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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
It is. It’s about people fighting a war in space. Saying that it happened “long time ago” in a different galaxy or in alternative reality doesn’t make it a historical drama.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellan_expedition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_and_Clark_Expedition
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.
https://xkcd.com/893/
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.
It is. It’s about people fighting a war in space. Saying that it happened “long time ago” in a different galaxy or in alternative reality doesn’t make it a historical drama.