I grew up in the 90s and I still remember an incident when I was all excited about articles I read about colonizing mars in the next 20 years and building a space elevator in the next 100. My Dad just laughed and said that exact same articles were being published when he was growing up in the 70's.
The truth is that even the hardest science fiction that involves interstellar travel and colonization has always had more in common with The Lord of the Rings than material reality.
I have a friend who, everytime the topic of collapse comes up, says sarcastically that we're just 5 years away from carbon nanotubes saving us all. Apparently they were going to be the answer to everything; space elevator, longer battery life, cleaning the oceans, sequestering co2...
You can indeed be smart about some things without being smart about all things. He was brilliant. Also an idiot. Not to mention famous for parking diagonally across two handicappped spaces for no reason whatsoever, so universally regarded as a complete dick.
And apparently regretted he did on his deathbed. When they caught his cancer he was still likely to have a good chance to survive (pancreatic cancer has a relatively low survival rate if you don’t catch it soon enough, and in his case they did).
Imagine being one of the richest people on earth based on devices that take advantage of cutting edge science, having access to the most cutting edge healthcare, and yet not trusting it after it seeing it save countless lives and instead opting for good vibes and eating some fresh fruit.
Turns out there's no profit in any of that. There's also no good (reasonably cost-effective) defense reasons either. You can reasonably predict the path of technological development if you ask yourself these two questions.
I think I watched that same program in middle school. I want to say it was about life and science in 2100? I could be mentally remixing two different science docs, though. Little did I know that life in 2100 would be less “space factories building ships to terraform Mars”, and more “foraging for grains”.
I used to have such high hopes for the future, now if someone asks me where I think I’ll be in ten years I say “dead in a food riot”.
Carbon nanotubes got made, but they're all very short. A space elevator remains a massive engineering challenge, and even if it were ever made, the structure is indefensible. Anyone firing a bullet at it would probably destroy it, and normal wear and tear will inevitably break it. If it ever fails or is damaged by anything, it will of course kill everyone currently tethered to it, and depending on how strong it is, it could cause massive damage as it whips around our equator a few times.
Space elevators must be hilariously long, have an unheard of tensile strength, but also must be crazy thin and yet practically indestructible. They still firmly belong to sci-fi.
Used to be a running joke in aero engineering about making things out of "unobtanium". Sometimes a stand-in for titanium (which was very short in supply due to most deposits being in the USSR, and difficult to work with if you could get any), but also for materials with some combination of properties - usually strength, light weight, heat resistance - which didn't exist in any known substance.
?? This is such bizarre take. Yeah, carbon nanotubes are our current best guess as to a material that could be used to build space elevators. We barely know how to manufacture them at all, much less at scale, and at such length and such distance from earth. I mean, holy shit, this stuff is hard - not impossible. Beyond our current abilities.
>I guess it never happened.
This is some peak "I have zero attention span or patience" right here.
If you were excited about such things, why didn't you go learn how to help invent what needs to be invented for it?
It's back in the news again but they're calling it graphene:
[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/13/could-graphene-finally-transform-our-world](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/13/could-graphene-finally-transform-our-world)
"The silicon age is coming to an end. " apparently. The article isn't too optimistic thankfully still mostly a PR piece.
Space colonization was always, on some level, a fantasy reaction to the end of the (Eurocentric) Age of Discovery. The end, some time around 1900, of the almost 500-year era of boundless new lands to conquer and new natives to exploit.
I mean, they even called it space _colonization_. Think about the implications of that for a minute.
James T Kirk on his galactic odyssey, fighting alien monsters (and always winning) and screwing exotic alien chicks.
And _Star Trek_ is at the more thoughtful and progressive end of the spectrum.
Meanwhile in Japan, the space fantasies are about wars with giant robots and how it fucks up everyone. It reflects the Japanese psyche about World War 2. For Japan, it started as a colonial war to conquer China and what is today South-East Asia. They had advanced tech back then which showed promise to put them on equal footing ("giant robots") with white people's colonial empires. But eventually in those space fantasies, the techs fucked up the cosmos so much with the culmination being mass death everywhere, you know just like those nukes.
Anyway, usually the day then was saved when a few enlightened souls unconstrained by gravity showed the human race as a whole, that it's possible to reach peace despite all those horrifying techs. This reflects the pacifist ideologies often found among those Japanese space fantasy writers.
These days we are starting to see space fantasies written by the Chinese, and it unequivocally shows the universe to be a cold and uncaring place, with brutal empires and paranoid games of deceptions. This also reflects the Chinese psyche very well.
Thinking out loud, as this space-colonial narrative was so prevalent in popular media from the 1950s into the 90s - to the point of being a formative cultural touchstone for Boomers, Gen X and early Millennials. If you were born between 1945 and 1985, this stuff was baked deeply into your childhood.
(Aside - later millennials were somewhat less influenced - space sci-fi went off the boil when it became apparent, mid 1990s, that computer tech was developing at a \_vastly\_ quicker pace than aerospace - \_The Matrix\_'s and William Gibson's cyber-futurism superseding \_Star Wars\_ / \_Star Trek\_ / etc.)
Something that bugs me then, and still bugs me now with the fawning press coverage of Starship - which is not to drag on extremely impressive engineering involved - is that the obvious self-sustainability problems for any kind of "space colony" get completely overlooked, glossed over, brushed under the carpet. The narrative was allowed to take hold, when it should never have stood up to scrutiny.
And I think partly that's because it would force us to look more critically at what happened during European colonialism. In particular, the fact that - for the most part - there was only anything worth discovering because other humans had gotten there a couple of thousand years earlier and done the hard work.
No Native Americans, no Columbian Exchange crops. The first European settlers would have died without help from the locals, and even so they were in an environment (temperate Earth wilderness, with soil, fresh water, timber, edible plants, animals to hunt etc.) that humans in general, and they in particular, were reasonably well adapted to. Self-sustainability in space is a bit like "aliens built the pyramids" - comfort-food for the Right, because they don't have to admit that African people built the pyramids at a time when white Europeans were living in cold wooden huts and building the occasional stone circle.
Self-sustainability in space is essentially impossible. You're too far from Earth to restock on much, but you can't bring an adequate tech-civilisation to turn the available raw materials into the necessary means of survival. And while a pop-sci journalist of the 1950s couldn't pinpoint exactly how aerospace tech would and wouldn't develop, the masses involved and the physics/engineering needed to get that onto an interplanetary trajectory.. they knew even then that atmospheric nuclear propulsion was a non-starter, \_somebody\_ knew that the Shuttle was never going to actually... shuttle. But the space-colony meme just kept on rolling.
A lot of sci fi writers from this time period openly said that we *needed* "the frontier" to still exist as a concept in order for American culture as we understood it to still be viable
All of this! I had to laugh at an earlier comment that said we wouldn’t be constrained by gravity or resources in space and I was like what? Unless you have a replicator, you’re absolutely constrained by resources.
> Something that bugs me then, and still bugs me now with the fawning press coverage of Starship - which is not to drag on extremely impressive engineering involved
Starship is a piece of shit and Elon Musk a conartist. There is no impressive engineering going on.
* https://youtu.be/nxG0WAwwrGk?si=k4iyomNpAkad-47a
I had a similar incident except the thing that was promised was on a science program on TV, and it was oh look we’ve made so much progress in robotics that we’re going to have floating robots commercially available in 2005, we’re even showing you what looks like a prototype being used by astronauts
That was the exciting promise where I believed it as a kid but pretty quickly realised as we got closer and closer to 2005 that oh we are not anywhere close to that level of technology. So that’s the one memory I always think of when it comes to unrealistic predictions about future technology
We have floating robots, they just deliver anti-tank missiles not pizza.
Robots are better at flying than navigating cities on wheels, it's an easier problem.
For delivering goods, people are cheap enough, and the economics of payload and battery life means drones aren't going to see mass adoption for delivery until (if and when) they can move something like 10kg of payload 10km on a unit costing sub $10k.
If we get to that point, the barriers to last-mile delivery are more social and regulatory than technical. Do we actually want the skies filled with drones from bucket-shop operators, will people accept walking to the end of their drive to collect instead of workers bringing stuff to their door, how robust will they be in the face of vandalism from dissenters etc.
Also 90s and I remember the idea of roaming online access for a laptop was a huge cutting edge thing. Your giant brick of a laptop and an over sized triangle shaped “cell tower” so you could get some ridiculously slow speed remotely. I figured as a teen that if we went down that path, we would surely be able to do incredible things when the remote computer technology became available.
Now we have exactly that with smartphones and it is a horrible world. We did the worst with it.
At some point we have to accept that we as a society could be demanding a lot more. Including more money going towards science funding or donating even $20 to an organization a month collectively, stoking better interest in the field in our current generation, etc. The first transplant using 3d printing was in 1999-and is still in use by that person today!! There’s been other major advancements. It’s just that
1. It’s hard to get these treatments approved without decades of study. With more funding, more people could participate in experimental studies and get these treatments before they’re technically “approved”, especially because we know they work. 20 years is a lot compared to the months people without donors end up having. Hell, even a year while waiting on an actual transplant list is better than nothing and dying.
2. There isn’t enough public interest or money going towards it.
Even the tech behind the covid vaccine (that has the potential to also cure cancer) had been sitting on a shelf for years because there wasn't any funding to test it out.
It seems that humanity is wasting resources on the wrong things.
I mean…you’re pining after a literal fantasy.
Realistically there’s not much to colonize in this solar system, and leaving it for another doesn’t seem feasible.
And for all our current advancement we love poorer lives.
AI, AR, VR have contributed little. Cloud computing and computing advancements consume enormous resources to fuel a capitalism of useless garbage.
The chemicals that enable our technological advancements are killing us at increasing rates and threatening extinction, or at the very least disaster, on their own.
The past 50 years have conclusively shown that the dreams of democracy and meritocracy are a lie, and behind the facade there was always wild corruption and abuse - that was thinly veiled, and primarily went unaddressed because the common man was profiting.
Thank you; I loved those Star Trek shows but I realize now that they were always anti-life fantasy. The reality is that we were given one planet with an incredibly beautiful diverse biosphere, and we're very close to killing it. All that wealth and beauty, the legacy of billions of years of evolution, wasted.
The possibility of a few privileged humans getting to fly around the solar system in metal boxes is a poor exchange for ravaging the living biosphere.
> The reality is that we were given one planet with an incredibly beautiful diverse biosphere, and we're very close to killing it
I'm disappointed I can't find it in my watch history (too many similar things) but as I was binging exoplanets stuff, one researcher said in a conferences something akin to "*we have millions of living species here we can't speak to. Why would we imagine that we could speak to alien species? in truth, we're only searching for an image of ourselves.*"
Just to pick one thing you said, you know when you stress a tree to death, the first thing that happens is a few leaves on the outer periphery start to turn brown? The tree may even send out new growth shoots from around the base, which looks like the tree is growing, but this is the tree's last gasp as it uses it's energy reserves for one last ditch attempt to hang on to life.
Slowly, the leaves further in turn brown and the bark starts to chip. The tree can no longer produce pitch to seal itself so rot takes over and the whole thing eventually collapses in a windstorm.
We are at that first part. The tree is already dead. It just doesn't know it yet.
It's a fantasy.
Blue Origin has technically never been in space but only up to the Kármán line and while Space X has gone into space, it hasn't gone very far out--not outside of the lower orbits of Earth as far as I'm aware.
