Really was a marvelous run, too bad we just kinda quit shortly after we got to the nearest solar body. We send drones for recon to mars and asteroids and deep space now but haven’t made huge leaps in some time.
The promised lunar bases and Martian colonies are so far out still.. the Jovian colonies/shipyards are still pure sci-fi dreams at this point
thanks Reagan! Oh and USSR for dropping out of the race. Luckily the Los Angeles engineers were able to use their trophy wives in porno to keep paying the bills instead.
The risk is pretty immense. Getting it right and not having any losses is a tremendous undertaking. I would love to see run at Mars. But the interest is low and everyone is more concerned with bombs and bullshit. It would be nice if we would explore again.
They thought automation would drastically reduce the amount of work someone needs to do to survive, instead of just increasing corporate profit and leading to layoffs.
I mean, sure, valid, but I am specifically speaking of the end state and don't personally believe that is the only pathway there, though I do fear much the same as many of us that it might be the most likely.
Real talk, aside from walking into a voting booth every few years, what actual real world effort have you put into changing the world and system?
Because I'm gonna be honest, I hear this defeatist sentiment a lot, and it's almost always from people taking other's word on the matter, not from the people who are out on the ground enacting real change every day.
Change isn't impossible, it's just hard. You just have to ask yourself if you care enough to put in the effort or if you're just waiting for revolution because it's the easy answer.
I actually used to attend protests, meetings, try and convince people to join back when I was part of a marxist organization. From my perspective all the people on the ground wanted a revolution. I think if you actually looked you would find plenty of people like this. I left for several reasons, including not agreeing with the actions of Leninists in the past, but also because I couldn't sustain the required time and energy to the cause.
What do you do to create change? What is your plan? I don't have a plan anymore, perhaps because I don't know enough. I am not sure it's even possible.
I am not suggesting I have all of the anwsers. I actually think there is a good chance things won't work out even after a revolution or civil war (see the soviet union for example). I don't think it's realistic to expect anything to change without one though. Almost all great leaps forward and changes in regime through history has been through violence and war. This didn't always improve things either.
Revolution isn't an easy answer at all. It seems impossible from my perspective no matter how much I try to tell people it might be necessary. Actually convincing people is extremely hard work and that's just the start. There are plenty of cases where revolution didn't work, and plenty of revolutionary ideologies to battle it out. None of this is simple and easy. It might be our only shot though, if we have a shot at all which I doubt very much. Honestly though I think if we do nothing things will collapse eventually anyway. The worst option is things become stagnant and stuck.
I think if you peer behind the curtain of that utopia, I see the shadowy outline of an authoritarian government controlling it all. And Star Fleet is the iron fist in the velvet glove. The utopia seems to exist to simply keep the masses fat, happy, and controllable.
Yep. Kill your masters, or youre killing yourself (and also literally every other living thing becauae climate change)
There is no third option. I mean, you could ask shitty Jeff to give it all up and srop, just fucking stop, and be an aging beach himbo and fuckerberg to just run a cringe mma gym and maybe contribute to an obscure Linux GUI a couple times a year. But they won't. Don't think they can.
The monkey paw curls. We get entitled pricks, destroying labor protections to build so much wealth they've bought everything worth owning on the planet and still yearn for more.
I wish we had robots to do our work!
Another finger curls. Wealth inequality cripples the working class. Corporations consolidate to the point that everything is profit driven... locked behind paywalls or subscriptions. The only publicly available art and literature are made by robots.
I wish we could all communicate with each other!
The last finger curls, and paw crumbles to dust. Democracies around the world flounder as their populations are brainwashed by greedy CEOs in the news and media...taught to fear their neighbors and mistrust those politicians who haven't been bought and paid for. Online, they're bombarded by misinformation campaigns on every topic until they live in different realities. Diseases and pestilence once vanquished through science and cooperation return when science isn't trusted and cooperation with your fellow citizens is viewed as betrayal to your tribe. The world now burns, and it, too, crumbles to dust.
Oooh oooh do conservatism next!!! It's gotta be something along the lines of "nothing but jacking off, usually in seclusion with other men since 1848" I'm sure you've got something spicier in store though
Facts. "Both parties" might definitely suck, but the scale and scope to which that suck remains entirely non-comparable. The democrats are incompetent and ineffective, yes, but the republicans are openly and enormously diabolical and hostile.
No. One is worse. This does not absolve the other.
Fight the worst bastards, but if you only fight them to the bosom of the less awful but still very awful bastards? Youre not winning. Youre not even surviving long.
Democrats would rather lose to Republicans than risk a third party gaining traction. Make no mistake, there's a mustache-twirling villain capitalist party, and a "I swear I'm trying, please vote for me on this most important election evar" capitalist party.
Our most recent chance at lasting real change was the rail strike. Before that it was Bernie Sanders. They're doing it on purpose and playing leftists for fools.
They're different, but they're good friends at the end of the day. One wants to kill me, the other doesn't care and wants to make their friends happy. I die either way.
They're not the same, but they aren't trying to be different.
If the dems wanted to win, there would have been a primary, and anyone but biden on the ballot. They care more about perpetuating genocide and sucking billionaire dick than they do about stopping fascism at home, and they're not willing to risk the former ending to do the latter.
I enjoyed how in Foundation novels they had mathematics that could predict the outcome of the future, had intergalactic travel, had personal shields, and a bunch of other fancy shit, but they were still using tapes to record information.
For those of you born after, or near the turn of the century, you don't understand how magical the year 2000 was. It was a completely different eon, and seemed so futuristic. Conan O'Brien had a whole gig about In the Year 2000. The term "2000" was used to indicate something was fancy, or ultimate, or high-tech. 2000 was the future, and therefore amazing. We did have a sense of optimism though, that is nowhere to be found nowadays.
Looks like it was recurring for a bit, I remember the hat move and trying to say “three thousand” with a frozen mouth after eating a bowl of ice cream is difficult
Tbf, we still do use tape to record information. For archival, magnetic tape is still far and away the undisputed king of high density storage. We've got single tape cartridges in the 60TB range.
They just completely suck for regular access so they're limited to archival only
Or in old sci-fi books and movies when astronauts would be furiously writing calculations for navigation. Computers took most sci-fi authors by surprise.
I'm actually super mad at the stagnation in the way of life.
The first manned flight was 1903, Apollo 11 was in 1969. I'm still going to work by chasing an exploding machine on four round dinosaurs, the same way someone in 1969 would. I still get hungry and homeless the same way someone in 1969 would. I have an 8 hour, five day work week just like someone in 1969 did.
On the other hand having a supercomputer in your pocket is a direct example of one way we've made huge leaps in technology since 1969, directly countering the original premise of stagnation.
first successful manned powered flight was in 1903. People have been killing themselves by strapping into gliders for centuries. there was also that French guy who flew in a hot air balloon in the 1800s.
they were patent trolls, essentially. tried to patent the entire concept of an airplane, and tried to sue Curtiss over him creating a plane that actually didn't use the technology they had patented.
