only reason you can't see cranes every which way in the downtown core is because the existing buildings block the view. It's a powerful reminder of how modern society is built on the "runaway train" model of economic development, that the economy has to grow every single quarter and it's a terrible defeat and tragedy if it doesn't.

I recognize that the proposed site of One Bloor East is incredibly valuable land. What I take issue with is the automatic notion that some developer should profit from it, rather than the ordinary people of Toronto. Personally I hope they don't build the place. I hope they return the $70 million they've already collected as down payments for condos that haven't even been built yet, and I hope that the land can instead be converted into another downtown public space - something that a city can never have enough of.

James Bow has decribed the Yonge Street Strip, the portion of it between Dundas Street and Bloor Street, as the "heart of Yonge." I would go one further and say that length also represents its soul. The spinning records of Sam the Record Man are gone, but that street still thrums, and for many Torontonians and non-Torontonians alike those leagues of storefronts and sidewalks are what comes to mind when Yonge Street is mentioned. Dundas Square anchors it in the south; rather than build yet another tower for the enrichment of yet another developer, I'd much prefer to see a Bloor Square where that field of dirt and gravel is now.

Polishing the Golden Ages

Though the last man alive, whenever he lives, will be justified in believing times were better in the past, that belief is a common thread that winds through the labyrinth of history. Today everything - comic books, the CBC, hats - seem to have experienced Golden Ages. The idea of the "golden age" as a purer, more enlightened, yet departed time was expressed in mythologies around the ancient world. The science fiction field alone has two of them (c. 1939 to 1959, and twelve).

The idea of social golden ages have their own haunting power, the more so because by their very nature they can't be recognized as such until they're gone. The mere definition of the recent past as a golden age implies that things have gone downhill since then. Science fiction has run with this concept very well in the past.

Last week I picked up a 1974 anthology entitled 2020 Vision, or possibly 20/20 Vision, edited by Jerry Pournelle and including stories by such luminaries as Poul Anderson, Norman Spinrad, Larry Niven and A.E. van Vogt. In his preface, Pournelle writes that while 2020 Vision originally began as a collection of stories which the author of each "truly believed" might take place in the year 2020, there emerged a unifying theme of "do we now, or will we soon, live in a Golden Age?"

From behind his typewriter in 1974, Pournelle did put forth a plausible argument that events could drive much of the world into poverty and despair well before 2009, let alone 2020. Sure, so far we've stood out of the long shadow of nuclear war - and the recent news from Moscow is even more encouraging on that front - but the global problems of pollution and overpopulation, and in the West a shrinking workforce supporting a massive pool of retirees, are with us still. In 1974 the free world was still riding high thanks to the boom years after the Second World War, tensions with the Soviet Union were relatively low, and the United States had yet to learn the lessons of Vietnam.

From behind my laptop in 2009, though, I have to wonder if the 1970s really were a golden age, and whether future generations might look back to them as such now that the history of those years has been written. Personally, though, when I think of the 1970s, I don't think of a golden age. I think of years of malaise, of years when the world stopped reaching for the stars, of bad polyester leisure suits and orange shag carpeting.

If I had to point to some point of recent history as a golden age, I'd go to the 1990s - specifically, 1991-2001. The Cold War was over, the early 1990s recession had effectively lifted, the international system was sufficiently peaceful and stable for Francis Fukuyama to declare that liberal democracy had won forever, new technologies were making more people more prosperous, and the future seemed bright. It wasn't until after September 11 that North America's "vacation from history" ended and the gold was put away. This represents, however, a very Western golden age; things were not nearly so rosy in places like Russia, Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia. Globalization or no, the world system is far too fragmented for things to be good and rosy everywhere.

Then again, I was born in 1982, and am a child of the 1990s. My entire experience with the 1970s is by necessity filtered through the opinions of others. Whether or not the 70s were a golden age, this is the sort of argument you can't have without knowing what a golden age is in the first place. Seeing as how that's an intensely subjective issue, I asked around.

Tesseract, of Screaming through Static: "When the greatest number of people are happy. Definitely not 2009."

Alex, roommate: "It's a society in which everyone respects the rights of everyone else, there's full egalitarianism, and the lowest possible percentage of homelessness and lack of education, and prosperity. Where everything is as close to perfect, in terms of general happiness and niceness, as you can get with human beings."

Acts of Minor Treason reader Professor S, harvesting brains in South Korea: "I would say that it is a point of significant power (political, military, cultural, economic, not necessarily all, but likely more than one) which includes a period of increasing rise in power, refinement, and complexity resulting in rising prosperity for a large segment of the population."

Similar in outline, different in the details. From my perspective, I doubt they explain the 1970s any better than they describe 2009.

