Über dergleichen stolpert man zufällig, wenn man etwas zuviel in alten SF-Magazinen blättert. Aus Robert Silverbergs "Opinions"-Kolumne (bevor sie von "Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine" übernommen wurde & seit guten 35 Jahren unter "Reflections" läuft): Amazing Stories, September 1983 (übrigens aus dem Jahr, bevor dann auch bei uns die Panikmache in Sachen "saurer Regen" Fahrt aufnahm):
Zitat There has been much talk, in this era of energy crises and heightened sensitivity to environmental problems, of the development of renewable-energy resources as an alternative to the use of fossil fuels. But a report released in the closing days of 1982 will surely create some somber second thoughts among the supporters of these energy alternatives. Among its conclusions were these:
Biomass energy production — the burning of wood and animal wastes — could, if improperly managed, bring about air pollution, deforestation, soil erosion, and the disruption of wildlife habitats. The large-scale development of geothermal energy sources might release toxic gases, cause earthquakes, and create water shortages. Further damming of rivers for hydroelectric power removes valuable land from cultivation, fosters silt buildups, and causes soil erosion and stagnation of streams. Large-scale use of windmills for power generation may cause noise pollution and could interfere with transmission of radio, television, and microwave signals. … The manufacture of solar photovoltaic cells will create troublesome shortages of such substances as cadmium and gallium, and the deployment of such cells in great quantity will consume large areas of land.
The interesting — and depressing — thing about this report is that it is not the privately sponsored product of some large oil company or any of the other corporations generally regarded as villains in popular energy-crisis mythology. No, this litany of sobering observations was released by the National Science Foundation; and the organization that conducted the study was one of our major enviromental groups, the Audubon Society. I suspect that not even in the farthest-out fringes of the alternative-energy movement is there anyone who thinks that the Audubon Society is in the pay of Mobil Oil or the sinister nuclear-energy tycoons.
What, though, of the Audubon Society’s warning? Dare we build all those windmills, if they’re going to foul up Channel Nine? Can we risk tapping geothermal energy if it’s going to unleash the San Andreas Fault?
The answer, of course, is that we’ll need to move cautiously and think through the consequences of whatever steps we take. But the real significance of the National Science Foundation’s energy study, I think, lies deeper than mere consideration of this or that specific energy-generation problem. The underlying truth arising from that report is this:
ALL forms of energy production have an environmental price. Or, as Robert A. Heinlein put it: "There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch."
The opponents of nuclear-energy power generation — I am not one, incidentally — have so effectively blocked all nuclear power plants in the United States that there has been a resurgence of coal-burning generation, previously deemed obsolete. Coal, unlike oil and gas, will be plentiful in the United States for centuries; the trouble is that we seem to be having a bothersome increase in the acid-rain phenomenon as a consequence of burning all that coal. Acid rain is harmful stuff. It may actually turn out to be more harmful, in the long run, than anything those nuclear power plants might have done to us. I suspect that before long, as awareness of the acid-rain menace grows, the same citizens who brought down the nuclear power industry will be out there demonstrating against the coal-burning plants, and calling for solar technology, biomass conversion, and all those other science-fictiony things that — oh, my! — the National Science Foundation is suddenly warning us about.
The lesson is clear enough to me. Not even the starriest-eyed Sierra Club member is apt to propose that we roll back our civilization to the level that obtained before Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. (Where would we stable all the horses? What about the problem of manure disposal? How could today’s reduced whale population keep all our lamps burning, and what would Greenpeace say about that, anyway?) We do need electrical energy, lots of it, and we do have to keep those internal-combustion engines combusting, somehow, until their replacements are at hand. And since we are going to continue to produce energy, we must do it in clean and economical ways. But it is absolute folly to think that we can run an industrial society of billions of people without paying some sort of environmental price for our energy. And it is unwise to let ourselves be so blinded by emotion — by the fear and hysteria, for example, that have throttled the nuclear-power industry in this country — that we fail to understand that there is no free lunch, that risk confronts us wherever we turn for our energy.
