- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
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Dystopias on the other hand, were way too optimistic about how long it would take for everything to turn to shit.
One of the defining characteristics of that eras literature, not just sci-fi, is a reflection of the cultural belief in a narrative history.
The belief that society will advance, and that there’s an inevitable direction that things will go even if there are setbacks.In fairness to the Sci-Fi writers, we’ve launched so many probes into deep space since then.
We’ve sent satellites to Jupiter and diving bells below the clouds of Venus. We’ve retrieved soil from Mars and sent signals from beyond the Ort Cloud. We’ve recorded Gravity Waves and captured light off the edge of Black Holes and recorded the touch of Neutrinos.
We don’t have six guys drinking coffee and staring out a window overlooking the moon of Titan. But that is largely because our signaling and robotics has made automated exploration more practical than manned missions.
And also because SciFi writers of the 1950s didn’t understand how much radiation humans would need to shield themselves against once they left the Earth’s magnetosphere.
Just fill the hull with clams!
We went from the first flight, to the first spaceflight in 58 years. 8 years after that, we put humans on the moon. I don’t think it was unreasonable for scifi writers in the 70s and early 80s to have glorious ideas about what we would accomplish in another 20-30 years.
Meanwhile, Asimov: We’ll have robots that will help us accomplish crazy shit but stupid zealots will keep whining about it and holding them back
This is in no way relevant to anything that’s happening today.
… That’s what you got from Asimov?
Yep. You have something to add?
You are absolutely correct that is a major theme, especially in the Foundation books. To be fair, Asimov also buried that point in ponderous prose and scattered it across centuries of book-time.
I think Goyer did the best one could do in adapting Foundation to visual media. He had to invent and re-imagine a lot in order to give continuity and cohesion to a sprawling story. If he had stayed more true to the books, it would have flopped instantly.
Seems a little reductive, especially when some of the whiny zealots are the robots themselves
I mostly picked up on the incest, but I was like 12 when I read that series
now take that and replace “robots” with “shareholders”. perspective of every single big shareholder today.
I’d rather replace zealots with shareholders.
I used to wonder if I would ever walk on the moon or Mars during my lifetime when I was a kid. I miss that
I have a copy of Popular Science from May of 1958, and they talk about nuking the moon twice, then building a missile base on it. That seems way more realistic.
People are confusing optimism with naiveté. The old sci-fi assumed the rate of progress with be constant or even accelerate. They saw people got to space and moon in what? 20 years? So they thought we will get to Mars by the end of century and beyond our solar system some time after that. They didn’t predict the end of Cold War and massive disinvestment from space exploration. But there were plenty of pessimistic takes on the future. In Bladerunner all the animals are dead, in Alien everything is run by evil corporations, in Battlestar Galactica everyone dies, in Star Wars whole worlds are destroyed, apocalyptic visions are common. Getting the dates wrong is not the same as being optimistic.
Cyberpunk like Blade Runner was a direct response to the optimism of the golden age of SF. They said there wasn’t enough sin in those stories. So they had protagonists who were heavy drug users taking out assassination contracts on big corpo CEOs and banging a prostitute in a back alley after they’re done. They have high technology compared to the time it was written, but it doesn’t help the common people make their lives any better. The Earth is a polluted wasteland, and the cities are stuffed full of people with trash all over the place.
Guess which approach is closer to what actually happened?
Don’t worry, they’re banning the sins of the poor and cracking down on the dregs of society, just in time for you to be part of that
Alien nailed it
Their decision to trap the physical hardware in the 1980s is very evocative.
The whole setting feels like a crystalized moment in US history.
Star Wars whole worlds are destroyed
Sure. But that happened a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
Folks make it sound like it was some kind of analogy to Vietnam, with the Vietcong being the good guys. Which is just absurd. Get your politics out of my SciFi!
The rapid progress and then stalling is not caused by lack of investment, it’s the harsh reality of physics.
We cracked how to have machines fly like birds and then it’s low hanging fruit to achieve amazing things in atmosphere.
While exploring that, rocketry makes nearby space possible, and the moon is “right there”.
But then things are exponentially farther away, and many of them bigger gravity wells, making the trips too long and difficult to make two way trips.
In a very very short time we got heavier than air flight, rocketry, fission, mass production, and all sorts of robotics and computing. But reach breakthrough has a point where we scratch our heads trying to do better. A ton has been spent and will continue to be spent trying to crack controlled fusion. Someone that lived through us managing to split an atom for the first time to fairly widespread deployment naturally assumed fusion would be next and maybe not too long after something that would extract energy directly according to Einstein’s most famous formula.
Nuclear rockets could have easily made space relatively cheap. The tech was actively tested by NASA, and it worked pretty well. Nixon canceled that program and saddled NASA with a mandate for a Shuttle without the proper funding.
