[HN Gopher] Where did all the starships go?
___________________________________________________________________
Where did all the starships go?
Author : speckx
Score : 107 points
Date : 2026-02-03 13:27 UTC (4 days ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.datawrapper.de)
| anovikov wrote:
| Quite naturally - 1960s were the time when we discovered that
| Solar System is a pretty barren place. Mariner IV sent back
| pictures of craters on Mars - proving it couldn't have an
| atmosphere dense enough for people. Venera series probes proved
| at about same time that Venus surface was unsurvivable for
| anything we could recognise as "life". Stars are too far away.
| That was about it.
|
| Many people don't get the origins of enthusiasm of first years of
| the space era, it wasn't because of politics, it was because
| there were real hope to find intelligent life in the Solar System
| itself - as crazy as it might sound now. And almost total surety
| of finding at least some form of complex, multicellular life.
| Disappointment when the real data came in, was massive. That's
| why space program went nowhere after Apollo, becoming a
| politicised clown show - by the time Apollo 11 landed, it was
| abundantly clear there wasn't much to see or do in the Solar
| System.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| In 1965, Clarke, Asimov, and other science writers were at NASA
| watching the first images appear. "Craters. Duh, it's right
| next to the asteroid belt, of course it has craters. Not that
| any of us thought of it beforehand..."
| eesmith wrote:
| Do you have a reference for that account? I hadn't heard it
| before, and it doesn't sounds quite right.
|
| They certainly knew the Earth and Moon had craters, so
| proximity to the asteroid belt isn't required.
|
| I suspect they thought the atmosphere on Mars was thicker and
| like Earth, where the high rate of erosion erases evidence.
|
| Digging around through archive.org I found
| https://archive.org/details/sim_popular-
| astronomy_1944-05_52... from Popular Astronomy 1944
|
| > The following extracts are taken from pp. 49 and 50:
|
| > "The recent dominance of the meteoritic impact theory of
| crater origin makes timely a review of the oases-crater
| question of Mars. In this treatise, these conclusions have
| been pointed out:
|
| > "I, Meteorite craters are known on the Earth and Moon;
| therefore, craters exist on Mars.
|
| > "2. The circular oases on Mars are the size, shape, and
| number of comparable lunar craters.
|
| > "3. Crater depressions form a natural reservoir, accounting
| for the intense vegetation in the Martian oases,
|
| > "4. The random distribution of crater oases is apparent,
| indicating that the canal system was adapted to this
| haphazard arrangement.
|
| The reviewer of the above points out
|
| > "Why didn't someone think of the crater theory sooner? The
| answer is simple. Someone did. Back in 1892, at Arequipa,
| Peru, W. H. Pickering not only discovered the small black
| spots on Mars, but he also recognized their similarity to the
| circlets on the Moon. Because lunar craters were then
| believed to be volcanic, Pickering may be forgiven for
| implying that the Martian craterets also were of volcanic
| origin.
|
| We now know these crater oases were not real. My point is
| only that some people proposed meteoric craters on the Moon
| before the 1960s.
|
| BTW, the SF of the pre-Mariner era does have volcanic craters
| on Mars, like https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v15
| n01_1941-01_c... and https://archive.org/details/Startling_St
| ories_v07n03_1942-05... .
|
| I also found https://archive.org/details/exploringmars0000ric
| h/page/150/m... saying in 1954 "no irregularities due to
| shadows have ever been observed along the terminator--the
| line dividing daylight from dark--such as would be produced
| by Martian craters." The author was an American astronomer
| and also a SF writer in the 1950s. By this we know
| astronomers were already considering there might be craters
| on Mars as there are on the Moon.
| mrec wrote:
| Yup. One early Arthur C Clarke story had plants growing
| natively on the _Moon_.
| Animats wrote:
| _It was because there were real hope to find intelligent life
| in the Solar System itself - as crazy as it might sound now._
|
| Yes. Von Braun wrote an otherwise realistic novel in which
| earth's explorers find intelligent life on Mars.[1] Heinlein
| wrote realistically of native intelligent life on Mars and
| Venus, with far more benign environments then they actually
| have. But once probes got there, we got to see how bleak they
| are.
|
| There's a little hope for extrasolar planets, now that we can
| detect some of them.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale
| thomasguide wrote:
| FYI, this is about the _titles_ of these books, not the textual
| content of the books themselves. The implication of the article
| is that sci-fi is losing relative standing to fantasy, but
| another interpretation is that science fiction titles have become
| more abstract and less literal over time.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Yeah, I think at most very literal titles would be a stylistic
| phase. Even "The Martian" is more a play on words than just a
| literal title for what it's about.
|
| Taking favourite novels which are within arm's reach: Sure
| "Rainbows End" is Science Fiction which doesn't involve space
| travel etc. but "Incandescence" is also SF but that's _deeply_
| about space travel. Banks ' "Whit" and "Surface Detail" are
| both sat here. One of those is set in a lightly fictionalized
| Scotland and the other is a Science Fiction novel where the
| main protagonist dies but is resurrected, then is witness to
| several of the most significant space battles of her era. But
| like, if you didn't know, how would you guess which is which?
|
| Now, Banks wasn't a _hard_ SF writer. Unlike say Egan 's
| "Incandescence" none of the events of his SF novels are
| actually physically plausible, but presumably this list is
| about genre SF and thus includes Banks, Bujold etc.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| so... it might be a marketing problem?
|
| no publisher was there to tell author "wtf did you name it,
| you'll get ignored" or smth?
| tialaramex wrote:
| Publishers make choices the author had no say in all the
| time. One of the things commonly mentioned about Phil Dick
| is that while the movies you've probably seen based on his
| work (such as "Blade Runner" and "Total Recall") have
| different titles than the stories they are based on, those
| stories weren't published under his proposed name in many
| cases either.
| duskwuff wrote:
| I don't think anyone's failing to recognize modern sci-fi
| novels because they aren't called "The Space Martians Go To
| The Moon In Their Starship" or whatever.
|
| Really, I think the most significant trend here is that,
| between 1950 and 1980 or so, the sci-fi genre grew up and
| stopped relying on painfully literal titles.
| rybosworld wrote:
| A bit of an off-topic observation:
|
| Banks might not have focused on the hard sci-fi aspects but I
| have a difficult time imagining a more likely future for
| humanity than something like the culture civilization.
| Ekaros wrote:
| As cynic I would imagine eventual collapse to be more
| likely. Probably slow degradation back to some sort of
| semi-advanced agricultural society. Say kinda post-
| apocalyptic world(without proper apocalypse) with larger
| societal structures still existing. Slow degradation of
| industrial output until some balance level is reached.
|
| Probably not best sci-fi universe one can come up to. Or
| most selling one.
| tialaramex wrote:
| The Culture can't happen. It requires Faster Than Light
| spaceships and that's not a thing in our universe. Also,
| and I know it's not what you meant, but in Banks' fiction
| "State of the Art" is specifically a novella about a
| Culture visit to Earth in the 1970s. They're not us.
|
| Egan's "The Amalgam" is an SF society which could in
| principle descend in part from some future humanity, and I
| suppose if you like Banks' setting for its utopianism you'd
| be satisfied with the Amalgam. Its citizens tend to live
| long, full lives in which they're definitely mostly
| concerned with the upper parts of Maslow's pyramid and
| their practical needs are fulfilled as a matter of course
| in most cases.
