The future is a branching path
The future is a branching path
89 comments
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They saw the invention of air travel and space travel within 70 years. As far as they were concerned, nothing was too extraordinary.
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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
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It is the distant future of the year 2024. Our intrepid hero uses her pocket computer to argue that the world is flat.
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Flat and gay*
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No that's just me. Understandable; I'm pretty tall.
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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.
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Almost like slave societies do not innovate, they just add slaves.
If you want cool new gadgets; kill your masters.
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But there are WAY more billionaires now!
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WTF, stagnation? The internet is transforming our daily lives constantly.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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to be fair, even the Dune universe had the human golden age, before the whole AI wars happened
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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.
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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.
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UBI is starting to sound more and more appealing as AI technology has surged.
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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
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Given the large Star Trek and socialist communities on Lemmy, I'm surprised this sub isn't more active.
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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.
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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
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Back to the Future 2 is set 30 years in the future... in 2015.
Blade Runner was set in 2019.
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And here we are with people who think the gubberment made the eclipse happen.
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How else do you control the masses
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They had such high hopes for the future of humanity, but their selfish-ass boomer kids ruined the fucking planet.
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Not all boomers sucked; the good ones just got butchered by the state or died from doing all the drugs.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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
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Sci-fi is merely a mirror upon society. Hopeful times? Hopeful sci-fi. Dark times? Dystopian sci-fi.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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it's 2030, the world is notching but hurricanes abd forest fires, also we got 1 guy on mars
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No potatoes on mars?
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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? 🤔
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Yes 1984 was written in 1949.
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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.
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Nah, idiocracy is weirdly eugenic drivel.
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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)
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Humans being smart and solving problems without crying and discussing their feelings in face of impending doom?
We Need More Mary Sue Protagonists!
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I would be good if at least not every single lead protagonist was either an asshole, an idiot or an obvious traitor.
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89 comments
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.
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.
Liberalism: nothing but jacking off with the monkey pawsince 1848.
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.