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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
So it kind of works in the Foundation universe because tapes are used for messages. Basically email but in audio format.
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.
And here we are with people who think the gubberment made the eclipse happen.
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!
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?
Commander Cisco said it best: "WHERE ARE MY FLYING CARS?!?"
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.
And yet somehow the lead character smokes cigarettes.
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!
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.
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
Given the large Star Trek and socialist communities on Lemmy, I'm surprised this sub isn't more active.
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.
back to the future thought we would have flying cars by 2015
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.
it's 2030, the world is notching but hurricanes abd forest fires, also we got 1 guy on mars
we got one 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.
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.
imagine missing out on all that. ☹️
OP was talking about fiction though...
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.
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..."
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)
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