Oh right, gotcha. I think I've read somewhere that they were pushed into suing by other outside influences, and that at least one of the brothers was opposed to suing at all, but that very well may have been from a whitewashed source. Either way, fuck patent trolls
Wait, really? I heard that what happened is they’d decided to be sneaky by patenting the control system for a heavier-than-air flying machine since they couldn’t patent the idea of the machine itself. Do you have sources I can research?
Don't you think that Commander Ryker had to get up and wade through all the paperwork, reports, and meetings every day for 8 hours, (plus mandatory OT), before he could get to screwing his way across that galaxy?
Within your example, at least your four cylinders aren't spewing lead and smog into your lungs and is massively more efficient. If someone runs a red in front of you, you are much more likely to survive. It can go much longer without any overhaul or tune up. You aren't having to regularly manually adjust your valves. When you panic brake, you no longer have to pump your brakes. Your car is adjusting breaking to motivate roll over by vectoring brakes too. For other people, they have cars that can largely drive themselves, avoid combusting any gasoline at all, and are more likely to avoid some accidents altogether with automatic emergency braking.
Going outside that, you have pervasive data connectivity, cheap high definition 100" screens, watches that would put the computers of 1969 to shame, a massively improved prognosis for many diseases notably including a whole bunch of cancers, brain implants that help Parkinson's patients have better motor control. Air conditioning is much more likely to be available, affordable, and effective.
Different areas have certain difficulty curves, basically moving a car is constrained by physics, the heavier than air flight and rocketry similarly have physics challenges that reared their heads quickly. Massive medical, computing, electronics, and connectivity have happened over the last 50 years, as well as a huge number of other advances I'm not thinking about. We have a number of issues that we haven't fixed, or really can't be fixed by tech.
Browsing the x board on 4chan when anything like that happens is amusing. All the schizos are out in full force with conspiracy theories. More than usual.
Honestly it would be a fuck load better for your health to grow, hang dry, cut, and roll your own vs buying the literal poison from PhillipMorris. The tobacco itself isn’t good by any means but the real threat to your health is the additives not the plant
The uniform that both men and women wear in the movie are cut to show off the amazing fisique of the female lead but the cut is totally working on the male lead also.
The Brian Herbert books aren't bad, but don't go into them thinking that the writing will be the same as his father. I've read a few of them through the anti AI Jihad timeline. They're not terrible but they feel a little rushed compared to Frank's writing... not "we need to get these out for the sake of the IP" like how Disney is just printing Marvel movies, but more like "meh, it could be better, but that's as good as we're gonna get it for now, just publish it."
Idiocracy sadly was the only futuristic story to get it right. Wall-ee probably a pretty safe bet too.
At this point, any "blue future" sci-fi writers still out there are disillusioned dreamers.
George Jetson went to work everyday at Spacely Sprockets and pushed a button. A single button. That was his whole job. The whole businesses was automated to the point George did not have to do anything except sit and press the button.
And he made enough money in that job to support a family of 4 in a nice house, as the sole bread winner.
Imagine that: A future where the benefits of automation technology are not solely for the wealthy and business owners. Automation and AI making people's jobs easier, instead of simply replacing them. Businesses that employ people to do jobs that could be automated, but don't, because people need living wages regardless of how easy the work has become.
There was a joke I remember in the episode they bought Rosie, their maid-bot: Jane said she was exhausted by all the cooking and cleaning while simply pressing two buttons that said “cooking” and “cleaning”.
I also enjoy the conspiracy theory that Jetsons and Flintstones exist at the same time, but Jetsons are upper class and live in cities above the nuclear rubble, and mutant, talking, dinosaur adjacent monsters below.
The Jetsons meets the Flintstones proves that. I own dvd and remember it when I was kid. Apparently Leroy invited a time machine but he really didn't its just telporter to surface.
Thinking about it now... Rosie the Robot was presented to the viewer as a being that was basically sentient and fully self aware. In fact, she could and did fall in love at one point. Like... the family owned her. She was a possession. Was that slavery? Is the future depicted in "The Jetsons" a slave based one?
Tbh, it was appealing to me the first time I heard of it. Its the most seamless way to transition from modern work society to post work society. It still has the same culture and incentive structure of what worked for society before, but removes the NEED to work in order to simply live
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: ![email protected]
The Jetsons lived in an apartment and George kept getting fired for stupid reasons. That very much resembles modern life where a lot of people can't afford a house and have no job security.
and small planes. They aren't all that expensive actually. I could buy a good used plane for less than half of what I would spend on a fancy italian sportscar of that same model year.
Planes also are built to last, so you can keep it for decades without it showing much age.
In dark times, many stories may take place in a dark society or similarly dark theme, but with a story that turns out hopeful in the end. Other times the story might be told in a way to try to emphasize a certain part of life at that time. The darker media becomes more relatable and understandable in darler times. So the older sci-fi that has humanity doing crazy feats in years that have already past exist because the world was a genuinely happier and more hopeful time in the past.
Take the 1982 anime Super Dimension Fortress Macross, for example. Written in the early 1980s in Japan, they wrote that in 1999 a global war would be ended by a spaceship crashing on Earth, with all governments combining into a single Earth government to study the crashed ship in 2001. By 2009, (yes, in only 10 years) humanity is supposed to have learned so much from that ship that they have advanced to building transforming bipedal F-14s that can fly in space, and having restored said spaceship that crashed earlier, faster than light warp technology. This story was written while Japan was experiencing an economic boom, and things were pretty hopeful in Japan until the market crash of 1992. But the story is not about humanity achieving these technological feats, all that is explained in episode 1. The story is about humanity's battle with alien invaders, and the realization that the aliens aren't as alien as humanity thought, and how differences between cultures often result in war that is entirely unnecessary. I imagine if this story was written in 1992 or 1993 when the Japanese economy crashed, it likely would have been significantly darker in setting and tone.
I can't quote a study, but I did read the book Germs Genes and Civilizations. The author observed that the power of the church grew during situations like the Black Plague or the 30 years war, and waned during the Enlightenment.
Everyone didn't. Everyone decided to delegate all their autonomy to some delusional shitheads we now feel powerless to stop. They made the decisions because they prefer having slaves.
There are a myriad of reasons we are on the shitty timeline, but a non-insignificant one to me is how terrible classic sci-fi writers were at writing humans rather than planks with faces drawn on them that periodically state the author’s views on something. The focus of sci-fi on massive space operations and colonization of other planets from the beginning was warped by a dis-interest from sci-fi writers in the positive potentialities within the human psyche that are outside the grasp of cynical structures of power and control, the part of ourselves that just wants to tend a garden in their backyard and nothing more.
I think this has lead to very hollow visions of the future that were well suited to becoming the basis for people like Elon Musk’s world view. Sci-fi looked to the stars and tried to see into the future while ignoring the one thing we can count on about the future, humans will still be humans.