A social golden age being "a time where everything was awesome" is something that pretty much everyone can agree on, but the details of what constitutes awesome always vary. An extreme social conservative might think of the 1950s as a golden age, because it was when women and minorities Knew Their Place. Others might think of it as when beer was cheap and music was good. For a few, it doesn't even have to happened yet. As David Brin wrote in his 2002 article "J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress," modern Western society is rare in that it has, "with its impudent notion of progress, brashly relocated any 'golden age' to the future, something we might work toward, a human construct for our grandchildren to achieve... assuming that we manage to prepare them."

People will only ever agree on the broad strokes of what constitutes a golden age. I don't know whether Jerry Pournelle today thinks the 1970s were a golden age after all, or whether future generations will come to think of them that way, but in the end that's not my decision to make. It may yet be that despite dark clouds and rumors of war, David Brin is right, and the great golden age is yet to come.

All I know is that if you're looking forward to a golden age, just make sure your base has plenty of Talents and no Drones, and you can't go wrong.

From Fort Totten to Russell Hill

The recent accident on the Washington Metro, Washington, D.C.'s subway system, is an all-too-rare and all-too-tragic black mark on public transit safety. News is still coming in fast and furious, and some of the details have changed significantly in the time since I started assembling notes for this post on Monday night. What we know for sure is that one Metro train rammed into another with enough force to stack cars like fallen dominoes, and that at least nine people are dead and eighty more injured. It's an accident that has such scope that people can only step back and be stunned by its scale - a train wreck in the clearest sense of the term.

This isn't the first time there's been such an accident on the Washington Metro - an accident involving a derailment in January 1982 killed three people and injured twenty-five - but it is the most deadly. Speculations as to the cause have been many, and it'll be some time before a consensus is reached as to what happened and why. For now, in the interests of similarity and contrast, I thought it might be instructive to compare this crash with the 1995 Russell Hill subway accident. That was the deadliest accident in the Toronto Transit Commission's history, and I hope that record stands for a long, long time.

On the face of it, the two accidents are broadly similar - one train, moving at standard subway speed, plowed into the back of a stationary train. In both cases the worst damage was in the front car of the colliding train, though Russell Hill was less deadly in this regard; the operator of the colliding train at Russell Hill survived to give his account of what led up to the accident, while the operator of the colliding Washington Metro train is among the deceased.

From there, the two situations continue to differ. The Russell Hill accident was deep underground, between St. Clair West and Dupont stations, which at 1.2 kilometers apart are among the more widely separated stations in the system, and in an area where the tunnel was not arrow-straight. Between Fort Totten and Takoma stations, where the Washington accident took place, the separation is even wider - 2.988 kilometers (1.85 miles) according to the Gmaps Pedometer, give or take a few meters (feet). The difference here, though, is that no portion of the track between Fort Totten and Takoma is underground. Viewed from Google Maps, it more closely resembles the insulated right-of-way the Toronto subway enjoys within the Allen Expressway, but without a highway on either side.

Weather wasn't a factor either. The accident occured at 5:03 PM ET; Weather Underground's records state that at 4:52 PM, a mere eleven minutes earlier, conditions in the Federal City were mostly cloudy and that no precipitation had fallen during the day. Overcast skies can make for depressing vistas, but they're not nearly enough to hide something as large as a subway train until the last minute.

The issue of operator control is one that's been back and forth. At Russell Hill, the operator of the colliding train threw on the brakes as soon as he saw the stopped train ahead of him. According to a Washington Post story I read on Tuesday morning, "it appeared that the operator of the train that crashed did not apply the emergency brakes," but on Tuesday evening a second story cited early results of an NTSB investigation that indicated the opposite. In any case, there was not nearly enough time to prevent the collision once the brakes were applied, either in Washington or Toronto.

In Toronto, the accident was chalked up to human error and design failure - the operator misread his signals, and the train's emergency brake equipment wasn't up to the task. In Washington, it's something different. Not only do we have likely human error, but computer error as well.

It wasn't until I started putting this post together that I learned the Washington Metro is one of a number of heavy rail systems that uses Automatic Train Operation (ATO). What this means is that the operator is, effectively, a spare part, and while the train is under ATO they operate mainly the doors. On the TTC it's completely different - subways have a crew of two, with an operator in the front car driving the thing and a guard in a middle car who's responsible for opening and closing the doors.

Trains on the Washington Metro are fully capable of driving themselves, and at the time of the accident, that's exactly what the colliding train was doing. It's not the first time computer-controlled trains have got into trouble in the District of Columbia, but never this badly. In 2005, two Metro operators had to override their computers to avoid a crash. This time - not so fortunate.