|
| I must say, to the extent we have any future at all, I
| think probably of Egan's "Dream Apes". An Orangutan-like
| self-engineered future humanity who have arranged that
| there are no apex predators above them, there's an
| abundance of resources for their relatively modest
| population, and they just chill, believing that if there
| _is_ something out there it 's not their concern. Of course
| in the story the Dream Apes are all annihilated by a
| cataclysmic event which destroys Earth, but hey, it's
| pretty quick.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The part where superintelligent computers keep humans
| around as pets in a powerful and happy civilization is
| plausible. The part where there's hyperdrive and energy
| grids and fields and effectors, less so.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| The sad state of the 'science fiction corner' in German book
| chains is completely real though. Over the last two decades or
| so you could literally see it shrink on each visit and what
| little remains is filled with mass produced trash (Star Wars
| novels etc). The fantasy section right next to it has been
| eating into the science-fiction shelf space but is filled with
| the same trash, just replace your laser-toting space troopers
| with vampires, werewolves and dragons.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| I wouldn't expect only one fiction subgenre to have such a
| dramatic increase of proportion of abstract titles while other
| related subgenres did not. In other words, I would expect all
| of these graphs to have a negative correlation with time due to
| a general abstraction of titles across all fiction subgenres. I
| would be surprised if there was enough consumer differentiation
| to support abstraction in one subgenre but not the others.
|
| Another interpretation might be that as fewer books are
| released in a subgenre, their titles also become more abstract,
| which would increase the effect seen in the data presented as
| well.
|
| But I would hesitate to believe that the observed effect should
| be chalked up to _only_ title abstraction, and not a decline in
| popularity. Occam's razor.
| Timshel wrote:
| Like none of The Expanse books would appear...
| masklinn wrote:
| Not one of the culture books either, even though several have
| spaceships as main characters. And only a handful of Hamilton
| books. And I reckon a single Polity book.
| masklinn wrote:
| > science fiction titles have become more abstract and less
| literal over time.
|
| Not even abstract, just not completely on the nose. Just as a
| lot if fantasy is not: only two discord novels would match the
| author's search terms even though you'll find all five inside
| the pages. None for Malazan. Or Nix's old kingdom.
|
| And worse, 40% of the sci-fi terms pretty only allow settings
| of "future solar system". Not _one_ of the Foundation books
| would match. Pretty much no classic sci-fi either. Wells's
| fucking The War of the Worlds would not, because for some
| reason (of having any sort of taste) it was not titled "the day
| Mars invaded planet earth through space and then was beaten"
| like some lone star light novel.
| notahacker wrote:
| Yep.
|
| In that sense I think it's less an overall literary trends
| and more reflecting the pretty basic way of marketing pulpy
| stories to teens means putting "vampire" rather than "planet"
| in big letters in the title. Also, people still writing
| fantasy novels about alien civilizations aren't setting them
| on the moon or Mars any more, for reasons...
| a3w wrote:
| The genre where we find the "fantasy/sci-fi" books right next
| to usually mystery books in our German book stores usually is
| speculative fiction:
|
| - mystery, - horror, - fantasy, - and sci-fi have lots of
| overlap. - And XKCDs What-If-Books even.
|
| But as someone who hates fantasy and loves sci-fi, the biggest
| difference for me comes from plausibility: "a witch did it" as
| Occam's fantasy razor for things being the way they happened,
| and the underlying physics engine means for me: either this is
| soft "sci-fi", or they better explain with hard rules the
| limitations and effects of their magic system.
|
| Since (low-sorcery) fantasy RPGs even have torches that would
| never work, when historical torched looked completely
| differently, suspension of disbelieve hardly sets in for me in
| fantasy books.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Fantasy is certainly big, but it's not like there isn't space sf
| or space opera out there.
|
| Authors in my library who've released space sf stuff in the last
| few years -- Anne Leckie, Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, Adrian
| Tchaikovsky, Arkady Martine, John Scalzi, Martha Wells, James
| Corey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Max Gladstone, Mary Robinette Kowal.
|
| To be fair, some of them get into philosophy or fantasy, or even
| romance. But the settings are SF.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| And you're not even getting into Baen and Tor books territory,
| where the hard military scifi lives (David Weber et al).
|
| (Scalzi is always fun.)
| mygrant wrote:
| Maybe 50% of my audiobook listening is the Expeditionary Force
| series by Craig Alanson. So dumb, so much fun, and all
| spaceships.
| Maultasche wrote:
| Yeah, that's a good one. "Dumb and fun" is a good
| description.
|
| Craig Alanson also wrote a fantasy trilogy a while back that
| proved much better than I was expecting. It started off as
| what appeared to be an uninteresting juvenile fantasy book,
| but quickly got better and darker. I very much enjoyed
| reading those.
| delichon wrote:
| The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a
| greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the
| future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later
| generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the
| source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history
| and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator,
| Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sideways into fantasy gained
| the popularity lost by escapes into the future.
|
| I predict a correlation between space-based scifi sales and polls
| on whether the country is heading in the right direction.
| Den_VR wrote:
| I still find myself quite taken by some sci-fi writing. Iain M
| Banks works, Rajaniemi, and Joan Slonczewski. The "problem" is
| that they are not popular the way Harry Potter or isekai are.
| chasil wrote:
| Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling
| faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances
| to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of
| years of travel even with the most efficient technology.
|
| Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life
| present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for
| protein (if gene expression even works that way).
|
| We also do not yet have the technology for a complete survey of
| nearby habitable planets.
|
| It is not an encouraging line of thought.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster
| than light is likely impossible
|
| Would any of the stories about the characters' relationships
| with people not traveling with them be entertaining given the
| effects of time dilation?
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Maybe, but the most compelling scifi to me personally is the
| generation ship stuff, like Ring by Steven Baxter.
| wiredfool wrote:
| And then there's Cloud Cuckoo Land. (Anthony Doerr)
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| This is motivated pessimism. We knew in the 50s that breaking
| the speed of light was highly unlikely. We dreamed of the
| stars anyway. Now we refuse to dream, or to even attempt to
| solve the problems (a common pattern when discussing
| spaceflight is people who are blatantly searching for
| problems, rather than solutions), because we are pessimistic,
| devoid of imagination, and seek to legitimise our collective
| depression through scientific and engineering arguments.
| chasil wrote:
| I have upvoted you, and perhaps you are right that there
| are shades of pessimism in this perspective.
|
| The 2020s have not been known as reasons for great
| optimism. The pandemic and AI culling clades of the job
| market have been traumatizing experiences.
| binary132 wrote:
| If you think this is something that started in the 2020s
| you need to review the chart.
| krapp wrote:
| I don't think it's motivated pessimism so much as a
| shifting tastes and changes in media. There are tons of SF
| stories with starships in movies, games and streaming
| platforms. It just happens to be the case that fantasy is
| more popular then SF at the moment where books are
| concerned.
| echelon wrote:
| Our astrophysicists don't even know why the universe is
| expanding, don't know that Lambda CDM is correct, don't
| know if things are universally consistent, yet we're so
| damned sure this is it.
|
| We don't even know that this isn't a simulation. Not non-
| falsifiable, sure. But we're convinced we're bound to this
| solar system with our crude tools and limits of detection.