(I know this is a generalization and isn’t true as a rule)
That and also Modern Western Sci-Fi tends to wave away all the hard parts of engineering, politics, and economics when it comes to actually doing the thing.
How did Heinlein assume we'd colonize the Moon in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress"? Oh, don't worry. We just bootstrapped ourselves up there Ayn Rand style.
How did Kirk and Picard and Janeway find themselves on Galaxy Class Starships traversing the deep corners of distant space? Well, first we did a quick global super-holocaust because of genetically engineered racism (don't ask the finer details of that) and then we just... got better and turned Earth into a Utopia.
Maybe you buy into the more Posadist vision of First Contact, where a few starving refugees accidentally broke the luminal barrier with a rocket they assembled from spare parts. But the truly hard parts - the laboriously assembly and re-learning of scientific knowledge by each new generation, the failed bluesky research projects and dead-end engineering projects, the accumulation of trust between individuals within a state and states within the world necessary to mobilize materials and labor for these grand mega-projects - largely get breezed over.
An epic spaceship battle with the Trisolarians is, after all, far sexier to put on screen than a bunch of scientists grappling with the mathematics behind three spheres floating through space. So the old Asimov-style of SciFi as a series of entertaining word problems falls away, to be replaced by the Science Fantasy of Space Wizards and Warp Cores and Time Traveling Monkeys.
How did Kirk and Picard and Janeway find themselves on Galaxy Class Starships traversing the deep corners of distant space? Well, first we did a quick global super-holocaust because of genetically engineered racism (don’t ask the finer details of that) and then we just… got better and turned Earth into a Utopia.
Nah actually a crazy guy named Zefram Cochrane creates the first warp drive on earth using an old ICBM as a platform to build his spaceship, he is basically just doing it as a crazy entrepreneur trying to make money. When he launches it to test it for the first time, the use of the warp drive alerts the Vulcans, who come and investigate. Generally, Vulcans did not have a policy of interfering with other planets that had not yet become spacefaring, but since Earth now had developed the warp drive the Vulcans established first contact and then helped usher Earth into a new space age. If it wasn't for the Vulcans, it is likely that Zefram Cochrane would have still been moderately successful but it is unlikely that the Federation would have arose complete with massive starships.
In the silly mirror universe where everyone is evil what happens is that instead of Zefram shaking hands with the Vulcans when they land and make first contact he and the other people in the camp shoot the Vulcans and steal their technology, eventually building an authoritarian galactic empire called the Terran Empire.
An epic spaceship battle with the Trisolarians is, after all, far sexier to put on screen than a bunch of scientists grappling with the mathematics behind three spheres floating through space. So the old Asimov-style of SciFi as a series of entertaining word problems falls away, to be replaced by the Science Fantasy of Space Wizards and Warp Cores and Time Traveling Monkeys.
I don't want scifi to only be about the mathematics of spheres though.
I also don't want my scifi to be just about Space Wizards (ughh Jedi and Sith are the most boring part of Star Wars by far), Warp Cores and Time Traveling Monkeys.... I want my scifi to be about people and the positive capacity of humanity. When we look to imagined futures they should remind us that we have the agency of choice to pick what the future is, and that is totally possible for us to pick kindness and empathy. That is why Star Trek is so much more interesting and compelling than 99% of scifi, because while sometimes it is grim it is always concerned with the choices we make and imagining a future where we make better choices. Outside of Star Trek, the feeling of scifi has overwhelming been dystopian futures and though there is good reason to imagine dystopian futures as cautionary tales, I think they are also a drug that when overdosed on makes us believe dystopian futures are inveitable.
For example I wanted to love the scifi show Tales From The Loop, the appeal of Simon Stålenhag's visions of alternate realities is undeniably captivating. However, all the characters seemed to act like complete sociopaths, the episode that did me in was where the two kids have their bodies swapped and kid who is switched into the body of the kid who has a much nicer life refuses to switch back. He goes on to just live that kids life presumably as an impostor... and I just... like I don't even remotely believe 99.99% of humanity would make that choice (especially as a child who hasn't even become comfortable in their own body yet). Some humans might, but that has far more to do with how abnormal those people are than it does to do with how technology might corrupt us with its power. Same thing with a lot of black mirror, it is this repeating vision of dystopian futures that just assumes that everybody will behave like sociopaths and it gets really tiring to me not the least because it fundamentally undermines the plausibility of the imagined future at a basic level. It subconsciously teaches us to deny the possibility of more positive futures since our imagination is a bayesian space defined and bounded by visions of the future provided to us by culture.
Meanwhile Philip K. Dick writing in the late 1940s: In the 2020s humanity is almost completely extinct on account of WWIII, and Earth has been taken over by an AI who constructs more and more elaborate war robots who are hunting down the last surviving humans hiding in nuclear proof bunkers.
I honestly believe that if the US alone used all of its military funds on researching fusion power, we'd have figured it out by now lol.
NASA made remarkable innovations in its prime during the Apollo missions because of the amount of people efficiently working on so many new technologies with proper funding.
There's a kind-of soft ceiling on scientific progress created by the Unknown Unknowns.
We didn't think we'd need to optimize silicon waffer chips before we could engineer a solution to a net-positive fusion reaction. We didn't consider the impact plastics tech in the 80s would have on our ability to survive in deep space in the 2000s. We had no idea adding lead to our gasoline and paint would set back our national intellectual output by a generation.
Consider that we do spend a substantive portion of our military budget on blue sky technological advancements. But because we put military leaders in charge, and because these dipshits will finance $10B to put screen doors on submarines if you promise them jobs on the company board when they retire, we end up with enormous malinvestment. Similarly, consider the $13B Microsoft sank into OpenAI to make a very advanced version of Clippy.
At some level, I don't think its an issue of Take $X and put it into Y projects. I think you need to till the soil and irrigate the field and see what grows. That means doing basic shit like feeding and housing and vaccinating people, educating them at the primary-to-collegiate level at cost, and keeping credit lines open to even the "least worthy" of us, so you can get the kind of inventiveness that paves the way for advancement.
But with more funding we would likely have silicon wafer chips figured out sooner
We already throw trillions (with a T) at the development of new silicon wafer chips. I don't think even a Pentagon's budget is going to make it move any faster.
By contrast, I do think increasing the base number of computer engineering graduates would do wonders for the domestic computer industry. Particularly, if those engineers had publicly available cash to incubate their own start-ups and noodle around in university graduate programs outside of the publish-or-perish model.
Forcing everyone to go hat-in-hand to guys like Musk, Theil, and Sam Altman every time they want a crack at the nut is what's holding us back far more than the volume of dollars we spend on those three gatekeepers.
I can't remember what it was, maybe some short story by Ray Bradbury, but I first read it in high school (so somewhere between 1999 and 2003) that took place in the distant future of 1998.