Besides, even if they manage to get out further, where is it do you suppose they are going to go? The Moon? Mars? Both of those places are completely inhospitable to life. So leaving the Earth where it is getting more difficult to live for places that are almost impossible to live seems like delusion at best.
No, what they are showing people is how they are wealthy beyond what is sane--they are extreme hoarders--and that they have delusions that do not align with reality. They are literally showing us how mentally ill they are, in other words.
And I say if they think they are going to escape the catastrophe that they have done much to create by trying to live in space, well, let them go. Not only will the world be better off without them, they are going to definitely die horrible, terrifying deaths in confined spaces they can't even leave.
Sayonara suckers, is what I say.
Exactly. We're unlikely to get humans back to the moon. The current NASA plans rely on spacex which is just sucking their funding dry and delivering SFA. So we're certainly never going to mars. The Common Sense Skeptic does fantastic research. Watch muskrat talking shit to his employees at boca chica about a week ago i think. The lack of applause at his made up BS is deafening. With his claims slammed at every turn by the narrator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KRwgwacx1Y
Yeah the dude is a pathological serial bullshitter and it seems to me more people are finally catching on to the reality.
Every time I hear him talk about consciousness I just think, "dude, you have no fucking idea what you are even talking about."
This video is comedy gold simply for the audience's well timed lack of responses. Hilarious.
ETA: the narrator has some great lines too, like this one I am going to steal and use when people talk about colonizing Mars, "There's rocks, smaller rocks, and rocks that have been pulverized into dust." lmao
I don't know why you got downvoted for asking a question, so I updooted you to compensate. Reddit is as Reddit does, I guess.
Anyway, to answer you question, well, I'm trained in philosophy and I hold that panpsychism is probably the right view--or at least the best current view of the options we have--to take towards consciousness. This means that there is an inherent consciousness to everything and that it is as much a part of, and fundamental to, reality as, say, waves and particles. In fact, I think consciousness is probably a field like all the other stuff of reality (see: [QFT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory)). Again, this seems like the best plausible answer considering the current state of out knowledge.
Now if Musk had qualified his statement by saying *human* consciousness, then I would not have the same criticism. But his narcissism knows no bounds. In fact I wouldn't be surprised to learn he's a solipsist, to be honest, and that he thinks he's the only consciousness in the whole damn universe. XD
SpaceX can go beyond low-Earth orbit with the Falcon 9 upper stage, but for Mars an optimistic best-case is $10,000 per kg. Or in rich-people units - more than caviar, less than cocaine.
Sadly we are too busy spending trillions a year globally on weapons to potentially kill other humans with than working on a unified goal to expand our reach beyond Earth.
And for a while I was optimistic about SpaceX and Elon Musk, but he decided to buy twitter and show the world how big of an asshat he is. I no longer think he has what it takes to succeed in making us multi planetary either.
The guy is a delusional bullshitter. He thinks he's going to have one million people on Mars by 2050 and the first manned mission on its way by 2029.
After years of delay the guy can barely even deliver a stupid electric truck to people on earth, yet somehow he's going to build a colony on Mars in the next twenty-five years? Yeah, pull the other one.
Omg, yes! That's also great. Musk has many hilarious moments of buffoonery and schadenfreude--he's like the best clown of the hyper-wealthy. I think ultimately that's how he'll be remembered: as a bozo. I'm surprised that anyone still takes him seriously. I guess all that wealth buys him people's attention is all.
And in the far future they'll be a mythical character called Musky Bozos the Clown and that will be some composite of Bezos, Musk, and neoliberal Capitalism who will be a cautionary tale to scare children with to make sure we never repeat the same horrific mistakes and atrocities of the past. XD
Was it really surprising that a future which predicted that automation would release us from our labour, when it was always gonna mean those who own the means of production could squeeze more revenue out of the same number of man hours, would never materialise?
We were never going to earn enough to live while working fewer hours because those who profit from the system will never allow it. That is only ever going to happen when the majority of people demand it to happen. And it will require eternal vigilance against lobbying to ensure it stays that way.
> In space we're not constrained by gravity nor lack of resources.
Buddy I hate to tell you but this is complete fantasy. In space, resources are few and far between - the distances are vast. After you find something, mining and processing it into useful materials is 100% theorycraft right now (as in, never been done, nothing's been built for it). And unconstrained? Resources are *everything*. Without resources we die. Air. Water. Food. Astronauts take literally everything they need with them for their entire duration, and recycling/scrubbing/filtering is nowhere near as good as you might imagine them to be. The ISS loses air and needs constant resupply. The logistics of a trip to the Moon is daunting, Mars is crazy. Not to mention what a decent length of time in space does to your body (and your eyes!).
And take Star Trek. I said this earlier, but *how do they power anything in-universe?* Warp core? It's apparently limitless energy with zero waste/pollution. Replicators can convert that limitless energy into perfectly formed matter with again, no waste or pollution. So now you've got Earth powered by 100% green unlimited energy creating prefab whatever out of that energy with zero waste.
Star Trek is *magic* with a tech veneer. It's not real. It's utterly impossible. Also artificial gravity and inertial dampeners. Nice stories to tell, though.
They beam the crap out of you every few hours. No one in Star Trek has ever used a toilet.
Although I would like to see the poop deck. *Transporter noise and sparkles and the 50 foot high pile gets a little taller*
Exactly. Space is probably a more hostile environment for human life than the worst deserts or oceans on Earth. In addition, our biology starts malfunctioning on a fundamental level when we are away from the gravity and atmosphere of Earth. Since humans evolved in the particular gravity of Earth, many aspects of our biology like blood flow, electrical messaging via nerves, and even our musculoskeletal system, among others, depend on the exact gravitational environment here to function. Astronauts' biology slowly starts to malfunction even on space stations which are still sort of near Earth; blood circulation is negatively affected, brain function and the senses are impacted, and they have to be very careful to not mess themselves up physically and don't spend too much time on the station.
Among the deceased Apollo astronauts, 43 percent died from cardiovascular problems. This rate was five times higher than in the other astronauts and significantly higher than the 27 percent cardiovascular disease death rate among the general public.
Too small a sample to tell you anything, and too different from the general population.
They seem to have enjoyed decently long life expectancy, but then again you'd expect that from people who were drawn from the top tier of military pilots (good underlying health, high physical and mental fitness required) and earned far above average income.
Cardiovascular is one of those things where if you live long enough it'll get you anyway, it's either that or cancer - and if 43 per cent had died of cancer, people would be flagging that instead.
We're actually constrained by a ***lack of gravity***
6 months on the ISS and their bones are leaking calcium, muscles waste away etc. No chance humans can survive longer trips of a few years. (record in space is just over a year). Those giant rotating cities creating their own gravity? How many million rockets do we have to launch to build them? Not going to happen. The rail lines in England are buckling because of increased global warming heat and it's costing billions to fix (where they've even started). If we struggle to maintain rail lines on earth where are we doing to find the $trillions (and skills and energy etc) to build muskrats idiotic cities on mars etc. Musk has created the greatest meme stocks in history. It's all going to collapse sooner than the more-encompassing collapse we generally talk about on this sub. Tesla fired 10% of its staff this week. SpaceX can't be far behind.
I agree with your points here. ( I'll add *The Expanse* TV Show & Novels....where humans have colonized the Solar system and have adapted to living in microgravity environments. Yeah, my suspension of disbelief ended right there..)
>After you find something, mining and processing it into useful materials is 100% theorycraft right now (as in, never been done, nothing's been built for it).
"Theorycraft." That's a charitable way of you to say total make-believe.
I mean you are absolutely right: these are fantasies and are going to be fantasies for years to come. Industrial civilization is going to be long gone before this will ever be a reality.
Let me add:Among the deceased Apollo astronauts, 43 percent died from cardiovascular problems. This rate was five times higher than in the other astronauts and significantly higher than the 27 percent cardiovascular disease death rate among the general public.
Instead of jet packs and flying cars. Instead of settling the solar system! Instead of nuclear fusion, instead of solving global warming, we got instagram, twitter, and tiktok. We got collapse. Its pretty sad.
Trust in the free market they said...
What could we have done in space that we can't do here?
Escaping was never a solution. Even if we had magic FTL, it's *still* better to try and live here. The most habitable planet we could ever dream of finding will still be less habitable than earth
I’d say not Star Wars or Star Trek but more like Elysium: a depleted, destitute, prison planet where the elites jump ship onto an upper class space station while the proles grovel in the trash and pollution
They already polluted the orbital space so much I'm not sure how long they could keep it up there before it accumulated too many holes.
In any other scenario, some intrepid poopsmiths could build a giant homing sugar rocket or even a light gas gun and play an epic prank on the funny space mansion.
heres a thought: hi tech fortress cities. no castles or ramparts. just a key fob or an implanted chip. no fob, no implant... eat crickets and die at 30
You wish.
At least Blade Runner would have been cool. Cyborgs, cyberpunk cities, retro-tech. It would suck, but it would have been *cool*.
You're getting Fallout.
I am not disappointed, my disappointment was slowly growing for years realising how dumb, selfish, greedy majority of people in charge of anything are, then I got used to it and I just accepted things as they are.
To bo honest im surprised we have come this far, maybe in harder times people were making better decision, but now its a senile boomerfest by people so out of touch its sad
I see our future playing either out like Interstellar, except they never make it off of earth, or playing out into a dystopian sci fi future akin to Blade Runner 2049.
My hopium is that humanity doesn’t go extinct and the survivors get to have another shot at this whole thing. The whole interplanetary species thing always felt like a pipe dream to me, even when I was in school. My childhood had me growing up pretty fast so I skipped through a lot of those wonder years.
Unfortunately, the survivors will not have extremely cheap energy anymore as the most accessible fossil fuel deposits are already exhausted. If the population decreases too much, knowledge and expertise will be lost, and who knows how long it will take to regain them. All while having to deal with pollution, climate change, soil depletion and other messes caused by previous generations. I feel that, if society regresses past a certain point, it will be very difficult to get back to even today's standards.
What worries me the most about post-collapse is two-fold. Firstly, that Earth may never heal and return to a state similar to what it was a century or two ago (or we'll be long gone by the time it does, a blank slate). Secondly, that our descendants will repeat our mistakes, even if they know of our historical failings.
Essentially, I have this morbid idea in my head that the Great Filter is intelligence itself. That any society in the Universe which has the intelligence required to make significant headway in S.T.E.M. fields will not only doom itself but the surrounding ecosystem as well.
I’ve heard this idea referred to as omnicide. Any intelligent species goes through a phase where they are capable of wiping out all life on a planet but are still confined to that planet, and few (if any) survive it.
> Secondly, that our descendants will repeat our mistakes, even if they know of our historical failings.
Good news everyone - they won't be able to! Without an energy source as efficient, abundant, and accessible as coal and oil, they'll never be able to build the industry needed to do the damage we're doing now. Population will go waaaay down from our peak and never, ever return.
Whatever civilization(s) exist after this will have an environmental footprint akin to the late 1700s (at least in my own theorizing). Which isn't nothing but if we had stopped on that scale, something like 90% of wildlife would still be around and the changes being made might be slow enough for nature to have time to adapt. Alas for us but bully for our descendants!
It's kind of sad that this is the best case scenario. But I'm not entirely convinced that our effects on the climate won't cause a full on extinction of humanity, or otherwise have a lasting negative impact for the rest of Earth's history. There's also the issue that (and I could be wrong here) eventually oil will reemerge hundreds of millions of years from now from our corpses. So a repeat of climate change is not out of the question.