Der Kleine Erbsenzähler, der gern ein wenig statistisches Rankenwerk aufhäuft, parkt mal ein paar Zwischensummen auf Vorrat. Silverbergs Kolumne "Reflections" ist mittlerweile in den wenigen noch verbliebenen Genremagazinen nicht nur die einzig verbliebene; sie ist mittlerweile auch die älteste. Silverberg hat die Reihe von Betrachtungen, Erinnerungen, Reflektionen über das Handwerk des Autors, etc. im Juli 1978 für das heute völlig vergessene Journal "Galileo" begonnen, das aufgrund fehlender Vertriebsmöglichkeiten, finanzieller Unterernährung (und der Tatsache, daß es von allem Genremagazinen seit gut 100 Jahren wohl das am häßlichsten gestaltete war) 1980 eingegangen ist. Daraufhin hat George Scithers die Kolumne übernommen, nachdem TSR (ja, genau: der Laden, der sich mit "Dungeons & Dragons" zu der Zeit eine goldene Nase verdient hat), die Rechte an "Amazing Stories" erworben hat, um mit der Weiterführung des dienstältesten SF-Magazins "Genre-Traditionspflege" zu betreiben. Bis zur Nummer vom "Herbst 1994" (der letzten regulären Ausgabe) sind dort isg. 94 Folgen erschienen; im September 1986 ist die Umbenennung von "Opinions" auf "Reflections" erfolgt.
Ab Juli 1994 hat Silverberg die Kolumne in "Asimov's" fortgeführt; die Folge in der aktuellen Ausgabe Mai-Juni 2025 über "The Other Schliemann" ist die Nr. 286 dort und die insgesamt 385. in diesen 47 Jahren. Seit gut einem Jahrzehnt sind es die einzigen Texte, die Silverberg noch verfaßt; das Handwerk des SF-Autors hat er mit dem Erscheinen des Erzählbandes "Tales of Majipoor" 2013 aufgegeben. Unter den aktiven (SF-)Autoren ist Silverberg mittlerweile der dienstälteste: im Januar ist er 90 geworden; seine erste professonell publizierte Kurzgeschichte ist 1954 erschienen.
Das erste SF-Magazin, das regelmäßig Artikel über Wissenschaft, Forschung, Astronomie, Elektronengehirne pp. gebracht hat, war "Astounding Science Fiction" ab Anfang der 1940er Jahre, nachdem John W. Campbell Jr nach der Übernahme der Herausgeberschaft Renommee + Niveau anheben wollte. Die erste regelmäßig erscheinende Kolumne, die ein einzelner Autor betreut hat, war Willy Leys "For Your Information" in "Galaxy" ab März 1952, von der bis zum November 1969 154 Folgen erschienen sind (Ley ist 2 Wochen vor der Landung von Apollo 11 an einem Herzinfarkt gestorben, aber der Vorlauf in den gedruckten Magazinen velief sich auf gute 6 Monate.) Die bekannteste und meistgelesene Kolumne dieser Art war die über "Mathematical Games" von Martin Gardner im "Scientific American", die es vom Dezember 1957 bis Dezember 1980 auf 297 Folgen gebracht hat.
Isaac Asimov hat zwischen 1958 bis zu seinem Tod 1992 für "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction" jeden Monat einen Artikel von exakt 5000 Wörtern Länge abgeliefert, insgesamt 399.
Als Kuriosa dazu merke ich kurz an: Die Herabstufung von Pluto von einem Planeten zu einem "Zwergplaneten" ist auf der Tagung der Internatoinalen Astronomischen Union in Prag im Juli 2006 erfolgt. In der Folge von "For Your Information" für den August 1956 (im Juli an die Kioske gekommen) widmet sich Ley dem Thema "The Demotion of Pluto" (wäre zu überprüfen, ob das auf den Tag genau 50 Jahre auseinanderliegt).
Anlaß der kleinen Spurensuche war übrigens die Relecture diverser Erzählungen Silverbergs aus den frühen 1970er Jahren, angefangen mit "Good News from the Vatican" aus dem Jahr 1971, in dem es um die Wahl eines Roboters zum neuen Papst geht. In den "Reflections" hat sich Silverberg zweimal mit einem vergleichbaren Thema befaßt: "Do Androids Dream of Electric Cats?" (Nov.-Dez. 2018) und "Do Androids Dream of Electric Popes?" (März-April 2020).
Kleiner Nachtrag: Die Degradierung Plutos ist am 24. August 2006 erfolgt. Wie ich gerade beim Gang ad fontes feststellen muß, ist in den alten Nummern von "Galaxy" das genaue Datum für das Erscheinen der Folgenummer nicht angegeben, anders als im Fall von "Astounding", wo das tagesgenau als Zusatz unter dem Inhaltverzeichnis aufgeführt war.