The USSR’s manned program, OTOH, was built mostly to hit a number of firsts (first dog in space, first man in space, first woman in space, first space walk, etc.), but do it as quickly as possible. This resulted in a series of “get it done right the fuck now” decisions. NASA did it the slow way, with each technical advancement building on the last, which is better in the long run (if you fund it, mind you). Russia did enough to build Soyuz and then ran that for decades.
The tech did not hit physical limits. The two major approaches to space flight hit different bureaucratic limits first.
Relevant article regarding NASA’s current bureaucratic limits: https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
I think repeatedly hitting the moon would have had the world shrugging, none of the sci fi was ‘hey we made it to the moon and… stayed there’.
A mission to the moon was a little under 2 weeks, a similar mission to mars would be well over two years. Sure, we could, but even the most adventurous human adventures in history have been measured in months, we’ve never displayed the will to commit to years for what would be a token mission.
Yes, the tech could be improved with more investment, but the sci-fi results of even settling mars is just unreasonably far out.
even the most adventurous human adventures in history have been measured in months, we’ve never displayed the will to commit to years for what would be a token mission.
It’s laughable how wrong this statement is. Someone else already posted about Magellan and Lewis & Clark, but there are SO MANY more examples in history. An expedition taking several years was the standard for centuries. One measured in months would have been considered pretty short until around the mid 20th century.
Ok, make i should have said single trips. Multi year expeditions involved many stops, a trip to Mars would be non stop.
Not with nuclear thermal propulsion, it wouldn’t. Time to Mars is estimated at 45 days with them.
Plenty of things could have been done with proper investment even before going to Mars. Reusable rockets, cheaper launch systems, more flights to the moon, moon bases, space stations. Yes, Mars is difficult but it would be easier with well established presence in the orbit and on the moon. All of this happened way too late (or never) because no one wanted to invest in it.
I just don’t see any of that leading to a ‘scifi’ image. None of those steps would change the sheer time it takes to get to Mars in a practical way, and that’s just a deal breaker for manned flight.
On the flip side, we have had great advances in technology that makes unmanned science better, which in a way even more reduces the chances of scifi vision of ‘manned’ space flight to far places, because it just doesn’t make sense.
Depends what SciFi we’re talking about. “2001: A Space Odyssey” plays like a total fairly tale now but I would say it was technically achievable to have lunar base in 2001 (but not going to Jupiter if I remember the plot correctly). Mars trilogy by Robinson starts in 2035 if I remember correctly and initial mission was based on cheap launch system to orbit. I think this was also feasible with sustained investment. A lot of other SciFi is based on FTL travel, AI or hibernation which we cannot place on some tech roadmap so we cannot say what does and doesn’t “lead” to it.
I don’t think that’s what they’re saying, that we’d already be exploring Andromeda or something by now. We haven’t even sent a crewed mission to the Moon, let alone Mars.
There has been no investment in space travel or any attempt to establish a research outpost on the moon. Nor a research station above the atmosphere on Venus. Nothing.
Well, we haven’t sent a crewed mission to the moon in a while, because we don’t really have any particular benefit from it, and even if that had continued, that wouldn’t have fit with the scifi vision of how things should be. A Mars trip is theoretically possible, but that’s a multi-year mission for a single trip. That’s a lot for what would mostly a vanity project of a manned mission compared to sending probes.
On the concept of a Venusian research station, the question would be… why? Staff would be in practical terms in no better position to study Venus than they would from Earth. All they could do would be supervise instruments in ways that could be done remotely.
The point is while advancements are possible, none that would even tickle the more tame sci-fi visions of expansion within the solar system. The larger impediments to a Mars mission are just “why” not technical impediments, unless a technical improvement could cut that trip down by 10-fold, but nothing even vaguely hints at that being a possibility.
Old sci-fi assumed progress in the physical world, of endless progress in speed or materials.
Instead we got near endless progress in the processing of information while we live in houses made of trees, drive cars on rubber tires, and eat animals. Much like before. Sure, we have jets, but even they work pretty much the same way as 50 years ago. Incremental progress, sure, but no warp drive, eh?
I wish our houses were made of trees, our tires made of rubber, our food made out of living things. Instead our houses and tires release micro plastics and our food is increasingly synthetic.
We’ve had amazing advances in material sciences that in hindsight have been harmful.
Well I agree that there have been great advances in materials. But nothing like sci-fi materials like “plasteel” or dilithium or various magical materials.
The periodic table of elements is it. There’s nothing else. Electromagnetic forces and electron orbitals. That’s it.
