I love old sci-fi
I love old sci-fi
I love old sci-fi
One of the defining characteristics of that eras literature, not just sci-fi, is a reflection of the cultural belief in a narrative history.
The belief that society will advance, and that there's an inevitable direction that things will go even if there are setbacks.
In fairness to the Sci-Fi writers, we've launched so many probes into deep space since then.
We've sent satellites to Jupiter and diving bells below the clouds of Venus. We've retrieved soil from Mars and sent signals from beyond the Ort Cloud. We've recorded Gravity Waves and captured light off the edge of Black Holes and recorded the touch of Neutrinos.
We don't have six guys drinking coffee and staring out a window overlooking the moon of Titan. But that is largely because our signaling and robotics has made automated exploration more practical than manned missions.
And also because SciFi writers of the 1950s didn't understand how much radiation humans would need to shield themselves against once they left the Earth's magnetosphere.
Just fill the hull with clams!
We went from the first flight, to the first spaceflight in 58 years. 8 years after that, we put humans on the moon. I don't think it was unreasonable for scifi writers in the 70s and early 80s to have glorious ideas about what we would accomplish in another 20-30 years.
I have a copy of Popular Science from May of 1958, and they talk about nuking the moon twice, then building a missile base on it. That seems way more realistic.
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.
I used to wonder if I would ever walk on the moon or Mars during my lifetime when I was a kid. I miss that
I saw Back to the Future 2 last night.
Ah, the distant future of 10 years ago!
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
Star Wars whole worlds are destroyed
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The old sci-fi assumed the rate of progress with be constant or even accelerate.
Lost in space took place in 1999!
Not forgetting our permanent Moonbase!
Dear God...
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
I would love to live in a world where every Hummer H2 was replaced by a Segway.
If there is anything about the 90s that I always found fun is just how everyone and everything anticipated the year 2000.
The night is 2000. I am walking around central london with my dad and his friends, drinking champagne from a bottle despite being underage. We are not near the place we are meant to be to see the fireworks display. The sky fills with coloured lights as giant fireworks are being let off and illuminating the entire heavens with one artificial colour at a time.
Spoilers, it all starts going to shit in November when the Supreme Court selects Bush as president along party lines.
But their computers are still the size of a room and everyone smokes
Our phones are just screens wirelessly attached to computers the size of buildings now. If Altman and Nvidia get their way data centers be the size of sport stadiums by next year.
Hey, my phone can do a lot just being the size of a phone. Running games, reading, voice synthesis and recognition, image and text generation, etc
You jest! Asimov’s computers are the size of planets.
The ones that aren't people, at least.
Their computers have AGI already. Our computers consume more energy than entire countries to make studio Ghibli fakes and autocomplete on steroids.
"The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" is one of the best self-aware computer novels.
I love that in the novel the computer has already become self aware before it attempts something really difficult - creating a CGI face for itself
Well, we have lots of building-sized computers out there right now.
For tasks your phone and 50 MB/s would be totally sufficient for.
Don't forget the reels of tape lmao
Everyone still smokes. Our computers are the size of an apartment block; they make you not xall customer service and have wild new mental illness instead.
When you saw how they managed to put a person on the moon with room sized computers and about 145K lines of code, yeah I can see how they think it’d be possible.
Old sci-fi be like
We've discovered a technology that explores the fundamental truths of human nature, gaze into the black mirror and reflect upon your modern folly.
...Also all the scientists are straight white men and we invented new ways for our women to cook dinner.
Edit: To be clear, old sci-fi is genuinely great. Merely pointing out the funny juxtaposition of nerdy white guys not fathoming any social change in their generally progressive and thought provoking works.
Fallout was the future to them. Before the bombs dropped.
The people writing science fiction were trying to make a living.
They wrote for magazines and TV shows that depended on advertising. A bunch of midcentury advertisers weren't going to have a Black wom,an President.
Another thing to consider is how much change you can put into a story and still expect the average reader to keep up.
There was an article about an early Star Trek episode. One scene involved a couple of lines about a salt shaker. The production team went out and brought a bunch of wild looking salt shakers. [1960's, remember?] None of the 'futuristic' looking salt shakers was any good for the scene, because they realized the TV audience wouldn't understand what that funny looking thing was. In the end they used an ordinary looking shaker.
To be fair; the less commercial stuff was better at that.
The year is 2025 And humanity is once again trying to reinvent the wheel
And failing, but we can't use the old obes anymore. Maintaning them is a crime. So we just gave to roll around on little cubes listening to the axles creak until that heavy smack...
