You may be interested in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, an entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. The planet on which the dog was located then exploded, but not due to the battle fleet, instead it was because some people didn't want the planet to provide the right question to an answer they already had, but they didn't realise they didn't need to owing to the accidental interference of a dead species that had sent away all their telephone sanitisers before being wiped out in a pandemic caused by a dirty telephone.
Legend2440 3 hours ago [-]
Hilariously, a dyson sphere operating at 5% capacity would still generate more power every second than humanity currently generates in 10,000 years.
Luckily with that kind of energy you can do absolutely insane things, like build planet-sized sunshades or push the earth to a more distant orbit. These challenges can be engineered around.
Calwestjobs 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, but 89 % of that 5% will be still used for interplanetary yacht fleet of owner of Chocó-Darién Inc.
philipkglass 2 hours ago [-]
The remaining 11% of 5% would need about 8 seconds to generate more energy than humanity currently generates in 10,000 years.
Luminosity of the sun: ~380 yottawatts (3.8 * 10^26 watts)
Sunlight conversion efficiency of a silicon based solar panel: ~20%
A Dyson swarm around the sun built with silicon solar panels: ~76 yottawatts
A Dyson swarm around the sun where 5% of the panels work: ~3.8 yottawatts
The leftovers from a Dyson swarm around the sun where 5% of the panels work and 89% of the output has been used for interplanetary yachts: ~418 zetawatts (4.18 * 10^23 watts)
Primary power production on Earth: ~20 terawatts (2 * 10^13 watts)
10000 years times 20 terawatts is 10000 * 365.25 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 10^12 = 3.16 * 10^24 joules
Since a joule is just a watt-second, it takes 7.6 seconds for that 418 zetawatts of leftover Dyson swarm output to match up to 10,000 years of current human energy consumption.
Calwestjobs 2 hours ago [-]
ok so are you saying that it is so much that we need 450 more planets worth of people to be able to use that
or
you're saying that if we can harness that much energy amount/density then we can just make matter on spot and we do not have to travel anywhere anymore, because we can make gold bricks or platinum sieves in particle accelerators just for fun? (this is same argument as why alcubierre drive is nonsense, having capability to manipulate such energy density makes us not want to travel anymore)
Legend2440 1 hours ago [-]
We would find new things to do with that energy.
Making matter from energy would still be inefficient though. c^2 is a really big number.
Calwestjobs 54 minutes ago [-]
No we wont. Because if you can drive car to your weekend house 6 miles away, you wont be taking Boeing 747. If you can manipulate such insane energy density you can do anything already even before you reach that capability.
Also Dyson sphere is old school idea, new more efficient idea is to make small black hole right next to star and harvest energy from that more concentrated flow. So actually black holes colliding (gravitational waves) can be sign of civilization...
Previous post with all those calculations says that you can power 4 149 473 current earths with that amount of energy. I write this with assumption that person is correct (im lazy to calculate that by my self, but it roughly has proper orders of magnitude).
My amazon joke was sarcasm.
AIPedant 3 hours ago [-]
It would also cost more power to construct than humanity is currently capable of generating in 10,000 years, so I am not sure what your point is.
Presumably a 5% functional Dyson sphere would be a corrupt boondoggle in the same way as a power plant which is down for maintenance 95% of the year, but the financial calculation would use much larger numerators and denominators than we are used to.
gcanyon 2 hours ago [-]
There is a science fiction story, I don’t remember who wrote it or the title, where humanity discovers a way to modify the speed of light within a region. Excited, they work incredibly hard to implement the technology, only to discover they can only make it slower.
Maybe it was jumping to a parallel universe to travel and then jumping back. But the same issue: the limit was lower.
cpeterso 58 minutes ago [-]
ChatGPT suggests the story is "Local Effect" by D. L. Hughes, published in 1968.
An alien named Firefoal of Swaylone observes that human physicists mistakenly believe in a constant light speed because humanity was unknowingly situated in a region of space where the speed of light had been artificially reduced. Humans discover they can modify the speed of light but find they can only make it slower.
aaronbrethorst 2 hours ago [-]
Something similar to this comes up in Death's End, the last book in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy.
m463 2 hours ago [-]
I think optimistic scifi needs to lie a bit:
- allow you to exceed the speed of light, or better yet portal somewhere
- learn we are not alone in the universe
- store basically infinite energy in your hip-mounted blaster
- get the girl/guy in the end
aleph_minus_one 2 hours ago [-]
> - learn we are not alone in the universe
This is neither a message that is optimistic nor pessimistic. Isn't it much more likely that this species (despite having something that can be called "intelligence" in an appropriate sense) simply be so different that the difference is insanely much larger than between an human and an octopus?
I think Greg Egan writes very optimistic science fiction that only really does 2 sort of. Exceeding the speed of light is, from my point of view, so absurd a premise as to make me feel that any hard science fiction which tries to get around it is not serious.
Its not that I can't enjoy that kind of science fiction, its just I can't take it seriously as having anything to do with actually reckoning with our position in the universe as human beings. Universe Big.
ferguess_k 3 hours ago [-]
I look forward to a world where people no longer need to sacrifice their curiosity to earn bread, clothes and basic housing. UBI would be a good start, but with the resources at hand we should be able to do more.
I look forward to a world where potentials are promptly discovered and put to be nurtured, instead of being wasted or randomly thrown to the society. Every one willing to share what they have learned or made are welcomed.
I look forward to a world that prevention of physical and mental illness is more recognized than treating them, or worse, extracting value from them.
I look forward to a world that citizens do not hesitate to speak out when they identify anything worrying. That is, they feel that they own the world, not be owned as some sort of human resources.
I look forward to a world that technological advance frees people, not keeping them enslaved.
