They saw the invention of air travel and space travel within 70 years. As far as they were concerned, nothing was too extraordinary.
Really was a marvelous run, too bad we just kinda quit shortly after we got to the nearest solar body. We send drones for recon to mars and asteroids and deep space now but haven’t made huge leaps in some time.
The promised lunar bases and Martian colonies are so far out still… the Jovian colonies/shipyards are still pure sci-fi dreams at this point
thanks Reagan! Oh and USSR for dropping out of the race. Luckily the Los Angeles engineers were able to use their trophy wives in porno to keep paying the bills instead.
I didn’t expect your comment to go where it did.
Yeah, almost like something happened in the 70s that put the breaks on most scientific and social progress in the west.
This needs to be everywhere.
Oh shit, I was born that year.
This is all your fault!
All that heroin from SE asia?
The risk is pretty immense. Getting it right and not having any losses is a tremendous undertaking. I would love to see run at Mars. But the interest is low and everyone is more concerned with bombs and bullshit. It would be nice if we would explore again.
For All Mankind is like porn for us.
Make no mistake, that is the future that we were entitled to, but which was stolen from us by capitalists and despots.
The old sci-fi writers weren’t wrong in their aspirations for us, we were wrong for letting our futures be taken away from us.
They thought automation would drastically reduce the amount of work someone needs to do to survive, instead of just increasing corporate profit and leading to layoffs.
and it should have reduced the work as predicted
The only reason we aren’t approaching Star Trek utopia is because of the unchecked greed fostered by our systems of capitalism.
There is no reason that, in a world of finite necessary work, increased automation shouldn’t have freed us from the constraints of some of that work.
The fact that it hasn’t isn’t indictment of automation, it’s indictment of unchecked capitalism.
Star Trek’s utopia came after economic collapse and a third World War, in that order. So we actually seem to be on track so far.
No war but class war (and preventing genocide)
I mean, sure, valid, but I am specifically speaking of the end state and don’t personally believe that is the only pathway there, though I do fear much the same as many of us that it might be the most likely.
At this point war and revolution is probably the only way forward. How else do we get rid of things like capitalism and nationalism?
Real talk, aside from walking into a voting booth every few years, what actual real world effort have you put into changing the world and system?
Because I’m gonna be honest, I hear this defeatist sentiment a lot, and it’s almost always from people taking other’s word on the matter, not from the people who are out on the ground enacting real change every day.
Change isn’t impossible, it’s just hard. You just have to ask yourself if you care enough to put in the effort or if you’re just waiting for revolution because it’s the easy answer.
I actually used to attend protests, meetings, try and convince people to join back when I was part of a marxist organization. From my perspective all the people on the ground wanted a revolution. I think if you actually looked you would find plenty of people like this. I left for several reasons, including not agreeing with the actions of Leninists in the past, but also because I couldn’t sustain the required time and energy to the cause.
What do you do to create change? What is your plan? I don’t have a plan anymore, perhaps because I don’t know enough. I am not sure it’s even possible.
I am not suggesting I have all of the anwsers. I actually think there is a good chance things won’t work out even after a revolution or civil war (see the soviet union for example). I don’t think it’s realistic to expect anything to change without one though. Almost all great leaps forward and changes in regime through history has been through violence and war. This didn’t always improve things either.
Revolution isn’t an easy answer at all. It seems impossible from my perspective no matter how much I try to tell people it might be necessary. Actually convincing people is extremely hard work and that’s just the start. There are plenty of cases where revolution didn’t work, and plenty of revolutionary ideologies to battle it out. None of this is simple and easy. It might be our only shot though, if we have a shot at all which I doubt very much. Honestly though I think if we do nothing things will collapse eventually anyway. The worst option is things become stagnant and stuck.
as horrible as it will to live through that (as many of us may), one can only hope
I think if you peer behind the curtain of that utopia, I see the shadowy outline of an authoritarian government controlling it all. And Star Fleet is the iron fist in the velvet glove. The utopia seems to exist to simply keep the masses fat, happy, and controllable.