What's this all mean for Toronto? Nothing, objectively - the Toronto subway is still manually controlled, and in the aftermath of the Russell Hill accident, the signalling system was modified to, hopefully, prevent a similar collision. In the fourteen years since there's been nothing to even remotely compare to it in this system. Still, there are potential issues.

One of the present blue-sky projects for Toronto subway expansion is an extension of the Yonge subway line from its current terminus at Finch station to Richmond Hill Centre, a major transit hub in southern York Region. The problem with this is that it's expected to draw significant ridership to a corridor that's already stressed well before it reaches downtown. Automatic Train Control has been touted as a possible solution, one that would enable separation between trains to be decreased to as little as ninety seconds. Sure, it would increase the capacity of the line, but it would decrease the margin for error.

Note that Automatic Train Control doesn't necessarily mean a conversion to driverless operation as on the Washington Metro - from what I understand, it's primarily an improved signalling system. Nevertheless, three-quarters of any success is in the name, and Automatic Train Control conjures up visions of some kind of robot at the controls.

Pure driverless operation may be ideal one day, once the system has been further refined. For now, though, it seems to me it might be better in the end to leave people at the controls and space things out. They can build more lines if they have to - I'd much rather have the opportunity to ride a Downtown Relief Line than never have to wait more than a minute and a half on the platform in rush hour.

I used to think an interesting concept for traffic control in a future city would involve a central coordinating mainframe that kept all the cars in order on their guideways, but accidents like this really make one stop and consider if that's the best way after all.

When All Old Words Are New Again

Science fiction is a field that's profoundly vulnerable to being dated, probably more so than any other genre except possibly historical pieces, and even then they'd only be dated in the event previously unknown and contradictory primary sources came to light. The future's never how anyone predicts it, but sometimes things can go particularly askew, and as a result a reader's willing suspension of disbelief gets to take a body blow.

Oftentimes, it's because the author simply didn't see something coming, and the something in question reinvented society. This is most obvious in stories written before the 1970s, with advanced and miniaturized computers being almost entirely absent. Robert A. Heinlein's 1950s juveniles had astrogators plotting their courses with slide rules instead of calculators. Computation in much of sf tended to follow the UNIVAC model, being based around large, complicated systems which demanded a great deal of resources and attention, and yet still don't seem much better than a 2009 laptop.

Nevertheless, obsolescence isn't solely confined to technology, or the lack thereof. Personally, I'm a forgiving enough reader that, say, the absence of ubiquitous smartphones and the presence of a lunar colony in the "present day" is a sticking point - frankly, I'd prefer to live in that world. A lot of obsolescence is in the words themselves.

Arguments have been put forward that advancements in printing and literacy have reduced the speed of language shift. Four hundred years after Shakespeare, his writings remain fairly easy to read, perhaps with some squinting at word choices that seem odd today; in what was history to Shakespeare, Old English and Middle English resembled Scandinavian languages more than they did the language I'm writing in. That may be so, but if the language isn't changing greatly in detail, it rapidly fluctuates in specifics. When was the last time you heard someone describe something as "copacetic," for example, or use the phrase "23 skidoo?"

It's not just slang, though. On Friday I reviewed Tom Ligon's "Funnel Hawk," written in 1990, and there were occasional word choices in it that would have been innocuous then, but strike me as odd now. At one point in the story, the heroine is playing a flight simulator game that would make perfect sense as a modern MMO. It's the terminology that gets me - she "calls up" a simulation of the SR-71 Blackbird, when today we would say "loaded," and a modified joystick is described as using "the MicroSoft controls." From what I understand, the only other name Microsoft ever had for itself was "Micro-Soft." Certainly by 1990, the Microsoft name as we know it had been in use for a while.

These aren't major things, nor did they decrease my enjoyment of the story - they're just speed bumps. But, as speed bumps, they rattle me and for a second jolt me out of the story's flow. I'm not saying this is the author's fault - language changes, it's a simple fact of life. Look what the last hundred years have done to the meaning of the word "gay."

Personally, what I've taken out of it is a commitment to use a conservative narrating style. Simple, clear words tend to stay in favor. If I use an odd word, or if I use a few, generally I'll do it for flavor with a specific character. That, at least, might put it to my advantage.

Nevertheless, it's an aspect of the genre that can't really ever be overcome. There's no telling how words will shift meaning and which will date a story just as surely as one that features our Intrepid Space Hero and the Rogue Princess storming the Computerized Catacombs of the Emperor of Mars.

That might be kinda neat in any event, though.

That Jumbuck In His Taser Bag

Despite the possibilities of our modern wired - or, more appropriately, wireless - future, it's instructive to remember that while news can circle the world in a blink of an eye, people aren't necessarily going to see it. A great deal of news has an inherently local basis and bias, and lessons learned in one corner of the world may be entirely unknown or ignored in another, even if they spring from the same seed.