I look forward to a world where monetary profit is not the dominating indicator for success and failure of an organization.
marc_abonce 2 hours ago [-]
This reminds me of a related quote from Ursula K. Le Guin:
"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."
Of course, that particular story later turns out to be a classic, boring dystopia, but only because we, the readers, refuse to accept the narrator's original premise of a prosperous and just society free of tradeoffs or caveats.
This is why I like her books so much, though. I don't know if the worlds she created are truly optimistic or possible at all, but at least she makes us imagine alternative ways for society to be organized.
snowwrestler 2 hours ago [-]
Optimistic science fiction shows humanity applying unique ingenuity to solve tough problems. Our lived reality today is that we already know the technical solutions to many tough problems (hunger, homelessness, many diseases, overpopulation, climate change, war) but simply refuse to apply them. Of course people don’t believe optimistic sci-fi anymore.
Star Trek the original series is usually taken as an example of optimistic sci-fi. It’s set in a faster-than-light space ship, so it’s science fiction. But the optimism came primarily from the back story: having solved our problems on Earth, and created a peaceful society of plenty, humanity turned its thoughtful minds to exploring the stars.
Does that seem like the track we are on?
Science fiction, to be optimistic today, needs to show how our society gets from here to there. Social progress was taken for granted in the latter 20th century. It’s not anymore. Something is stopping us, something beyond science and engineering. In fact whatever it is, is driving us to actively attack and destroy the science and engineering we have already developed.
A better future is going to take something else: culture, or society, or kindness, or empathy. It will take choice, and effort, not antimatter and phasers.
Retric 2 hours ago [-]
That negative view doesn’t match the underlying reality of the world today. We’re simply getting a closer look at just what most people are like on social media/reality TV/streaming etc. Meanwhile the past sucked.
Consider what are the major issues right now that aren’t being addressed? Global poverty is at an all time low, climate change has been met with vast investments in solar/wind/batteries/EV’s etc, there’s suddenly effective drugs for obesity, poverty’s down, medicine keeps advancing and antibiotic resistance is being slowed down by better methodologies, etc
The mainstream in the US is far more accepting than ever, remember when gay marriage was illegal? Yea interracial marriage was illegal in some areas as recently as 1967.
Not everything is improving in lockstep, but the general trends aren’t nearly as bad as you imply.
aleph_minus_one 2 hours ago [-]
> Consider what are the major issues right now that aren’t being addressed? Global poverty is at an all time low, climate change has been met with vast investments in solar/wind/batteries/EV’s etc, there’s suddenly effective drugs for obesity, poverty’s down, medicine keeps advancing and antibiotic resistance is being slowed down by better methodologies, etc
> The mainstream in the US is far more accepting than ever, remember when gay marriage was illegal? Yea interracial marriage was illegal in some areas as recently as 1967.
> Not everything is improving in lockstep, but the general trends aren’t nearly as bad as you imply.
Whether a lot of these changes are good/optimistic or bad/pessimistic depends a lot on your political stance.
Yes, society is very divided.
Retric 52 minutes ago [-]
Are you including anything blind how accepting mainstream society is in the US in that assessment? Because there’s other examples like abortion, lower crime, etc are definitely seen as positives by the other side of the political spectrum.
Really I’m not sure what specific political ideology would measure the world as going downhill by their stated goals.
armchairhacker 2 hours ago [-]
> Our lived reality today is that we already know the technical solutions to many tough problems (hunger, homelessness, many diseases, overpopulation, climate change, war) but simply refuse to apply them.
Do we? We can do a lot for individuals, but even with cooperation, maybe can’t immediately give food and shelter to everyone, let alone fix climate change (war is fixable with cooperation, but unless I’m mistaken a very small minority of the world’s population is in a hot war). Even if we have enough resources, we also need logistics (hence why people in some areas lack clean water).
Also, Star Trek’s backstory is that humanity only started cooperating like in the show after nuclear wars. Most people would rather mutually benefit than mutually suffer (otherwise we’d have MAD), and the solutions that benefit humanity the most are mutual. Society may have backslided since the 2000s, but it’s far better now than it was before and temporary backslides happened before; humans have evolved to be altruistic because, barring death or extreme circumstances, altruistic groups win in the long term.
1 hours ago [-]
beeflet 2 hours ago [-]
Is the purpose of mankind to support drug-addled hobos?
wirdnok 3 hours ago [-]
Jerry Holkins of penny-arcade recently shared a similar sentiment.
> You can't operate a deconstruction machine indefinitely; ultimately, the machine is all you have left to take apart. We need to make aspirational shit again so we have something to deconstruct later. It's not a mysterious process, it's just the opposite of what we were doing before.
The problem with that sentiment is that cynicism isn't deconstruction. It's often an accurate assessment of current trends and a prediction of where they might lead, not a collapse into abstractions.
On the other hand, pining for "aspirational" works is the real collapse into abstractions and magical, associative thinking: get rid of the bad and bring in the good, sad is bad. A lot of people have the aspiration of wiping out entire cultures; idealizing aspirations is nothing but idealizing desires, and in a commercial environment that just means pandering to middle-class power fantasies.
In short, I accuse this sentiment of being a covert desire to deconstruct the present in order to quiet middle class fears. "Actually what we've been doing will work! If we ever need to change course, I'm sure we will. We'll defeat the evil."
jerf 1 hours ago [-]
The "optimistic" science fiction that people are pining for was written during the World War period, during the social unrest of the 1960s, during the inflation and oil shock of the 1970s, during periods of racial violence, during the heights of the Cold War (the Fallout series came from real societal trama, not just a neat schtick about putting a 1950s face on disaster movies), during environmental scares, nuclear disasters, terrorism, during social upheavals and economic crises and international crises.
The 20th century was not a cakewalk either. I'm not saying it was or was not better than today, I am saying, "gee there's an awful lot of reasons to be depressed" isn't new.