|
| One new instrument could upset our grand understanding and
| models. Maybe we should wait until they get better hardware
| to marry ourselves to their prognostications of the end of
| time.
|
| During the postwar years of plenty, people stopped
| dreaming. We had bold dreams before WWII, but people
| stopped looking at how far we'd come and started comparing
| themselves to everyone else. We had no mortal enemy,
| tremendous wealth, and "keeping up with the Joneses" became
| the new operating protocol.
|
| We have more than we did in the past. The manufacturing
| wealth of 1940-1970 was a fluke. The trade wealth of
| 1980-2020 was a fluke. We were upset over an unfair
| advantage that won't last forever. Even today we're still
| better off than a hundred years ago, yet everyone focuses
| on how bad things are.
|
| Maybe a return to hardship will make us dream again.
| jfengel wrote:
| We do know why the universe is expanding. That's due to
| general relativity. That's well attested to high
| confidence.
|
| We don't know why the expansion is accelerating. For that
| we have only speculation.
| Recurecur wrote:
| It's well understood that the expansion of the universe
| is not "due to general relativity". General relativity
| does explain some details of that expansion.
| jfengel wrote:
| You don't need to break the speed of light to get to the
| stars. Time dilation and space contraction mean that you
| can get there in as little time as you desire.
|
| Everyone you knew on earth would be dead by the time you
| got back, but if it's just about you, the speed of light is
| no limitation at all. (The rocket equation, however,
| presents stupendous engineering challenges.)
| WJW wrote:
| Time dilation and space contraction only matter if you
| can reasonably achieve speeds of a significant portion of
| the speed of light. AFAIK nobody has even come up with a
| reasonable way to achieve this for lightweight probes,
| let alone for hundred-ton ships capable of carrying
| humans. And let's not forget the practical problems like
| all photons incoming from the front being blueshifted
| into ultrahard radiation that would make a point blank
| nuclear bomb seem like a small candle.
|
| Realistically even getting to the nearest star in less
| than 400 years experienced time is way way WAY out of
| reach for now.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| Laser accelerate a lightweight probe, probe lands on
| alien planet and self replicates a receiver and basic
| robot body. Send mind in the form of information at speed
| of light and download into robot body.
|
| Something roughly along these lines was believable enough
| for the Altered Carbon universe.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| "lightweight probe" and "self replicates" don't go
| together. Nanobots are just as much fantasy physics as
| FTL is.
| jfengel wrote:
| Landing from relativistic speed would be a massive
| engineering problem, since you won't have a laser de-
| celerator on the other end. And landing on a planet would
| seem to require a rocket, which cannot be lightweight.
|
| Not necessarily insoluble, but a massive unsolved
| problem.
| WJW wrote:
| So what? Dilithium + antimatter + magic space warping was
| enough for the Star Trek universe. The sky is the limit
| for science fiction.
|
| Just in that first paragraph:
|
| - How do you stop at the other end? There won't be a
| large laser array at the receiving end and a laser probe
| will not have enough stored energy to decelerate itself.
|
| - How exactly do you download a mind to be transmitted?
| We can't do it right now to be sure, and it's not clear
| we could ever accurately do that depending on how finely
| detailed a human brain is.
|
| - How do you transmit it reliably over several hundred
| light years? Background radiation alone is enough to
| drown out any signal after a few dozen light years no
| matter how good your transmission is. Also, when do you
| start sending? You cannot possibly know which probes
| survived. (you DID send out at least a few hundred probes
| right? Don't forget to multiply laser energy requirements
| by the amount of probes)
|
| - How does the receiving end download a mind into a robot
| body? We can't even begin to do that on Earth, not even
| with worms or flies. Humans are right out.
|
| - How do we power the lasers? Conservative estimates have
| put required laser power at several gigawatts at least.
| Current laser systems can do that in pulsed mode but only
| with extremely low duty cycles. Getting enough power
| together to supply millions of homes would be tricky to
| say the least. (and see the note above about needing
| multiple probes just to be on the good side of
| probability)
|
| - How does the probe survive decades of ultrahard
| radiation? What about dust it will encounter at high-
| subluminal speeds, also for decades? The shielding for
| that won't be lightweight, but the heavier the probe gets
| the more difficult it will be to accellerate.
|
| - The satellite which is light enough to be powered by
| lasers also contains the most magical 3d printer anyone
| has ever seen. You can't just pull the molecules for
| advanced processors and energy generation equipment out
| of the air, such a probe would need to set up significant
| mining industries all on its own without any human
| interaction.
|
| - A basic robot body. Keep in mind that "picking up a
| keychain and choosing the right key out of it without
| dropping the whole keychain" is already a challenge for
| modern robots.
|
| In short, it'll be several centuries before humanity even
| gets close to such a project. I'd like to be wrong, but
| it seems extremely unlikely anyone of us will see such a
| thing in our lifetime.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > and any life present at the destination will not use the
| same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works
| that way).
|
| Well, that could be worked around in the world building. My
| favorite SF-friendly scenario would be if life originated in
| the Sun's natal cluster (perhaps not around the Sun itself),
| with tens of thousands of star systems, and spread between
| them before the cluster dispersed. Presumably panspermia
| would be much easier in such a situation because the stars
| are closer together and because maybe residual gas could help
| particles get trapped near other young systems. In this case
| all the "infected" systems could have the same coding.
|
| A nice consequence of this scenario is it's compatible with
| the Fermi argument: even if origin of life is unlikely, it
| just had to happen once here, and so it not happening
| elsewhere in the galaxy (or even visible universe) is not a
| problem.
| bot403 wrote:
| Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding
| dragons, faeries, or magic?
|
| Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon.
| But both make for great stories.
| dboreham wrote:
| Presumably these are equally likely because you could build
| a DNA-printer and thereby create a dragon of some sort (not
| sure if it could have fully functional fire breathing
| though)?
| WJW wrote:
| Dragons are physically impossible in many more ways than
| the firebreathing. For one, things that large would
| probably struggle to fly. We can make larger things fly,
| but have to cheat using jet (or rocket!) engines to
| generate incredible thrust in ways not typically
| accessible to living beings.
| boothby wrote:
| And now I'm picturing a dragon with bombardier-beetle
| style pulsed jet boosters. And while I'd typically
| question your assumptions of how big dragons need to be
| in order to deserve the name, I'll assert that
| _quetzocoatlus nothropi_ [1] was big enough.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus
| krapp wrote:
| "Dragon" as a classification is odd, because when you
| look at every kind of mythological creature that gets
| classified as such nowadays, sometimes from cultures that
| wouldn't have recognized the concept, you find that they
| have little in common beyond some vaguely reptilian vibe
| and being scary.
|
| And I'm sorry but that _thing_ is too goofy looking to be
| considered a dragon.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Science Fiction doesn't have to be fantasy, it can be
| speculative. But if your setting or plot relies on
| something we know to be scientifically untrue, and you
| don't put some effort into explaining why it somehow works
| in your setting, it's fantasy and not speculative.
|
| Someone like Asimov never considered his books to be
| fantasy and that he could just insert whatever he wanted
| with no justification. In fact, he never considered sci-fi
| to be a genre, he always argued it was a setting and that
| his most famous stories were detective stories in a sci-fi
| setting. But detective stories don't work if your world
| isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader
| can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the
| answer because it's based on what the author thought was
| cool and not what logically connects.