Ignored in, say, Australia.

The Sydney Morning Herald carried a story yesterday entitled "State's police licensed to Taser," reporting that police forces across the Australian state of New South Wales will be equipped with tasers in "the biggest revolution of police equipment since... 1862." It explains that tasers have been in limited use by NSW police special operations units for two years and regular police departments since last year, and that while previously "Tasers had to be signed out by supervisors," under the new state of affairs "every officer will have a Taser on his or her belt."

Progress, right? On the face of it the introduction of a "less than lethal" alternative into the police's arsenal will enable them to defuse situations that might otherwise have ended with a bullet. The article states that New South Wales police "have drawn Tasers about 280 times, but the sight of the weapon has caused suspects to capitulate about 180 times."

That's a pretty significant takedown-by-threat ratio alone. You'd have to wonder why. Maybe it has something to do with the concern raised by taser opponents, who say they are "potentially deadly."

The phrase "potentially deadly" comes up twice in the document. The word "kill" does not appear once. I have to wonder if this is a result of limited research or biased reporting. Here in Canada, where tasers have been used by police since 1999, twenty people have died after being shocked by one. The case of Robert Dziekański, who died after being tasered by Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers in Vancouver International Airport in October 2007, is just the most high-profile. Similar cases have occured in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

In Australia none of this appears to be a blip on the radar. In my opinion, the circumstantial evidence alone surrounding taser deaths should merit something stronger than the bloodless "potentially deadly." At no point in the article is any reason given as to why tasers are "potentially deadly" - it's as if the comment was shoved in there just for the sake of addressing it, without really doing so. It's not as if the Sydney Morning Herald would've had to work to find this out; in a search for "taser" on Google.com.au, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation news story "Man dies after police use Taser" is hit number five. The next three hits also deal with taser deaths in Australia.

So it's not even the case that taser deaths are a "foreign problem." Australia, it seems, has already got plenty of its own to deal with.

I have to wonder if this is research failure or an intentional effort to strengthen one side of the debate by papering over the other. Ideally, newspapers should present both sides of an issue to fulfill their honest mandate, that being to inform the reading public. Realistically, that doesn't happen very much at all anymore. That doesn't mean I shouldn't be irritated when I find a newspaper being derelict in its duty.

if that swagman had been boiling his billy today, the squatter would've given him a taste of the electric rifle well before he could've got up and jumped into that billabong

(Dark) Magic Highway U.S.A.

More personal disclosure time: the sort of thing I wrote about on Monday most definitely leads to me taking a jaundiced view of what I'm writing about today.

Back in 2007, a colorful piece of Disney futurism called Magic Highway U.S.A. made its way across the internet. First broadcast in 1958 as part of the Disneyland series, it looked forward from a time where the Interstate Highway System was just beginning to transform the way Americans travelled to a perfect retrofuture where the roads were wide, journeys swift and the automobile king.

A good way to gain insight to a specific point in history is to look at its futurism, its science fiction. Nineteenth-century Britain's preoccupation with a rival European power found expression in invasion literature such as 1871's The Battle of Dorking, and a century later Japan's seemingly invincible economy saw science-fictional works predicated around the United States eclipsed by the Rising Sun.

In the 1950s, everything was swell, so long as you weren't black, a woman, an atheist, a communist, a beatnik, or any kind of minority, and were American. The Second World War was over and America was stronger than ever, ready and able to spread freedom, democracy, and Mom's apple pie to every part of the world, thanks to the twin fists of Prosperity and Science. Magic Highway U.S.A. reflects that postwar optimism and forecasts a world in which great highways "link together all nations, and help create a better understanding among the peoples of the world... and a better way of life for the future."

In this Magic Highway U.S.A. reflects the boundless, triumphal optimism of a country that had not yet learned to fear the Soviet nuclear threat, and had not been humbled by Vietnam. The highways would be laid down, the people would be free to drive where they pleased, and everything would be awesome.

Another truth about science fiction is that one can learn nearly as much from what isn't said as what is. Take a look at it yourself, if you haven't; I've found it here on YouTube, but there's no telling if this is authorized by Disney, and so I offer no guarantees as to whether this video is actually live as you read this. If so, you're missing out - but I do have a couple of stills from the movie below, as well.



Magic Highway U.S.A. stresses scale. Bigness! The highways themselves are massive, the network is massive, and the machines that build it are massive, from mobile bridgebuilders to the monstrous roadbuilder, which devours the land with a toothy maw and lays down road like some tremendous steel behemoth. It's suggested with such casual flippancy that I somehow doubt there was much in the way of an environmental impact assessment before it rumbled through. What we don't see are the prefabricated suburbs being flown in from roaring factories, slung below a fleet of carrier helicopters each with blades the breadth of a football stadium, but that would hardly be out of place in Magic Highway U.S.A.'s vision of the future.