GoatInGrey 1 hours ago [-]
Applied cynicism is deconstruction in the sense that all that is being offered is criticism and disbelief in a thing. There is no message of doing something else because it is better, only a message to do something else because it isn't the thing the cynicism is targeting. Sometimes not even an alternative is offered. The thing just sucks and it shouldn't be done, according to the critic.
You will notice how in current political conversations that no matter what the problem being discussed is, the solution is almost always the destruction of something or someone. There's this stubborn perspective that X would be resolved if we could just somehow eliminate Y.
To be crude, the pattern I described isn't aspirational, it's bitchy. You'll also notice how very little gets accomplished in the current cynical environment for the same reason that nagging people doesn't motivate them as much as inspiring them does.
gmuslera 3 hours ago [-]
The difference between science fiction and fantasy is feeling that it might become possible somewhat, or that it is consistent. In present world our culture has advanced enough to rule out or at least make it too complex things like FTL or time travel, and our current civilization struggles don't put in a good way long term perspectives.
Somewhat aliens are not the saviors anymore, it is complex to impossible to travel, and worse, colonize, anywhere else in the universe, and the bringer of doom is already here, now, and it is us.
What is left? Going virtual and living in a digital world? Lena ( https://qntm.org/mmacevedo ) ended with that.
Animats 3 hours ago [-]
OK, we know what's coming.
- Energy is less of a problem, between cheap solar cells and batteries.
- Materials may start to be a problem, but not yet.
- Population is leveling off and dropping in some countries, but continues to grow in Africa and among the religious groups which keep women at home.
- Equatorial areas are becoming uninhabitable.
- AI is rapidly getting better. Not clear how good it gets, but if everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, you're in trouble.
- Robots for unstructured tasks are just beginning to work. Maybe. The mechanical problems of building robots have been pretty much solved. Motors, sensors, controllers, etc. work well and are not too expensive. There are well over a dozen humanoid robots that can walk now. (Unlike the days of Asimo, which barely worked over two decades of improvement.)
- Automatic driving is being deployed now.
So how do we build a society to deal with that?
socalgal2 3 hours ago [-]
- Population is leveling off and dropping in some countries,
- AI is rapidly getting better. Not clear how good it gets, but if everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, you're in trouble.
Or, everything gets so abundant that we can actually have high UBI
This reminds me if why I disliked to movie Elysium. They had a robots that effectively gave free perfect medical care. I didn't buy the premise of the movie that only that rich would be able to use them. Given they were robots, governments, hospitals, could and would make them readily available since ultimately it would massively lower their medical costs.
antasvara 52 minutes ago [-]
>I didn't buy the premise of the movie that only that rich would be able to use them. Given they were robots, governments, hospitals, could and would make them readily available since ultimately it would massively lower their medical costs.
Given Big Pharma's current ability to get lots and lots of money for vital medicine, I'm not optimistic they'd price a theoretical medical machine low enough for a government to afford.
Plus, if overpopulation is a concern, a wealthy person wouldn't necessarily want the machine to get into the hands of everyone. Given that the creator of this machine would become very wealthy, the incentives would probably lean towards offering it to a select group.
stickfigure 27 minutes ago [-]
Nearly every edifice of modern society relies on the tacit consent of other people. Pharma needs patent laws and a whole market economy to function.
"One wealthy person controls everyone with robots" basically ends up with one wealthy person alone with some robots.
beeflet 2 hours ago [-]
I think elysium isn't an effective sci-fi in the sense that it discusses the effect of technology on mankind. It is just a metaphor for the US/Mexico border.
The only takeaway I got from the movie is that the robots look cool, it's the same robot design from chappie. Both half-baked scifi movies, but I would like to imagine they both exist in the same world.
WorldPeas 2 hours ago [-]
you assume their compotence and forethought. Such things cannot be taken for granted.
Calwestjobs 2 hours ago [-]
actually materials may be not a problem, - 40% of all transport is for transporting of fossil fuels !
so after we lower amount of fossil fuels mined, transported, refined, we can start focusing on working with other materials or start using freed workforce/manufacturing capacity for other kinds of terraforming activities.
AI - how many connections in human brain? google says 100 trillion, how many transistors in one NVIDIA Blackwell GPU - 200 billion. so you need just 500 GPUs to have number of connections as brain does. those are transistors only for connections, you need much more transistors for processing which is connected thru said connections, so does one datacenter holds one brain worth of biological level processing already ?
walterbell 3 hours ago [-]
Step 1: kindergarten through university simulator-based training for remedial omnipotence.
libraryofbabel 2 hours ago [-]
An essay on optimistic science fiction but no discussion of Iain M. Banks’ The Culture series…? for that matter, it doesn’t mention any specific sci fi writer at all.
lif 3 hours ago [-]
Unpopular take, and note, I am not an expert:
There seems to be an overabundance of sci-fi that is hyperoptimistic with regard to tech advances. The 2nd law of thermodynamics is not understood by most,
or waved away as 'overcome thru future science'.
fwiw, here's a few works I've found to be less the above:
book:
Kim Stanley Robinson's _Aurora_
short stories:
Damon Knight's _Stranger Station_
Larry Nivens' _Inconstant Moon
Calwestjobs 3 hours ago [-]
Exactly ! Just simple : Do we have any complex mechanism which works for last 100 years nonstop without fail ? Answers question of generational ships towards other solar systems. XD
aleph_minus_one 2 hours ago [-]
> Do we have any complex mechanism which works for last 100 years nonstop without fail ?