|
| The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart
| if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a
| more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless
| there is some serious justification as to why the author
| didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is
| supposed to be our world, but in the future).
| Recurecur wrote:
| FTL starships in an SF story don't need a detailed
| explanation, just a new invention.
|
| It's the exact same thing as a speculative story in the
| 1920s discussing supersonic flight, even though the jet
| engine hadn't been invented yet.
|
| For instance "Tunnel in the Sky" bypassed the whole issue
| in the 50's, later imitated by "Stargate"...
| wolvoleo wrote:
| True but at that point items travelling faster than sound
| had been demonstrated.
|
| It was just hard to engineer a plane that could do it.
| For example during WWII the V2 rockets travelled much
| faster than sound. They were just unmanned.
|
| What I mean is, nobody thought the sound barrier was a
| hard limit we could never break.
| jacquesm wrote:
| These two examples are not equally unlikely. They are of
| different orders of unlikelihood, the one is extremely
| unlikely, the other simply impossible.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| There is a scene in Pirates of the Carribean where captain
| jack is stuck in a void surrounded by duplicates of himself.
| It is his hell. As we have biult better and better telescopes
| we realize that as we expand into space we will be stuck
| talking only to ourselves, at least for a few thousand
| generations.
|
| When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping
| around. But all we saw was distant black hole mergers;
| interesting but not exactly a star trek moment. When areicebo
| fell and was not immediately rebiult, i realized that most
| people just dont care about ever meeting another
| civilization. Even if we did find one it wouldnt change much
| here on earth. Most people dont care about climate change.
| They dont care about anything beyond their own lifetime. What
| matter will aliens be if they are a thousand lightyears away?
| So people dream now about other things, about grimy politics
| and alternative history.
| chasil wrote:
| The Chinese built a much larger spherical telescope, so
| what was the point of rebuilding Arecibo?
|
| I visited Arecibo a decade before it collapsed. It was
| impressive and of great historical value, but could repair
| be cost-effective?
|
| Edit: It did have some unique features.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-
| meter_Aperture_Sp...
| wat10000 wrote:
| Rebuilding it would cost maybe half a billion dollars.
| Give ICE an unpaid week off and job done. Maybe not the
| absolute best way to spend that money on science, but I
| fear the actual outcome is "it's not cost effective so
| we're not going to spend it on any science."
| ricksunny wrote:
| >When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives
| whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole
| mergers; interesting but not exactly a star trek moment.
|
| * The LIGO methodology is to look for hyper-specified
| patterns in voluminous reams of apparent 'noise'. It
| wouldn't be unfair to call it an extensively aggravated
| search for what one is looking for. That's okay, so long as
| they provide the stats to back up the non-noisiness of what
| they turn up. (I'm not a stats person and can't debate
| that, and. I trust their caliber enough that I don't feel
| the need to). But to your point, if there are other
| signatures lurking in LIGO data _that they don't know
| already how to look for_, then there is no reason why a
| paper would have gotten produced describing it since the
| first GW detection in 2015.
|
| * Now, take this for what it's worth in terms of
| fragmentary information relaying - But at the first Sol
| Symposium in 2023 at Stanford, I can tell you that in
| podium-level banter between talks (perhaps it was Q&A and
| the like IIRC) it was asserted that the LIGO consortium was
| not allowing studies (read: not allowing access to its
| data) where the investigator's intension was related to UFO
| / UAP phenomena (like, extrapolating here, looking for
| signatures correlated with external reports of UAP
| sightings). If that claim was borne out, than perhaps the
| LIGO consortium is just doing preemptive reputation
| protection in not allowing such studies to kick off with
| its name associated with it. (One could attempt to follow
| up with astronomer Beatriz Villaroel for a lead on who said
| that or if there's substance to that research policy claim)
|
| But my point is, between these two bullet points, you are
| afforded a complete 'empty set' - and decidedly not a
| 'negative result' - on whether or not LIGO has detected
| signatures of a 'warp drive' or other some such non-prosaic
| phenomenon.
| HoldOnAMinute wrote:
| That's true, but stop to consider all the things we ARE
| doing...
|
| * Space Station that lasts 25 years
|
| * 3,000 satellites providing Internet Service
|
| * Mars rovers that run for 10+ years
|
| * Flying helicopters on Mars
| davedx wrote:
| > the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean
| tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most
| efficient technology.
|
| Spoken like someone who's never read Tau Zero
| 0xf00ff00f wrote:
| Stephen Baxter's short story "Pilot" is another good one:
|
| https://www.stephen-baxter.com/stories.html#pilot
| antonvs wrote:
| Spoken like someone who's never read the Relativistic
| Rocket: https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/S
| R/Rocket/...
|
| I really find it hard to understand how people confuse
| science fiction with reality. I love Tau Zero - I first
| read it over 40 years ago - but it's _fiction_ , ffs.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| You don't need to go faster than light. Once you approach
| anywhere near the speed of light, time slows down so much
| that journey time becomes irrelevant.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| Not if you want to go back home to the place you once knew
| though
| nine_k wrote:
| Interstellar space contains neutral hydrogen atoms. Hitting
| a spaceship, they would produce electromagnetic radiation.
| When the collision speed goes past about 0.25c, the
| radiation becomes hard gamma rays which are dangerous to
| living things, and cannot be efficiently shielded against.
|
| At this speed, the time dilation is slightly above 3%, so
| you're still not going to reach even Alpha Centauri in one
| human lifetime, or maybe you barely can.
| gpm wrote:
| Alpha Centauri is only 4.2 light years away. 0.25c is
| definitely enough to reach it. You could even do a round
| trip in only your adult years.
| WalterBright wrote:
| And yet we still have a solar system, empty of life other
| than Earth, we can expand to. Why try to cross an ocean when
| everything we could want is across the river?
|
| Two things baffle me:
|
| 1. The idea that Terran life is toxic and must not be allowed
| on other planets in the solar system.
|
| 2. The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities
| by leaps and bounds is routinely vilified and excoriated on
| HackerNews.
| xixixao wrote:
| 2. I'm a big fan of the guy, except he went completely off
| the rails on political stuff... It's hard that both can be
| true at the same time.
| nephihaha wrote:
| There are a lot of ethical issues surrounding Neuralink
| and how it would be used. It might be good for certain
| medical stuff but I can see how it can be abused.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > There are a lot of ethical issues surrounding Neuralink
| and how it would be used
|
| Like what? (There are always ethical issues with new
| medical technology.)
|
| > It might be good for certain medical stuff
|
| Yes, like giving sight to the blind! What a _monster_
| Musk is!
|
| P.S. two of my largest medical fears are becoming
| paralyzed or going blind. Neuralink has promise in making
| these treatable. I'm all for it!
| krapp wrote:
| >Why try to cross an ocean when everything we could want is
| across the river?
|
| That "river" is still vast and nothing we want is on the
| other side.
|
| >1. The idea that Terran life is toxic and must not be
| allowed on other planets in the solar system.
|
| It's less the idea that Terran life is toxic and more that
| we're still hoping to find some forms of primitive life
| elsewhere in the solar system, and don't want those efforts
| thwarted by cross-contamination. _You_ decided the rest of
| the solar system is dead, not the scientific community.