For example, re-reading some Larry Niven ARM stories, one of the police officers works in the asteroid belt in some hollowed out large asteroid. Various magical technologies like fusion drives are just assumed to be simple and easy, and there are so many people mining asteroids they’re starting their own civilization.
In the meantime there’s one computer handling the police files and it’s in the basement, as the police talk to each other on analog radios I guess.
In the rah-rah 1960s Space Age, it was assumed that the whole horse->car->airplane->rocket->Moon chain of events that had just happened was going to keep going. Instead it very much stopped and something else kept getting better.
Why? It’s quite simple, it’s about energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle
In other words, we can’t keep going up on the energy scale. It stopped with kerosene in jet engines and uranium in nuclear reactors.
Information, however, requires a trivial amount of energy to manipulate, and our entire progress in the last 50 years was about going DOWN on the energy scale by shrinking transistors by factors of millions.
And of course, the math that goes with being able to make sense of the structures that you can make with millions and billions of transistors on a single chip.
In conclusion, no one is going anywhere, and space is a dead, radiation-blasted hell with nothing in it. No space colonies, no Moon bases, no asteroid mining. The future is here, on this planet.
Thank you for your attention to this vital topic.
Except getting the dates wrong is exactly what the person writing the text in the image in the OP is showing was optimistic.
In reality it is incredibly, perhaps foolishly, optimistic to believe humanity (or just Americans) will explore the deep reaches of the universe at all.
This belief in exploring space as some kind of new manifest destiny is a peculiarly American phenomenon resulting from various obvious historical facts. It seems to be very difficult to let go of. Elon Musk hijacking the new space race for his personal profit, resulting in the coming loss to China will be hard to accept.
The old sci-fi assumed the rate of progress with be constant or even accelerate.
never watched the original series but if you’re talking about the reimagined series BSG technically doesn’t belong in the list. don’t want to spoil why.
I also never watched original BSG but I assumed the part about aliens blowing up everything and the war with robots in general was still there.
yeah but that’s not the relevant part. the list is about pessimistic takes on the future.
also star wars takes place a long time ago so technically that doesn’t belong either
I think that global war with machines and death of most of the population is quite a pessimistic take on the future.
did you not watch the finale?
I don’t know what you’re getting at. It was a show about war. It was grim. It’s not a optimistic take on the future. I don’t care if it had happy ending or if technically it was set in the past.
spoiler alert
it’s not that it’s an optimistic take on the future, it’s that it’s not a take on the future at all.
I saw Back to the Future 2 last night.
Ah, the distant future of 10 years ago!
Lost in space took place in 1999!
Not forgetting our permanent Moonbase!
Dear God…
as a kid i was so convinced, near the end of 90s i thought “maybe there are huge advancements made but they’re saving it for the year 2000 so it’ll be bombastic like people have expected.”
instead we got fucking segway lol
I would love to live in a world where every Hummer H2 was replaced by a Segway.
If there is anything about the 90s that I always found fun is just how everyone and everything anticipated the year 2000.
The night is 2000. I am walking around central london with my dad and his friends, drinking champagne from a bottle despite being underage. We are not near the place we are meant to be to see the fireworks display. The sky fills with coloured lights as giant fireworks are being let off and illuminating the entire heavens with one artificial colour at a time.
this reads like the beginning of neuromancer
high praise, thank you.
I might have to steal it for a novel.
Spoilers, it all starts going to shit in November when the Supreme Court selects Bush as president along party lines.
Kindly do not remind me of that…
But their computers are still the size of a room and everyone smokes
You jest! Asimov’s computers are the size of planets.
The ones that aren’t people, at least.
Their computers have AGI already. Our computers consume more energy than entire countries to make studio Ghibli fakes and autocomplete on steroids.
“The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” is one of the best self-aware computer novels.
I love that in the novel the computer has already become self aware before it attempts something really difficult - creating a CGI face for itself
Our phones are just screens wirelessly attached to computers the size of buildings now. If Altman and Nvidia get their way data centers be the size of sport stadiums by next year.
Hey, my phone can do a lot just being the size of a phone. Running games, reading, voice synthesis and recognition, image and text generation, etc
Don’t forget the reels of tape lmao
Well, we have lots of building-sized computers out there right now.
For tasks your phone and 50 MB/s would be totally sufficient for.
When you saw how they managed to put a person on the moon with room sized computers and about 145K lines of code, yeah I can see how they think it’d be possible.
Everyone still smokes. Our computers are the size of an apartment block; they make you not xall customer service and have wild new mental illness instead.
Old sci-fi be like
We’ve discovered a technology that explores the fundamental truths of human nature, gaze into the black mirror and reflect upon your modern folly.
…Also all the scientists are straight white men and we invented new ways for our women to cook dinner.
Edit: To be clear, old sci-fi is genuinely great. Merely pointing out the funny juxtaposition of nerdy white guys not fathoming any social change in their generally progressive and thought provoking works.