For the following examples, this question is open, and you might have a different opinion whether they fit your opinion of "complex", but the following are candidates that I am aware of:
lets say they fit, but they do not work, people expect for them to work. but yes they are designed to work that long in stress free environment.
your ship needs to be repaired on the way, do you need to have repair tools, materials, for that on board ? Seafaring cargo ship can not be going 100 years without repair. I bet space ship can not go either. What if your 3d printer on board which makes your repair tools brakes... etc etc.
you "can" fly 99.99% of speed of light to get there sooner, but you smash into grain of dust and what happens? either radiation burst or explosion. space is not vacuum as a 0 particle space.
Sevii 1 hours ago [-]
This is really a question of slack. How long can it fail for? For a 100 year mission you likely want at least a month of slack in your air supply. Things are going to break. You build in redundancy.
rcxdude 1 hours ago [-]
I mean, we have systems of government and other organizations which have lasted (significantly) longer than that. I think that's an important indicator of such questions.
JPLeRouzic 2 days ago [-]
I love science fiction, but as someone born in the middle of the last century, I am biased toward authors from the 20th century.
I noticed that the novels at the end of Nature (the journal) were sad and weird, but I thought it was probably an editorial choice to look "modern".
Yet recently, I read SF novels with authors sorted alphabetically, and it struck me again how weird and sad 21st-century novels are.
EdwardCoffin 1 hours ago [-]
This is what Neal Stephenson's Project Hieroglyph [1] was meant to be.
> I believe that a lack of alternatives to our current political and economic ideas is a problem for the world right now.
While I agree with this statement, I think imagining alternative political and economic systems is not primarily about science fiction. We could imagine these new forms of society with existing technology. We could imagine a future with technological regress which is political/economic retro-utopia where everyone has adequate food, housing, access to healthcare, education, green-space ... but no screen-based brain-rot, AI, space exploration or other fancy tech.
As is !kinda! said in Remembrance of Earth's Past but people seem to not understand that (what) all kinds of warnings are in those books. For example concept of Sophons is applicable to computer espionage... Or i can see with visible , IR , UV sensors on satellite, what literally my neighbors backyard looks like... everything is transparent on high enough level... privacy is only between citizens not between state/military and citizen. and no between states.
i provided Russian casualties because currently there is big disinformation campaign of Russian gov going, targeted towards USA citizens.
Edit: Because russia is no.1 threat to western style of live in current time. (because what they do. not because what we think about them)
raymond_goo 2 hours ago [-]
This story is set in a future, where work is done by robots and humans spend all their time in virtual reality. https://rejacked.glitch.me/
pkdpic 3 hours ago [-]
Agreed on all counts. Any advice on how so start writing some short amateur scifi from folks who have a writing practice or are at the start of developing one?
Udemy classes, youtube tutorials / lectures, books on how to start writing scifi etc?
throwanem 3 hours ago [-]
500 words a day, dead or alive.
WorldPeas 2 hours ago [-]
another piece of advice, when I wrote I used a keypuller to remove my backspace key. Following the example of Phillip K. Dick, think like a serial writer, uncanny ideas are the birth of great literature
luotuoshangdui 2 days ago [-]
Good point. Can someone recommend some good optimistic science fiction?
stevenwoo 2 days ago [-]
Project Hail Mary, The Martian, Contact. Somewhat in line with a better future mentioned in the essay, The Ministry for the Future and the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson posit some solutions to some big technological challenges with a lot of time with each side in the political debate, though whether one finds it optimistic lies with the reader.
sho_hn 3 hours ago [-]
I was as disappointed as everbody else by Artemis, but Project Hail Mary was a great return to form and a great Space MacGyver Procedura. Definitely left me fired up and feeling positive as well. I really appreciate just the joy in knowledge that Weir's books revel in.
cpeterso 45 minutes ago [-]
A film adaptation of Project Hail Mary wrapped filming last year and is set to be released in 2026.
I might just be vulnerable to maudlin storylines but Project Hail Mary made me tear up a couple of times. The audiobook adaptation is tremendous with sound effects, too.
i80and 3 hours ago [-]
The Monk & Robot books[1] are my personal favorites in the whole genre.
But it begins with a nightmarish heatwave that kills hundreds of thousands in India, which may be a little hard for some people to handle (judging by the reactions of people I've recommended it to...)
lukewrites 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah I stopped after that and still find myself thinking about it from time to time...if the book gets happier from there, I'll pick it up again.
gmuslera 3 hours ago [-]
When you realize all that must work (not in the physical world, but in the human one) perfectly for that problem to be solved it becomes very pessimistic.
The human part of that book is fantasy, and not a great one. At some point the suspension of disbelief crash into pieces.
pkdpic 3 hours ago [-]
Literally anything written by Liu Cuxin. Not overtly positive all the time but always infused with a deep historical optimism about humanity and the power of science + engineering.
Also I second Ministry for the Future.
Reading the newer translation of We right now also and the first 1/2 or so is weirdly positive. Not what I remembered at all.
It takes it a long while to get there, but L.E. Modesitt, Jr.'s "Forever Hero Trilogy" has always felt optimistic to me.
porphyra 3 hours ago [-]
Star Trek is often considered the archetype of optimistic science fiction.
sho_hn 3 hours ago [-]
Sadly its present-day incarnations are often anything but, so it's not an easy rec anymore.
morkalork 3 hours ago [-]
The TNG Picard character was a man of _principles_ that you just don't see anymore on TV.
nntwozz 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah TNG is my go-to for optimistic sci-fi. Voyager a close second; Deep Space 9 is a bit more muddled.
Modern Trek is a let-down, although Lower Decks has been awesome with lots of member berries sprinkled throughout for the TNG-era enjoyers.
I should add that Star Trek: Prodigy (albeit a kids show) has been very optimistic and enjoyable too, feels very much like TNG-era. Janeway and Chakotay are in as well.
P.S.
On a tangent The Orville (a Star Trek TNG clone by Seth MacFarlane) is pretty good; some Star Trek actors even show up in it.