|
| >2. The one person who is advancing our space faring
| abilities by leaps and bounds is routinely vilified and
| excoriated on HackerNews.
|
| If you really can't comprehend the reason why Elon Musk is
| villified by people then there's no point in trying to
| explain it to you.
|
| Suffice to say that owning a rocket company doesn't absolve
| a person of their sins to everyone, even on Hacker News.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > nothing we want is on the other side
|
| Wow.
|
| > You decided the rest of the solar system is dead, not
| the scientific community.
|
| The odds are heavily stacked against other life existing,
| and get worse with every probe. Of course, nobody can
| prove there is no other life. And it's not very credible
| that Terran life will out-compete locally evolved life.
|
| And the idea that preserving some slime mold on Pluto
| justifies us constraining ourselves to Earth is just sad.
|
| > If you really can't comprehend the reason why Elon Musk
| is villified by people then there's no point in trying to
| explain it to you.
|
| I once asked another Musk-hater on HN why? All he could
| come up with is Musk called a diver a pedo-boy. I pointed
| out that Musk only did that because the diver went on
| national TV and told Musk to shove his submarine up his
| backside.
|
| If you've got a better reason, I'd love to hear it!
| nephihaha wrote:
| 1) There may well be other biospheres in the solar system.
| There is some indirect and inconclusive evidence of
| microbial life on Mars, and even in the Venusian
| atmosphere. This dates back to results from the Viking and
| Venera, as well as more recent research. Earth life could
| be destructive to native life in these places, and vice
| versa (since they would likely be extremophiles) resulting
| in invasive species.
|
| 2) Musk is putting a lot of money into these things but he
| is still heavily subsidised by US government money and
| facilities (a loophole in the Outer Space Treaty allows
| individuals and corporations to claim other planets but not
| countries.)
| WalterBright wrote:
| > There is some indirect and inconclusive evidence of
| microbial life on Mars, and even in the Venusian
| atmosphere. This dates back to results from the Viking
| and Venera, as well as more recent research.
|
| Yes, I've been hearing that forever. Every probe shrinks
| the envelope on the possibility.
|
| > Earth life could be destructive to native life in these
| places,
|
| Better us than slime mold.
|
| > and vice versa (since they would likely be
| extremophiles) resulting in invasive species.
|
| Perhaps. If anyone was transporting things back from
| there, there'd be a long space voyage where any such
| toxicity to the astronauts would be pretty clear.
|
| 2. Musk is not getting subsidies. He does get government
| contracts, where he exchanges rockets for money. That is
| not a subsidy, like if I make boxes and sell them to the
| government I am not getting a subsidy.
| givinguflac wrote:
| 2. How do you define loans, tax credits and other
| subsidies then? You claim it's this person specifically
| advancing space faring capabilities- which literally
| would not be possible without the US government. So
| please elaborate, as you're not making sense.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 1. A loan is not a subsidy. Loans get paid back with
| interest.
|
| 2. Tax credits - the tax code is full of various credits.
| Anyone can use those credits.
|
| 3. Other subsidies - like what?
|
| > which literally would not be possible without the US
| government
|
| The US government buying launches at prices far cheaper
| than NASA is not a subsidy.
| nephihaha wrote:
| I believe we already have the resources to colonise the Moon
| and maybe Mars right now. There would have to be considerable
| R&D, and willpower, and it would be very expensive but I
| think it is within our powers. Humans would have to live
| underground and deal with dust, maybe microbes in the case of
| Mars, but we could do it. The spaceships to go to Mars would
| have to be big but they could more easily be built on the
| Moon due to the lower gravity.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Stated with a different spin, the detached-from-reality takes
| of Campbell-era SF finally became too strained to enjoy.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I don't know, to the East of the Iron Curtain science fiction
| wasn't mostly about future optimism (at least after the initial
| "we're building a better society" optimism had been brutally
| murdered during the 1950s and 60s), but often a critical mirror
| of then-current society transported into the future to escape
| state censorship.
|
| Maybe it's as simple as free societies not having the
| evolutionary pressure to produce great literature that requires
| an interested and intelligent reader to decode the hidden
| messages written between the lines ;)
| nephihaha wrote:
| There are some brilliant SF writers from the eastern bloc.
| They had to write to get around censorship and the official
| line. Stanislaw Lem is great.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Why did people want to escape Earth though? Maybe they felt
| Earth was past saving.
| DennisP wrote:
| A lot of the old stuff isn't so much about escaping Earth, as
| outgrowing it. A feeling that it's our destiny to expand to
| the stars, just as it was life's destiny to come out of the
| oceans.
|
| The more we look for alien civilizations and come up empty,
| the more I feel like they were on to something. For all we
| know, life is exceedingly rare in the universe.
| mlinhares wrote:
| I kinda have the same feeling for music as well, the best
| phases for metal and punk music are usually when stuff is going
| to shit. When everything looks bright and good the music just
| doesn't have the same quality, people are not angry all the
| time.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| > best phases for metal and punk music are usually when stuff
| is going to shit.
|
| Now should be a productive time for music in the US then, and
| possibly elsewhere if things continue on the same trajectory.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think I would argue that we already see the sea change in the
| later Dune books
|
| The inner systems become hidebound as they continue to reach
| out they find that not only has someone beaten them there, they
| have become Other as well as antagonistic and expansionist.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Anime went from science-fiction dominated in the 1980s ( _Gundam_
| ) to fantasy-dominated ( _Friern_ ) today. The strange thing
| about fantasy was it lived under the shadow of Tolkien and Lewis
| which I think suppressed it for half a century.
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| My theory about this aligns with my theory about the
| disappearance of 'futurists' from the popular conversation -
| we're living in science fiction. The future is arriving every
| day. It no longer feels necessary to speculate about a changed
| world - you need only look out the door.
|
| I say this as someone that still loves (and writes a little)
| speculative fiction. Just a guess as to what's happening.
| eesmith wrote:
| The 20th century was a period of wild change. Someone born
| before the first powered airplane flight in their lifetime
| could have flown on a jet plane to Europe and watched the first
| moon landing live on TV.
|
| Vaccines put an end to endemic diseases which killed so many
| children every year. The birth control pill catalyzed the
| sexual revolution. We had a treatment for diabetes, which was
| once a death sentence.
|
| The 1950s and onward saw huge changes in how businesses are
| organized due to computerization. In the US, cheap automobiles,
| cheap gas, the federal highway system, and subsidies
| transformed how most people live, including white flight into
| suburbia.
|
| Plastic was a wonder material. Materials like nylon and
| polyester transformed the clothing industry.
| esafak wrote:
| Futurist Michio Kaku once gave a talk at my company five years
| ago and though I forgot the details, I remember the audience
| found his vision quite dystopian.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 9/11 was the turning point. We'd been fed a future "in the year
| 2000." When we got there, that future turned into a nostalgic
| vision of the past.
|
| It's still possible to imagine _new_ bright futures, but that
| kind of imagination is very much against a cultural tide that
| 's fervently regressive and nostalgic.
| weregiraffe wrote:
| Where did all the starships go,
|
| Long time passing...