"In one sweep, a giant roadbuilder changes rough ground into a wide, finished highway."

The film's vision of a country "[decentralized]... into vast urban areas" is a simple extension of the suburban impulse which was, in 1958, still in its infancy. Our perspective changes from a tightly-packed labyrinth of buildings without a scrap of ground or grass visible, to a few stands of towers that stretch toward the horizon, linked together by wide roads almost free of traffic and standing largely separate from one another.

They tried that once in North York, by the by, with a new model suburb based around tall residential towers isolated from each other by wide-open areas. Today it's called Jane and Finch and has some of the highest crime and poverty rates in the city. I'm not saying that correlation equals causation here, but for me it's hardly a stellar advertisement for the concept.

These "urban areas" look far less like cities than they do farmers' fields that yielded a bumper crop of skyscrapers. The only allowance for pedestrian travel we're shown is in a shopping center, where "moving sidewalks make window shopping effortless," and "escalator ramps carry office workers from level to level."

At no point in Magic Highway U.S.A. is anything non-mechanical ever depicted as moving. Motor cars and moving sidewalks are the arteries of this world of statues. Nor does it acknowledge that anyone gets around by any method other than a car; obviously, the General Motors streetcar conspiracy was only the beginning in this future. Even freight trains have been replaced by "truck trains," which "combine railroad volume with highway flexibility."

Environmental consequences? What environmental consequences? For that matter, what environment? The use of cantilevered skyways above the sort of desert where Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner dueled is framed as preserving "the beauty and grandeur of mountain travel," not the beauty and grandeur of nature itself. While I'll admit that highway networks do go a long way to bind together peoples and countries, they're hardly the unalloyed good that Magic Highway U.S.A. represents - at the least, with present methods, they encourage negative impacts such as carbon pollution. In this future, they certainly don't have a problem with building highways straight through equatorial rain forests.

To be fair, Magic Highway U.S.A. doesn't assume that the internal combustion engine will reign supreme forever, and this is one point where I wish it had hit the mark. It posits automobiles switching first to jets, then to nuclear power, and finally "the sun-powered electro-suspension car, which needs no wheels."

Yes, of course! All we have to do in order to have Hover-Boards is to make sure they're solar-powered! Mattel's only got six years; they'd better get cracking!

"These spectacular conceptions will lead to new dimensions for the American highway." And, one would hope, perfectly reliable cars...

At the time it was made, Magic Highway U.S.A. was earnestly showing a world that was supposed to be pleasant and full of promise, a utopia that we could all look forward to. Fifty-one years later, it looks to me more like a roadmap to social breakdown. Not only does its world of the future encourage sprawl and dependency, it practically makes them mandatory. It is so married to the concept of the personal automobile that there is no allowance at all for their absence. In this world of the future, people would probably think they were better off dead than have their driver's license revoked. Personally, I can only be thankful that the techno-utopian excesses of Magic Highway U.S.A. did not come true.

The most outlandish prediction, though? "America will one day be criss-crossed by a network of super-speed transcontinental motorways." Oh, the things they believed back then...

just because I'm behind the curve doesn't mean I don't care

The Glorious Sixth of June

I'll be leaving shortly to attend Toronto's D-Day ceremony at Nathan Phillips Square. As this is the 65th anniversary, and because people tend to like big round numbers, I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say it'll probably be well-attended. As far as big round numbers go, too, this may well be the last gasp for many of the remaining veterans - not even a lot of eighteen-year-olds are still going strong sixty-five years later.

When that day comes, I have to wonder what it'll look like, because I may have had a preview. Five years ago, on the 60th anniversary of D-Day, I attended the ceremony held at the small but powerful Peterborough war memorial. Aside from a scattering of small children and the cadets in uniform, my small group of friends and I seemed to be the only people there under the age of thirty-five.



Is this the future? An ever-smaller crowd of men and women with silver hair to acknowledge the past? How long will it be before people begin seriously suggesting that D-Day and the Second World War as a whole are no longer relevant to the modern world, and how long before other people start listening to them?

As the last veterans die, is D-Day and its lessons doomed to slide into forgotten history, into irrelevance? We've lost, I think, too much already. We can't let even that remembrance slip away. Otherwise, as I've written before, it strips the significance and meaning away from what they did; if, one day, it comes to no one (or only a very few) caring about what happened on D-Day, and all the other days of decision during all of the other wars, they lose the principles they fought for.