Season 4 is apparently in production.
alganet 1 hours ago [-]
Star Trek kinda sucks.
It's an attempt at reforming quasi fascistic points of view. Strong hierarchies, heavy specialization of individuals, etc.
It is also kinda nice, in the sense that it explores this idea that you should put yourself in the shoes of the places they explore.
It also sucks, because their fans like to put themselves in the shoes of the quasi fascistic spaceship troops.
So, in the end, it is a dystopian nightmare. Told from the perspective of the ones who brought the dystopia to fruition. Which makes it optimistic, I guess! Except for all the planets not on their control having to put up with them.
morkalork 1 hours ago [-]
Lower Decks and Prodigy are very much created by people who have fond memories of TNG and Voyager. Even though Prodigy is a kids show, I have a soft spot for it since I was watching Voyager as a 10-13 year old. It definitely works at tapping into the fuzzy nostalgia vibes if you're the right age.
krapp 2 hours ago [-]
I'd disagree. Modern day Trek is optimistic, just not in the naive way the original series and TNG were, where it was simply taken for granted that humans had evolved beyond their base vices and utopia was simply a natural expression of their enlightened nature. That isn't something one can aspire to. In modern Trek, humans are humans and human nature is realistic, and those utopian ideals have to be struggled for.
sho_hn 1 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure that being sentimental about and talking up genocidal mass-murderers like the Georgiou character etc. easily fits your characterization of the franchise.
krapp 1 hours ago [-]
The Section 31 series flopped pretty hard though. Georgiou isn't portrayed as sympathetically outside of a series that's supposed to be a vehicle for Michelle Yeoh.
igor47 3 hours ago [-]
The "Delta V" books by Daniel Suarez.
I've been recommending "The Deluge" by Stephen Markeley, which is simultaneously very dark and quite optimistic.
"Walkaway" by Cory Doctorow
blacksmith_tb 3 hours ago [-]
I liked the _The Deluge_ (great characterization), Doctorow is generally good and _Walkaway_ was great, his _The Lost Cause_[1] is also a fairly hopeful novel.
If you're reading this, you should watch "Bicentennial Man" (1999)
socalgal2 3 hours ago [-]
My biggest issue with most scifi now-a-days is it ignores the acceleration of tech. Of course there's "Accelerando" and "Marooned in Realtime" but lots of scifi has "race/society X has been doing Y for 1000s of years" and now I immediately tune out because no society is going to remain static enough to do Y for thousands of years unless there is some premise in the book preventing anyone from inventing anything new.
"Tales of Alvin Maker" had that. "Dune" did too but I didn't buy Dune's excuse because militaries always want new tech.
This is also one of the many reasons why I can't buy into Star Wars anymore because a society that can make droids can make droids that make droids which means they have the means make everything cheap and abundant. That they don't is just bad writing. The writers didn't think through the implications of their world building. Of course I get that Star Wars isn't hard sci-fi. It's fantasy sci-fi, hence we have droids that scream and get tortured ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On the other hand, my first ride in a Waymo reminded me of the optimisim I used to feel about the future like when the Jetsons promised us moving sidewalks, flying cars, robot maids, etc..
aleph_minus_one 2 hours ago [-]
> Of course I get that Star Wars isn't hard sci-fi. It's fantasy sci-fi, hence we have droids that scream and get tortured ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
AI, give me an optimistic sci fi plot for the world.
AI, now compare it to communism.
aleph_minus_one 2 hours ago [-]
> AI, give me an optimistic sci fi plot for the world.
> AI, now compare it to communism.
Considering how every attempt of communism has turned out, this optimistic science fiction plot better turns out to be quite different from communism.
alganet 2 hours ago [-]
That is exactly what the AI told me.
In theory, communism works but in practice it was different.
The AI also tells me that the sci fi plot is not like that, that it will work in practice.
In the words of the famous prophet Dave Mustaine "if there's a new way, I'll be the first in line, but it better work this time" and also "you know your worth when your enemies praise your architecture of aggression".
GoatInGrey 57 minutes ago [-]
I'll add the nuance that some systems like communism have proven to work well at specific scales (typically small, like kibbutzim) and be horrendous at others. Not too unlike how different rocket propulsion architectures are suited for different levels of the atmosphere.
alganet 53 minutes ago [-]
Good point. Anyone else wants to comment though?
4ggr0 2 hours ago [-]
97% match!
alganet 2 hours ago [-]
I find it particularly hilarious that some AIs insist in deal with communism saying stuff like "stated goals" or "theoretical", but for the sci fi plot they go full throttle on the make believe like "pff, don't worry bro"
AdrianB1 3 hours ago [-]
Is this a call for pink glasses? It sounds like that to me.
sho_hn 3 hours ago [-]
I think it's a call for being aspirational. I grew up with optimistic, aspirational sci-fi in my childhood, and I feel it's given me a solid grounding and the ability to notice when things are not right and not going well. I, too, worry about society losing that ability.
AdrianB1 31 minutes ago [-]
I grew up with sci-fi as it was one of the very few genres allowed in Communist Romania. It was a mix of authors from Asimov to Strugatski, from Philip K. Dick to Ursula K Le Guin. It was sometimes very dark, sometimes moderate, but overall even Asimov's future is not optimistic in many ways, but I don't think I missed anything or it was better to be different. I did not become a grumpy pessimist nor an antisocial geek, I think reading a lot made me a better person overall, including the mix of sci-fi that was for sure not optimistic.
d--b 1 hours ago [-]
The fact that sci fi has gotten more pessimistic is debatable. But if we had to pinpoint a reason, I’d say that Silicon Valley selling the world technological utopia and delivering attention farming algorithms is a good culprit.