Technology had been advancing at a breakneck pace for over a century. It’s not crazy for them to think that would keep happening.
Isn’t it though? Each age has had its technological advance that defines that age. But at no time did the next age come immediately. It was always reasonable to assume that after electricity there would be yet another lull before the next paradigm shifting innovation. It seems to me that the great lie of capitalism has been convincing people that every new product is that next great innovation.
Steam power gave way almost immediately to electricity, which gave way to nuclear technologies, which gave way to information technology, all building on what came before.
And then there’s all the various transportation technologies that happened at the same time. Going from the first flight to the Moon in under 70 years it’s no wonder, to me at least, that people thought we’d be on Mars by now.
Especially with Walt Disney putting a Nazi rocket scientist on TV a bunch of times.
The industrial and technological revolutions were a cause of radical change in human civilization. It was inspiring to think we would continue to grow instead of monetizing every last vestige of this world and our psyches?!
Pretty much, I struggle to see any real human achievement in my lifetime. Sure we invented phones and computers are faster than ever before. We haven't really done anything worthwhile. No real improvements in the human condition.
We have fun content, but our planet is going to cook
PK Dick: Everything's been nuked and there are feral psychics roaming the wasteland stealing people's emotions.
Me too. My dream home would be inspired by Forbidden Planet
idk how rich you are But I will need to live this life in my dreams at night for the rest of my life
Yeah, that's why it's just my dream home. But if I could design and furnish a home that is what it would look like
Even Superman had hover taxis by 1990.
Now recontextualize this using modern sci-fi that looks toward multiple centuries from now. Star Trek's egalitarian socialist utopia would never come to pass and the most likely future is that of Frank Herbert's Dune, where nearly 8,000 years from now we have a galactic feudal society where the ultra wealthy fight for control over limited resources while using religion to manipulate the poor into being their cannon fodder.
There were significant lows before the highs of the 23rd and 24th centuries of Star Trek. Incidentally the dark parts happen right around where we are now.
Foundation is also a sort of techno feudal society.
Parts of it. Towards the end it was more of an egalitarian society.
I watched the first Moon Landing on our neighbors' TV. I was so disappointed because I'd been reading my Dad's and big brother's Asimov Magazines since I was six, and I couldn't believe our real technology was so primitive.
In my teens, the year 2000 was unreal. It embodied THE FUTURE - it was so far away.
Edit: centuries even.
I mean... the one first 1950s sci-fi story I ever read as a kid was The Sound of Thunder. It is and will always be the first thing I think about when it comes to 50s sci-fi. And that story isn't exactly happy or optimistic about humanity fucking around with tech and time, lol.
In 'Starship Troopers' the narrator is amazed that the military has musical instruments that sound like the real thing, but can fit in your pocket. One major plot point hinges on the hero getting a hand written letter delivered by a FTL craft.
Radiant indeed, but then Chernobyl happened and we got a lot more cautious about nuclear power. Also about trusting other countries. Well, we didn't trust them before but that coverup didn't help.
Three Mile Island was a near melt down years before Chernobyl.
And it's a shame that we became scared of one of the greatest technologies we ever created.
Nuclear accidents have killed using the most extreme number 45,000 people. Directly meltdowns have killed less than 100. The middle ground estimates average out around 5,000, but let's give the most extreme number possible for the sake of the argument. These numbers are including projected cancer rates.
Cars annually kill 1.19 million people in comparison.
Even if you were to add nuclear weapon usage to the numbers you'd still barely be close to these numbers. Plus every time there's been an nuclear accident new technologies and safe guards are deployed. 40,000 of that estimated/projected death toll is from Chernobyl.
Yes I remember when it happened. It too eroded trust, but in our own country.
Humanity is exploring the deep corners of the universe to discover more resources to exploit.
They didn’t expect bigotry to basically hold us hostage for 100+ years.
It's the future we could have had; if line didn't have to go up.
But line has to go up.
One of my favourites.
What's this from?
A trip to the moon. 1902
"Journey to the Moon", I believe - a silent movie from the 20s (?).
And the heroes were scientists
The more I learn about our modern age, the more I start to feel that the premise of the Matrix isn't such a bad deal at all. Normally, we should be there by now, the machine war ended decades ago.
I read a ton of Andre Norton in my youth
Dystopias on the other hand, were way too optimistic about how long it would take for everything to turn to shit.