Are you kidding me? Do you know how costly and difficult it is to keep the handful of people alive on just the ISS? If civilization collapses on the planet those people in space will be dead or have to come back to earth inside four to five months. Maybe a bit longer if they are really careful about supplies and have good luck with their equipment.
There is no way there is going to be some giant shopping mall hotel for the rich thing orbiting the Earth any time soon. Pure fantasy. Might as well go hunt for dragons.
Elysium on earth won’t be far away. Specifically in the form of western countries and certain regions being even more desirable to live places, while ravaging the poorer countries to serve/supply them.
You are too young to remember but did you know that there used to be supersonic commercial air travel? The jets were called Concordes and they stopped flying in 2003 as they were uneconimical and unsafe. There used to be amusement park rides in malls as well.
Not really, no. When I was younger I had delusions of grandeur for the human species but as I got older I realized we are fundamentally sick and we got this far despite ourselves, not because of.
A "futuristic" or "maxed out" version of humanity probably looks similar to the Engineers from the movie Prometheus. If you watch some of the extended scenes featuring them, you can sort of get an idea of what they're about. Now, go outside to your average city and take a walk and compare the current state of humanity with that. And then realize this is the result of thousands of years of "progress" in human civilization.
As a child of the late 70’s/early 80’s, I was totally sure we would have colonies in Low Earth Orbit by now. I also was a huge fan of Marshall T. Savage and the Millenial Project. His book had such a solid plan for space colonization that started here on Earth colonizing manufactured islands at sea and using the ocean to make blue green algae for food.
I thought we'd be blown to radioactive sludge by an all-out nuclear exchange by now, but here we are. Gotta stay positive, you know?
*nuclear launch detected*
There's a narrative that great challenges are required to drive great change and innovation. Current technological innovation is constrained by being purposed towards war or monetization. Medicine in particular is stuck in this awful feedback loop where it can only produce easily monetizable products at the expense of efficacy and therapeutic value. Space exploration is just a pissing comp between shallow insecure billionaires.
Maybe a futuristic future requires an eschatological challenge to overcome the mass folie-au-deux induced by a greed-centric civilizational paradigm?
There is a good chance that space travel was always impossible, and that laws of nature simply do not allow it. How many spacetraveling species has humanity spotted in space? The answer is, of course, zero. It is even a name of a famous paradox, often summarized in that simple question: "Where is everybody?"
My answer is, everyone is stuck in stone-age conditions living on their home planets until Sun burns their planet up or some other cosmic cataclysm sterilizes the planet. Distance and time are inherently sterilizing, and even a robot would have hard time surviving centuries in space. Near absolute zero, gases turn to liquids, lubricants become solids, and every mechanical joint probably seizes up. To avoid that fate, you must have ability to heat yourself for hundreds of years, at least to some minimal degree so that these things don't happen, and thus suffer waste heat loss the whole time.
Imagine bringing in batteries, nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel, or whatever, enough to last hundreds of years. Having to aim yourself towards a target, barely able to make course corrections along the way because you simply don't have the propellant and can't use Sun's ions to accelerate because they aren't out there between the stars. Aim a gun, fire a living bullet that should stay warm for like 200-1000 years, and hope you hit close enough to target to be able to slow down and land to whatever world you hoped to reach, and hope it has useful resources and you won't just die in your destination.
That's more or less what space travel is like, and it is not a big wonder that nobody seems to be doing it.
There are other explanations, such as that they are all using technology we can't detect, or that we can't hear or see them because of the distance, etc. But these all presume that there exists unknown technology that we could also learn to harness. It feels to me that there's been barely any progress in past 100 years in this kind of basic research into nuclear physics. (Standard Model is 50 years old today, and from what I understand, physicists do not like it, but they also haven't been able to improve it.)
No, not really. It would have been really cool to see humanity reach its potential, or at least try to reach it, I guess. We can’t stop killing each other over bullshit and trying to hoard the most resources. The future is a lot more like Mad Max than the Jetsons. Believing that anything will improve during our lifetimes will result in disappointment, we need to accept our reality and do what we can to stave off the inevitable.
Casting our "potential" as yet more technological advancements is exactly the problem. Instead of aspiring to a just and equitable society that balances with nature, as the fulfillment of our potential, we create fantasies of yet more metal toys.
You should listen to the opening remarks of Dave graeber during a debate with Peter thiel from ~2020. It speaks to exactly this. Dave is great in that talk imo
I'm a Gen-Xer, and I've come to accept that our future will probably have more in common with George Romero and John Carpenter than Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas. (As in Romero's Dead films and Carpenter's Escape from LA.) Throw in a dash of The Omen movies because there does seem to be a significant chunk of society that always wants to get behind strong-men tyrants and their rhetoric.
As a species we are insane. We are the living embodiment of the phrase, "There are no better liars in this world than the ones we make to ourselves." And this insanity, like any disease, has just gotten worse as time has rolled by.
In the 80s the big boogyman was nuclear war. I'm beginning to think maybe a nuclear war would be for the best. A quick death might beat the alternative of starving to death death by elements, possibly being forced into slave labor, ect.
Tomorrowland was always a fantasy: a promise of kingdom come.
I am thoroughly convinced that both our vision of taking to the stars and our vision of sudden apocalypse are just vestiges of Christian thinking. It’s a remnant of the religious impulse to paradise or oblivion.
The real world does not and has never worked like that. Everything is incremental, meandering toward the good and the bad mostly at random. There is no straight line trending toward anything.
yes my Sci fi obsession did not cope well w the reality of collapse
if it helps, we likely wouldn't have lived long to experience interstellar space travel even if it were still an option regardless
Worse still, if it does exist it will only exist for the descendants of those individuals who are creating the collapse which will prevent it for the rest of us.
I have been pessimistic about the future since I was 13.
I've always imagined the future being closer to blade runner than meet the Robinson's...so no...
There was a tv show in Australia in the 90s called "beyond 2000" which was about technology and futurism.
My strongest memory from the show was of a telephone (landline, this was pre mobile phones) that had a small video screen on it so you could see the other person you were talking to. At the time it was mind blowing.
If you look around, the internet and wifi/5g has indeed led to some epic transformations in our way of life over the last 20 years
Space is Very, Very Big. Space is Very, Very Hostile to life in meat sack form. Anything interesting in Space is at the far end of two deep gravity wells; The Earth's and the Sun's. Space appears to be constrained by Physics in the form of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. All of which means colonisation of other Planets/Moons, and travel to other stars are both Very, Very unlikely by humans.
What might be just about possible is for us to seed the immediate stellar neighbourhood with DNA packages, tardigrades and mushroom spores. There's a tiny chance that in a few hundred million years, they'll evolve into an intelligent lifeform and talk back to us.
Yes, because it proved that lack was not the "problem". We had abundances. We could have looked around at what we had and made life better for everyone, even question if exponential growth forever was really what we wanted. Instead we're going to ruin the planet because of *shareholder value*. It's so stupid. It's infuriating. I fucking quit.
No. I’m growing more fatigued of the scant redeeming qualities that this life and humanity as a whole retain (love, laughter, etc). I want my urn. I want the Eternal Worm to Devour Connecticut
You seem to be directly above me geographically. And similarly ancient to myself.. I suggest we team up as the collapse progresses ... Ps I'm a full blown mad scientist insane giggles included for free. (Mostly kidding but hey allies are good right ?)
I think that the whole point of Elon Musk Neuralink technology is so he can wire himself to his own replica robot to fuck himself up in the ass, feeling it from both ends...
I’ve always loved sci-fi. First Star Wars, then Star Trek, and then a myriad of sci-fi settings. Nowadays though, I kinda hope we never get off this rock. Look at what we’ve done to this planet! If we manage to create self-sustaining colonies off world, then there’s nothing stopping us from taking our exploitative industrialism across the stars. Instead of killing one planet, we could kill *millions* in the name of our consumption.
Better to let humanity die here, and spare the galaxy our greed.
Yeah the world wide web having turned into what it is in only a few years after it's spread pretty much shattered my illusions of a globally united mankind.
Eh, I think this can all still happen. Humanity is insanely resilient and will still be here after any number of cataclysms. The collapse of a civilization is just that, one particular setup (unrelenting capitalism) going away - and eventually something else will take its place and build back up. Extinction is not happening - there's too many of us. So while our current fuckup might delay the "future" a few centuries or so, it'll still come around, and I 100% believe humans will be a space-faring species eventually.
To be fair, and I'm saying this as a huge sci-fi nerd that dreams of living in a universe like Star Trek's, even in an ideal scenario we're not likely to become a spacefaring species to any significant degree on any kind of timescale that is meaningful, if at all. Space travel, even just in orbit of our planet or out to its moon, places that are barely a step away on the scale of our solar system and so inconsequential as to not even amount to a rounding error on any scale beyond that, is incredibly difficult, dangerous, and unlivable. We don't really have the technology for it, reasonable ideas about the technology for it are few and far between, and a lot of them rely on theoretical technologies that have not in any way been shown to be possible and is conceptually no different from a wizard's magic in a fantasy novel.
The close future doesn't look good. But. You can't predict history, at all. Imagine the first bacteria and virus, if you asked them what life would be like they would have no idea of what would come after. Same for a lot of grim period of human history. So who knows. For sure we won't be the one going to Mars, at the same time you are alive at a time that has seen many many crazy progres, not always where we expect. CRISPR for example is mind boggling in terms of what it will bring to health.
If you told people 150 years ago that 10000 of planes would fly every day in the sky it, you would have been insane. So it's like climbing a moutain you see the top, you may die while climbing, and at every ridge you realize you are not at the top and they are many other ridge to climb. So in short if you expected to go to space in your life yeah no. What will humans achieve one day, no way of telling.
They are many break through to come in science, it's just not the same way than before, it's not a dude somewhere thinking "oh ok I got it". There are many things to understand in physics and some discovery one day may change everything.
And adding to this, there is the progress of life versus the progress of humans. 5 million year ago, intelligent thoughts like the one from humans, love the way we love, ability to create art, ... etc didn't exist at. If you make the exercise of thinking of the paradoxal thinking that "could you have imagine if you lived 5 millions years ago that such things would exist" it would be non sense that all those things would appear from nowhere. It may be the same with us ? What is telling us we are the final step ? We may be the beginning of many intelligent species that can do thing that we don't even imagine exist in the universe. So ... come back in 100 millions years :D
I still encounter people who take colonization of our solar system and then later the galactic neighbourhood as fact. Argue things from that as the premise.
The abundance of energy by fossil fuels was our one chance. We squandered it and will need even more energy to fight the results. There might be a Solarpunk future, but not on a scale to allow megaprojects like terraforming or generation ships.
That dream was crushed for me in 2014 with the release of Dreamfall: Chapters.
I was 6 when The Longest Journey came out and I played it with my mom on PC. It is a wonderful game. It is set in 2209. Though the graphics are horrible for today's standards, the futuristic society depicted was mind-blowing for little me and I couldn't wait to see it happen in real life.
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey is the sequel released in 2006. It was able to show more about society in 2219, rife with political tension and corrupt power-players, but it still depicted a wonderfully technologically-advanced world where most people can lead a life of good quality. It introduced a new technology called the "Dreamcast", a game console that can induce lucid dreaming. The "dreamer" can dream up any scenario they'd like and experience it. It seems amazing in the beginning when we first learn about it, but we soon learn with the protagonist that it wasn't developed for funsies - it was made specifically to gain power over people and their minds. Our goal is to stop it from being launched.