Now every time there is some kind of tech progress, we can’t avoid imagining how its monetization is going to affect people in a bad way.
The second obvious reason is that we’re fucking the planet up and this has been enabled by technological advances.
And well authoritarian regimes. Ahem.
That said, to me there’s plenty of recent sci fi that isn’t too pessimistic. The Martian, Interstellar, Arrival, Her, to name a few.
bitwize 3 hours ago [-]
Right now, "humanity surviving into the future long-term" is a pretty optimistic vision. Real life looks like a William Gibson novel right now, except just the shitty parts.
MartinGAugustin 1 hours ago [-]
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black_13 2 hours ago [-]
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jackmottatx 2 hours ago [-]
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nothercastle 2 days ago [-]
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johnea 3 hours ago [-]
How about this:
Little Jimmy used his space laser pistol to blast the eyeballs out of the reptilian space alien invaders from Chinnastan, thus saving humanity and getting the girl!
THE END
This is pretty much a summary of 90% of Japanese anime (I try to watch the other 10% --> 他一割部分を見てほしい)
How much more optimistic could it get for a white male anglo-european christian sci-fi reader?
drivingmenuts 3 hours ago [-]
You actually have to be able to envision the possibility of a bright future to predict one. Right now, not the time.
Truly pessimistic science fiction would have
- people worshipping an AI God which is demonstrably dumber than a dog
- friendly humanoid robots which don't really understand how to walk down a flight of stairs
- gravitational warp drives which are purely cosmetic and cannot travel anywhere, though it leads to terrible cancer
- a Potemkin Dyson Sphere where only 5% of the panels work and the government blames out-of-system immigrants for the blackouts
[1] https://xcancel.com/colin_fraser/status/1911129344979964207#...
Luckily with that kind of energy you can do absolutely insane things, like build planet-sized sunshades or push the earth to a more distant orbit. These challenges can be engineered around.
Luminosity of the sun: ~380 yottawatts (3.8 * 10^26 watts)
Sunlight conversion efficiency of a silicon based solar panel: ~20%
A Dyson swarm around the sun built with silicon solar panels: ~76 yottawatts
A Dyson swarm around the sun where 5% of the panels work: ~3.8 yottawatts
The leftovers from a Dyson swarm around the sun where 5% of the panels work and 89% of the output has been used for interplanetary yachts: ~418 zetawatts (4.18 * 10^23 watts)
Primary power production on Earth: ~20 terawatts (2 * 10^13 watts)
10000 years times 20 terawatts is 10000 * 365.25 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 10^12 = 3.16 * 10^24 joules
Since a joule is just a watt-second, it takes 7.6 seconds for that 418 zetawatts of leftover Dyson swarm output to match up to 10,000 years of current human energy consumption.
or
you're saying that if we can harness that much energy amount/density then we can just make matter on spot and we do not have to travel anywhere anymore, because we can make gold bricks or platinum sieves in particle accelerators just for fun? (this is same argument as why alcubierre drive is nonsense, having capability to manipulate such energy density makes us not want to travel anymore)
Making matter from energy would still be inefficient though. c^2 is a really big number.
Also Dyson sphere is old school idea, new more efficient idea is to make small black hole right next to star and harvest energy from that more concentrated flow. So actually black holes colliding (gravitational waves) can be sign of civilization...
Previous post with all those calculations says that you can power 4 149 473 current earths with that amount of energy. I write this with assumption that person is correct (im lazy to calculate that by my self, but it roughly has proper orders of magnitude).
My amazon joke was sarcasm.
Presumably a 5% functional Dyson sphere would be a corrupt boondoggle in the same way as a power plant which is down for maintenance 95% of the year, but the financial calculation would use much larger numerators and denominators than we are used to.
Maybe it was jumping to a parallel universe to travel and then jumping back. But the same issue: the limit was lower.
An alien named Firefoal of Swaylone observes that human physicists mistakenly believe in a constant light speed because humanity was unknowingly situated in a region of space where the speed of light had been artificially reduced. Humans discover they can modify the speed of light but find they can only make it slower.
- allow you to exceed the speed of light, or better yet portal somewhere
- learn we are not alone in the universe
- store basically infinite energy in your hip-mounted blaster
- get the girl/guy in the end
This is neither a message that is optimistic nor pessimistic. Isn't it much more likely that this species (despite having something that can be called "intelligence" in an appropriate sense) simply be so different that the difference is insanely much larger than between an human and an octopus?
Example:
Stanisław Lem; Solaris
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)
where the alien species is an intelligent ocean.
Its not that I can't enjoy that kind of science fiction, its just I can't take it seriously as having anything to do with actually reckoning with our position in the universe as human beings. Universe Big.
I look forward to a world where potentials are promptly discovered and put to be nurtured, instead of being wasted or randomly thrown to the society. Every one willing to share what they have learned or made are welcomed.
I look forward to a world that prevention of physical and mental illness is more recognized than treating them, or worse, extracting value from them.
I look forward to a world that citizens do not hesitate to speak out when they identify anything worrying. That is, they feel that they own the world, not be owned as some sort of human resources.
I look forward to a world that technological advance frees people, not keeping them enslaved.
I look forward to a world where monetary profit is not the dominating indicator for success and failure of an organization.
"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."
Of course, that particular story later turns out to be a classic, boring dystopia, but only because we, the readers, refuse to accept the narrator's original premise of a prosperous and just society free of tradeoffs or caveats.
This is why I like her books so much, though. I don't know if the worlds she created are truly optimistic or possible at all, but at least she makes us imagine alternative ways for society to be organized.
Star Trek the original series is usually taken as an example of optimistic sci-fi. It’s set in a faster-than-light space ship, so it’s science fiction. But the optimism came primarily from the back story: having solved our problems on Earth, and created a peaceful society of plenty, humanity turned its thoughtful minds to exploring the stars.
