I love old sci-fi
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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I saw Back to the Future 2 last night.
Ah, the distant future of 10 years ago!
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If there is anything about the 90s that I always found fun is just how everyone and everything anticipated the year 2000.
Spoilers, it all starts going to shit in November when the Supreme Court selects Bush as president along party lines.
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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.
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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...
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Yep. You have something to add?
Seems a little reductive, especially when some of the whiny zealots are the robots themselves
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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.
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Lost in space took place in 1999!
Not forgetting our permanent Moonbase!
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Not forgetting our permanent Moonbase!
Dear God...
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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!
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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. -
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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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.
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Ok, maybe I should have said single trips. Multi year expeditions involved many stops, a trip to Mars would be non stop.
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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.
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Ok, maybe I should have said single trips. Multi year expeditions involved many stops, a trip to Mars would be non stop.
wrote last edited by [email protected]That is a fair point. There are still examples of multi-year expeditions without any stops for resupply, such as antarctic expeditions of the early 1900's, but they are a lot fewer; and many of those didn't turn out too great.
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That is a fair point. There are still examples of multi-year expeditions without any stops for resupply, such as antarctic expeditions of the early 1900's, but they are a lot fewer; and many of those didn't turn out too great.
I suppose early antartic expeditions would be a decent comparison point, an exceedingly dangerous and long journey when people already know they almost certainly won't find anything 'nice' there. I suppose we know more about Mars now than they did in the antarctic expeditions knew in advance, but I think they had the general idea of what they could possibly find as being grim enough to be doubtful of it being worth it.
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Are there any particularly good sci-fi novels with wild and imaginative ideas? I love trying to visualize and recreate the scenes in my mind after reading a novel.