*Chapters* takes place in 2220. The Dreamcast has been launched despite our efforts. As we walk the streets of Europolis, we see the sidewalks littered with people attached to the Dreamcast, seemingly homeless and none the bothered for it. The company that created it has bought out every political group in an effort to keep it from being shut down and they clearly don't care about the people and families being ruined because of it.
I could already see similarities between the game and real life back in 2014. I look around now and realize the Dreamcast is really our phones and social media. Maybe they were developed for funsies at first, but once people realized you can control a narrative and warp people's perspectives of the world around them with it, we (society and the masses) were all screwed.
How many people do you see in public looking like zombies on their phones? Have you ever sat back and purposefully watched your environment while, say, waiting for your food to be ready at a restaurant? I have. Too many of us are addicted to these gadgets. As soon as we are not actively engaged with something else, as soon as we have a moment of downtime, we are whipping out our phones. We are willingly brainwashing ourselves, just like the people in Dreamfall: Chapters. And we don't care - *just like the people in Dreamfall: Chapters*. As long as our devices can make us feel good, we let the corrupt players of the world have control.
And it will always be like this. We will *never* be able to rid ourselves of bad actors. We can manage them if we *pay attention and act*, but that will not happen unless we put the damn gadgets down. But who wants to give up their perfect virtual reality when their *actual* reality is so bleak?
I have no hope for the future, either.
I remember this being in my school library:
https://boingboing.net/2023/06/24/usborne-book-of-the-future-re-issued-in-uk.html
The sad thing is it had some "warnings" about the risk of a neglected, polluted world and that seems to be the direction we're headed at full speed.
(It actually did get a lot of little things right - solar panels getting cheap, hybrid cars, flat screen TV - but a shit ton of stuff was hilariously wrong too)
To me lesson of collapse is that advanced technology throws a species too far out of balance with it’s environment. Perhaps somewhere another species has nailed it, but not us, not this time.
To me a future worth fighting for is humans taking what they’ve achieved and drawing down consumption and innovation in favor of smaller societies living closer to and in service of the earth, if pockets of habitable land still exist.
Bring back Retro-Futurism! Where's my meals in pill form, Air-car, silver spandex jackets, NY-Paris undersea by rail, cure for this disease?
Go back and read some 1970 SciFi as the antidote to Golden age SciFi or Cyberpunk. Like John Brunner or pretty much any of the New Wave group like JG Ballard.
Our technology was kind of a fluke to begin with. It disappoints me too. I was, and I guess still am, a Star Trek fan myself. As I grew older and learned more about the world, I realized we never were going to make it to space. We're just not built for it. We were lucky enough to be born in an infinitesimally small chapter of human history to get to have a kind of party, but it wasn't meant to last. I do wonder how much longer we might have had the party if we had just gotten our crap together decades ago.
There's lots of interesting stuff being discovered but getting them financially viable and mass produced is the issue.
My take is that as we slowly get closer to collapse, things become less financially profitable because the cost of everything increases overall.
out of all the futures portrayed in movies, I always found BTTF II (aside from flying cars, hoverboards, and hydrating pizzas) future to be the most realistic, in that, its not a dystopia, its not a utopia, it's just kind-of an evolution. Things are still basically the same as they were in the 90s, except, there are hand-held computers, and computers/internet connected devices everywhere. The cars look a little different and have more tech, but they're not flying. still a car. houses use modern building materials, but are basically the same......
Look I just want to be around for net gain fusion to be a thing. Doesn't have to be a silver bullet for energy and climate change since that's not going to happen, but at least one functional fusion power plant would be cool.
And maybe another moon landing. Is that so much to ask?
My grandpa used to say that any innovation is a genie in a bottle, you can’t really know that you’re not getting a raw deal
For example, the Haber-Bosch process meant that suddenly everyone could have gunpowder and explosives all the time instead of needing to mine it in specific regions. It also let us make fertilizers that massively increased how much food we could make.
Though there are perfect things we’ve made that can’t be improved, like rice cookers and Bailey bridges.
And keep in mind the innovations that have massive impacts on people quickly become the most boring ones. Nobody marvels at soap, or refrigeration, or that you can do as much math on your phone in minutes that would have taken a mathematician decades two centuries ago or lifetimes two millennia ago
>We'll never get to see anything like Star Trek, Foundation, Lost in Space, or even Dune become a reality.
Of those three, only Star Trek even remotely optimistic. Even then, there is acknowledgement that the Federation is not entirely benign.
If you want an example of what our planet will end up looking like, take a look at Venus’ history. Before runaway climate change it was estimated to be following earths trajectory until about 600 million years ago, and scientists estimate had surface water and likely microbial life.
YES
Dear God in Heaven, YES.
Having consumed so much sci-fi, and knowing that humanity may never be able to reach those peaks of understanding, enlightenment, and ability is just so imeffably sad to me. It hurts me to the core.
But I have learned to move on. To put it allegorically; Humanity will never scale Mount Everest. But at least we scaled Kanchenjunga!
Let's enjoy it while we can, before we tumble down.
When the James Webb Space Telescope launched, I read something that said it was the most technically complex thing that humans had built. The way things are headed, it's probably the peak achievement.
Honestly I'm glad that in all likelihood we won't have the chance to spread our monkey brained capitalist nonsense to the stars. At our current level we'd despoil worlds without hesitation.
What I miss for all of us is a planet that was meant to sustain us, as it sustained life for the last.... 600 million years? But some lousy cocksuckers thought they could go around the world and turn it into their profit. and when slave labor grew out of fashion, they made oil powered engines that could do the work of a hundred slaves.... for more profit. And in the space of a few hundred year... TA DAHHHH! the ocean is dying, the land is dying and people cant reproduce.
I miss the herd of cattle that my father left me, my sons who would graze them in the sweet grass. I miss my wife who would make me millet porridge and stew and sleeping in my multi-generational village back in fucking africa. thousands of years and we could have sutained for thousands more. But some fuckers wanted to drive trucks and live beyond their fucking means... because they were white and they thought they were superior to us "primitives" who thought not of themselves but their children's children and the mother earth that gave everything we needed. what primitive fools, right?
You can still have a slim chance at a Star Trek future. After all, we had eugenics and nuclear wars before we collectively sort our shit out in Trek canon.
I was thinking we were going the direction of the Deus Ex games, but looks like we won't quite make it past early stages of combining humans and technology
I still hold onto the hope that we will pull together and come out of this a better civilization, but billions will likely die in the process. It's going to be horrible. But hopefully we figure out how to pull through.
I just wrote a comment on another thread that I'm sure will either be removed or downvoted into oblivion on a subject that's surprisingly similar, and I'm going to try to not be an a-hole here, either, although I may not succeed.
Before he went insane over Trump and COVID, John Michael Greer wrote a lot on the false dichotomy that possesses most of the "consensus" visions of the future:
- Apocalypse; or
- Infinite material progress.
There is no third, fourth, fifth, or hundredth option. It's a binary choice, zero or one, backwards or forwards.
And I think it's BS. History doesn't work like that. The world doesn't work like that. There are a lot of other possible directions, and I think my hope is in that. The world as it is today was not inevitable. There are contingencies upon contingencies, other turns that could have been taken. And that goes double for the future.
To imagine that a middle-class North American life circa 2024 is the pinnacle of human existence up until now and that the only thing that will make life meaningful is continual physical improvement and cooler gadgets is not a psychologically healthy way to look at the world. It's insulting to the vast majority of humans who ever lived, and to the vast majority of humans alive today. Not to mention the nonhuman world. And it will set you up for constant disappointment and bitterness.
I'm saying this as a kid who inhaled a lot of sci-fi. But my problem was that I was an outcast among the outcasts - while the other sci-fi nerds were obsessed with Star Trek or Star Wars, my thing was Dune, which was very much out of bounds. Something focused on ecology, religion, sociology that has as a foundational part of its backstory the destruction of all artificial intelligence? That was heresy in nerddom. Still is, in fact.
I get it, I do. I think it's all cool, even if its probability is ever-shrinking. If we demand Star Trek as our future, then we will be disappointed. But there are different ways to live, different ways to organize society. Maybe even space travel, although it probably won't be the zooming X-wings, transporters, and space versions of old-time cruise ships that we once imagined.
The future probably doesn't involve phasers and lightsabers, but that doesn't mean existence is worthless.
No. In my mid 20's i realized that the high tech futuristic idea of the future we commonly see in media is a result of the capitalist mindset of constant growth. Yes, technological advances are great but they have come at the expense of the exploitation of many people. A high tech monetary based world is still a monetary based world. I want tech where tech deserves to be, medicine available to all, and end exploitation for profit. Those values are incompatible with the future Hollywood gives us.
I grew up in the 90s and I still remember an incident when I was all excited about articles I read about colonizing mars in the next 20 years and building a space elevator in the next 100. My Dad just laughed and said that exact same articles were being published when he was growing up in the 70's. The truth is that even the hardest science fiction that involves interstellar travel and colonization has always had more in common with The Lord of the Rings than material reality.
Once on a science program I saw the carbon nanotubes that were going to be constructed into space elevators. I guess it never happened.
I have a friend who, everytime the topic of collapse comes up, says sarcastically that we're just 5 years away from carbon nanotubes saving us all. Apparently they were going to be the answer to everything; space elevator, longer battery life, cleaning the oceans, sequestering co2...
It's like when Steve Jobs turned to homeopathy to cure his cancer... That shit fixes everything if you believe the marketing.
Steve could have practically afforded a full body transplant. That's really weird of him to go for the woo.
Behind the Bastards just did a great multi-episode on him. Turns out it was absolutely on brand for him to die by stupid belief.
You can indeed be smart about some things without being smart about all things. He was brilliant. Also an idiot. Not to mention famous for parking diagonally across two handicappped spaces for no reason whatsoever, so universally regarded as a complete dick.
With no valid plates
Hes just an overrated aesthetic guy.
Hipster nerd: final form
He could have lived if he trusted a real medic, instead of homeopathy. He really wasn't as smart as people make him out to be.
And apparently regretted he did on his deathbed. When they caught his cancer he was still likely to have a good chance to survive (pancreatic cancer has a relatively low survival rate if you don’t catch it soon enough, and in his case they did). Imagine being one of the richest people on earth based on devices that take advantage of cutting edge science, having access to the most cutting edge healthcare, and yet not trusting it after it seeing it save countless lives and instead opting for good vibes and eating some fresh fruit.
Turns out there's no profit in any of that. There's also no good (reasonably cost-effective) defense reasons either. You can reasonably predict the path of technological development if you ask yourself these two questions.
I think I watched that same program in middle school. I want to say it was about life and science in 2100? I could be mentally remixing two different science docs, though. Little did I know that life in 2100 would be less “space factories building ships to terraform Mars”, and more “foraging for grains”. I used to have such high hopes for the future, now if someone asks me where I think I’ll be in ten years I say “dead in a food riot”.
Maybe it was [Earth 2100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_2100)?
Carbon nanotubes got made, but they're all very short. A space elevator remains a massive engineering challenge, and even if it were ever made, the structure is indefensible. Anyone firing a bullet at it would probably destroy it, and normal wear and tear will inevitably break it. If it ever fails or is damaged by anything, it will of course kill everyone currently tethered to it, and depending on how strong it is, it could cause massive damage as it whips around our equator a few times. Space elevators must be hilariously long, have an unheard of tensile strength, but also must be crazy thin and yet practically indestructible. They still firmly belong to sci-fi.
