Hatrack River Writers Workshop: sf-ish litter

This is topic sf-ish litter in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by arriki (Member # 3079) on :

I was tqalking about this problem in one of the 13-line topics.

What would be litter in an sf environment? In a hallway in a future low rent apartment building or on a space station?

I was saying that I fear that urine in the halls would be with us probably. But what else?

Things broken, discarded as of no use, used up...but what are they?

Bits of food? Animal and human turds? Dead pests? Roaches on the space station? Flyers? Peeled off decals? But all those are of the here and now. What would be futuristic?

Posted by trousercuit (Member # 3235) on :

Old organ cloning tubes, bare puddles of nuclear waste, a pile of defunct cybernetic eyeballs...

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

Any SF-y device that's busted and abandoned.

Posted by franc li (Member # 3850) on :

Water bottles with the tops twisted firmly on, trapping several ounces of precious h2o outside the ecosphere.

Spent nutri-flares (a stick you "strike" on a rough surface and it grows you a meal.)

Pharynges, which are some kind of narcotic delivery device.

Defunct reclamation minibots, that eat HDPE that isn't coated with a deterrent.

Diapers whose self-destruct mechanism didn't fully deploy.

Discarded cosmetic masks.
Yeah, I know these are probably all too wordy.

Posted by hoptoad (Member # 2145) on :

I love questions that get the creative juices flowing.

litter will vary on where you are and what state society is in. Litter in a city will be different than in a country, in a spaceport versus a bus station.

If it is a really 'together' society' perhaps there will be a profusion of recycle stations and reduce reuse recycle reminders....

In a city that is not that 'together' it will probably be IMO info-trash like spam made corporeal. Old holographic advertising material flickering as it blows along the alley whispering things like 'but wait, there's more...' Or smart-tags inserted into every piece of packaging all emitting faint and corrupted signals and screwing around with your cell phone/blackberry/cable tv/gaming console mounted in your sunglasses. Broken up digital images of people appearing on the inside of your lenses like disintegrating revenants offering you free ringtone downloads. Or a Nigerian general asking for help getting access to 28 million dollars 'just give me your bank details'.

That was a fun exercise, thanks...

Posted by hoptoad (Member # 2145) on :

I agree with 'franc li my dear'; food scraps and diapers-gone-wrong will always be with us. I might add aluminium foil and cigarette butts, but who knows by then?

edit: or what about stuff designed to biodegrade that is all in varying states of bio-degradation some slimy, some dusty....

you've got me started arriki, its saturday here and this will float around in my head all day... hmmmm.

disgarded disposable firearm fuel cells leaking... 'water!'

I like the pharynges, mainly because if it's illegal anyway they won't bother complying with any code.

[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited November 03, 2006).]

Posted by wbriggs (Member # 2267) on :

Tiny bits of aluminum left when the can-eating robots come by. Covered with graphite, which they use as saliva

Posted by J (Member # 2197) on :

Litter presumes a society relatively wealthy in resources, that can afford to waste raw materials on things like packaging or pamphlets.

This could be an instance where the familiar accentuates the exotic--the litter could be the same types of litter we have now; food packaging, etc., just made of different materials.

Posted by hoptoad (Member # 2145) on :

hey that's true, what if you had a 'living polymer' for packaging, one suffused with gm organisms that were 'keyed-in' to begin preying on one another thirty days after the 'use-by' date unless you had it in your cupboard, shelf, fridge etc

[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited November 03, 2006).]

Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :

Litter is litter...or not.

Urine in the halls might not a problem if low maintanance surfaces in the future have nanocatalitic surfaces which degrade common stains and adhesions. This would also eliminate the problem of graffiti and flyers being pasted on everything. If those low maintanance surfaces were also made with super-tensile materials, it would be rare to see any kind of breakage too.

The market forces driving recyling programs will only increase as the intrinsic value of discarded items (advanced packaging material and broken technological devices) rises as menial labor begins to be taken over by robots. If there are autonomous mechanoids, they might actually undertake such scavenging on their own. Even if there were no way for any impovershed humans to profit from intentionally recycling, somebody is going to want to collect those leftovers.