Fallout was the future to them. Before the bombs dropped.
The people writing science fiction were trying to make a living.
They wrote for magazines and TV shows that depended on advertising. A bunch of midcentury advertisers weren’t going to have a Black wom,an President.
Another thing to consider is how much change you can put into a story and still expect the average reader to keep up.
There was an article about an early Star Trek episode. One scene involved a couple of lines about a salt shaker. The production team went out and brought a bunch of wild looking salt shakers. [1960’s, remember?] None of the ‘futuristic’ looking salt shakers was any good for the scene, because they realized the TV audience wouldn’t understand what that funny looking thing was. In the end they used an ordinary looking shaker.
And then they repurposed the weird-looking salt shakers as medical instruments.
Read the same book…
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_World_of_Star_Trek
My favorite story is the one where a company that made automatic doors sent a letter asking how they got their door to move so smoothly…
A bunch of midcentury advertisers weren’t going to have a Black wom,an President.
And neither did 21st century American voters.
Ba-dum tssssss
To be fair; the less commercial stuff was better at that.
The year is 2025 And humanity is once again trying to reinvent the wheel
And failing, but we can’t use the old obes anymore. Maintaning them is a crime. So we just gave to roll around on little cubes listening to the axles creak until that heavy smack…
Technology had been advancing at a breakneck pace for over a century. It’s not crazy for them to think that would keep happening.
Isn’t it though? Each age has had its technological advance that defines that age. But at no time did the next age come immediately. It was always reasonable to assume that after electricity there would be yet another lull before the next paradigm shifting innovation. It seems to me that the great lie of capitalism has been convincing people that every new product is that next great innovation.
Steam power gave way almost immediately to electricity, which gave way to nuclear technologies, which gave way to information technology, all building on what came before.
And then there’s all the various transportation technologies that happened at the same time. Going from the first flight to the Moon in under 70 years it’s no wonder, to me at least, that people thought we’d be on Mars by now.
Especially with Walt Disney putting a Nazi rocket scientist on TV a bunch of times.
… all building on what came before.
That was my point though. Metallurgy gave way to cannons and guns but we don’t have a “cannons and guns” age. Everything is iterative but occasionally we have something come along that changes everything and starts the iterations anew. But that has never continued after, just been followed by more iteration.
Also, it took over 1000 years to get from the first steam experiments to a useful engine.
I mean, we do have a cannons and guns age.
I agree that it’s been iteration, but the pace of iterations seems to be slowing down. Since the Internet was invented there hasn’t been a game-changing technology created.
Lots of things that claim to be it - Bitcoin, metaverse, now AI - but nothing like what we saw in the 19th and 20th centuries.
And I think that’s because huge population growth and a relatively unknown world led to huge advances very quickly. Now to make similar advances you can’t be a polymath like Newton or Tesla. You need huge investments.
Case in point: Physics. A lot of the fundamental physics from the 19th and 20th centuries can be re-created with simple materials and a little expertise. People can replicate the double slit experiment with a $2 laser pointer and a piece of foil.
But to make new advances in physics you need particle accelerators and supercomputers, and many highly educated people working together.
I’m not sure if we are talking past each other this point or what, but take the Internet since you mentioned it;
Let’s compare to transistors for instance. You could have (and did have) the internet without transistors and you could have transistors without the internet. Nobody would argue that either are not massively impactful inventions but neither would exist without electricity. Electricity is the paradigm shifting breakthrough. In the same way neither cannons nor guns were the breakthrough themselves.
…but the pace of iterations seems to be slowing down.
I thought that was the whole conversation we were having. My main point was not only that innovation is slowing down but that we should expect it to slow based on the trajectory of previous paradigm shifting breakthroughs.
I think we are, but by your logic the real breakthrough was fire, because without that we wouldn’t have electricity.
I wouldn’t go quite that far but yeah, in my view there have only been a handful of main paradigm shifting changes; Language, fire, tools, husbandry, agriculture, metallurgy, electricity.
The primary separation between humans and pretty much everything else on earth is the passing of knowledge from generation to generation so if I had to pick the innovation I would probably pick language.
I don’t think that’s a fair comparison to modern day.
People were experimenting with steam engines for 1,000 years sure, but this wasn’t 1,000 years of dedicated research.
It was more like someone discovered the principle, then someone re-discovered the same principle 200 years later in a different, and repeat. Every time interest was lost. It wasn’t until much later that people started to build off of each other and actually pursue technology.
My point was that it didn’t give way immediately to electricity as the person I was replying to said. Even if you go from the first commercial steam engine it was still ~250 years before magnetos were regularly being hooked up to steam engines for small electrical applications.