Yep. Kill your masters, or youre killing yourself (and also literally every other living thing becauae climate change)
There is no third option. I mean, you could ask shitty Jeff to give it all up and srop, just fucking stop, and be an aging beach himbo and fuckerberg to just run a cringe mma gym and maybe contribute to an obscure Linux GUI a couple times a year. But they won’t. Don’t think they can.
It reduced the number of laborers who were necessary. The rest outlived their usefulness.
I wish we were exploring space more!
The monkey paw curls. We get entitled pricks, destroying labor protections to build so much wealth they’ve bought everything worth owning on the planet and still yearn for more.
I wish we had robots to do our work!
Another finger curls. Wealth inequality cripples the working class. Corporations consolidate to the point that everything is profit driven… locked behind paywalls or subscriptions. The only publicly available art and literature are made by robots.
I wish we could all communicate with each other!
The last finger curls, and paw crumbles to dust. Democracies around the world flounder as their populations are brainwashed by greedy CEOs in the news and media…taught to fear their neighbors and mistrust those politicians who haven’t been bought and paid for. Online, they’re bombarded by misinformation campaigns on every topic until they live in different realities. Diseases and pestilence once vanquished through science and cooperation return when science isn’t trusted and cooperation with your fellow citizens is viewed as betrayal to your tribe. The world now burns, and it, too, crumbles to dust.
This timeline sucks, yo.
Ummmm does anyone know what painkiller heals soul damage?
Liberalism: nothing but jacking off with the monkey pawsince 1848.
Oooh oooh do conservatism next!!! It’s gotta be something along the lines of “nothing but jacking off, usually in seclusion with other men since 1848” I’m sure you’ve got something spicier in store though
Liberalism is a conservative ideology.
If you mean fascism its just coward’s suicide.
You don’t even realize you’re evil and that’s the sadist part.
Don’t tell me what I know, or what the most sadistic part of me is.
It’s the pinky toe, isn’t it?
No comment.
Excuse you, i was a child when all of that was happening 😭
Hey everyone, this child fucked it up for us all!
Let’s look at which legislators have held progress back since we landed on the moon and it’s almost exclusively one party…
Facts. “Both parties” might definitely suck, but the scale and scope to which that suck remains entirely non-comparable. The democrats are incompetent and ineffective, yes, but the republicans are openly and enormously diabolical and hostile.
No. One is worse. This does not absolve the other.
Fight the worst bastards, but if you only fight them to the bosom of the less awful but still very awful bastards? Youre not winning. Youre not even surviving long.
Democrats would rather lose to Republicans than risk a third party gaining traction. Make no mistake, there’s a mustache-twirling villain capitalist party, and a “I swear I’m trying, please vote for me on this most important election evar” capitalist party.
Our most recent chance at lasting real change was the rail strike. Before that it was Bernie Sanders. They’re doing it on purpose and playing leftists for fools.
This both sides are the same shit is so old now
If you truly can’t tell the difference between them, I don’t know what will help you now.
They’re different, but they’re good friends at the end of the day. One wants to kill me, the other doesn’t care and wants to make their friends happy. I die either way.
They’re not the same, but they aren’t trying to be different.
If the dems wanted to win, there would have been a primary, and anyone but biden on the ballot. They care more about perpetuating genocide and sucking billionaire dick than they do about stopping fascism at home, and they’re not willing to risk the former ending to do the latter.
I just told you the difference.
Not leftists. Libs. No overlap.
It is the distant future of the year 2024. Our intrepid hero uses her pocket computer to argue that the world is flat.
Flat and gay*
No that’s just me. Understandable; I’m pretty tall.
I enjoyed how in Foundation novels they had mathematics that could predict the outcome of the future, had intergalactic travel, had personal shields, and a bunch of other fancy shit, but they were still using tapes to record information.
For those of you born after, or near the turn of the century, you don’t understand how magical the year 2000 was. It was a completely different eon, and seemed so futuristic. Conan O’Brien had a whole gig about In the Year 2000. The term “2000” was used to indicate something was fancy, or ultimate, or high-tech. 2000 was the future, and therefore amazing. We did have a sense of optimism though, that is nowhere to be found nowadays.
I loved it when he would continue to do it after the year 2000 had passed, without changing the format.