Orbital Warfare Should Not Work That Way

Of course I'm concerned about the future. It's where I plan to spend the rest of my life.

When I first came across George Friedman's The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century in a bookstore, I flipped through it but didn't buy it because 1) I had to get to work soon and 2) I really didn't feel like shelling out $30 CDN plus applicable taxes. Nevertheless, it did intrigue me quickly and the ideas I was exposed to from briefly flipping through it kept nattering at me, and so on Friday I went and paid the $30 CDN plus applicable taxes.

Forecasting is an inherently tricky business. Also on my shelf is Your Next Fifty Years by Robert W. Prehoda, circa 1979, which among other things forecast a barely-averted Malthusian famine and population collapse in 1994 that ended the Cold War because the United States shared its emergency food supplies with the Soviets. Technological forecasting, which is really what much of the field is concerned with, is particularly hard to nail down.

Geopolitical forecasting is something else again. Geopolitics doesn't play by the same rules as technology - regardless of the tools at hand, the overarching goals, drives, and motivations of its players are the same as they've been throughout history. As the founder and Chief Intelligence Officer of the private intelligence agency Stratfor, Friedman probably has access to a wealth of information from around the world that helped him design a possible 21st century.

This is not a review; I won't cover the grand sweep of the book. Honestly I think I may raid it for inspiration myself, as if nothing else it is creative - nowhere else have I seen the 21st century shaped, in part, by a great power war between the United States, Poland (!), Japan, and Turkey (!!). Nevertheless, the way Friedman pulled off that war kind of bugs me.

In Friedman's 2050, the United States has militarized space and keeps watch over the world from three geosynchronous stations called "Battle Stars" - named such "for no other reason than that it's a cool name" - which, in turn, are the nerve centers of the new American remote-controlled military of UAVs and hypersonic missiles. The war begins when Japan destroys the three Battle Stars with, in a page from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, kinetic missiles hurled from its lunar station.

Friedman did score extra points for acknowledging that, yes, these launches would have been detected by the American orbital awareness system. He likewise explains why that detection does not necessarily mean awareness - computers in his 2050 are of the don't-speak-unless-spoken-to kind, it seems. None of the Battle Star's defense systems are effective at brushing away the missiles, and "at 5 p.m., all three Battle Stars will explode, killing all of the remaining crew members and knocking out the rest of the U.S. space force."

Whether or not a space station with room enough for hundreds of people would explode in the manner to which televised science fiction is something I'm not deeply qualified to comment on, but based on my limited knowledge I'd tend to say "space does not work that way." That's a moot point, though; a kinetic impact would break up the station, and so it may just be a problem of suboptimal word choice.

What really gets me is that, considering that the Japanese-Turkish coalition is banking on its possession of an intact satellite network to pummel the United States into submission, physically destroying its Battle Stars is fucking stupid - but then, when you get right down to it, the same can be said for orbital warfare as a whole.

Humans are spoiled by habits that a gravity field encourages. If we blow something up, we expect the rubble to stay where it is; no fun to clean up, sure, but also something that can be sidestepped and no longer provides any value to the enemy. Space doesn't work that way. Sure, Japan's destroyed the Battle Stars and blinded the American eyes in the sky, but it won't matter because the debris from the destroyed stations, tens or hundreds of thousands or millions of pieces of debris, is now hurling around Earth at 8 kilometers per second on unpredictable orbits that may intersect with yet more satellites. Many of them would, undoubtedly, constitute the intact Japanese-Turkish network with which they can keep an eye on the States.

This is a perfect recipe for a Kessler Syndrome, something I've written about before, where the volume of debris in Earth orbit makes spaceflight effectively impossible. This is also something people aren't really familiar with yet. After all, garbage doesn't last forever - except in space, where it effectively does.

I don't think it's a question of whether space is militarized, but when - the only reason it hasn't happened yet is because spaceflight is still extremely expensive, and presently there's no reason to place weapons in space when they'd just be doing the same things Earth-based ones do, but not as well.

When it does happen, though, for the future's sake I hope they're not all idiots about it.

Democracy and the Modern Sisyphus

"Huzzah!" said Diane Sowell of State College, PA. "At long last, we are rid of that corrupt, antiquated system of government known as democracy, a system that has done nothing but maintain the status quo of political inequality, economic stagnation, and social injustice. Our good king will change all that."
- "Exiled American King Triumphantly Returns To Washington." The Onion, August 28, 2002.

With the defeat of the Tamil Tigers and the end of Sri Lanka's twenty-seven-year civil war, that country's Sinhalese majority is caught up in the emotional rush of peace. Many of the plaudits for ending the war are being heaped like jewels at the feet of Sri Lanka's president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, to the extent that Sinhalese Sri Lankans have begun saluting him with the words, "Praise our king."