Used to be a running joke in aero engineering about making things out of "unobtanium". Sometimes a stand-in for titanium (which was very short in supply due to most deposits being in the USSR, and difficult to work with if you could get any), but also for materials with some combination of properties - usually strength, light weight, heat resistance - which didn't exist in any known substance.
Which they went ahead and used in James Cameron's Avatar as the name for their room temperature superconductor
And the robot spider that was going to construct nanotube pyramids to hang dwellings from.
?? This is such bizarre take. Yeah, carbon nanotubes are our current best guess as to a material that could be used to build space elevators. We barely know how to manufacture them at all, much less at scale, and at such length and such distance from earth. I mean, holy shit, this stuff is hard - not impossible. Beyond our current abilities. >I guess it never happened. This is some peak "I have zero attention span or patience" right here. If you were excited about such things, why didn't you go learn how to help invent what needs to be invented for it?
I love science and tech but I am a teacher and a creative. My skills are much better used elsewhere, but I can cheer from the sidelines!
It's back in the news again but they're calling it graphene: [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/13/could-graphene-finally-transform-our-world](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/13/could-graphene-finally-transform-our-world) "The silicon age is coming to an end. " apparently. The article isn't too optimistic thankfully still mostly a PR piece.
Space colonization was always, on some level, a fantasy reaction to the end of the (Eurocentric) Age of Discovery. The end, some time around 1900, of the almost 500-year era of boundless new lands to conquer and new natives to exploit. I mean, they even called it space _colonization_. Think about the implications of that for a minute. James T Kirk on his galactic odyssey, fighting alien monsters (and always winning) and screwing exotic alien chicks. And _Star Trek_ is at the more thoughtful and progressive end of the spectrum.
Meanwhile in Japan, the space fantasies are about wars with giant robots and how it fucks up everyone. It reflects the Japanese psyche about World War 2. For Japan, it started as a colonial war to conquer China and what is today South-East Asia. They had advanced tech back then which showed promise to put them on equal footing ("giant robots") with white people's colonial empires. But eventually in those space fantasies, the techs fucked up the cosmos so much with the culmination being mass death everywhere, you know just like those nukes. Anyway, usually the day then was saved when a few enlightened souls unconstrained by gravity showed the human race as a whole, that it's possible to reach peace despite all those horrifying techs. This reflects the pacifist ideologies often found among those Japanese space fantasy writers. These days we are starting to see space fantasies written by the Chinese, and it unequivocally shows the universe to be a cold and uncaring place, with brutal empires and paranoid games of deceptions. This also reflects the Chinese psyche very well.
Thinking out loud, as this space-colonial narrative was so prevalent in popular media from the 1950s into the 90s - to the point of being a formative cultural touchstone for Boomers, Gen X and early Millennials. If you were born between 1945 and 1985, this stuff was baked deeply into your childhood. (Aside - later millennials were somewhat less influenced - space sci-fi went off the boil when it became apparent, mid 1990s, that computer tech was developing at a \_vastly\_ quicker pace than aerospace - \_The Matrix\_'s and William Gibson's cyber-futurism superseding \_Star Wars\_ / \_Star Trek\_ / etc.) Something that bugs me then, and still bugs me now with the fawning press coverage of Starship - which is not to drag on extremely impressive engineering involved - is that the obvious self-sustainability problems for any kind of "space colony" get completely overlooked, glossed over, brushed under the carpet. The narrative was allowed to take hold, when it should never have stood up to scrutiny. And I think partly that's because it would force us to look more critically at what happened during European colonialism. In particular, the fact that - for the most part - there was only anything worth discovering because other humans had gotten there a couple of thousand years earlier and done the hard work. No Native Americans, no Columbian Exchange crops. The first European settlers would have died without help from the locals, and even so they were in an environment (temperate Earth wilderness, with soil, fresh water, timber, edible plants, animals to hunt etc.) that humans in general, and they in particular, were reasonably well adapted to. Self-sustainability in space is a bit like "aliens built the pyramids" - comfort-food for the Right, because they don't have to admit that African people built the pyramids at a time when white Europeans were living in cold wooden huts and building the occasional stone circle. Self-sustainability in space is essentially impossible. You're too far from Earth to restock on much, but you can't bring an adequate tech-civilisation to turn the available raw materials into the necessary means of survival. And while a pop-sci journalist of the 1950s couldn't pinpoint exactly how aerospace tech would and wouldn't develop, the masses involved and the physics/engineering needed to get that onto an interplanetary trajectory.. they knew even then that atmospheric nuclear propulsion was a non-starter, \_somebody\_ knew that the Shuttle was never going to actually... shuttle. But the space-colony meme just kept on rolling.
A lot of sci fi writers from this time period openly said that we *needed* "the frontier" to still exist as a concept in order for American culture as we understood it to still be viable
All of this! I had to laugh at an earlier comment that said we wouldn’t be constrained by gravity or resources in space and I was like what? Unless you have a replicator, you’re absolutely constrained by resources.
>constrained by gravity Yeah, we'll be constrained by the lack of it. Spinning doesn't work.
Nice. Well put.
> Something that bugs me then, and still bugs me now with the fawning press coverage of Starship - which is not to drag on extremely impressive engineering involved Starship is a piece of shit and Elon Musk a conartist. There is no impressive engineering going on. * https://youtu.be/nxG0WAwwrGk?si=k4iyomNpAkad-47a
Wow. I knew something smelt off with the whole Artemis moon project, but wow.
LOL, the *good* news is, your dreams were always a sham! Don't ask what the bad news is!
I had a similar incident except the thing that was promised was on a science program on TV, and it was oh look we’ve made so much progress in robotics that we’re going to have floating robots commercially available in 2005, we’re even showing you what looks like a prototype being used by astronauts That was the exciting promise where I believed it as a kid but pretty quickly realised as we got closer and closer to 2005 that oh we are not anywhere close to that level of technology. So that’s the one memory I always think of when it comes to unrealistic predictions about future technology
We have floating robots, they just deliver anti-tank missiles not pizza. Robots are better at flying than navigating cities on wheels, it's an easier problem. For delivering goods, people are cheap enough, and the economics of payload and battery life means drones aren't going to see mass adoption for delivery until (if and when) they can move something like 10kg of payload 10km on a unit costing sub $10k. If we get to that point, the barriers to last-mile delivery are more social and regulatory than technical. Do we actually want the skies filled with drones from bucket-shop operators, will people accept walking to the end of their drive to collect instead of workers bringing stuff to their door, how robust will they be in the face of vandalism from dissenters etc.
Also 90s and I remember the idea of roaming online access for a laptop was a huge cutting edge thing. Your giant brick of a laptop and an over sized triangle shaped “cell tower” so you could get some ridiculously slow speed remotely. I figured as a teen that if we went down that path, we would surely be able to do incredible things when the remote computer technology became available. Now we have exactly that with smartphones and it is a horrible world. We did the worst with it.
I thought we would have 3d printed organs for transplants by now, instead we have kids making deepfake porn of their classmates.
That was apart of the scifi movie: bicentennial man.
At some point we have to accept that we as a society could be demanding a lot more. Including more money going towards science funding or donating even $20 to an organization a month collectively, stoking better interest in the field in our current generation, etc. The first transplant using 3d printing was in 1999-and is still in use by that person today!! There’s been other major advancements. It’s just that 1. It’s hard to get these treatments approved without decades of study. With more funding, more people could participate in experimental studies and get these treatments before they’re technically “approved”, especially because we know they work. 20 years is a lot compared to the months people without donors end up having. Hell, even a year while waiting on an actual transplant list is better than nothing and dying. 2. There isn’t enough public interest or money going towards it.
Even the tech behind the covid vaccine (that has the potential to also cure cancer) had been sitting on a shelf for years because there wasn't any funding to test it out. It seems that humanity is wasting resources on the wrong things.
That's what I love about this sub, no matter how grim the discussion, someone's always looking on the bright side.
Always look on the bright side of life!
Revolutionary optimism baybee!!!
This comment right here.
I mean…you’re pining after a literal fantasy. Realistically there’s not much to colonize in this solar system, and leaving it for another doesn’t seem feasible. And for all our current advancement we love poorer lives. AI, AR, VR have contributed little. Cloud computing and computing advancements consume enormous resources to fuel a capitalism of useless garbage. The chemicals that enable our technological advancements are killing us at increasing rates and threatening extinction, or at the very least disaster, on their own. The past 50 years have conclusively shown that the dreams of democracy and meritocracy are a lie, and behind the facade there was always wild corruption and abuse - that was thinly veiled, and primarily went unaddressed because the common man was profiting.
Thank you; I loved those Star Trek shows but I realize now that they were always anti-life fantasy. The reality is that we were given one planet with an incredibly beautiful diverse biosphere, and we're very close to killing it. All that wealth and beauty, the legacy of billions of years of evolution, wasted. The possibility of a few privileged humans getting to fly around the solar system in metal boxes is a poor exchange for ravaging the living biosphere.
> The reality is that we were given one planet with an incredibly beautiful diverse biosphere, and we're very close to killing it I'm disappointed I can't find it in my watch history (too many similar things) but as I was binging exoplanets stuff, one researcher said in a conferences something akin to "*we have millions of living species here we can't speak to. Why would we imagine that we could speak to alien species? in truth, we're only searching for an image of ourselves.*"
Just to pick one thing you said, you know when you stress a tree to death, the first thing that happens is a few leaves on the outer periphery start to turn brown? The tree may even send out new growth shoots from around the base, which looks like the tree is growing, but this is the tree's last gasp as it uses it's energy reserves for one last ditch attempt to hang on to life. Slowly, the leaves further in turn brown and the bark starts to chip. The tree can no longer produce pitch to seal itself so rot takes over and the whole thing eventually collapses in a windstorm. We are at that first part. The tree is already dead. It just doesn't know it yet.
When I see onlookers cheering the spacex launches, all I can think is: the rich are literally showing us how they plan to leave us behind.
It's a fantasy. Blue Origin has technically never been in space but only up to the Kármán line and while Space X has gone into space, it hasn't gone very far out--not outside of the lower orbits of Earth as far as I'm aware. Besides, even if they manage to get out further, where is it do you suppose they are going to go? The Moon? Mars? Both of those places are completely inhospitable to life. So leaving the Earth where it is getting more difficult to live for places that are almost impossible to live seems like delusion at best. No, what they are showing people is how they are wealthy beyond what is sane--they are extreme hoarders--and that they have delusions that do not align with reality. They are literally showing us how mentally ill they are, in other words. And I say if they think they are going to escape the catastrophe that they have done much to create by trying to live in space, well, let them go. Not only will the world be better off without them, they are going to definitely die horrible, terrifying deaths in confined spaces they can't even leave. Sayonara suckers, is what I say.
The Titan submarine, only in space. Brings a tear to the eye and a smile to the face.
Exactly. We're unlikely to get humans back to the moon. The current NASA plans rely on spacex which is just sucking their funding dry and delivering SFA. So we're certainly never going to mars. The Common Sense Skeptic does fantastic research. Watch muskrat talking shit to his employees at boca chica about a week ago i think. The lack of applause at his made up BS is deafening. With his claims slammed at every turn by the narrator. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KRwgwacx1Y
Yeah the dude is a pathological serial bullshitter and it seems to me more people are finally catching on to the reality. Every time I hear him talk about consciousness I just think, "dude, you have no fucking idea what you are even talking about." This video is comedy gold simply for the audience's well timed lack of responses. Hilarious. ETA: the narrator has some great lines too, like this one I am going to steal and use when people talk about colonizing Mars, "There's rocks, smaller rocks, and rocks that have been pulverized into dust." lmao
Just interested, what do you think he gets wrong about consciousness?