"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande." - Voltaire
Robert Silverberg, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Popes?" Asimovs Science Fiction Magazine, März-April 2020:
Zitat A long time ago I wrote a story called "Good News from the Vatican," telling of the election of the first robot pope. My Friend Terry Carr was starting to assemble material for a new anthology called Universe, and he asked me to do a piece for him. I very quickly obliged with a lighthearted little item that first neatly into Terry's first issue. "This is the morning everyone has waited for," the story begins, "when at last the robot cardinal is to be elected pope. There can no longer be any doubt of the outcome. The conclave has been deadlocked for many days between the obstinate advocates of Cardinal Accuiga of Milan and Cardinal Carciofo of Genoa, and word has gone out that a compromise is in the making. All factions are now agreed on the selection of the robot."
Someone who speaks Italian might have bene able to tell, simply from that first paragraph, that I was not being entirely serious. "Accuiga" is Italian for "anchovy." "Carciofo" is Italian for "artichoke." These are, let us say, not exactly common surnames in Italy.
But I continued in the same deadpan tone:
"'Every era gets the pope it deserves,' Bishop FitzPatrick observed somewhat gloomily at breakfast. 'The proper pope for our times is a robot, certainly. At some future date it may be desirable for the pope to be a whale, an automobile, a cat, a mountain.'"
I don't actually believe this to be true. Although I'm not a Roman Catholic myself, I think that in the immediate future and for as long as there is likely to be a Roman Catholic Chruch, the head of the church ls going to be be an ordained priest who is a flesh-and-blood human being. We may have a female pope some day (there is a legend that there was one in the Middle Ages, the apocryphal Pope Joan), but a mountain, a cat, a robot - no. All I was doing, though, was telling a science fiction story.
...
Somewhat to my surprise, my amiable little spoof went on to win a Nebula in 1972, was a nominee for the Hugo, and has turned up in any number of anthologies over the years. Evidently it was rather more than the fluffy item I wrote in a day and a half in the winter of 1971.
...
And now we learn, once again, that life will imitate art. Not long ago Gabriele Trovato, a roboticist and associate professor at Waseda University in Japan, announced that he has developed a robot he calls SanTO, which stands for Santified Theomorphic Operator, which is capable of speaking with humans in need of religious counseling and offering them appropriate spiritual advice. Professor Trovato presented SanTO at an international conference on human-robot interaction in 2018 during a discussion of whether robots can perform religious tasks and perhaps - a really startling concept - even become divine in their own right. "What if robots could do more than just assist someone in performing a religious task and actually become sacred objects themselves?" he asked, a notion that I find personally hard to grasp and that I think the Church would immediately find blasphemous. But not so: a group of scholars from Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Peru showed up at the conference, not to burn Trovato at the stake (as would surely have happened five hundred years earlier) but to help him explore the theological consequences of introducing robots into the procedures of the Church. That such a concept could be taken seriously by any Catholic scholastics, even for a moment, is a sign that we are indeed living in the twenty-first century, which I have suspected for some time now.
Of course, the Church is taking a cautious approach to the coming of what can properly be called a deus ex machina. The Church is always cautious: that is how it has survived for more than twenty centuries. Trovato says he has discussed his robot with several vatican officials. They find the idea of a Catholic robot quite interesting but express uneasiness about allowing a robot endowed with artificial intelligence to give advice to parishioners or offer interpretations of Scripture, because those are functions that belong exclusively to the Church, and no one, Trovato included, is talking about ordaining SanTO as a priest ... at least, not yet.
Nor should we imagine anything that looks like R2-D2 or C-3PO sitting in the confessional booth. Trovato's robot, he says, will have "the appearance and identity of a familiar religious entity or icon. The sacred appearance can be seen as a mask - which covers the robotic component - for a device that will perform some service that can range from keeping worshippers company during prayer to even performing cataechesis, teaching positive values of a certain religion." ... I suppose we'll have to wait until the Vatican gives SanTO its blessing to find out what Trovato has in mind.
The use of robots in religious contexts isn't something that Gabriele Trovato intends to limit to Catholicism. He's already devised a robotic Daruma - a Japanese good-luuck talisman linked to Shinto and Buddhism. Perhaps he'll get somewhere with Hinduism, a polytheistic religion that has already absorbed dieites of all sorts for other religions of Asia, and is quite confrtable wiht an elephant-headed god, one with blue skin, a monkey-god, and a goddess with many arms. in our own day India has become quite the technology-oriented nation, and it seems to me that it might not be all that difficult for Hundu theologians to addd a robot to the pantheon, even without the need to disguise its mechanical nature. But Islam is a deeply conservative creed, so sternly monotheistic that it abjures holy images of any kind, and I would not expect to have robot imams turning up in the mosques very soon.