Also, wasn't 1984 set in the future of when it was written? 🤔
I never looked it up but I always heard it was written in 1948 and he just reversed the last two numbers as it was an easy way to put it in the not too distant future.
Like I said though, I never had the inclination to look it up, maybe he wrote it in 1948 but it was first published in 1949.
I think this still happens. People have no concept of time when we look 10+ years out. 10 years isn't really that long. I think life is going to look very much the same in the next 40 years with the biggest change being AI tools if they can get past the "idiotification" of LLMs and the like as they are subject to human interaction.
I think you're absolutely right. It's funny watching old shows/interviews where people seem very similar to modern day "doomers". They always had legitimate reasons to be worried (like we do), but similarly, they struggle to conceptualize life going on like normal a few decades into the future.
Retrospectively, wasn't a lot of the space-exploration-based SciFi from the 50s 60s 70s serving the purpose of justifying massive government spendings in big rockets, mainly used to build ICBMs, to justify imperialist policies and the cold war?
were we (the scifi afficionados) the useful idiots of this missile race?
As someone who lived through those decades, I don't think it was so much being useful stooges, but rather each decade was very different in social tone and was a reaction to the current events.
The 1950's was about the successful end of WW2 and the bright future ahead of humanity. Good always wins over evil. We were going to have unlimited nuclear power and powerful computers to supply all our wants and needs. And rockets? Well, they were new and exciting. The future looked bright.
The 1960s brought real fear of nuclear Armageddon to everyone. If you think the world political situation is bad today, we all thought we were going to die at any moment. I can remember doing nuclear blast drills as a 5 year old in school. We invented the nuclear clock...... And the Cuban Missile Crisis was on. But, we were going to land a man on the moon before it was all over. But for SciFi, the Plucky Human arrived. Star Trek exemplified that. Captain Kirk foiled Evil Aliens(tm) while screwing every hot green or blue chick with two legs in a short skirt or skimpy furs across the (Un)known Galaxy.
The 1970's were simply more of the same. SciFi had expanded on the "Plucky Human" schitick with Battle Star Galactia. But Buck Rogers made a brief return also. But if you look closer, government has become more authoritarian yet somehow benevolent. Big Brother(tm) knows best was the unspoken motto. And a SciFi darkness started to show. Logan's Run, A Clockwork Orange, Roller Ball, and Soylant Green are just a few of the darker tend.
Which is kind of the path we are still following today I think. A strange mixture of r/HFA! and the dark ambiguity of Batman.
Philip K. Dick was writing stories about nuclear armageddon in the late 1940s-early 1950s. Even the few stories he did about humans inventing space travels usually involved humans meeting an alien race that is more advanced than us, and eventually defeating us.
I can beat that. "Atomic Weight 500" is a book of nuclear power written in 1925 by a guy born 1870 about nuclear power - and nuclear war. Though his nuclear war was "different". Even Hans Dominik didn't expect Chain Reactions being so quick as they really were. But the basic idea of creating a critical mass to generate uncontrollable amounts of energy was implemented perfectly.
They saw the invention of air travel and space travel within 70 years. As far as they were concerned, nothing was too extraordinary.
Really was a marvelous run, too bad we just kinda quit shortly after we got to the nearest solar body. We send drones for recon to mars and asteroids and deep space now but haven’t made huge leaps in some time.
The promised lunar bases and Martian colonies are so far out still.. the Jovian colonies/shipyards are still pure sci-fi dreams at this point
thanks Reagan! Oh and USSR for dropping out of the race. Luckily the Los Angeles engineers were able to use their trophy wives in porno to keep paying the bills instead.
Neither did I brother
Yeah, almost like something happened in the 70s that put the breaks on most scientific and social progress in the west.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
This needs to be everywhere.
Oh shit, I was born that year.
This is all your fault!
All that heroin from SE asia?
The risk is pretty immense. Getting it right and not having any losses is a tremendous undertaking. I would love to see run at Mars. But the interest is low and everyone is more concerned with bombs and bullshit. It would be nice if we would explore again.
For All Mankind is like porn for us.
Make no mistake, that is the future that we were entitled to, but which was stolen from us by capitalists and despots.
The old sci-fi writers weren't wrong in their aspirations for us, we were wrong for letting our futures be taken away from us.
They thought automation would drastically reduce the amount of work someone needs to do to survive, instead of just increasing corporate profit and leading to layoffs.
and it should have reduced the work as predicted
The only reason we aren't approaching Star Trek utopia is because of the unchecked greed fostered by our systems of capitalism.
There is no reason that, in a world of finite necessary work, increased automation shouldn't have freed us from the constraints of some of that work.
The fact that it hasn't isn't indictment of automation, it's indictment of unchecked capitalism.
Star Trek's utopia came after economic collapse and a third World War, in that order. So we actually seem to be on track so far.
No war but class war (and preventing genocide)
I mean, sure, valid, but I am specifically speaking of the end state and don't personally believe that is the only pathway there, though I do fear much the same as many of us that it might be the most likely.
At this point war and revolution is probably the only way forward. How else do we get rid of things like capitalism and nationalism?
Real talk, aside from walking into a voting booth every few years, what actual real world effort have you put into changing the world and system?
Because I'm gonna be honest, I hear this defeatist sentiment a lot, and it's almost always from people taking other's word on the matter, not from the people who are out on the ground enacting real change every day.
Change isn't impossible, it's just hard. You just have to ask yourself if you care enough to put in the effort or if you're just waiting for revolution because it's the easy answer.
I actually used to attend protests, meetings, try and convince people to join back when I was part of a marxist organization. From my perspective all the people on the ground wanted a revolution. I think if you actually looked you would find plenty of people like this. I left for several reasons, including not agreeing with the actions of Leninists in the past, but also because I couldn't sustain the required time and energy to the cause.
What do you do to create change? What is your plan? I don't have a plan anymore, perhaps because I don't know enough. I am not sure it's even possible.
I am not suggesting I have all of the anwsers. I actually think there is a good chance things won't work out even after a revolution or civil war (see the soviet union for example). I don't think it's realistic to expect anything to change without one though. Almost all great leaps forward and changes in regime through history has been through violence and war. This didn't always improve things either.
Revolution isn't an easy answer at all. It seems impossible from my perspective no matter how much I try to tell people it might be necessary. Actually convincing people is extremely hard work and that's just the start. There are plenty of cases where revolution didn't work, and plenty of revolutionary ideologies to battle it out. None of this is simple and easy. It might be our only shot though, if we have a shot at all which I doubt very much. Honestly though I think if we do nothing things will collapse eventually anyway. The worst option is things become stagnant and stuck.
as horrible as it will to live through that (as many of us may), one can only hope
I think if you peer behind the curtain of that utopia, I see the shadowy outline of an authoritarian government controlling it all. And Star Fleet is the iron fist in the velvet glove. The utopia seems to exist to simply keep the masses fat, happy, and controllable.