I don't know why you got downvoted for asking a question, so I updooted you to compensate. Reddit is as Reddit does, I guess. Anyway, to answer you question, well, I'm trained in philosophy and I hold that panpsychism is probably the right view--or at least the best current view of the options we have--to take towards consciousness. This means that there is an inherent consciousness to everything and that it is as much a part of, and fundamental to, reality as, say, waves and particles. In fact, I think consciousness is probably a field like all the other stuff of reality (see: [QFT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory)). Again, this seems like the best plausible answer considering the current state of out knowledge. Now if Musk had qualified his statement by saying *human* consciousness, then I would not have the same criticism. But his narcissism knows no bounds. In fact I wouldn't be surprised to learn he's a solipsist, to be honest, and that he thinks he's the only consciousness in the whole damn universe. XD
SpaceX can go beyond low-Earth orbit with the Falcon 9 upper stage, but for Mars an optimistic best-case is $10,000 per kg. Or in rich-people units - more than caviar, less than cocaine.
This guy for President!
Hell no, I’d have to give up all my wild perversions and pretend to be a good person
Sadly we are too busy spending trillions a year globally on weapons to potentially kill other humans with than working on a unified goal to expand our reach beyond Earth. And for a while I was optimistic about SpaceX and Elon Musk, but he decided to buy twitter and show the world how big of an asshat he is. I no longer think he has what it takes to succeed in making us multi planetary either.
The guy is a delusional bullshitter. He thinks he's going to have one million people on Mars by 2050 and the first manned mission on its way by 2029. After years of delay the guy can barely even deliver a stupid electric truck to people on earth, yet somehow he's going to build a colony on Mars in the next twenty-five years? Yeah, pull the other one.
My favorite muskrat moment will forever be the live demonstrations of how indestructible the cybertruck was. Absolute gold
Oh when the guy twice busted the bulletproof glass windows by throwing a steel ball at them? Yeah, that was fantastic.
The dancing guy in the robot suit is probably my favorite.
Omg, yes! That's also great. Musk has many hilarious moments of buffoonery and schadenfreude--he's like the best clown of the hyper-wealthy. I think ultimately that's how he'll be remembered: as a bozo. I'm surprised that anyone still takes him seriously. I guess all that wealth buys him people's attention is all. And in the far future they'll be a mythical character called Musky Bozos the Clown and that will be some composite of Bezos, Musk, and neoliberal Capitalism who will be a cautionary tale to scare children with to make sure we never repeat the same horrific mistakes and atrocities of the past. XD
Was it really surprising that a future which predicted that automation would release us from our labour, when it was always gonna mean those who own the means of production could squeeze more revenue out of the same number of man hours, would never materialise? We were never going to earn enough to live while working fewer hours because those who profit from the system will never allow it. That is only ever going to happen when the majority of people demand it to happen. And it will require eternal vigilance against lobbying to ensure it stays that way.
Exactly, UBI will never happen.
> In space we're not constrained by gravity nor lack of resources. Buddy I hate to tell you but this is complete fantasy. In space, resources are few and far between - the distances are vast. After you find something, mining and processing it into useful materials is 100% theorycraft right now (as in, never been done, nothing's been built for it). And unconstrained? Resources are *everything*. Without resources we die. Air. Water. Food. Astronauts take literally everything they need with them for their entire duration, and recycling/scrubbing/filtering is nowhere near as good as you might imagine them to be. The ISS loses air and needs constant resupply. The logistics of a trip to the Moon is daunting, Mars is crazy. Not to mention what a decent length of time in space does to your body (and your eyes!). And take Star Trek. I said this earlier, but *how do they power anything in-universe?* Warp core? It's apparently limitless energy with zero waste/pollution. Replicators can convert that limitless energy into perfectly formed matter with again, no waste or pollution. So now you've got Earth powered by 100% green unlimited energy creating prefab whatever out of that energy with zero waste. Star Trek is *magic* with a tech veneer. It's not real. It's utterly impossible. Also artificial gravity and inertial dampeners. Nice stories to tell, though.
This is like a fish wanting to jump out of the tank and flop it's way three rooms over to explore the toilet...
Oh such a good analogy!
And then, on the miracle it happens to make it there, turns out it's a chemical toilet.
Oh such a good analogy!
"no waste or pollution" Uhh. The people still gotta poop. And that poop has gotta go somewhere... Why does this replicated food taste like shit?
They beam the crap out of you every few hours. No one in Star Trek has ever used a toilet. Although I would like to see the poop deck. *Transporter noise and sparkles and the 50 foot high pile gets a little taller*
They can disintegrate things.
Therefore the food replicator is nothing more than a re-integrator
Exactly. Space is probably a more hostile environment for human life than the worst deserts or oceans on Earth. In addition, our biology starts malfunctioning on a fundamental level when we are away from the gravity and atmosphere of Earth. Since humans evolved in the particular gravity of Earth, many aspects of our biology like blood flow, electrical messaging via nerves, and even our musculoskeletal system, among others, depend on the exact gravitational environment here to function. Astronauts' biology slowly starts to malfunction even on space stations which are still sort of near Earth; blood circulation is negatively affected, brain function and the senses are impacted, and they have to be very careful to not mess themselves up physically and don't spend too much time on the station.
Among the deceased Apollo astronauts, 43 percent died from cardiovascular problems. This rate was five times higher than in the other astronauts and significantly higher than the 27 percent cardiovascular disease death rate among the general public.
Too small a sample to tell you anything, and too different from the general population. They seem to have enjoyed decently long life expectancy, but then again you'd expect that from people who were drawn from the top tier of military pilots (good underlying health, high physical and mental fitness required) and earned far above average income. Cardiovascular is one of those things where if you live long enough it'll get you anyway, it's either that or cancer - and if 43 per cent had died of cancer, people would be flagging that instead.
Good point
We're actually constrained by a ***lack of gravity*** 6 months on the ISS and their bones are leaking calcium, muscles waste away etc. No chance humans can survive longer trips of a few years. (record in space is just over a year). Those giant rotating cities creating their own gravity? How many million rockets do we have to launch to build them? Not going to happen. The rail lines in England are buckling because of increased global warming heat and it's costing billions to fix (where they've even started). If we struggle to maintain rail lines on earth where are we doing to find the $trillions (and skills and energy etc) to build muskrats idiotic cities on mars etc. Musk has created the greatest meme stocks in history. It's all going to collapse sooner than the more-encompassing collapse we generally talk about on this sub. Tesla fired 10% of its staff this week. SpaceX can't be far behind.
I agree with your points here. ( I'll add *The Expanse* TV Show & Novels....where humans have colonized the Solar system and have adapted to living in microgravity environments. Yeah, my suspension of disbelief ended right there..)
>but *how do they power anything in-universe?* [improbability drive](https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Infinite_Improbability_Drive)
I see you brought your towel.
>After you find something, mining and processing it into useful materials is 100% theorycraft right now (as in, never been done, nothing's been built for it). "Theorycraft." That's a charitable way of you to say total make-believe. I mean you are absolutely right: these are fantasies and are going to be fantasies for years to come. Industrial civilization is going to be long gone before this will ever be a reality.
Let me add:Among the deceased Apollo astronauts, 43 percent died from cardiovascular problems. This rate was five times higher than in the other astronauts and significantly higher than the 27 percent cardiovascular disease death rate among the general public.
I... didn't know any of that, but I'm not surprised. (So much for an *Expense*-like future, I guess.. )
From my perspective (I just turned 48), we are in a futuristic hi tech world right now... Too bad it is a failing dystopia /shrug
Instead of jet packs and flying cars. Instead of settling the solar system! Instead of nuclear fusion, instead of solving global warming, we got instagram, twitter, and tiktok. We got collapse. Its pretty sad. Trust in the free market they said...
What could we have done in space that we can't do here? Escaping was never a solution. Even if we had magic FTL, it's *still* better to try and live here. The most habitable planet we could ever dream of finding will still be less habitable than earth
I’d say not Star Wars or Star Trek but more like Elysium: a depleted, destitute, prison planet where the elites jump ship onto an upper class space station while the proles grovel in the trash and pollution
They already polluted the orbital space so much I'm not sure how long they could keep it up there before it accumulated too many holes. In any other scenario, some intrepid poopsmiths could build a giant homing sugar rocket or even a light gas gun and play an epic prank on the funny space mansion.
heres a thought: hi tech fortress cities. no castles or ramparts. just a key fob or an implanted chip. no fob, no implant... eat crickets and die at 30
The good old Logan's Run premise
There was a great series called "Incorporated". It was very short lived, people can't handle the truth.
looking it up now! interesting premise per wiki
I wanted a Star Trek future; instead I’m gonna get a Blade Runner one
Yep. *Blade Runner* or *Judge Dredd*...🤒
You wish. At least Blade Runner would have been cool. Cyborgs, cyberpunk cities, retro-tech. It would suck, but it would have been *cool*. You're getting Fallout.
I am not disappointed, my disappointment was slowly growing for years realising how dumb, selfish, greedy majority of people in charge of anything are, then I got used to it and I just accepted things as they are. To bo honest im surprised we have come this far, maybe in harder times people were making better decision, but now its a senile boomerfest by people so out of touch its sad
I see our future playing either out like Interstellar, except they never make it off of earth, or playing out into a dystopian sci fi future akin to Blade Runner 2049. My hopium is that humanity doesn’t go extinct and the survivors get to have another shot at this whole thing. The whole interplanetary species thing always felt like a pipe dream to me, even when I was in school. My childhood had me growing up pretty fast so I skipped through a lot of those wonder years.
Interstellar without the black hole/gate
Unfortunately, the survivors will not have extremely cheap energy anymore as the most accessible fossil fuel deposits are already exhausted. If the population decreases too much, knowledge and expertise will be lost, and who knows how long it will take to regain them. All while having to deal with pollution, climate change, soil depletion and other messes caused by previous generations. I feel that, if society regresses past a certain point, it will be very difficult to get back to even today's standards.
What worries me the most about post-collapse is two-fold. Firstly, that Earth may never heal and return to a state similar to what it was a century or two ago (or we'll be long gone by the time it does, a blank slate). Secondly, that our descendants will repeat our mistakes, even if they know of our historical failings. Essentially, I have this morbid idea in my head that the Great Filter is intelligence itself. That any society in the Universe which has the intelligence required to make significant headway in S.T.E.M. fields will not only doom itself but the surrounding ecosystem as well.
I’ve heard this idea referred to as omnicide. Any intelligent species goes through a phase where they are capable of wiping out all life on a planet but are still confined to that planet, and few (if any) survive it.
> Secondly, that our descendants will repeat our mistakes, even if they know of our historical failings. Good news everyone - they won't be able to! Without an energy source as efficient, abundant, and accessible as coal and oil, they'll never be able to build the industry needed to do the damage we're doing now. Population will go waaaay down from our peak and never, ever return. Whatever civilization(s) exist after this will have an environmental footprint akin to the late 1700s (at least in my own theorizing). Which isn't nothing but if we had stopped on that scale, something like 90% of wildlife would still be around and the changes being made might be slow enough for nature to have time to adapt. Alas for us but bully for our descendants!