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| The sci-fi keywords are all specifically space-related. I wonder
| if the trend is space-specific or if other sci-fi topics suffered
| the same fate (like robots, computers, technology, etc). It does
| seem to me like society generally became less interested in space
| exploration after the moon landing (though I wasn't around then
| so that is really just what I gather from watching/reading things
| about western society in the latter half of the 20th century).
|
| On the other hand, fantasy includes vampires and werewolves. I
| guess you could call them fantasy but to me they are quite a
| different niche to Tolkien. Traditionally vampires and werewolves
| would probably be considered horror rather than fantasy, though
| it's a bit more complicated now as _Twilight_ is clearly not
| horror.
|
| I think the author's point stands regardless, as there has been a
| resurgence across all of those keywords, but I do think the
| reasons for the resurgence in magic and dragons aren't
| necessarily the same as the reasons for the resurgence in
| vampires and werewolves.
| masklinn wrote:
| > The sci-fi keywords are all specifically space-related.
|
| Worse, half are confined to the solar system.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| That Berlin bookstore (Otherland) also has great staff for
| recommendations. The resident scifi attendant was quite
| knowledgeable about original scifi written in German (as opposed
| to translated works). That's quite useful if your knowledge of
| the field is limited to the obvious Andreas Esbach (unsurpassed)
| and Perry Rodan (pass).
| pfdietz wrote:
| I enjoyed The Carpet Makers (which is available in English.)
| Sometimes translated works rub the wrong way because of
| cultural differences, but in that one the differences enhanced
| the experience.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I have been seeing the trend of Fantasy slowly taking over SF for
| a while, maybe as long as 30 years :(
|
| Real Science based SF seems to have disappeared completely, at
| least based upon the only Book Store left in my area, Barnes and
| Noble.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| > Barnes and Noble
|
| ...this might be the main problem (same with Thalia in
| Germany), those large book store chains are aggressively
| optimized for monetization, and that kicks off a death spiral
| of filling the available space with cheap industrially produced
| trash.
|
| The good stuff might still be there, but it's much harder to
| find, and you need to know where to look (same thing that
| happened to music basically).
| Ekaros wrote:
| Not to forget being linked to main-stream publishers that
| have different editorial goals compared to era when these
| works were released. Not saying there were not biases back
| then. But now the biases are different and thus the published
| output is as well.
| pfdietz wrote:
| There was also the "death of the mid-list" which cut out a
| lot of SF books. The Thor Power Tool decision in the US had
| a big effect.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Power_Tool_Co._v._Commis
| s...
|
| "The Thor decision caused publishers and booksellers to be
| much quicker to destroy stocks of poorly-selling books in
| order to realize a taxable loss. These books would
| previously have been kept in stock but written down to
| reflect the fact that not all of them were expected to
| sell."
|
| Today, I understand mass market paperbacks are dying.
| pfdietz wrote:
| A great deal of science fiction is just fantasy with spaceships.
| It uses technological tropes to _seem_ like it isn 't fantasy,
| but that's just surface gloss.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Which is unfortunately true, but also just illustrates how far
| science-fiction has fallen - not sure when it started but I
| guess Star Wars played an important role to remove the
| 'science' from 'science-fiction'.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It's been there since day one. What, you thought early era SF
| used accurate science? No, they used made-up rules based on
| whether they could tell a good story.
|
| Science fiction usually doesn't conform to how the world
| actually works in the same way pornography usually doesn't
| conform to the way sexual relationships work. They are both
| there to tell titillating stories, not describe reality.
| krapp wrote:
| For instance: Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics aren't
| based on any practical science, they exist as a plot device
| for setting off mystery stories with robots and morality
| plays about hubris. And the reason robots have positronic
| brains is that positrons were recently discovered at the
| time, and it sounded cool. Yet people will swear Asimov is
| one of the hardest SF authors around.
|
| Sometimes you might get a SF author who's an expert in a
| particular field or has a specific hyperfixation, and that
| one aspect of their stories might be grounded somewhat in
| plausibility, but _everything else_ turns out to be
| complete nonsense.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| > What, you thought early era SF used accurate science?
|
| It depends on the author I guess. Stanislaw Lem for
| instance mostly separated his "silly-fiction universes"
| (e.g. the Ijon Tichy and 'robot fairytales' novels) from
| his "hard sci-fi" universes (for instance the Pilot Pirx
| novels) - and there it was mostly about the restrictions of
| space travel (where space travel is usually just plain old
| cargo hauling), Pirx never left the solar system because it
| simply wasn't possible during his lifetime (part of him
| eventually _did_ - maybe - in his last book 'Fiasco'),
| instead the Pirx novels were mostly occupied with typical
| 'space trucker' problems like oil leaks on his rocket
| boosters, wrestling with space harbour bureaucracy or the
| occasional humanoid robot going into a mode that could be
| described as 'mad' or 'depressed'.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| I believe people use the word "hard" to differentiate more
| scientifically rigorous scifi. I'm not well-versed enough to
| know when that started being a term, or what the status quo
| was before it was a term.
|
| Interestingly there's also "high" fantasy to differentiate
| between earth like and non earth like subject worlds, and
| then even "historical fiction" to describe books that try to
| be faithful to some degree to some historical time period on
| earth.
|
| Anyway, this is all to say maybe "how far science-fiction has
| fallen" might be a narrow interpretation of what's been
| happening to fiction in general over the past 75 years. More
| options than ever, maybe...
| watwut wrote:
| I suggest you rewatch star trek. Plot and complexity wise,
| they are basically childrend stories plus technobable.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Really though? Seems to me that the only sub-genre of space
| science fiction that is surviving relative to others is hard
| space science fiction. There's an abundance of high quality
| titles to choose from even (compared to the previous
| millennium).
|
| Edit: Highlights include Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse, The
| Three-Body Problem, Children of Time, Pushing Ice (and other
| titles by Alastair Reynolds), Interstellar (debatable, but it's
| good), Project Hail Mary, For All Mankind, and many more.
| colinb wrote:
| Recommendations?
| chmod775 wrote:
| For literature: House of Suns* if you feel like strapping
| in for a wild ride with nevertheless believable physics.
| Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse if you're looking for a more
| "down to Earth" setting. Children of Time if you want an
| alien experience. Avoid reading summaries of any of these
| books beforehand. They're best enjoyed going in blind.
|
| I've heard "The Expanse" and "For All Mankind" are supposed
| to be good TV shows, but I haven't seen them yet.
|
| If you've already read most of the well-known ones, I could
| give you some recommendations from less well-known authors
| and self-published authors you probably haven't heard of
| yet. Though it would help to have some general direction of
| what you're looking for (military/space opera/other,
| ftl/aliens?, etc). Allowing for limited FTL handwavyness
| opens up a lot of space opera titles that elect to
| otherwise play by hard sci-fi rules.
|
| * Some may recommend "Pushing Ice" over this one for being
| more "hard" sci-fi, but personally House of Suns was a much
| more satisfying read.
| colinb wrote:
| Alas I think I've read/watched everything on your list.
| I'll try a useful echo response. I read the two big
| Arkady Martine books, and much of Ann Leckie's work. I
| thought they were all pretty good. Martine because the
| Aztec's in space genre is new to me, and she writes so
| well about people, Leckie because her galaxy spanning
| empire of genetically cloned god-kings and spaceships
| with transferrable personalities is clever and
| disconcerting.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from
| magic, after all.
