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, maybe I should have said single trips. Multi year expeditions involved many stops, a trip to Mars would be non stop.

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.

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.

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.

Realistically speaking I’d rewrite those numbers to 202003 (in accordance to Gregorian calendar)

...because of the building-sized computers.

No please don't.

There's nothing inherently wrong with enjoying fiction in this mode, but doing that to old scifi without trying to figure out the moral valence of shit/editorial position of the writer is kind of how we got here.

I ain't gonna lie. I'm not entirely sure this answer didn't come from an LLM.

Yeah, that’s the way I write. It’s the other way around though. LLM are trained on a lot of academic writing.

So I guess, LLM sound like me?