Does that seem like the track we are on?
Science fiction, to be optimistic today, needs to show how our society gets from here to there. Social progress was taken for granted in the latter 20th century. It’s not anymore. Something is stopping us, something beyond science and engineering. In fact whatever it is, is driving us to actively attack and destroy the science and engineering we have already developed.
A better future is going to take something else: culture, or society, or kindness, or empathy. It will take choice, and effort, not antimatter and phasers.
Consider what are the major issues right now that aren’t being addressed? Global poverty is at an all time low, climate change has been met with vast investments in solar/wind/batteries/EV’s etc, there’s suddenly effective drugs for obesity, poverty’s down, medicine keeps advancing and antibiotic resistance is being slowed down by better methodologies, etc
The mainstream in the US is far more accepting than ever, remember when gay marriage was illegal? Yea interracial marriage was illegal in some areas as recently as 1967.
Not everything is improving in lockstep, but the general trends aren’t nearly as bad as you imply.
> The mainstream in the US is far more accepting than ever, remember when gay marriage was illegal? Yea interracial marriage was illegal in some areas as recently as 1967.
> Not everything is improving in lockstep, but the general trends aren’t nearly as bad as you imply.
Whether a lot of these changes are good/optimistic or bad/pessimistic depends a lot on your political stance.
Yes, society is very divided.
Really I’m not sure what specific political ideology would measure the world as going downhill by their stated goals.
Do we? We can do a lot for individuals, but even with cooperation, maybe can’t immediately give food and shelter to everyone, let alone fix climate change (war is fixable with cooperation, but unless I’m mistaken a very small minority of the world’s population is in a hot war). Even if we have enough resources, we also need logistics (hence why people in some areas lack clean water).
Also, Star Trek’s backstory is that humanity only started cooperating like in the show after nuclear wars. Most people would rather mutually benefit than mutually suffer (otherwise we’d have MAD), and the solutions that benefit humanity the most are mutual. Society may have backslided since the 2000s, but it’s far better now than it was before and temporary backslides happened before; humans have evolved to be altruistic because, barring death or extreme circumstances, altruistic groups win in the long term.
> You can't operate a deconstruction machine indefinitely; ultimately, the machine is all you have left to take apart. We need to make aspirational shit again so we have something to deconstruct later. It's not a mysterious process, it's just the opposite of what we were doing before.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2025/02/28/opfor
On the other hand, pining for "aspirational" works is the real collapse into abstractions and magical, associative thinking: get rid of the bad and bring in the good, sad is bad. A lot of people have the aspiration of wiping out entire cultures; idealizing aspirations is nothing but idealizing desires, and in a commercial environment that just means pandering to middle-class power fantasies.
In short, I accuse this sentiment of being a covert desire to deconstruct the present in order to quiet middle class fears. "Actually what we've been doing will work! If we ever need to change course, I'm sure we will. We'll defeat the evil."
The 20th century was not a cakewalk either. I'm not saying it was or was not better than today, I am saying, "gee there's an awful lot of reasons to be depressed" isn't new.
You will notice how in current political conversations that no matter what the problem being discussed is, the solution is almost always the destruction of something or someone. There's this stubborn perspective that X would be resolved if we could just somehow eliminate Y.
To be crude, the pattern I described isn't aspirational, it's bitchy. You'll also notice how very little gets accomplished in the current cynical environment for the same reason that nagging people doesn't motivate them as much as inspiring them does.
Somewhat aliens are not the saviors anymore, it is complex to impossible to travel, and worse, colonize, anywhere else in the universe, and the bringer of doom is already here, now, and it is us.
What is left? Going virtual and living in a digital world? Lena ( https://qntm.org/mmacevedo ) ended with that.
- Energy is less of a problem, between cheap solar cells and batteries.
- Materials may start to be a problem, but not yet.
- Population is leveling off and dropping in some countries, but continues to grow in Africa and among the religious groups which keep women at home.
- Equatorial areas are becoming uninhabitable.
- AI is rapidly getting better. Not clear how good it gets, but if everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, you're in trouble.
- Robots for unstructured tasks are just beginning to work. Maybe. The mechanical problems of building robots have been pretty much solved. Motors, sensors, controllers, etc. work well and are not too expensive. There are well over a dozen humanoid robots that can walk now. (Unlike the days of Asimo, which barely worked over two decades of improvement.)
- Automatic driving is being deployed now.
So how do we build a society to deal with that?
This is a problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
- AI is rapidly getting better. Not clear how good it gets, but if everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, you're in trouble.
Or, everything gets so abundant that we can actually have high UBI
This reminds me if why I disliked to movie Elysium. They had a robots that effectively gave free perfect medical care. I didn't buy the premise of the movie that only that rich would be able to use them. Given they were robots, governments, hospitals, could and would make them readily available since ultimately it would massively lower their medical costs.
Given Big Pharma's current ability to get lots and lots of money for vital medicine, I'm not optimistic they'd price a theoretical medical machine low enough for a government to afford.
Plus, if overpopulation is a concern, a wealthy person wouldn't necessarily want the machine to get into the hands of everyone. Given that the creator of this machine would become very wealthy, the incentives would probably lean towards offering it to a select group.
"One wealthy person controls everyone with robots" basically ends up with one wealthy person alone with some robots.
The only takeaway I got from the movie is that the robots look cool, it's the same robot design from chappie. Both half-baked scifi movies, but I would like to imagine they both exist in the same world.
so after we lower amount of fossil fuels mined, transported, refined, we can start focusing on working with other materials or start using freed workforce/manufacturing capacity for other kinds of terraforming activities.