An article by Doug Saunders in the Globe and Mail looks at what may well be an incipient personality cult forming around President Rajapaksa, posters and billboards of whom "are placed on every block... on every street corner, every public building, every shop front," and some of which now read "King Mahinda Rajapaksa: Our saviour."

Not bad mileage in terms of popularity for a man who eked out a relatively narrow victory in the 2005 Sri Lankan presidential election. The question that arises now is whether there will ever be another election in Sri Lanka so long as Rajapaksa is alive, or whether Sri Lanka's fifth President will become a modern-day monarch, the island's first since its conquest by the British Empire one hundred and ninety-six years ago.¹

"Why do we need elections any more?" a Sri Lankan university student is quoted as saying in the Globe and Mail's story. "He is the king we need."

For all but the most recent fraction of history, people were ruled by the strong. In ancient days, that's exactly what they were; as time went on and the political power of one strongman was passed down to his descendants, elaborate social constructs came about to justify why this particular man (or, in very very rare cases, woman) was in charge. Democracy was a breakthrough made possible by the outward-looking, inquisitive, exploratory maritime city-states of classical Greece, and after weathering the Persian storm at Salamis their peculiar form of government was transmitted to the Roman Republic and its memory preserved by the Roman Empire.

The United Kingdom and United States became the standard bearers of democracy in the modern age, and with the global influence of first one and then the other since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the concept spread to every continent and flowered in almost every nation. In 2008, of all the states in the world, only four - Brunei, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, and the Vatican City - did not at least pretend to be democracies.² You could argue that as the 21st century dawns, the age of strongmen is nearing its end. Back in the '80s, Francis Fukuyama thought that much.

The idea that liberal democracy represents the end point of human sociocultural evolution is an appealing one, for those who like what liberal democracy represents. Who wouldn't want to believe that there'll be no more wars against the fascists or silent struggles with the communists to darken the future? Liberal democracy, they say, is a pretty good thing; let's stick with it.

What I can't help but wonder is whether democracy is fundamentally in opposition to basic human nature. While humans aren't pack creatures like canines, the evidence of history demonstrates that something in the human spirit lends itself to small groups dominating large ones. To my mind, monarchies, dictatorships, and other forms of government wherein succession is determined by something other than the consent of the governed represent the "natural state" of humanity.

Before the twentieth century, democracy was something that had to be fought for. Whether it was realized in the efforts of American colonists to separate themselves from an unrepresentative Parliament in 1776 or British reformers to abolish the rotten boroughs and extend voting rights in 1832, for most of history democracy was not something that just happened.

Democracy has become the way of the world in the 21st century, but at the same time, familiarity breeds contempt. It's not a perfect system by any means of the imagination, but the lack of any real, vibrant alternative system of government that eschews the concept entirely may create a sort of funhouse mirror effect - not only making democracy seem far worse because of its ubiquity, but making non-democratic government more attractive because of its unfamiliarity, its exoticism.

Entropy dictates that, over time, systems decay from order to disorder. Democracy is like pushing a boulder uphill. It takes a great deal of deliberate effort to just stay in the same place, let alone move forward, and if we lose interest the boulder rolls back down to the bottom. Left alone, without anyone to defend it, democracies inevitably decay into dictatorships and one-man rule.

There's something to be said, in human culture, for a king. The pomp and circumstance and iron certainty of a strong, bold, decisive leader in a palace fills a great many psychological needs; just as gods controlled the parts of the world that the ordinary person didn't understand, kings controlled the parts of the world that they knew themselves. Democracy transfers the responsibility of leadership from such elevated men to the most common people on the street.

For some people, it's easy to see that this would be deeply unsettling. It's no wonder that so many people crave kings.

People crave a lot of things that, in the end, aren't much good for them at all.

¹ Not counting the British monarchs, since I don't think any of them were even from Sri Lanka.

² Even North Korea calls itself "democratic." Which I suppose shows how far just calling yourself democratic gets you.

Looking Down on North York

If I tend to disparage North York in this weblog, it's because despite its pretensions of urbanity, to me the City that Mel Built represents some of the worst things I got away from up north and the poor strategies that continue to be followed throughout the developed world. The chain of gleaming steel-and-glass spires between Sheppard and Finch may constitute Metro Toronto's second downtown, but stray much more than a block to the west or east and you'll find yourself drowning in suburbia.

Back in 2006, James Bow put together a compelling travelogue of Yonge Street, which is frequently bandied to be "longest street in the world," even though not even its alignment is continuous to Rainy River as that sidewalk map at Yonge and Dundas suggests. In particular, what fascinated me about his journey was the transition between Toronto and North York, the switch from urban center to suburban sprawl. It wasn't until today that I was in the area and motivated to investigate it for myself.

