"The end of Eternity" is one of those rogue Asimov novels that don't fit within his Foundation / Robots universe.
Ignoring all the plot devices, the background tells a tale of an elite organization which continually alters reality with time travel devices, tasking themselves with the job of pre-emptively preventing suffering and unhappiness.
They ultimately cause the demise of humanity, since their actions delayed the development of interstellar travel.
People happy -> no incentive to move or expand their horizons. The invention of many new technologies were prevented, because they were inevitably misused and caused more suffering than happiness, and thus deemed undesirable. Any deviation from the norm suppressed -> evolution of mankind was halted for thousands of years.
Asimov has this way of presenting his facts and theories in a "matter of fact" way which goes a long way to convincing you that there's no reason they couldn't be true.
Well it was a cute idea. =p But I'm all for increasing happiness and reducing suffering, thank you very much =p
2 comments:
lol.
but you once said you would not exchange any amount of hapiness for a lot of sadness.
In a way if humanity had perpetuated, there would have been happiness just more sorrow with it. So, would you decrease large amounts of sorrow along with small amounts of hapiness? Or would you let both exist :P ?
the scenario was something like, suffering for this hundred years pays off thousands of years later with the further development of something else.
humans aren't farsighted enough to deal with that.
for example, consider an alternate history : the development of the Atom Bomb eventually caused a nuclear war between america and the middle east which wiped out much of both continents and caused a nuclear winter, killing fully half the worlds population... but the extremely fast / desperate pace of research lead humanity to develop the following technologies
1. radiation shields / cleanup
2. nutrient recycling and generation
3. anticancer treatments and vaccines
which eventually, in 500 years, leads to colonization of other planets, as humanity also realises the potential for the entire earth to be destroyed.
if you were only observing a time period of the 100 years from the start of the nuclear war you would almost definitely conclude that it is "undesirable" ... and uhm I would certainly not want live through a nuclear war either.
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