Yep. Kill your masters, or youre killing yourself (and also literally every other living thing becauae climate change)
There is no third option. I mean, you could ask shitty Jeff to give it all up and srop, just fucking stop, and be an aging beach himbo and fuckerberg to just run a cringe mma gym and maybe contribute to an obscure Linux GUI a couple times a year. But they won't. Don't think they can.
It reduced the number of laborers who were necessary. The rest outlived their usefulness.
I wish we were exploring space more!
The monkey paw curls. We get entitled pricks, destroying labor protections to build so much wealth they've bought everything worth owning on the planet and still yearn for more.
I wish we had robots to do our work!
Another finger curls. Wealth inequality cripples the working class. Corporations consolidate to the point that everything is profit driven... locked behind paywalls or subscriptions. The only publicly available art and literature are made by robots.
I wish we could all communicate with each other!
The last finger curls, and paw crumbles to dust. Democracies around the world flounder as their populations are brainwashed by greedy CEOs in the news and media...taught to fear their neighbors and mistrust those politicians who haven't been bought and paid for. Online, they're bombarded by misinformation campaigns on every topic until they live in different realities. Diseases and pestilence once vanquished through science and cooperation return when science isn't trusted and cooperation with your fellow citizens is viewed as betrayal to your tribe. The world now burns, and it, too, crumbles to dust.
This timeline sucks, yo.
Ummmm does anyone know what painkiller heals soul damage?
Yeah, that's knowledge available to you for 12.99 per month, or if you prepay for the whole year, only 129.99!
Liberalism: nothing but jacking off with the monkey pawsince 1848.
Oooh oooh do conservatism next!!! It's gotta be something along the lines of "nothing but jacking off, usually in seclusion with other men since 1848" I'm sure you've got something spicier in store though
Liberalism is a conservative ideology.
If you mean fascism its just coward's suicide.
You don't even realize you're evil and that's the sadist part.
Don't tell me what I know, or what the most sadistic part of me is.
It's the pinky toe, isn't it?
No comment.
Excuse you, i was a child when all of that was happening 😭
Hey everyone, this child fucked it up for us all!
Let's look at which legislators have held progress back since we landed on the moon and it's almost exclusively one party...
Facts. "Both parties" might definitely suck, but the scale and scope to which that suck remains entirely non-comparable. The democrats are incompetent and ineffective, yes, but the republicans are openly and enormously diabolical and hostile.
No. One is worse. This does not absolve the other.
Fight the worst bastards, but if you only fight them to the bosom of the less awful but still very awful bastards? Youre not winning. Youre not even surviving long.
Democrats would rather lose to Republicans than risk a third party gaining traction. Make no mistake, there's a mustache-twirling villain capitalist party, and a "I swear I'm trying, please vote for me on this most important election evar" capitalist party.
Our most recent chance at lasting real change was the rail strike. Before that it was Bernie Sanders. They're doing it on purpose and playing leftists for fools.
This both sides are the same shit is so old now
If you truly can't tell the difference between them, I don't know what will help you now.
They're different, but they're good friends at the end of the day. One wants to kill me, the other doesn't care and wants to make their friends happy. I die either way.
They're not the same, but they aren't trying to be different.
If the dems wanted to win, there would have been a primary, and anyone but biden on the ballot. They care more about perpetuating genocide and sucking billionaire dick than they do about stopping fascism at home, and they're not willing to risk the former ending to do the latter.
I just told you the difference.
Not leftists. Libs. No overlap.
It is the distant future of the year 2024. Our intrepid hero uses her pocket computer to argue that the world is flat.
Flat and gay*
No that's just me. Understandable; I'm pretty tall.
Well! Aren't you a tall, gay drink of water!
I enjoyed how in Foundation novels they had mathematics that could predict the outcome of the future, had intergalactic travel, had personal shields, and a bunch of other fancy shit, but they were still using tapes to record information.
For those of you born after, or near the turn of the century, you don't understand how magical the year 2000 was. It was a completely different eon, and seemed so futuristic. Conan O'Brien had a whole gig about In the Year 2000. The term "2000" was used to indicate something was fancy, or ultimate, or high-tech. 2000 was the future, and therefore amazing. We did have a sense of optimism though, that is nowhere to be found nowadays.
I loved it when he would continue to do it after the year 2000 had passed, without changing the format.
I still use 2000 like I did in the 90's, which produces some really confused reactions from younger people.
Didn’t they switch to 3000 at some point? Feel like I remember Andy saying it
That sounds familiar. I don't recall if it was a one time bit or recurring though.
Looks like it was recurring for a bit, I remember the hat move and trying to say “three thousand” with a frozen mouth after eating a bowl of ice cream is difficult
I just wanna agree and be in a thread with someone named after Picard and two froody dudes.
Are you named after a tiger and a hoopy?
👍
so 2000 late
Tbf, we still do use tape to record information. For archival, magnetic tape is still far and away the undisputed king of high density storage. We've got single tape cartridges in the 60TB range.
They just completely suck for regular access so they're limited to archival only
I remember the show “Beyond 2000” or that 2020 was going to be this magical date that all things happened in.
Absolutely. It was the fuuuutuurre!
What, you chumps don’t have flying cars? Psh later.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Or in old sci-fi books and movies when astronauts would be furiously writing calculations for navigation. Computers took most sci-fi authors by surprise.
Dracula 2000.
I rest my case.
I'm actually super mad at the stagnation in the way of life.
The first manned flight was 1903, Apollo 11 was in 1969. I'm still going to work by chasing an exploding machine on four round dinosaurs, the same way someone in 1969 would. I still get hungry and homeless the same way someone in 1969 would. I have an 8 hour, five day work week just like someone in 1969 did.
This is bullshit.
Almost like slave societies do not innovate, they just add slaves.
If you want cool new gadgets; kill your masters.
But there are WAY more billionaires now!
On the othet hand you have a super computer in your pocket.
On the other hand who cares when you can’t even afford housing or healthcare?
On the other hand having a supercomputer in your pocket is a direct example of one way we've made huge leaps in technology since 1969, directly countering the original premise of stagnation.
first successful manned powered flight was in 1903. People have been killing themselves by strapping into gliders for centuries. there was also that French guy who flew in a hot air balloon in the 1800s.
Also, fuck the wright brothers.
Wait, why fuck the Wright brothers? I'm out of the loop
they were patent trolls, essentially. tried to patent the entire concept of an airplane, and tried to sue Curtiss over him creating a plane that actually didn't use the technology they had patented.
Oh right, gotcha. I think I've read somewhere that they were pushed into suing by other outside influences, and that at least one of the brothers was opposed to suing at all, but that very well may have been from a whitewashed source. Either way, fuck patent trolls
Wait, really? I heard that what happened is they’d decided to be sneaky by patenting the control system for a heavier-than-air flying machine since they couldn’t patent the idea of the machine itself. Do you have sources I can research?
WTF, stagnation? The internet is transforming our daily lives constantly.