| fpsvogel wrote:
| Fantasy appeals to a wider audience (see the "Romantasy" genre)
| and seems to overlap more with YA fiction so captures more young
| readers.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. What's popular with teens varies over time, of course. At
| peak Twilight, the Barnes and Noble at Hillsdale Mall had seven
| bookcases of Teen Paranormal Romance. I mentioned this to one
| of the store Goths, and she told me that vampires were on the
| way out and the next thing was probably going to be zombies.
| The Monster Hunter thing had a brief moment.
|
| Then we had the survival period - Harry Potter overlapped the
| Hunger Games and Divergent eras, all of which produced too many
| spinoffs. This moved into the Game of Thrones spinoffs. Now,
| dragons seem to be out, except that Anne McCaffery is back on
| the shelves.
|
| The latest shift is driven by "booktok" on TikTok. I just saw
| teenage girls giggling over the new books in the Romance
| section, while avoiding the YA section. The Dark Romance
| subgenre is in, and now has its own shelf space.
|
| Hard SF? Other than the Expanse series, not much recently.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| That was fun.
|
| I recall an early editorial of the podcast Escaped Pod describing
| science fiction as a means to more directly engage with topics of
| the human condition by using the conceits of science fiction.
| _Have a difficult time discussing your relationship with your
| parents? Write a story about orphans raised by space aliens._
| That sort of thing.
|
| Maybe something is going on with our human condition that science
| fiction is not as productive a foil as it once was?
|
| I don't know. I'm not a fiction writer. But I can say that since
| I bought my second motorcycle (back on a moto after 20 years
| away) I am enjoying spaceships in my science fiction.
| hdivider wrote:
| Wait till the Chinese land on the Moon first in this new space
| race. There will be a Sputnik moment, massive additional
| investment, and this will inevitably impact sci-fi. Just like in
| the previous space race, we had to fall quite a bit behind first
| before we wake up -- and _then_ , we go all-out.
|
| I also don't agree with the general dystopian or cynical view
| quite prevalent here on HN these days, frankly. It's always been
| so, but it seems to have gotten darker, such that I think a lot
| of old-timers like me pretty much avoid HN these days. It's not
| all bleak, especially when you get away from these screens and
| out into the real world. Looking outward, rather than inward, can
| lead to the kind of desire for discovery and progress which
| underpinned the Apollo era. The world out there is in extreme
| disarray too -- but to an optimist, it presents opportunity to do
| good.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Space Age, mid-50s to mid-70s.
| metalman wrote:
| Texas.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The succession is steampunk, dieselpunk (which includes art deco,
| internal combustion), then atompunk (which includes atomic
| energy, apocalyptic possibilities, space, sci-fi, martians etc),
| then I dunno, regular punk (age of mass single-stream media),
| then our current era of cyberpunk.
| gostsamo wrote:
| Scifi as a space based genre failed due to the end of the space
| race. The generation that grew in the post WWII era aged and
| died. The lack of big scientific breakthroughs for the last fifty
| years added to the lack of new dreams. The future is here, just
| it's not exciting.
|
| For the last few decades the culturally significant fiction has
| been in anime and manga. Lots of it is trash, but lots of it
| captures the ya themes of friendship and adventure. Some of it
| captured better the ideas of the cyber age, I suppose. If one
| explores those genres with a bit of background, you can see how
| they have been inspired by the traditional sf works, but
| repackaged them for new audiences without the introspection and
| conventions of yesterday.
|
| I'm not sure if it is all bad. Definitely, science is not an
| aspiration any more and those works lack the grounding hard scifi
| taught us. On the other hand, there is still romanticism in those
| stories and they teach kids to dream for the impossible. I choose
| to believe that this is still something to base some optimism on.
| Dove wrote:
| In the 1950s, and perhaps to some degree in the 1990s, it seemed
| possible to believe technology was limitless and miraculous and
| conducive to human thriving. As a result, breathlessly hopeful
| and exciting stories about the wonders of the future made sense.
|
| It is hard to feel that way in the 2020s. Technology seems
| oversold, scammish, dystopian, inhuman. Everything is slop and
| skinner boxes. It impoverishes rather than enriches, and it seems
| to be getting worse. It is easy to feel that the Amish, nay
| perhaps even the medievals, have a point.
|
| Worse, the science fiction oriented around starships took its
| cues from our experience of the naval - journeys of days or weeks
| would take you to alien places teeming with new and interesting
| and enriching life. Foods you couldn't eat anywhere else. People
| you couldn't meet at home. But now the globe seems smaller,
| explored, and conquered. Those faraway goods are easily shipped
| to your door, and those faraway people show up in your comments
| section and they're just people. The excitement of the seas is no
| longer such a part of our outlook that reskinning it in fantasy
| speaks to us.
|
| Not only is the excitement of the seas greatly diminished, the
| more we have learned about the universe, the worse the naval
| analogy seems. The distant stars no longer seem like tropical
| islands, but rather hopelessly distant and inhospitable. In 1958,
| Heinlein wrote a wonderful short story about scout troops in the
| verdant jungles of Venus back when that was a reasonable
| expectation[1], but it seems like a silly thing to write now.
| https://xkcd.com/2202/ seems to capture the current expectation
| well.
|
| Several decades ago it was easy to get excited about the march of
| scientific discovery and technological progress. But now we're
| asking why science seems to have slowed down so much, and new
| technology seems about as exciting as new mechanisms for
| dependence and dystopia.
|
| Atheism is weakening and religion is rising.
|
| The imagined global society of the UN that was reimagined at a
| larger scale as The Federation may have seemed like the way of
| the future for a few decades, but now that dream looks foolish
| and the globe is visibly fracturing.
|
| The classic science fiction trope that progress will better us as
| people, that leisure will lead to fitness, that access to
| information will make us wise scholars, that we will use the
| convenience of machines to free ourselves for the pursuit of
| virtue... it makes for an inspiring story. I had my suspicions
| about how true all of that was back _before_ the internet. I am
| now very sure that Wall-E and Idiocracy are nearer to the mark.
|
| The human-like AIs of Star Wars' robots or Star Trek's androids
| or innumerable superintelligent computers from Asimov to Heinlein
| seem further away every year. AI is part of everyday life now,
| and our major concern is how to keep it from catastrophically
| failing at mundane research, not whether it should have voting
| rights or makes humans obsolete. Ambulatory human-like AI seems
| unlikely when data centers the size of small cities struggle with
| emdashes. The hope and promise of a generation of robot children
| and citizens seems as misguided as the forests of Venus.
|
| I could go on. We GOT a lot of the wonders science fiction
| predicted, or things so much more powerful that our most
| audacious futurists didn't dare to imagine them. And yet it
| doesn't feel like the promised land. Science fiction promised
| instant video conferences across the globe, but when we got it,
| it didn't look like all the world's best researchers
| collaborating on its hardest problems. It looked like all of the
| miscreants with their dick pics and the dreary business meetings
| and school lessons suddenly having access to your home. I don't
| mean to imply it's all bad, but the difference between
| imagination and reality has been stark on many fronts.
|
| I really think the truth is that in a thousand ways, the tropes
| of the genre no longer speak to the moment.
|
| [1] https://writingatlas.com/story/3984/robert-a-heinlein-a-
| tend...