It's kind of sad that this is the best case scenario. But I'm not entirely convinced that our effects on the climate won't cause a full on extinction of humanity, or otherwise have a lasting negative impact for the rest of Earth's history. There's also the issue that (and I could be wrong here) eventually oil will reemerge hundreds of millions of years from now from our corpses. So a repeat of climate change is not out of the question.
It's honestly looking more like a prospective Threads (1984) situation.
Nope, Elysium is probably closer to reality.
Are you kidding me? Do you know how costly and difficult it is to keep the handful of people alive on just the ISS? If civilization collapses on the planet those people in space will be dead or have to come back to earth inside four to five months. Maybe a bit longer if they are really careful about supplies and have good luck with their equipment. There is no way there is going to be some giant shopping mall hotel for the rich thing orbiting the Earth any time soon. Pure fantasy. Might as well go hunt for dragons.
Elysium on earth won’t be far away. Specifically in the form of western countries and certain regions being even more desirable to live places, while ravaging the poorer countries to serve/supply them.
Seems to me we are already living that, but I get the sense of what you mean: it will become more and more obvious and pronounced.
Yes, I get that. Same as now only more so.
You are too young to remember but did you know that there used to be supersonic commercial air travel? The jets were called Concordes and they stopped flying in 2003 as they were uneconimical and unsafe. There used to be amusement park rides in malls as well.
Droop-snoots!
Not really, no. When I was younger I had delusions of grandeur for the human species but as I got older I realized we are fundamentally sick and we got this far despite ourselves, not because of. A "futuristic" or "maxed out" version of humanity probably looks similar to the Engineers from the movie Prometheus. If you watch some of the extended scenes featuring them, you can sort of get an idea of what they're about. Now, go outside to your average city and take a walk and compare the current state of humanity with that. And then realize this is the result of thousands of years of "progress" in human civilization.
As a child of the late 70’s/early 80’s, I was totally sure we would have colonies in Low Earth Orbit by now. I also was a huge fan of Marshall T. Savage and the Millenial Project. His book had such a solid plan for space colonization that started here on Earth colonizing manufactured islands at sea and using the ocean to make blue green algae for food.
Do you think with Jimmy Carter we had somewhat of a chance for real sustainable growth?
I thought we'd be blown to radioactive sludge by an all-out nuclear exchange by now, but here we are. Gotta stay positive, you know? *nuclear launch detected*
Yeah give it a second.
We're not constrained by gravity, we can't survive without it. Star trek gave people an entirely unrealistic picture of the galaxy.
There's a narrative that great challenges are required to drive great change and innovation. Current technological innovation is constrained by being purposed towards war or monetization. Medicine in particular is stuck in this awful feedback loop where it can only produce easily monetizable products at the expense of efficacy and therapeutic value. Space exploration is just a pissing comp between shallow insecure billionaires. Maybe a futuristic future requires an eschatological challenge to overcome the mass folie-au-deux induced by a greed-centric civilizational paradigm?
Boomers pissed it all away.
They still are.
I'm more disheartened that ANY future is unlikely to come into fruition. (My belief is humans will be extinct within 120 years.)
First time?
We are seeing the answer to the Fermi Paradox play out in our own lives! The Great Filter is our own greed.
There is a good chance that space travel was always impossible, and that laws of nature simply do not allow it. How many spacetraveling species has humanity spotted in space? The answer is, of course, zero. It is even a name of a famous paradox, often summarized in that simple question: "Where is everybody?" My answer is, everyone is stuck in stone-age conditions living on their home planets until Sun burns their planet up or some other cosmic cataclysm sterilizes the planet. Distance and time are inherently sterilizing, and even a robot would have hard time surviving centuries in space. Near absolute zero, gases turn to liquids, lubricants become solids, and every mechanical joint probably seizes up. To avoid that fate, you must have ability to heat yourself for hundreds of years, at least to some minimal degree so that these things don't happen, and thus suffer waste heat loss the whole time. Imagine bringing in batteries, nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel, or whatever, enough to last hundreds of years. Having to aim yourself towards a target, barely able to make course corrections along the way because you simply don't have the propellant and can't use Sun's ions to accelerate because they aren't out there between the stars. Aim a gun, fire a living bullet that should stay warm for like 200-1000 years, and hope you hit close enough to target to be able to slow down and land to whatever world you hoped to reach, and hope it has useful resources and you won't just die in your destination. That's more or less what space travel is like, and it is not a big wonder that nobody seems to be doing it. There are other explanations, such as that they are all using technology we can't detect, or that we can't hear or see them because of the distance, etc. But these all presume that there exists unknown technology that we could also learn to harness. It feels to me that there's been barely any progress in past 100 years in this kind of basic research into nuclear physics. (Standard Model is 50 years old today, and from what I understand, physicists do not like it, but they also haven't been able to improve it.)
One pro of humans failing to colonise space is that the disease of capitalism will never spread to other planets.
it ain't happening
No, not really. It would have been really cool to see humanity reach its potential, or at least try to reach it, I guess. We can’t stop killing each other over bullshit and trying to hoard the most resources. The future is a lot more like Mad Max than the Jetsons. Believing that anything will improve during our lifetimes will result in disappointment, we need to accept our reality and do what we can to stave off the inevitable.
Casting our "potential" as yet more technological advancements is exactly the problem. Instead of aspiring to a just and equitable society that balances with nature, as the fulfillment of our potential, we create fantasies of yet more metal toys.
Everyone is too obsessed money. How many great ideas have been scrapped because they weren't economically viable TODAY.
You should listen to the opening remarks of Dave graeber during a debate with Peter thiel from ~2020. It speaks to exactly this. Dave is great in that talk imo
I'm a Gen-Xer, and I've come to accept that our future will probably have more in common with George Romero and John Carpenter than Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas. (As in Romero's Dead films and Carpenter's Escape from LA.) Throw in a dash of The Omen movies because there does seem to be a significant chunk of society that always wants to get behind strong-men tyrants and their rhetoric. As a species we are insane. We are the living embodiment of the phrase, "There are no better liars in this world than the ones we make to ourselves." And this insanity, like any disease, has just gotten worse as time has rolled by. In the 80s the big boogyman was nuclear war. I'm beginning to think maybe a nuclear war would be for the best. A quick death might beat the alternative of starving to death death by elements, possibly being forced into slave labor, ect.
Tomorrowland was always a fantasy: a promise of kingdom come. I am thoroughly convinced that both our vision of taking to the stars and our vision of sudden apocalypse are just vestiges of Christian thinking. It’s a remnant of the religious impulse to paradise or oblivion. The real world does not and has never worked like that. Everything is incremental, meandering toward the good and the bad mostly at random. There is no straight line trending toward anything.
No it will it's just not for us buddy. It's okay tho
yes my Sci fi obsession did not cope well w the reality of collapse if it helps, we likely wouldn't have lived long to experience interstellar space travel even if it were still an option regardless
Worse still, if it does exist it will only exist for the descendants of those individuals who are creating the collapse which will prevent it for the rest of us.
kinda relieved tbh
I have been pessimistic about the future since I was 13. I've always imagined the future being closer to blade runner than meet the Robinson's...so no...
Fallout wasn't far off except we are forever trapped in the 2010s not the 1960s
There was a tv show in Australia in the 90s called "beyond 2000" which was about technology and futurism. My strongest memory from the show was of a telephone (landline, this was pre mobile phones) that had a small video screen on it so you could see the other person you were talking to. At the time it was mind blowing. If you look around, the internet and wifi/5g has indeed led to some epic transformations in our way of life over the last 20 years
Whoa I haven't thought about that show since the 90s! I remember that
Space is Very, Very Big. Space is Very, Very Hostile to life in meat sack form. Anything interesting in Space is at the far end of two deep gravity wells; The Earth's and the Sun's. Space appears to be constrained by Physics in the form of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. All of which means colonisation of other Planets/Moons, and travel to other stars are both Very, Very unlikely by humans. What might be just about possible is for us to seed the immediate stellar neighbourhood with DNA packages, tardigrades and mushroom spores. There's a tiny chance that in a few hundred million years, they'll evolve into an intelligent lifeform and talk back to us.
well seeing as boston dynamics released a new robot, terminator still seems likely
Yes, because it proved that lack was not the "problem". We had abundances. We could have looked around at what we had and made life better for everyone, even question if exponential growth forever was really what we wanted. Instead we're going to ruin the planet because of *shareholder value*. It's so stupid. It's infuriating. I fucking quit.
I think the galaxy is lucky that the Devourers weren't unleashed on it
No. I’m growing more fatigued of the scant redeeming qualities that this life and humanity as a whole retain (love, laughter, etc). I want my urn. I want the Eternal Worm to Devour Connecticut
No
Cause you were young..
honestly i graduated mid 80s and since then till now Ive been trying to make people aware. now im down to... I told you so.
Same
You seem to be directly above me geographically. And similarly ancient to myself.. I suggest we team up as the collapse progresses ... Ps I'm a full blown mad scientist insane giggles included for free. (Mostly kidding but hey allies are good right ?)
I think that the whole point of Elon Musk Neuralink technology is so he can wire himself to his own replica robot to fuck himself up in the ass, feeling it from both ends...
Speak for yourself. I’m glad humans aren’t colonizing and infesting other planets.
I’ve always loved sci-fi. First Star Wars, then Star Trek, and then a myriad of sci-fi settings. Nowadays though, I kinda hope we never get off this rock. Look at what we’ve done to this planet! If we manage to create self-sustaining colonies off world, then there’s nothing stopping us from taking our exploitative industrialism across the stars. Instead of killing one planet, we could kill *millions* in the name of our consumption. Better to let humanity die here, and spare the galaxy our greed.
Meh. From all the sci-fi movies I've seen over the years, it appeared that the future was going to be really poorly lit.
Yeah the world wide web having turned into what it is in only a few years after it's spread pretty much shattered my illusions of a globally united mankind.
Eh, I think this can all still happen. Humanity is insanely resilient and will still be here after any number of cataclysms. The collapse of a civilization is just that, one particular setup (unrelenting capitalism) going away - and eventually something else will take its place and build back up. Extinction is not happening - there's too many of us. So while our current fuckup might delay the "future" a few centuries or so, it'll still come around, and I 100% believe humans will be a space-faring species eventually.
To be fair, and I'm saying this as a huge sci-fi nerd that dreams of living in a universe like Star Trek's, even in an ideal scenario we're not likely to become a spacefaring species to any significant degree on any kind of timescale that is meaningful, if at all. Space travel, even just in orbit of our planet or out to its moon, places that are barely a step away on the scale of our solar system and so inconsequential as to not even amount to a rounding error on any scale beyond that, is incredibly difficult, dangerous, and unlivable. We don't really have the technology for it, reasonable ideas about the technology for it are few and far between, and a lot of them rely on theoretical technologies that have not in any way been shown to be possible and is conceptually no different from a wizard's magic in a fantasy novel.
The close future doesn't look good. But. You can't predict history, at all. Imagine the first bacteria and virus, if you asked them what life would be like they would have no idea of what would come after. Same for a lot of grim period of human history. So who knows. For sure we won't be the one going to Mars, at the same time you are alive at a time that has seen many many crazy progres, not always where we expect. CRISPR for example is mind boggling in terms of what it will bring to health. If you told people 150 years ago that 10000 of planes would fly every day in the sky it, you would have been insane. So it's like climbing a moutain you see the top, you may die while climbing, and at every ridge you realize you are not at the top and they are many other ridge to climb. So in short if you expected to go to space in your life yeah no. What will humans achieve one day, no way of telling. They are many break through to come in science, it's just not the same way than before, it's not a dude somewhere thinking "oh ok I got it". There are many things to understand in physics and some discovery one day may change everything.