The question is if it'a for the better or for the worse.
I think both, and we need laws to protect us from the worse.
Don't you think that Commander Ryker had to get up and wade through all the paperwork, reports, and meetings every day for 8 hours, (plus mandatory OT), before he could get to screwing his way across that galaxy?
Within your example, at least your four cylinders aren't spewing lead and smog into your lungs and is massively more efficient. If someone runs a red in front of you, you are much more likely to survive. It can go much longer without any overhaul or tune up. You aren't having to regularly manually adjust your valves. When you panic brake, you no longer have to pump your brakes. Your car is adjusting breaking to motivate roll over by vectoring brakes too. For other people, they have cars that can largely drive themselves, avoid combusting any gasoline at all, and are more likely to avoid some accidents altogether with automatic emergency braking.
Going outside that, you have pervasive data connectivity, cheap high definition 100" screens, watches that would put the computers of 1969 to shame, a massively improved prognosis for many diseases notably including a whole bunch of cancers, brain implants that help Parkinson's patients have better motor control. Air conditioning is much more likely to be available, affordable, and effective.
Different areas have certain difficulty curves, basically moving a car is constrained by physics, the heavier than air flight and rocketry similarly have physics challenges that reared their heads quickly. Massive medical, computing, electronics, and connectivity have happened over the last 50 years, as well as a huge number of other advances I'm not thinking about. We have a number of issues that we haven't fixed, or really can't be fixed by tech.
Commander Cisco said it best: "WHERE ARE MY FLYING CARS?!?"
And here we are with people who think the gubberment made the eclipse happen.
How else do you control the masses
What movie is this from? 🤔
Apocalypto
🙏
They made the eclipse happen but no one went to the moon.
Browsing the x board on 4chan when anything like that happens is amusing. All the schizos are out in full force with conspiracy theories. More than usual.
And yet somehow the lead character smokes cigarettes.
They got that one right, at least
Doesn't everyone vape now?
Cigarettes are as last century today as snuff boxes were to 1950's authors.
It’s certainly far more popular among the youth than traditional smoking but there are plenty of cigarettes being sold still.
I’m a dinosaur and I like my cigarettes. I’m waiting for them to get banned altogether and I’ll have to grow my own tobacco :(
Honestly it would be a fuck load better for your health to grow, hang dry, cut, and roll your own vs buying the literal poison from PhillipMorris. The tobacco itself isn’t good by any means but the real threat to your health is the additives not the plant
I feel it’s the additives I would miss most. Not sure if or how I could recreate those.
The uniform that both men and women wear in the movie are cut to show off the amazing fisique of the female lead but the cut is totally working on the male lead also.
And then there's Dune: it's the year 40'000 (or something) and mankind is fighting a religious war in the desert over natural resources. Haha!
to be fair, even the Dune universe had the human golden age, before the whole AI wars happened
I've actively avoided reading the Brian Herbert stuff because I tried to read a Kevin J. Anderson book once and it nearly gave me an aneurysm.
The Brian Herbert books aren't bad, but don't go into them thinking that the writing will be the same as his father. I've read a few of them through the anti AI Jihad timeline. They're not terrible but they feel a little rushed compared to Frank's writing... not "we need to get these out for the sake of the IP" like how Disney is just printing Marvel movies, but more like "meh, it could be better, but that's as good as we're gonna get it for now, just publish it."
Idiocracy sadly was the only futuristic story to get it right. Wall-ee probably a pretty safe bet too. At this point, any "blue future" sci-fi writers still out there are disillusioned dreamers.
'Ministry of the future' wasnt bad, by a typically Utopian writer. Parts of it felt plausible.
I haven't read Ministry, but I'm not sure I'd call KSR a utopian. Aurora was some pretty bleak shit. (Great book though)
Nah, idiocracy is weirdly eugenic drivel.
The Jetsons:
George Jetson went to work everyday at Spacely Sprockets and pushed a button. A single button. That was his whole job. The whole businesses was automated to the point George did not have to do anything except sit and press the button.
And he made enough money in that job to support a family of 4 in a nice house, as the sole bread winner.
Imagine that: A future where the benefits of automation technology are not solely for the wealthy and business owners. Automation and AI making people's jobs easier, instead of simply replacing them. Businesses that employ people to do jobs that could be automated, but don't, because people need living wages regardless of how easy the work has become.
There was a joke I remember in the episode they bought Rosie, their maid-bot: Jane said she was exhausted by all the cooking and cleaning while simply pressing two buttons that said “cooking” and “cleaning”.
I also enjoy the conspiracy theory that Jetsons and Flintstones exist at the same time, but Jetsons are upper class and live in cities above the nuclear rubble, and mutant, talking, dinosaur adjacent monsters below.
The Jetsons meets the Flintstones proves that. I own dvd and remember it when I was kid. Apparently Leroy invited a time machine but he really didn't its just telporter to surface.
Nah in the movie it was a time machine, I do like the theory though.
He called it a time machine but I like the idea that he and his parents just didn't realize it isn't.
Fuck. Now I have that "meet the flintstones" song stuck in my head and have to rethink my childhood media consumption at the same time.
Thinking about it now... Rosie the Robot was presented to the viewer as a being that was basically sentient and fully self aware. In fact, she could and did fall in love at one point. Like... the family owned her. She was a possession. Was that slavery? Is the future depicted in "The Jetsons" a slave based one?
UBI is starting to sound more and more appealing as AI technology has surged.
Tbh, it was appealing to me the first time I heard of it. Its the most seamless way to transition from modern work society to post work society. It still has the same culture and incentive structure of what worked for society before, but removes the NEED to work in order to simply live
![email protected]
Given the large Star Trek and socialist communities on Lemmy, I'm surprised this sub isn't more active.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: ![email protected]
Thanks, bot! It looks like this aspect of Thunder is a bit broken...
Who’s to say there wasn’t a working class supporting their comfortable lifestyle, living on the ground, beneath the cloud-covered hi-rises?
So just give people free money instead of wasting resources
No. They don't deserve it and I will die in filth and poverty before I let someone have something they don't deserve!
Except billionaires. They get everything and deserve less than nothing.
The Jetsons lived in an apartment and George kept getting fired for stupid reasons. That very much resembles modern life where a lot of people can't afford a house and have no job security.
We could actually make flying cars. It's just not sustainable.
What's missing is that garbage disposal food processor the Doc had for fuel conversion.
We might soon have flying taxis. I am just not sure if I want us to have flying taxis.
and small planes. They aren't all that expensive actually. I could buy a good used plane for less than half of what I would spend on a fancy italian sportscar of that same model year.
Planes also are built to last, so you can keep it for decades without it showing much age.
Thank fuck. Those are a terrible idea in like every way.
Also, we used them a lot in the attempted colonization of Vietnam?
Back to the Future 2 is set 30 years in the future... in 2015.
Blade Runner was set in 2019.