But life is full of surprises, though. The Roman Catholic Church has shown itself remarkably open to change in the past fifty years, since the startling revolution in procedures and dogmas thrust upon it by Pope John XXIII at the Second Vatican Council in 1962. And, since the current Pope Francis has recently been complaining of a developing shortage of qualified priests, we may very well find Gabriele Trovato's theomorphic robots helping out in church in various ways in the years just ahead. Life does indeed sometimes imitate art. Recall the Bishop FitzPatrick of my 1971 story saying that "at some future date it may be desirable for the pope to be a whale, an automobile, a cat, a mountain," and compare it with Gabriele Trovato's recent statement before a group of electronics engineers that "we have to investigate how humanity expreses the divine across religions. The answer is that across world religions there are divine humans, divine animals, divine objects. Therefore a theomorphic robot is a robot that tkaes the appearance of an existing divine entity."
There we are: the deus ex machina. With the coming of SanTO, the advent of Pope Sixtus the Seventh suddenly seems not all that far in the future.
Zitat SanTO (Sanctified Theomorphic Operator) is a small social robot with the appearance of an interactive statue of a Catholic saint. It is the first Catholic robot since the time of the “mechanical monk” commissioned by Philip II of Spain in the 1560s. The intended main function of SanTO is to be a prayer companion (especially for elderly people), by containing a vast amount of teachings, including the whole Bible. SanTO incorporates elements of sacred art, including the golden ratio, in order to convey the feeling of a sacred object, matching form with functionality.
SanTO-PL is the second version of SanTO, realised in Poland and on permanent exhibition at the Copernicus Science Centre, in Warsaw, for the upcoming years. SanTO-PL is an upscaled (2.5X, around 1m tall) version of the original, based on an improved design featuring 2 DoF and a panel with buttons. Its refined contents are in three languages (English, Polish, Russian), with particular emphasis on the words by Pope John Paul II
Related publications
R. Leon, U. Kumar, A. Battaglie, V. H. Lam, T. V. Sinh, F. Pariasca and G. Trovato: "Sacred or uncanny? Exploring visitors’ reaction to a robotic saint in exhibition", The 33rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2024), Los Angeles, USA, August 2024.
Y.-H. Weng and G. Trovato: "Ethical, Legal, and Social Concerns in Social Robots for Religious Use: A Case Study on the Catholic Robot SanTO", The Cambridge Handbook of the Law, Policy, and Regulation for Human–Robot Interaction, Cambridge University Press, July 2024
G. Trovato, F. Pariasca, A. Purizaga, L. Gonzales, and L. Rodriguez: "SanTO in exhibition – a sacred robot in the profane", The 32nd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2023), Pusan, South Korea, August 2023.
G. Trovato and Y.-H. Weng: "Retrospective Insights on the Impacts of the Catholic Robot SanTO", Robophilosophy 2022, Helsinki, Finland, August 2022. [link]
G. Trovato: "Il robot SanTO: il nuovo con uno sguardo al passato", Filosofia (65), pp-39-50 (in Italian), October 2020 [link]
G. Trovato: "La sacralità nella macchina tra passato e presente", Officina vol. 26, pp. 22-27 (in Italian), August 2019 [link]
Nachtrag. Der Kleine Bibliograph merkt als pflichtgemäße Fußnote an, daß es von Ray Bradbury ein Gedicht gibt, das den Titel "The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope" trägt - zuerst im Januar 1980 in der Zeitschrift Science Digest erschienen und ein Jahr darauf zum Titelstück eines Gedichtbandes beim Alfred A. Knopf erhoben. Freilich ist es mit Bradburys lyrischer Begabung so bestellt, daß ich selbst stets den Verdacht gehegt habe, seine Elaborate könnten Douglas Adams als Inspiration für die Dichtkunst der Vogonen im "Anhalter durch die Galaxis" gedient haben.
Haunted Computer, Android Pope, One serves data, the other hope. The late-night ghosts of man's dire needs Are snacks on which computer feeds To harvest zeros, sum the sums, Knock something wicked ere it comes, And drop dumb evil to its knees With inked electric snickersnees. While Android Pope takes up from there, Where physics stops mid-flight, mid-air, There Papa's primed electric mind Grows faith in countries of the blind. Where mass and gravity bulk huge - Andromeda its centrifuge - Or matter dwindles to mere flea There Android Pope makes papal tea.
"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande." - Voltaire
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