The other half of the sci-fi novels begin, ‘It’s 2023, twenty years since Nuclear Armageddon…’
I remember my Grandfather telling me with utter seriousness and sincerity that by the year 2000 everyone would have a personal hovercraft and that we’d take holidays on the moon.
This was in 1996.
If you look at the growth of travel speeds in the first half of the twentieth century and project them forward, it really wasn’t such a crazy prediction.
Hell, right now, we’re one technology away from being able to build actual interstellar vessels. You need a robot that can harvest materials from an asteroid, build a copy of itself, and do some useful work before breaking down. If you have self-replicating robots, building big giant dumb objects in space becomes practical. And no, if you’re not an idiot about it, the robots diverging from their original programming and multiplying out of control is not a problem.
This would allow you to build large spacecraft, cities in space capable of carrying tens of thousands or more. And that’s the scale you really need to be thinking about when discussing interstellar travel.
How do you actually move the things? Giant solar-powered pushing lasers. Hell you might even put them directly in the Sun’s outer atmosphere and use the Sun itself as the lasing medium. And if you’re clever about it, it’s also possible to use a laser around Sol to slow down at the destination. You can build an interstellar ark propelled entirely by pushing lasers in the Sol system.
A lot of problems of space colonization and travel can be solved if you can build stupidly large objects for cheap. And self-replicating robots are just such a technology.
In 4 years
we have holidays on the moonall white color jobs will be automated by ai.Ironic how times have not changed in 30 years.
I thought space travel was just around the corner until I was like 22 :(
Musk gave me hope when he sent a car to mars and then he spent the next decade either fucking democracy or fucking children.
Only 5 years more until Mars!
And hyperloop. And AGI.
when did musk send a car to Mars?
I know space x put one in orbit as an advertisement campaign but Mars is ridiculously more impressive.
I can’t find any source to back up your claim though
Ya that’s the one I’m talking about. I got mixed up
Musk wanted to fuck children but wasn’t cool enough with the pedo crowd. Which is gross and extremely pathetic.
I too have high hopes I’ll see a human in orbit or on mars before I die. But all that big money is instead being spent on mega yachts and lobbying to fuck us over. So I think it’s more likely we’ll be living in a Mad Max movie instead of a cool space sci-fi one.
Musk wanted to fuck children but wasn’t cool enough with the pedo crowd. Which is gross and extremely pathetic.
Just because he’s too cringe to be allowed on the main pedo island, it doesn’t mean he couldn’t have found other ways.
It’s maddening how Earth has become a resort for about 2000 of this monsters, while everyone else has to suffer to feed their neverending greed.
Luckily we don’t need any sci-fi tech to solve this problem. A French invention that’s already two centuries old at this point will do just fine.
Hear me out for a second, what if we did a bit of both and built guillotine drones?
I thought there were multiple instances of him “partying”. There’s mostly just that one email exchange where they didn’t want him back.
He just sent that car to orbit. Its not really a great achievment we have been sneding heavier things than that for some time. Just a publicity stunt and rocket test in one.
And also spending a some time making shit up about his past and “upbringing”
I will always be grateful to my second year middle school geography teacher for hinting towards Musk’s space grift. They were so underated, but everything they said was real.
I know this is just a meme but one thing I love about classic sci-fi (i.e. pre-1990) is the concept art. Michael Whelan and Frank Frazzeta being prominent examples of this. Their artwork are on another fucking level. There’s just so ethereal about those hand-drawn/pre-digital artwork of non-existent worlds.
There is a 1970 British series called UFO. If you are an XCOM (or X-COM, for older folks like me) you should check it out.
There are tech like shuttles to the Moon and racism has been all left in the past. In the future year of 1980.
I’m a Yank so I know it as UFO: Enemy Unknown even though I was born in 1999.
XCom 2 is one of my favourite games ever made.
what’s your favorite part? and why is it sexy snake aliens?
The year is pretty much arbitrary. It’s a simple calculation:
date(published) + 50or so.This is why I often prefer SciFi that distances itself from any idea of “our near future” - by using a completely different dating system for example.
The thing that actually gave SciFi its name - fantasizing about where science and technology might go from here - is not my favorite, esp. if there’s no consideration for societal development. Like misogynistic cowboys with laser guns.
Stanisław Lem famously disliked contemporary sci-fi precisely for the reason of it being “cowboys in space”.