Until January 1, 1998, Toronto ended at Yonge Boulevard. Before the Yonge subway was built, and for a few years afterward, the Yonge streetcar and, later, trolleybus looped for its southbound journey at Glen Echo Loop, now the parking lot of a Loblaws grocery store. Yonge Street as a pedestrian destination, built by a long tradition of reliable surface transit options until the 1970s and resilient enough to survive the tracks being pulled up, simultaneously continues and ends there today. North York's limits begin at the north end of the boulevard, and from there to Steeles the suburban ethic had free rein. Witness this video, also embedded below, of the wide divide that separates the two cities with a deep corridor of green. I love the flexibility video provides.



Part of this is due to geography. Yonge Boulevard is a natural border; just beyond it the terrain dips into the valley carved by the West Don River, and it does not climb out of it until beyond the footprint of Highway 401. Terrain separated the core of North York from Toronto in its early days, and with no continuous urban footprint as can be found along Yonge Street today, North York was free to invent itself along the lines that were dominant in the postwar period, when a township of connected villages and farmer's fields spread into the semi-urban conglomeration of today.

It's rare in Metro Toronto for natural geography to so bluntly determine the nature and fate of cities. Etobicoke is separated from Toronto by the Humber River, a boundary historically simple to overcome and thus contributing to a more gradual shift from urban concentrations to suburban constructions as one travels westward. In the east, Victoria Park Avenue represents a wholly artificial border between Toronto on one side and Scarborough on the other. York and East York have historically been so close to Toronto that it's difficult to tell when you've left one and entered another.

Here, though, it's different. Yonge Street has always been the core of Toronto, and this discontinuity as it dives into the West Don valley and Hoggs Hollow may have played a major role in the difference between the historical development of the two cities. The subway runs north to Finch now, and may soon extend to Richmond Hill, but it tunnels under patterns that were long determined before the first shovel was sunk into the dirt.

If not for the geography of the Don, I wonder what sort of city North York would have turned out to be.

21st Century Decivilization

There's a recurring idea in science fiction that the rural-to-urban population shift is a temporary one, and with the right combination of technological advancement we'll all start filtering back to the countryside and once again leaving the cities to rot. Transhuman Space includes this as "decivilization," with one of its supplements detailing the demolition of multiple blocks of Manhattan to expand Central Park, and the 1946 Arthur C. Clarke short "Rescue Party" takes time out to describe how the advent of the personal helicopter "brought universal transportation" and enabled people to return "to the fields and forests for which they had always longed."

Personally I can't take the idea of "the death of the city" too seriously. The city has been the foundation of human civilization ever since one brick was stacked on top of another at Jericho, and I don't believe that a transportation revolution or sophisticated communications technologies will make the abandonment of the metropolis feasible. To me it's a relic of twentieth-century modes of thought that still refuse to take externalities into account. The environmental cost of the cities emptying, of people dispersing through the countryside but still demanding the same amentities available in an urban area, would be disastrous.

Nevertheless, cities will empty, by degrees. As it happens, it's not necessarily a negative thing.

Flint, Michigan is far from ground zero of the recession. As Michael Moore spared no detail to demonstrate in Roger & Me, Flint was already screwed a full twenty years before the markets went south; the crisis of the last year has only been kicking the city with steel-toed boots until it coughs up blood. Flint's crisis is one of overextension, and the City that General Motors Built now may as well have been founded on quicksand. On Tuesday, the New York Times' David Streitfeld reported on the newest idea to save Flint from collapse: decivilization.

"The population would be condensed into a few viable areas," Streitfeld writes, with the remainder of the city being demolished rather than left to rot. "A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval."

This is an excellent idea, and I wholeheartedly support the concept. Partially that's just my surprise that people in positions of authority are recognizing reality; that sometimes there's no going back to the way things were. Flint overextended itself back when times were good, and a consolidation of the city around a functional core may be the only real way to save it from collapse. Furthermore, the rationalization of cities into smaller, more compact forms not only enhance livability through a reduced necessity to rely on cars, but have environmental bonuses via land returned to nature.

Today, I see reflected in Flint the future fortunes of the world as a whole. Since the days of Levittown we've invested more and more time, energy, and resources into spreading, taming, harnessing, and exploiting as much as possible so that the markets will always keep climbing. Back in the 1950s it was as if Prosperity had been handed down by Moses from Mount Sinai. Fifty years later the assumptions of our ancestors are increasingly transparent.

I do hope that through the admittedly drastic measure of shrinkage and demolition, Flint can turn its fortunes around. It may be a dress rehearsal for far larger things in the years to come.