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.
All that heroin from SE asia?
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.
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.
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.
Liberalism: nothing but jacking off with the monkey pawsince 1848.
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.
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.
It is the distant future of the year 2024. Our intrepid hero uses her pocket computer to argue that the world is flat.
Retrospectively, wasn’t a lot of the space-exploration-based SciFi from the 50s 60s 70s serving the purpose of justifying massive government spendings in big rockets, mainly used to build ICBMs, to justify imperialist policies and the cold war?
were we (the scifi afficionados) the useful idiots of this missile race?
Back to the Future 2 is set 30 years in the future… in 2015.
Blade Runner was set in 2019.
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!
I think this still happens. People have no concept of time when we look 10+ years out. 10 years isn’t really that long. I think life is going to look very much the same in the next 40 years with the biggest change being AI tools if they can get past the “idiotification” of LLMs and the like as they are subject to human interaction.
I think you’re absolutely right. It’s funny watching old shows/interviews where people seem very similar to modern day “doomers”. They always had legitimate reasons to be worried (like we do), but similarly, they struggle to conceptualize life going on like normal a few decades into the future.
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.
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
I loved it when he would continue to do it after the year 2000 had passed, without changing the format.
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?
There are a myriad of reasons we are on the shitty timeline, but a non-insignificant one to me is how terrible classic sci-fi writers were at writing humans rather than planks with faces drawn on them that periodically state the author’s views on something. The focus of sci-fi on massive space operations and colonization of other planets from the beginning was warped by a dis-interest from sci-fi writers in the positive potentialities within the human psyche that are outside the grasp of cynical structures of power and control, the part of ourselves that just wants to tend a garden in their backyard and nothing more.
I think this has lead to very hollow visions of the future that were well suited to becoming the basis for people like Elon Musk’s world view. Sci-fi looked to the stars and tried to see into the future while ignoring the one thing we can count on about the future, humans will still be humans.
(I know this is a generalization and isn’t true as a rule)
That and also Modern Western Sci-Fi tends to wave away all the hard parts of engineering, politics, and economics when it comes to actually doing the thing.
How did Heinlein assume we’d colonize the Moon in “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress”? Oh, don’t worry. We just bootstrapped ourselves up there Ayn Rand style.
How did Kirk and Picard and Janeway find themselves on Galaxy Class Starships traversing the deep corners of distant space? Well, first we did a quick global super-holocaust because of genetically engineered racism (don’t ask the finer details of that) and then we just… got better and turned Earth into a Utopia.
Maybe you buy into the more Posadist vision of First Contact, where a few starving refugees accidentally broke the luminal barrier with a rocket they assembled from spare parts. But the truly hard parts - the laboriously assembly and re-learning of scientific knowledge by each new generation, the failed bluesky research projects and dead-end engineering projects, the accumulation of trust between individuals within a state and states within the world necessary to mobilize materials and labor for these grand mega-projects - largely get breezed over.
An epic spaceship battle with the Trisolarians is, after all, far sexier to put on screen than a bunch of scientists grappling with the mathematics behind three spheres floating through space. So the old Asimov-style of SciFi as a series of entertaining word problems falls away, to be replaced by the Science Fantasy of Space Wizards and Warp Cores and Time Traveling Monkeys.
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
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.
Nah, idiocracy is weirdly eugenic drivel.
back to the future thought we would have flying cars by 2015
We could actually make flying cars. It’s just not sustainable.
What’s missing is that garbage disposal food processor the Doc had for fuel conversion.
We already have flying cars. They are called helicopters.
We might soon have flying taxis. I am just not sure if I want us to have flying taxis.
it’s 2030, the world is notching but hurricanes abd forest fires, also we got 1 guy on mars
No potatoes on mars?
I’m actually super mad at the stagnation in the way of life.
The first manned flight was 1903, Apollo 11 was in 1969. I’m still going to work by chasing an exploding machine on four round dinosaurs, the same way someone in 1969 would. I still get hungry and homeless the same way someone in 1969 would. I have an 8 hour, five day work week just like someone in 1969 did.
This is bullshit.
WTF, stagnation? The internet is transforming our daily lives constantly.
The question is if it’a for the better or for the worse.
I think both, and we need laws to protect us from the worse.
On the othet hand you have a super computer in your pocket.
On the other hand who cares when you can’t even afford housing or healthcare?
On the other hand having a supercomputer in your pocket is a direct example of one way we’ve made huge leaps in technology since 1969, directly countering the original premise of stagnation.
Within your example, at least your four cylinders aren’t spewing lead and smog into your lungs and is massively more efficient. If someone runs a red in front of you, you are much more likely to survive. It can go much longer without any overhaul or tune up. You aren’t having to regularly manually adjust your valves. When you panic brake, you no longer have to pump your brakes. Your car is adjusting breaking to motivate roll over by vectoring brakes too. For other people, they have cars that can largely drive themselves, avoid combusting any gasoline at all, and are more likely to avoid some accidents altogether with automatic emergency braking.
Going outside that, you have pervasive data connectivity, cheap high definition 100" screens, watches that would put the computers of 1969 to shame, a massively improved prognosis for many diseases notably including a whole bunch of cancers, brain implants that help Parkinson’s patients have better motor control. Air conditioning is much more likely to be available, affordable, and effective.
Different areas have certain difficulty curves, basically moving a car is constrained by physics, the heavier than air flight and rocketry similarly have physics challenges that reared their heads quickly. Massive medical, computing, electronics, and connectivity have happened over the last 50 years, as well as a huge number of other advances I’m not thinking about. We have a number of issues that we haven’t fixed, or really can’t be fixed by tech.
first successful manned powered flight was in 1903. People have been killing themselves by strapping into gliders for centuries. there was also that French guy who flew in a hot air balloon in the 1800s.
Also, fuck the wright brothers.
Wait, why fuck the Wright brothers? I’m out of the loop
they were patent trolls, essentially. tried to patent the entire concept of an airplane, and tried to sue Curtiss over him creating a plane that actually didn’t use the technology they had patented.
Wait, really? I heard that what happened is they’d decided to be sneaky by patenting the control system for a heavier-than-air flying machine since they couldn’t patent the idea of the machine itself. Do you have sources I can research?
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.
UBI is starting to sound more and more appealing as AI technology has surged.
Given the large Star Trek and socialist communities on Lemmy, I’m surprised this sub isn’t more active.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !ubi@leminal.space
Thanks, bot! It looks like this aspect of Thunder is a bit broken…
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
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.
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.