And I love Lem’s work! Esp. Eden.
Like misogynistic cowboys with laser guns.
I read first few stories from Asimov’s I, Robot, and, holy shit, his robots are pretty much stand-ins for slaves. They are property, get threatened with violence, are forbidden to be in the streets at night, and some models even address their owners as “master”. But none of that is addressed anywhere, it’s some convoluted logic puzzles instead. So I don’t know if author was oblivious or thought such things are OK because they are not humans (terrible slippery slope to go on).
Pretty sure Asimov dealt with the human/robot division in at least some of his books. But also, ‘I, Robot’ is probably the worst collection to look for that. You’d do better with ‘The Caves of Steel’, and probably the rest of the novels centered around R. Daneel Olivaw.
Robot literally came from the Czech word “robota”, meaning slave.
This is a commonly repeated falsehood. “Robota” in Czech (and many slavic languages) means work. So it’s a worker at that.
Kinda. Robota means hard work, often with a feudal undertone. Which probably sometimes isn’t too far from slavery, but Czech has a separate word for that.
Social values go up and down. It’s not linear.
Look at how right Gen Z is or gay acceptance/persecution every few centuries.
Except we’ll get well into 2552 and people will still be struggling to survive paycheque to paycheque while reading the Halo series wishing John Halo would save them.
It takes less time to walk completely around the earth than to fly at light speed to the nearest star.
Unless you have an Epstein Drive. (No pun intended, it’s really called that. I’m sure the authors weren’t aware of future implications.) Anyhow, when some hard SciFi fans asked them how fast the Epstein drive is, they answered “really, really fast”.
Not really. It’s still a fusion drive with ridiculously low fuel use, so functions in real space. That means it can’t go faster than light speed. With 1G acceleration and a flip and burn, the max speed is 0.95 light speed.
You know, I think they actually said that. The Expanse is one of the few near-future solar-system-only SciFi I really like. I should have gone with Iain M Banks I guess.
My point: it’s fiction. It can be as fast as you need it to be.
(*) if you can walk on water and do 30km per day on average over the course of 4 years.
That’s about 6 hours per day. Using a rowboat is actually faster, from what I can see from the attempts.
If we’re just assuming distance not terrain.
I think most people can manage that speed. (Most as in not disabled)
Manage? Probably yes. Be motivated to keep walking for that long? Doubt it :D
Just our luck that Cosmic Horror ended up being the most accurate prediction.
It isn’t that you can’t hear in space… It is hard to hear over the screams of the void.
Very much agree. I love old Sci-Fi for this reason. The authors dreamt big.
Look what the fucking boomers took from us…
Early Cyberpunk RPGs are called Cyberpunk 2013 and it’s sequel Cyberpunk 2020.
One of the key themes of cyberpunk is dystopia. They got that part right.
Yes but 90s vision of dystopia is better than 2020s reality in some ways. For example all those tech gadgets and implants actually work without any subscription, cloud connection etc. any kind of spying and malware usage is actually done by criminals or special agents on specific targets.
Not even true, you have to pay to breath clean air in the height of the day. In my games, if your netrunner isn’t up to snuff you are paying monthly to activate your wrist gun implant. Its a critique of today not of the future, add all that shit in and fuckinf wreck your players, its the cyberpunk way.
Nice.
At least we don’t reside in any of Phillip K Dicks futures
I feel like this one is close https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_My_Tears,_the_Policeman_Said
I feel like we are heading straight for this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_My_Tears,_the_Policeman_Said
There was a man who really told us who he was. I’d be reading along in my dad’s Analog Magazine, not really noticing authors, and suddenly find myself chest-deep in evil. What a dick.
Its 2027 and most candidates need to find “underaged women” to be able to qualify for the office. Everyone will vote and their vote will count! Except for women, minorities, and people who don’t earn a minimum of 5 million per year.
Well, in the mid-20th century, it was easy to think like that. The New York Times predicted that mankind would build a working flying machine within the next million years. The Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk two weeks later. Less than seventy years after that, an average American citizen could fly to Europe on a jumbo jet and man had walked on the moon. By the time I was born, the space shuttle was regularly flying, we had CD players and satellite television. the 20th century was NUTS.
I have an old 70s Star Wars book about space. They’re talking moon cities by the year 1990