Lighting costs are already dropping as new technologies make it possible to convert energy into specifically visible frequencies ever more efficiently. And these new devices are far more robust than the old filiment in a glass bulb.

As for spam, what could be more insulting than to be deemed unworthy of recieving it?

So perhaps in the future you know a place is "trashy" because of the abscence of "the human touch". A perfectly clean hallway, the display board never shows anything but legitimate public announcements, the lighting is exactly tuned to make everything visible, nothing is out of place or odd...ever.

As an alternative, you could do a "virtual reality" take on that, where the low-end areas simply didn't support trash (corpses), stains (decals), or other non-functional elements. If you broke an item such that it became unusable, then it would simply be deleted to save resources. If you tried to mar something, it simply wouldn't have any effect unless you succeeded in "breaking" it.

Posted by J (Member # 2197) on :

Now that's creative thinking. I like it.

Posted by hoptoad (Member # 2145) on :

quote:
Spent nutri-flares (a stick you "strike" on a rough surface and it grows you a meal.)

You know what would be cool here would be the food that grows on the tiny bit of material left on the rough surface —bite-sized snacks for winos.

quote:

If there are autonomous mechanoids, they might actually undertake such scavenging on their own.

If I were an 'underemployed' youth with a chip on my shoulder I'd be out there on an 'autonomous mechanoid' hunting trip — or just dirty something up, wait until an AM arrives and start taking pot shots at it. Or kidnap it and sell it back to the city, something that's a bit harder to do with flesh-and-blood city workers.

There you are Arriki, discarded GPS devices and burned-out or disabled Maintenance Droids. Hmmm bad part of town.

[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited November 03, 2006).]

Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :

By "autonomous mechanoid" I meant something other than a robot per se. It would be collecting spare parts and such in the interests of its own survival...so it might not take kindly to "unemployed youths" interfering with that goal.

Posted by hoptoad (Member # 2145) on :

I was talking about robots. But I like the self-building/modifying/evolving scavborgs.

[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited November 04, 2006).]

Posted by arriki (Member # 3079) on :

If we do get nanotech working -- maybe I can see clean hallways, but short of that, I think the low rent districts are going to be messy whether on a space station or ground.

Broken casing for gps-like stuff and drug paraphrenalia which may be rather bizarre. Dirt and oily residues? What about alien stuff leaking down the walls? In a closed enviroment like a station...or a moon dome, it just about has to be generated by the populace.

Dangerous items? Alien pets/pests that got loose in the past? Seepage from even lower levels like production that emit bad gases that filter up/down through the walls? Constant breakdown of facilities like air circulation and power. But, hey, that's not litter.

Litter is people being too lazy to pick up and place in proper containers/recycling units. So that is more likely packaging, broken/discarded items, and flyer-like ads for everything including politics. I still think I'm overlooking some good items.

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

The main problem with garbage is somebody's always trying to recycle it.

Futurama had a rather raw account of garbage and recycling, as I recall.

Posted by oliverhouse (Member # 3432) on :

Many Japanese wear disposable surgical masks in public to prevent disease -- they could be lying around on the ground, next to a pair of latex gloves.

Go multicultural in other ways: broken strings of prayer beads.

I'm sure there's more there, but I'm in a rush...

Posted by Robert Nowall (Member # 2764) on :

Disposable gloves as litter aren't a sign of the future---where I work, they're already all over the place. (Nitrile, not latex---either the bosses are afraid of being blamed for aggrivating an allergy or they're just cheap.)

Posted by oliverhouse (Member # 3432) on :

Interesting thought. You can probably find a lot of "futuristic" litter just by looking around.

Posted by franc li (Member # 3850) on :

quote:
If there are autonomous mechanoids, they might actually undertake such scavenging on their own.

Imagine if the mechanoids went rampant, "murdering" one another for scrap. There would have to be some part they leaved displayed as a trophy, to frighten off other marauders. But the self-aware garbage bot is a maguffin I've had on the back burner for a while.

Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :

I think it'd have to be a predator/prey heirarchy rather than "murdering one another".