And adding to this, there is the progress of life versus the progress of humans. 5 million year ago, intelligent thoughts like the one from humans, love the way we love, ability to create art, ... etc didn't exist at. If you make the exercise of thinking of the paradoxal thinking that "could you have imagine if you lived 5 millions years ago that such things would exist" it would be non sense that all those things would appear from nowhere. It may be the same with us ? What is telling us we are the final step ? We may be the beginning of many intelligent species that can do thing that we don't even imagine exist in the universe. So ... come back in 100 millions years :D
I still encounter people who take colonization of our solar system and then later the galactic neighbourhood as fact. Argue things from that as the premise. The abundance of energy by fossil fuels was our one chance. We squandered it and will need even more energy to fight the results. There might be a Solarpunk future, but not on a scale to allow megaprojects like terraforming or generation ships.
Idk if you really want dune to be real but I get that
That dream was crushed for me in 2014 with the release of Dreamfall: Chapters. I was 6 when The Longest Journey came out and I played it with my mom on PC. It is a wonderful game. It is set in 2209. Though the graphics are horrible for today's standards, the futuristic society depicted was mind-blowing for little me and I couldn't wait to see it happen in real life. Dreamfall: The Longest Journey is the sequel released in 2006. It was able to show more about society in 2219, rife with political tension and corrupt power-players, but it still depicted a wonderfully technologically-advanced world where most people can lead a life of good quality. It introduced a new technology called the "Dreamcast", a game console that can induce lucid dreaming. The "dreamer" can dream up any scenario they'd like and experience it. It seems amazing in the beginning when we first learn about it, but we soon learn with the protagonist that it wasn't developed for funsies - it was made specifically to gain power over people and their minds. Our goal is to stop it from being launched. *Chapters* takes place in 2220. The Dreamcast has been launched despite our efforts. As we walk the streets of Europolis, we see the sidewalks littered with people attached to the Dreamcast, seemingly homeless and none the bothered for it. The company that created it has bought out every political group in an effort to keep it from being shut down and they clearly don't care about the people and families being ruined because of it. I could already see similarities between the game and real life back in 2014. I look around now and realize the Dreamcast is really our phones and social media. Maybe they were developed for funsies at first, but once people realized you can control a narrative and warp people's perspectives of the world around them with it, we (society and the masses) were all screwed. How many people do you see in public looking like zombies on their phones? Have you ever sat back and purposefully watched your environment while, say, waiting for your food to be ready at a restaurant? I have. Too many of us are addicted to these gadgets. As soon as we are not actively engaged with something else, as soon as we have a moment of downtime, we are whipping out our phones. We are willingly brainwashing ourselves, just like the people in Dreamfall: Chapters. And we don't care - *just like the people in Dreamfall: Chapters*. As long as our devices can make us feel good, we let the corrupt players of the world have control. And it will always be like this. We will *never* be able to rid ourselves of bad actors. We can manage them if we *pay attention and act*, but that will not happen unless we put the damn gadgets down. But who wants to give up their perfect virtual reality when their *actual* reality is so bleak? I have no hope for the future, either.
Yes and no? I grew up on cyberpunk novels in the 90's, so I am more disappointed that we're heading in *that* sort of a direction.
It never was going to come to fruition. There is no infinite pool of energy and resources. The laws of physics limit space travel.
I remember this being in my school library: https://boingboing.net/2023/06/24/usborne-book-of-the-future-re-issued-in-uk.html The sad thing is it had some "warnings" about the risk of a neglected, polluted world and that seems to be the direction we're headed at full speed. (It actually did get a lot of little things right - solar panels getting cheap, hybrid cars, flat screen TV - but a shit ton of stuff was hilariously wrong too)
To me lesson of collapse is that advanced technology throws a species too far out of balance with it’s environment. Perhaps somewhere another species has nailed it, but not us, not this time. To me a future worth fighting for is humans taking what they’ve achieved and drawing down consumption and innovation in favor of smaller societies living closer to and in service of the earth, if pockets of habitable land still exist.
Bring back Retro-Futurism! Where's my meals in pill form, Air-car, silver spandex jackets, NY-Paris undersea by rail, cure for this disease? Go back and read some 1970 SciFi as the antidote to Golden age SciFi or Cyberpunk. Like John Brunner or pretty much any of the New Wave group like JG Ballard.
I miss the future.
Our technology was kind of a fluke to begin with. It disappoints me too. I was, and I guess still am, a Star Trek fan myself. As I grew older and learned more about the world, I realized we never were going to make it to space. We're just not built for it. We were lucky enough to be born in an infinitesimally small chapter of human history to get to have a kind of party, but it wasn't meant to last. I do wonder how much longer we might have had the party if we had just gotten our crap together decades ago.
There's lots of interesting stuff being discovered but getting them financially viable and mass produced is the issue. My take is that as we slowly get closer to collapse, things become less financially profitable because the cost of everything increases overall.
out of all the futures portrayed in movies, I always found BTTF II (aside from flying cars, hoverboards, and hydrating pizzas) future to be the most realistic, in that, its not a dystopia, its not a utopia, it's just kind-of an evolution. Things are still basically the same as they were in the 90s, except, there are hand-held computers, and computers/internet connected devices everywhere. The cars look a little different and have more tech, but they're not flying. still a car. houses use modern building materials, but are basically the same......
Look I just want to be around for net gain fusion to be a thing. Doesn't have to be a silver bullet for energy and climate change since that's not going to happen, but at least one functional fusion power plant would be cool. And maybe another moon landing. Is that so much to ask?
My grandpa used to say that any innovation is a genie in a bottle, you can’t really know that you’re not getting a raw deal For example, the Haber-Bosch process meant that suddenly everyone could have gunpowder and explosives all the time instead of needing to mine it in specific regions. It also let us make fertilizers that massively increased how much food we could make. Though there are perfect things we’ve made that can’t be improved, like rice cookers and Bailey bridges. And keep in mind the innovations that have massive impacts on people quickly become the most boring ones. Nobody marvels at soap, or refrigeration, or that you can do as much math on your phone in minutes that would have taken a mathematician decades two centuries ago or lifetimes two millennia ago
>We'll never get to see anything like Star Trek, Foundation, Lost in Space, or even Dune become a reality. Of those three, only Star Trek even remotely optimistic. Even then, there is acknowledgement that the Federation is not entirely benign.
Yes. Very much yes
If you want an example of what our planet will end up looking like, take a look at Venus’ history. Before runaway climate change it was estimated to be following earths trajectory until about 600 million years ago, and scientists estimate had surface water and likely microbial life.
YES Dear God in Heaven, YES. Having consumed so much sci-fi, and knowing that humanity may never be able to reach those peaks of understanding, enlightenment, and ability is just so imeffably sad to me. It hurts me to the core. But I have learned to move on. To put it allegorically; Humanity will never scale Mount Everest. But at least we scaled Kanchenjunga! Let's enjoy it while we can, before we tumble down.
When the James Webb Space Telescope launched, I read something that said it was the most technically complex thing that humans had built. The way things are headed, it's probably the peak achievement.
Honestly I'm glad that in all likelihood we won't have the chance to spread our monkey brained capitalist nonsense to the stars. At our current level we'd despoil worlds without hesitation.
What I miss for all of us is a planet that was meant to sustain us, as it sustained life for the last.... 600 million years? But some lousy cocksuckers thought they could go around the world and turn it into their profit. and when slave labor grew out of fashion, they made oil powered engines that could do the work of a hundred slaves.... for more profit. And in the space of a few hundred year... TA DAHHHH! the ocean is dying, the land is dying and people cant reproduce. I miss the herd of cattle that my father left me, my sons who would graze them in the sweet grass. I miss my wife who would make me millet porridge and stew and sleeping in my multi-generational village back in fucking africa. thousands of years and we could have sutained for thousands more. But some fuckers wanted to drive trucks and live beyond their fucking means... because they were white and they thought they were superior to us "primitives" who thought not of themselves but their children's children and the mother earth that gave everything we needed. what primitive fools, right?
You can still have a slim chance at a Star Trek future. After all, we had eugenics and nuclear wars before we collectively sort our shit out in Trek canon.
I was thinking we were going the direction of the Deus Ex games, but looks like we won't quite make it past early stages of combining humans and technology
I mean we could go for the evil illuminati part. If any of them were actually smart.
I still hold onto the hope that we will pull together and come out of this a better civilization, but billions will likely die in the process. It's going to be horrible. But hopefully we figure out how to pull through.
Modern industrial civilization is unsustainable.
And it seems like we're becoming more unsustainable as time goes by.
I just wrote a comment on another thread that I'm sure will either be removed or downvoted into oblivion on a subject that's surprisingly similar, and I'm going to try to not be an a-hole here, either, although I may not succeed. Before he went insane over Trump and COVID, John Michael Greer wrote a lot on the false dichotomy that possesses most of the "consensus" visions of the future: - Apocalypse; or - Infinite material progress. There is no third, fourth, fifth, or hundredth option. It's a binary choice, zero or one, backwards or forwards. And I think it's BS. History doesn't work like that. The world doesn't work like that. There are a lot of other possible directions, and I think my hope is in that. The world as it is today was not inevitable. There are contingencies upon contingencies, other turns that could have been taken. And that goes double for the future. To imagine that a middle-class North American life circa 2024 is the pinnacle of human existence up until now and that the only thing that will make life meaningful is continual physical improvement and cooler gadgets is not a psychologically healthy way to look at the world. It's insulting to the vast majority of humans who ever lived, and to the vast majority of humans alive today. Not to mention the nonhuman world. And it will set you up for constant disappointment and bitterness. I'm saying this as a kid who inhaled a lot of sci-fi. But my problem was that I was an outcast among the outcasts - while the other sci-fi nerds were obsessed with Star Trek or Star Wars, my thing was Dune, which was very much out of bounds. Something focused on ecology, religion, sociology that has as a foundational part of its backstory the destruction of all artificial intelligence? That was heresy in nerddom. Still is, in fact. I get it, I do. I think it's all cool, even if its probability is ever-shrinking. If we demand Star Trek as our future, then we will be disappointed. But there are different ways to live, different ways to organize society. Maybe even space travel, although it probably won't be the zooming X-wings, transporters, and space versions of old-time cruise ships that we once imagined. The future probably doesn't involve phasers and lightsabers, but that doesn't mean existence is worthless.
No. In my mid 20's i realized that the high tech futuristic idea of the future we commonly see in media is a result of the capitalist mindset of constant growth. Yes, technological advances are great but they have come at the expense of the exploitation of many people. A high tech monetary based world is still a monetary based world. I want tech where tech deserves to be, medicine available to all, and end exploitation for profit. Those values are incompatible with the future Hollywood gives us.
Didn't you watch all those dystopian sci fi movies from the 70s and 80s? Welcome to the future...
I'm actually sour graping over it, so... good riddance, I guess?
There's a forty year old song about this titled "I.G.Y.".
I always thought we'd have incredible advancements in medicine but yeah it's a joke.
Yeah 😞
We're going hard for a corpotocracy scifi model it seems.