AI - how many connections in human brain? google says 100 trillion, how many transistors in one NVIDIA Blackwell GPU - 200 billion. so you need just 500 GPUs to have number of connections as brain does. those are transistors only for connections, you need much more transistors for processing which is connected thru said connections, so does one datacenter holds one brain worth of biological level processing already ?
There seems to be an overabundance of sci-fi that is hyperoptimistic with regard to tech advances. The 2nd law of thermodynamics is not understood by most, or waved away as 'overcome thru future science'.
fwiw, here's a few works I've found to be less the above:
book: Kim Stanley Robinson's _Aurora_
short stories: Damon Knight's _Stranger Station_ Larry Nivens' _Inconstant Moon
For the following examples, this question is open, and you might have a different opinion whether they fit your opinion of "complex", but the following are candidates that I am aware of:
The 10,000 Year Clock (Clock of the Long Now)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now
https://www.10000yearclock.net/index.html
The organ in the St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt (Germany) that is used to play the ORGAN²/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible) by John Cage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible
https://www.aslsp.org/
your ship needs to be repaired on the way, do you need to have repair tools, materials, for that on board ? Seafaring cargo ship can not be going 100 years without repair. I bet space ship can not go either. What if your 3d printer on board which makes your repair tools brakes... etc etc.
you "can" fly 99.99% of speed of light to get there sooner, but you smash into grain of dust and what happens? either radiation burst or explosion. space is not vacuum as a 0 particle space.
I noticed that the novels at the end of Nature (the journal) were sad and weird, but I thought it was probably an editorial choice to look "modern".
Yet recently, I read SF novels with authors sorted alphabetically, and it struck me again how weird and sad 21st-century novels are.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hieroglyph
While I agree with this statement, I think imagining alternative political and economic systems is not primarily about science fiction. We could imagine these new forms of society with existing technology. We could imagine a future with technological regress which is political/economic retro-utopia where everyone has adequate food, housing, access to healthcare, education, green-space ... but no screen-based brain-rot, AI, space exploration or other fancy tech.
Mid-century America?
i provided Russian casualties because currently there is big disinformation campaign of Russian gov going, targeted towards USA citizens.
Edit: Because russia is no.1 threat to western style of live in current time. (because what they do. not because what we think about them)
Udemy classes, youtube tutorials / lectures, books on how to start writing scifi etc?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hail_Mary_(film)
[1]: https://us.macmillan.com/series/monkrobot
Ada Palmer had a good write-up on Hopepunk. Many of the example books come towards the latter half of the write-up. https://beforewegoblog.com/purity-and-futures-of-hard-work-b...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future
The human part of that book is fantasy, and not a great one. At some point the suspension of disbelief crash into pieces.
Also I second Ministry for the Future.
Reading the newer translation of We right now also and the first 1/2 or so is weirdly positive. Not what I remembered at all.
https://www.project-apollo.net/mos/
Modern Trek is a let-down, although Lower Decks has been awesome with lots of member berries sprinkled throughout for the TNG-era enjoyers.
I should add that Star Trek: Prodigy (albeit a kids show) has been very optimistic and enjoyable too, feels very much like TNG-era. Janeway and Chakotay are in as well.
P.S.
On a tangent The Orville (a Star Trek TNG clone by Seth MacFarlane) is pretty good; some Star Trek actors even show up in it.
Season 4 is apparently in production.
It's an attempt at reforming quasi fascistic points of view. Strong hierarchies, heavy specialization of individuals, etc.
It is also kinda nice, in the sense that it explores this idea that you should put yourself in the shoes of the places they explore.
It also sucks, because their fans like to put themselves in the shoes of the quasi fascistic spaceship troops.
So, in the end, it is a dystopian nightmare. Told from the perspective of the ones who brought the dystopia to fruition. Which makes it optimistic, I guess! Except for all the planets not on their control having to put up with them.
I've been recommending "The Deluge" by Stephen Markeley, which is simultaneously very dark and quite optimistic.
"Walkaway" by Cory Doctorow
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Cause_(novel)
"Tales of Alvin Maker" had that. "Dune" did too but I didn't buy Dune's excuse because militaries always want new tech.
This is also one of the many reasons why I can't buy into Star Wars anymore because a society that can make droids can make droids that make droids which means they have the means make everything cheap and abundant. That they don't is just bad writing. The writers didn't think through the implications of their world building. Of course I get that Star Wars isn't hard sci-fi. It's fantasy sci-fi, hence we have droids that scream and get tortured ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On the other hand, my first ride in a Waymo reminded me of the optimisim I used to feel about the future like when the Jetsons promised us moving sidewalks, flying cars, robot maids, etc..
The genre of Star Wars is "Space Opera":
> https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceOpera
AI, now compare it to communism.
> AI, now compare it to communism.
Considering how every attempt of communism has turned out, this optimistic science fiction plot better turns out to be quite different from communism.
In theory, communism works but in practice it was different.
The AI also tells me that the sci fi plot is not like that, that it will work in practice.
In the words of the famous prophet Dave Mustaine "if there's a new way, I'll be the first in line, but it better work this time" and also "you know your worth when your enemies praise your architecture of aggression".
Now every time there is some kind of tech progress, we can’t avoid imagining how its monetization is going to affect people in a bad way.
The second obvious reason is that we’re fucking the planet up and this has been enabled by technological advances.
And well authoritarian regimes. Ahem.
That said, to me there’s plenty of recent sci fi that isn’t too pessimistic. The Martian, Interstellar, Arrival, Her, to name a few.
Little Jimmy used his space laser pistol to blast the eyeballs out of the reptilian space alien invaders from Chinnastan, thus saving humanity and getting the girl!
THE END
This is pretty much a summary of 90% of Japanese anime (I try to watch the other 10% --> 他一割部分を見てほしい)
How much more optimistic could it get for a white male anglo-european christian sci-fi reader?