They had such high hopes for the future of humanity, but their selfish-ass boomer kids ruined the fucking planet.
Not all boomers sucked; the good ones just got butchered by the state or died from doing all the drugs.
#notallboomers #butmost
Generational disputes are like class wars, they only help take the heat off those at the top who have the actual responsibility
You know what, respect.
it's 2030, the world is notching but hurricanes abd forest fires, also we got 1 guy on mars
And he's not coming back. We abandoned the program. Last food delivery gets to him in three years; after that its nothing.
Also, most people alive are survivors of sharknadoes, zombie fire, and desert oceans.
No potatoes on mars?
The "deep corners" of their universe probably extended bout as far as alpha centauri
Sci-fi is merely a mirror upon society. Hopeful times? Hopeful sci-fi. Dark times? Dystopian sci-fi.
In my mind, I've always suspected the reverse!
Scary times: people would gravitate toward comforting, optimistic media
Comfortable times: people would find dystopian, edgy media more appealing
I wonder if anyone has done a study on this before.
I think it more correlates to the setting.
In dark times, many stories may take place in a dark society or similarly dark theme, but with a story that turns out hopeful in the end. Other times the story might be told in a way to try to emphasize a certain part of life at that time. The darker media becomes more relatable and understandable in darler times. So the older sci-fi that has humanity doing crazy feats in years that have already past exist because the world was a genuinely happier and more hopeful time in the past.
Take the 1982 anime Super Dimension Fortress Macross, for example. Written in the early 1980s in Japan, they wrote that in 1999 a global war would be ended by a spaceship crashing on Earth, with all governments combining into a single Earth government to study the crashed ship in 2001. By 2009, (yes, in only 10 years) humanity is supposed to have learned so much from that ship that they have advanced to building transforming bipedal F-14s that can fly in space, and having restored said spaceship that crashed earlier, faster than light warp technology. This story was written while Japan was experiencing an economic boom, and things were pretty hopeful in Japan until the market crash of 1992. But the story is not about humanity achieving these technological feats, all that is explained in episode 1. The story is about humanity's battle with alien invaders, and the realization that the aliens aren't as alien as humanity thought, and how differences between cultures often result in war that is entirely unnecessary. I imagine if this story was written in 1992 or 1993 when the Japanese economy crashed, it likely would have been significantly darker in setting and tone.
I can't quote a study, but I did read the book Germs Genes and Civilizations. The author observed that the power of the church grew during situations like the Black Plague or the 30 years war, and waned during the Enlightenment.
They saw us go from the wheel to cars to planes to space travel in a crazy small amount of time.
It’s not their fault everyone just decided to stop there.
Everyone didn't. Everyone decided to delegate all their autonomy to some delusional shitheads we now feel powerless to stop. They made the decisions because they prefer having slaves.
There are a myriad of reasons we are on the shitty timeline, but a non-insignificant one to me is how terrible classic sci-fi writers were at writing humans rather than planks with faces drawn on them that periodically state the author’s views on something. The focus of sci-fi on massive space operations and colonization of other planets from the beginning was warped by a dis-interest from sci-fi writers in the positive potentialities within the human psyche that are outside the grasp of cynical structures of power and control, the part of ourselves that just wants to tend a garden in their backyard and nothing more.
I think this has lead to very hollow visions of the future that were well suited to becoming the basis for people like Elon Musk’s world view. Sci-fi looked to the stars and tried to see into the future while ignoring the one thing we can count on about the future, humans will still be humans.
(I know this is a generalization and isn’t true as a rule)
That and also Modern Western Sci-Fi tends to wave away all the hard parts of engineering, politics, and economics when it comes to actually doing the thing.
How did Heinlein assume we'd colonize the Moon in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress"? Oh, don't worry. We just bootstrapped ourselves up there Ayn Rand style.
How did Kirk and Picard and Janeway find themselves on Galaxy Class Starships traversing the deep corners of distant space? Well, first we did a quick global super-holocaust because of genetically engineered racism (don't ask the finer details of that) and then we just... got better and turned Earth into a Utopia.
Maybe you buy into the more Posadist vision of First Contact, where a few starving refugees accidentally broke the luminal barrier with a rocket they assembled from spare parts. But the truly hard parts - the laboriously assembly and re-learning of scientific knowledge by each new generation, the failed bluesky research projects and dead-end engineering projects, the accumulation of trust between individuals within a state and states within the world necessary to mobilize materials and labor for these grand mega-projects - largely get breezed over.
An epic spaceship battle with the Trisolarians is, after all, far sexier to put on screen than a bunch of scientists grappling with the mathematics behind three spheres floating through space. So the old Asimov-style of SciFi as a series of entertaining word problems falls away, to be replaced by the Science Fantasy of Space Wizards and Warp Cores and Time Traveling Monkeys.
Nah actually a crazy guy named Zefram Cochrane creates the first warp drive on earth using an old ICBM as a platform to build his spaceship, he is basically just doing it as a crazy entrepreneur trying to make money. When he launches it to test it for the first time, the use of the warp drive alerts the Vulcans, who come and investigate. Generally, Vulcans did not have a policy of interfering with other planets that had not yet become spacefaring, but since Earth now had developed the warp drive the Vulcans established first contact and then helped usher Earth into a new space age. If it wasn't for the Vulcans, it is likely that Zefram Cochrane would have still been moderately successful but it is unlikely that the Federation would have arose complete with massive starships.
In the silly mirror universe where everyone is evil what happens is that instead of Zefram shaking hands with the Vulcans when they land and make first contact he and the other people in the camp shoot the Vulcans and steal their technology, eventually building an authoritarian galactic empire called the Terran Empire.
I don't want scifi to only be about the mathematics of spheres though.
I also don't want my scifi to be just about Space Wizards (ughh Jedi and Sith are the most boring part of Star Wars by far), Warp Cores and Time Traveling Monkeys.... I want my scifi to be about people and the positive capacity of humanity. When we look to imagined futures they should remind us that we have the agency of choice to pick what the future is, and that is totally possible for us to pick kindness and empathy. That is why Star Trek is so much more interesting and compelling than 99% of scifi, because while sometimes it is grim it is always concerned with the choices we make and imagining a future where we make better choices. Outside of Star Trek, the feeling of scifi has overwhelming been dystopian futures and though there is good reason to imagine dystopian futures as cautionary tales, I think they are also a drug that when overdosed on makes us believe dystopian futures are inveitable.
For example I wanted to love the scifi show Tales From The Loop, the appeal of Simon Stålenhag's visions of alternate realities is undeniably captivating. However, all the characters seemed to act like complete sociopaths, the episode that did me in was where the two kids have their bodies swapped and kid who is switched into the body of the kid who has a much nicer life refuses to switch back. He goes on to just live that kids life presumably as an impostor... and I just... like I don't even remotely believe 99.99% of humanity would make that choice (especially as a child who hasn't even become comfortable in their own body yet). Some humans might, but that has far more to do with how abnormal those people are than it does to do with how technology might corrupt us with its power. Same thing with a lot of black mirror, it is this repeating vision of dystopian futures that just assumes that everybody will behave like sociopaths and it gets really tiring to me not the least because it fundamentally undermines the plausibility of the imagined future at a basic level. It subconsciously teaches us to deny the possibility of more positive futures since our imagination is a bayesian space defined and bounded by visions of the future provided to us by culture.