I still use 2000 like I did in the 90’s, which produces some really confused reactions from younger people.
Didn’t they switch to 3000 at some point? Feel like I remember Andy saying it
That sounds familiar. I don’t recall if it was a one time bit or recurring though.
Looks like it was recurring for a bit, I remember the hat move and trying to say “three thousand” with a frozen mouth after eating a bowl of ice cream is difficult
I just wanna agree and be in a thread with someone named after Picard and two froody dudes.
👍
Are you named after a tiger and a hoopy?
so 2000 late
Tbf, we still do use tape to record information. For archival, magnetic tape is still far and away the undisputed king of high density storage. We’ve got single tape cartridges in the 60TB range.
They just completely suck for regular access so they’re limited to archival only
So it kind of works in the Foundation universe because tapes are used for messages. Basically email but in audio format.
I remember the show “Beyond 2000” or that 2020 was going to be this magical date that all things happened in.
Absolutely. It was the fuuuutuurre!
What, you chumps don’t have flying cars? Psh later.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Or in old sci-fi books and movies when astronauts would be furiously writing calculations for navigation. Computers took most sci-fi authors by surprise.
Dracula 2000.
I rest my case.
And here we are with people who think the gubberment made the eclipse happen.
They made the eclipse happen but no one went to the moon.
Browsing the x board on 4chan when anything like that happens is amusing. All the schizos are out in full force with conspiracy theories. More than usual.
And yet somehow the lead character smokes cigarettes.
They got that one right, at least
Doesn’t everyone vape now?
Cigarettes are as last century today as snuff boxes were to 1950’s authors.
It’s certainly far more popular among the youth than traditional smoking but there are plenty of cigarettes being sold still.
I’m a dinosaur and I like my cigarettes. I’m waiting for them to get banned altogether and I’ll have to grow my own tobacco :(
Honestly it would be a fuck load better for your health to grow, hang dry, cut, and roll your own vs buying the literal poison from PhillipMorris. The tobacco itself isn’t good by any means but the real threat to your health is the additives not the plant
I feel it’s the additives I would miss most. Not sure if or how I could recreate those.
The uniform that both men and women wear in the movie are cut to show off the amazing fisique of the female lead but the cut is totally working on the male lead also.
Idiocracy sadly was the only futuristic story to get it right. Wall-ee probably a pretty safe bet too. At this point, any “blue future” sci-fi writers still out there are disillusioned dreamers.
‘Ministry of the future’ wasnt bad, by a typically Utopian writer. Parts of it felt plausible.
I haven’t read Ministry, but I’m not sure I’d call KSR a utopian. Aurora was some pretty bleak shit. (Great book though)
Nah, idiocracy is weirdly eugenic drivel.
And then there’s Dune: it’s the year 40’000 (or something) and mankind is fighting a religious war in the desert over natural resources. Haha!
to be fair, even the Dune universe had the human golden age, before the whole AI wars happened
I’ve actively avoided reading the Brian Herbert stuff because I tried to read a Kevin J. Anderson book once and it nearly gave me an aneurysm.
The Brian Herbert books aren’t bad, but don’t go into them thinking that the writing will be the same as his father. I’ve read a few of them through the anti AI Jihad timeline. They’re not terrible but they feel a little rushed compared to Frank’s writing… not “we need to get these out for the sake of the IP” like how Disney is just printing Marvel movies, but more like “meh, it could be better, but that’s as good as we’re gonna get it for now, just publish it.”
The Jetsons:
George Jetson went to work everyday at Spacely Sprockets and pushed a button. A single button. That was his whole job. The whole businesses was automated to the point George did not have to do anything except sit and press the button.
And he made enough money in that job to support a family of 4 in a nice house, as the sole bread winner.
Imagine that: A future where the benefits of automation technology are not solely for the wealthy and business owners. Automation and AI making people’s jobs easier, instead of simply replacing them. Businesses that employ people to do jobs that could be automated, but don’t, because people need living wages regardless of how easy the work has become.
There was a joke I remember in the episode they bought Rosie, their maid-bot: Jane said she was exhausted by all the cooking and cleaning while simply pressing two buttons that said “cooking” and “cleaning”.
