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.

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.

What about SNW?

The vibe I'm getting is "we're eager and optimistic, but also, things get bad, the larger landscape is kinda bad and we are trying to hold straight faces?"

It feels very 2020s.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

Me too. My dream home would be inspired by Forbidden Planet

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.

idk how rich you are
But I will need to live this life in my dreams at night for the rest of my life

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.