Neither do I. But there's a lot of Sci Fi to explore that doesn't require you to invent to teleporter or the laser sword.
Meanwhile Philip K. Dick writing in the late 1940s: In the 2020s humanity is almost completely extinct on account of WWIII, and Earth has been taken over by an AI who constructs more and more elaborate war robots who are hunting down the last surviving humans hiding in nuclear proof bunkers.
OP was talking about fiction though...
imagine missing out on all that. ☹️
I honestly believe that if the US alone used all of its military funds on researching fusion power, we'd have figured it out by now lol.
NASA made remarkable innovations in its prime during the Apollo missions because of the amount of people efficiently working on so many new technologies with proper funding.
There's a kind-of soft ceiling on scientific progress created by the Unknown Unknowns.
We didn't think we'd need to optimize silicon waffer chips before we could engineer a solution to a net-positive fusion reaction. We didn't consider the impact plastics tech in the 80s would have on our ability to survive in deep space in the 2000s. We had no idea adding lead to our gasoline and paint would set back our national intellectual output by a generation.
Consider that we do spend a substantive portion of our military budget on blue sky technological advancements. But because we put military leaders in charge, and because these dipshits will finance $10B to put screen doors on submarines if you promise them jobs on the company board when they retire, we end up with enormous malinvestment. Similarly, consider the $13B Microsoft sank into OpenAI to make a very advanced version of Clippy.
At some level, I don't think its an issue of Take $X and put it into Y projects. I think you need to till the soil and irrigate the field and see what grows. That means doing basic shit like feeding and housing and vaccinating people, educating them at the primary-to-collegiate level at cost, and keeping credit lines open to even the "least worthy" of us, so you can get the kind of inventiveness that paves the way for advancement.
But with more funding we would likely have silicon wafer chips figured out sooner
There are diminishing returns, sure. But tech would still have more quickly developed with more than we have currently put in
We already throw trillions (with a T) at the development of new silicon wafer chips. I don't think even a Pentagon's budget is going to make it move any faster.
By contrast, I do think increasing the base number of computer engineering graduates would do wonders for the domestic computer industry. Particularly, if those engineers had publicly available cash to incubate their own start-ups and noodle around in university graduate programs outside of the publish-or-perish model.
Forcing everyone to go hat-in-hand to guys like Musk, Theil, and Sam Altman every time they want a crack at the nut is what's holding us back far more than the volume of dollars we spend on those three gatekeepers.
I can't remember what it was, maybe some short story by Ray Bradbury, but I first read it in high school (so somewhere between 1999 and 2003) that took place in the distant future of 1998.
Also, wasn't 1984 set in the future of when it was written? 🤔
Yes 1984 was written in 1949.
I never looked it up but I always heard it was written in 1948 and he just reversed the last two numbers as it was an easy way to put it in the not too distant future.
Like I said though, I never had the inclination to look it up, maybe he wrote it in 1948 but it was first published in 1949.
Yes but also 1984 wasnt set in 1984; even the years were lies.
I think this still happens. People have no concept of time when we look 10+ years out. 10 years isn't really that long. I think life is going to look very much the same in the next 40 years with the biggest change being AI tools if they can get past the "idiotification" of LLMs and the like as they are subject to human interaction.
I think you're absolutely right. It's funny watching old shows/interviews where people seem very similar to modern day "doomers". They always had legitimate reasons to be worried (like we do), but similarly, they struggle to conceptualize life going on like normal a few decades into the future.
"Future events like this will affect us in the future..."
Retrospectively, wasn't a lot of the space-exploration-based SciFi from the 50s 60s 70s serving the purpose of justifying massive government spendings in big rockets, mainly used to build ICBMs, to justify imperialist policies and the cold war?
were we (the scifi afficionados) the useful idiots of this missile race?
As someone who lived through those decades, I don't think it was so much being useful stooges, but rather each decade was very different in social tone and was a reaction to the current events.
The 1950's was about the successful end of WW2 and the bright future ahead of humanity. Good always wins over evil. We were going to have unlimited nuclear power and powerful computers to supply all our wants and needs. And rockets? Well, they were new and exciting. The future looked bright.
The 1960s brought real fear of nuclear Armageddon to everyone. If you think the world political situation is bad today, we all thought we were going to die at any moment. I can remember doing nuclear blast drills as a 5 year old in school. We invented the nuclear clock...... And the Cuban Missile Crisis was on. But, we were going to land a man on the moon before it was all over. But for SciFi, the Plucky Human arrived. Star Trek exemplified that. Captain Kirk foiled Evil Aliens(tm) while screwing every hot green or blue chick with two legs in a short skirt or skimpy furs across the (Un)known Galaxy.
The 1970's were simply more of the same. SciFi had expanded on the "Plucky Human" schitick with Battle Star Galactia. But Buck Rogers made a brief return also. But if you look closer, government has become more authoritarian yet somehow benevolent. Big Brother(tm) knows best was the unspoken motto. And a SciFi darkness started to show. Logan's Run, A Clockwork Orange, Roller Ball, and Soylant Green are just a few of the darker tend.
Which is kind of the path we are still following today I think. A strange mixture of r/HFA! and the dark ambiguity of Batman.
And for fun. I will leave you with this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio
Philip K. Dick was writing stories about nuclear armageddon in the late 1940s-early 1950s. Even the few stories he did about humans inventing space travels usually involved humans meeting an alien race that is more advanced than us, and eventually defeating us.
I can beat that. "Atomic Weight 500" is a book of nuclear power written in 1925 by a guy born 1870 about nuclear power - and nuclear war. Though his nuclear war was "different". Even Hans Dominik didn't expect Chain Reactions being so quick as they really were. But the basic idea of creating a critical mass to generate uncontrollable amounts of energy was implemented perfectly.
It is not so much about the year the story plays at but also about shying away from some stories nowadays.
A story where humans are Cool Bastards and the Aliens just Plain Evil?
Can't have that. It wouldn't be social critic enough.
Humans being smart and solving problems without crying and discussing their feelings in face of impending doom?
Naaah... would alienate the audience.
c/HFY and r/HFY show how to do it different... (shameless self propaganda, noteworthy The Typo which saved humanity, Day of the Fat Man, Deterrence)
We Need More Mary Sue Protagonists!
I mean, yeah. I'd watch it.
Just watch any police procedural or cowboy show
I would be good if at least not every single lead protagonist was either an asshole, an idiot or an obvious traitor.
I generally prefer ensemble casts to "lead" characters to avoid some of that