I also enjoy the conspiracy theory that Jetsons and Flintstones exist at the same time, but Jetsons are upper class and live in cities above the nuclear rubble, and mutant, talking, dinosaur adjacent monsters below.
The Jetsons meets the Flintstones proves that. I own dvd and remember it when I was kid. Apparently Leroy invited a time machine but he really didn’t its just telporter to surface.
Nah in the movie it was a time machine, I do like the theory though.
He called it a time machine but I like the idea that he and his parents just didn’t realize it isn’t.
Fuck. Now I have that “meet the flintstones” song stuck in my head and have to rethink my childhood media consumption at the same time.
Thinking about it now… Rosie the Robot was presented to the viewer as a being that was basically sentient and fully self aware. In fact, she could and did fall in love at one point. Like… the family owned her. She was a possession. Was that slavery? Is the future depicted in “The Jetsons” a slave based one?
UBI is starting to sound more and more appealing as AI technology has surged.
Tbh, it was appealing to me the first time I heard of it. Its the most seamless way to transition from modern work society to post work society. It still has the same culture and incentive structure of what worked for society before, but removes the NEED to work in order to simply live
Given the large Star Trek and socialist communities on Lemmy, I’m surprised this sub isn’t more active.
Who’s to say there wasn’t a working class supporting their comfortable lifestyle, living on the ground, beneath the cloud-covered hi-rises?
The Jetsons lived in an apartment and George kept getting fired for stupid reasons. That very much resembles modern life where a lot of people can’t afford a house and have no job security.
deleted by creator
it’s 2030, the world is notching but hurricanes abd forest fires, also we got 1 guy on mars
we got one guy on mars
And he’s not coming back. We abandoned the program. Last food delivery gets to him in three years; after that its nothing.
Also, most people alive are survivors of sharknadoes, zombie fire, and desert oceans.
They had such high hopes for the future of humanity, but their selfish-ass boomer kids ruined the fucking planet.
Not all boomers sucked; the good ones just got butchered by the state or died from doing all the drugs.
#notallboomers #butmost
Back to the Future 2 is set 30 years in the future… in 2015.
Blade Runner was set in 2019.
The “deep corners” of their universe probably extended bout as far as alpha centauri
Sci-fi is merely a mirror upon society. Hopeful times? Hopeful sci-fi. Dark times? Dystopian sci-fi.
In my mind, I’ve always suspected the reverse!
Scary times: people would gravitate toward comforting, optimistic media
Comfortable times: people would find dystopian, edgy media more appealing
I wonder if anyone has done a study on this before.
I think it more correlates to the setting.
In dark times, many stories may take place in a dark society or similarly dark theme, but with a story that turns out hopeful in the end. Other times the story might be told in a way to try to emphasize a certain part of life at that time. The darker media becomes more relatable and understandable in darler times. So the older sci-fi that has humanity doing crazy feats in years that have already past exist because the world was a genuinely happier and more hopeful time in the past.
Take the 1982 anime Super Dimension Fortress Macross, for example. Written in the early 1980s in Japan, they wrote that in 1999 a global war would be ended by a spaceship crashing on Earth, with all governments combining into a single Earth government to study the crashed ship in 2001. By 2009, (yes, in only 10 years) humanity is supposed to have learned so much from that ship that they have advanced to building transforming bipedal F-14s that can fly in space, and having restored said spaceship that crashed earlier, faster than light warp technology. This story was written while Japan was experiencing an economic boom, and things were pretty hopeful in Japan until the market crash of 1992. But the story is not about humanity achieving these technological feats, all that is explained in episode 1. The story is about humanity’s battle with alien invaders, and the realization that the aliens aren’t as alien as humanity thought, and how differences between cultures often result in war that is entirely unnecessary. I imagine if this story was written in 1992 or 1993 when the Japanese economy crashed, it likely would have been significantly darker in setting and tone.
I can’t quote a study, but I did read the book Germs Genes and Civilizations. The author observed that the power of the church grew during situations like the Black Plague or the 30 years war, and waned during the Enlightenment.