| deadbabe wrote:
| People didn't travel as much back in those days. Visiting a
| foreign country or too might as well be like a trip to the moon.
|
| But now, we basically live in the climax of the jet age, we can
| be anywhere in the world within 24 hours. And there's so much of
| the world to see and stories to discover, not really worth the
| bother to imagine space travel to far off distant empty worlds,
| which will inevitably be used to further extend capitalism and
| just live the same lives we live here on Earth, just on a
| different world. The lack of any other interesting
| extraterrestrial civilizations to interact with makes it all
| pretty pointless. Going very far into space is mostly for
| exploration as a sport, like cave diving or something.
| buildsjets wrote:
| It turned out that the aliens live in inner space, not outer
| space.
| giorgioz wrote:
| Some new sci-fi books among the stars:
|
| We are Bob Red rising Murderbot
| RustyRussell wrote:
| You're writing this from a dystopian future where punctuation
| is banned? :)
|
| For those like me who still require parsing assistance :
|
| - We are Bob
|
| - Red Rising
|
| - Murderbot
| ralfd wrote:
| Because most men stopped reading and most women don't care much
| about sci-fi .
|
| https://archive.is/I1QyW
|
| > Beyond the bookstore, much of the architecture of book
| discovery is informally targeted at women. Celebrity book clubs
| are mostly led by female celebrities and increasingly court women
| of all ages, from those who are fans of Oprah Winfrey and Reese
| Witherspoon to those who are more interested in the tastes of Dua
| Lipa and Kaia Gerber... #BookTok, the vast community on TikTok
| that has become a best-seller machine, is largely populated by
| women recommending books by other women, like Colleen Hoover's
| "It Ends With Us."
|
| In a sense this is just a regression to mean, normality, because
| the literary boys club of the 20th century was the exception:
|
| > In the 19th century, the most popular novels were written by
| women for a female audience. Their output was considered "paltry
| entertainment,"
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Reading has become a strongly gendered lifestyle and supposed
| status marker.
|
| Most of the books are indeed paltry entertainment - soapy and
| saccharine romances, formulaically transgressive erotica,
| fantasies about unlimited witchy powers, and perfect book
| boyfriends - but it's still a huge market.
|
| Men moved to video games and chan culture. Which are a
| different kind of paltry entertainment.
|
| It's curious how there was a shift from male dominated niches,
| like Lovecraftian fantasy and heroic fantasy, through the
| imperial sci-fi peak in the 50s to 70s, through the Hollywood-
| influenced 80s, then into slow decline from the 90s onwards.
|
| With a few exceptions, a bold imagination became more of a
| liability than an asset.
|
| This is a culture which has no idea where it's going and would
| prefer not to get there.
| Evenjos wrote:
| Yeah. As a sci-fi author, I have strong opinions about this.
| Made an authortube video on the topic:
| https://youtu.be/THVpdcgTYrQ
|
| But tl;dr: Gatekeepers in big/mainstream publishing have
| outsourced their slush-piles to underpaid interns, most of whom
| are young and ambitious women. They tend to like certain
| things. Also, big/mainstream publishing is chasing data trends,
| like all other big businesses, which leads to a staleness cycle
| where they only publish what worked in the last two years.
| They're afraid to take financial gambles on unproven ideas or
| new IP.
|
| The good sci-fi these days is mostly indie and mostly
| underground, IMO. You really have to dig for it. Personally, I
| find good stuff via Reddit r/powerprogression, but even there,
| you may have to dig to find gems that speak to you.
|
| I joke that I'm a male author and reader, even though I'm
| female. The first book of my epic series (which is fully
| published) is Majority: Torth Book 1.
| LanceH wrote:
| I'm of the opinion that the teen novel has stunted literature in
| general.
|
| As a kid beginning to read in the 70's I jumped from what were
| clearly kids books to Lord of the Rings (pure chance -- I liked
| the cover). There wasn't that watered down in between. It was a
| jump to real books with real consequences (spoilers: Boromir
| dies).
|
| I've witnessed the rise of the teen section and seen how kids --
| who are reading less in general -- never leave it.
|
| It feels like the fantasy adventure lends itself a lot more to
| these teen novels and has a knock on effect into the mainstream.
| I for one could do without anther book about someone born to be a
| prince(ss) up against the evil realm who can't choose their way
| out of their romantic triangle.
|
| I'm not knocking anyone's choices. There are more books already
| than I'll ever read. But it should would be a blast to get
| another Dune out of nowhere.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I would posit that the issue lies not with YA novels or fantasy
| in general, but with the continuously declining sense of
| agency, opportunity, and self-realization among teens and
| adults. There are deep-seated needs that reality can
| increasingly no longer meet, which results in rising dependency
| on simplistic escapism.
| watwut wrote:
| I remeber reading tons of junk and pulp as a teen decades ago.
| If anything, the teen section is more complex then pure hero
| fantasies and repetitive scary stories that used to make the
| bulk of reading. Yes, lord of the rings was popular before and
| now. But the stuff people read en masse was not lord of the
| rings and certainly not some kind of smart complex stuff.
|
| What used to be read a lot was literary equivalent of a sitcom
| or slash fantasy.
| johngossman wrote:
| I speculate that a lot of sci-fi reflects the cutting edge of
| science and technology at the time it is written. For well over a
| century a lot of that frontier was transportation: and we got
| "Around the World in 80 Days" and "20000 Leagues under the Sea"
| and then a lot of books about space. We also got "Canticle for
| Leibowitz" and other post-apocalyptic books out of the age when
| nuclear weapons and energy was top of mind. Then, in the 70s and
| 80s computer technology became the center of innovation and we
| got cyberpunk and a lot of sci-fi turned inward to virtual worlds
| and the like. Given we're in a new space age, maybe sci-fi will
| start to follow? I'm certainly seeing a new wave of AI centric
| fiction.
| bowsamic wrote:
| No one thinks the future is in space anymore. We realised that
| there's a lot wrong with us culturally and spiritually
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaQuest_DSV
|
| _Set in "the near future" (the year 2018 in the first season),
| seaQuest DSV originally mixed high drama with realistic
| scientific fiction._
| dmix wrote:
| I figure with Andy Weirs movies getting so big that there'd be an
| increase in scifi readship after the new movie comes out.
| eschneider wrote:
| They didn't go anywhere. Lots of excellent starship/space opera
| novels out there with more coming out each year. There's just
| lots there stuff too. :)
| jmyeet wrote:
| The popularity of a genre is deeply tied to the historical
| context of what's going on in the real world. In the 1950s and
| 1960s you obviously had the Space Race, which itself was a
| product of the Cold War. Some commments view this as _optimism_.
| I disagree. I view it as an expression of _patriotism_.
|
| I view this patriotism as a crutch in uncertain times. Another
| example of this is the rise of the superhero genre in the 21st
| century. Marven was skirting with bankruptcy in the 1990s. A
| perpetual Spiderman license was sold for a fraction of what it
| would today. And I think it's no coincidence that the superhero
| genre ascended post-9/11.
|
| I used to read a lot of fantasy but many years ago I pretty much
| switched almost entirely to sci-fi. For me the reason was because
| sci-fi asked questions. I mean there's also space opera and it
| scratches the same itch as fantasy (IMNHO) but my personal
| interest in sci-fi is more in the "what if" category.
|
| That's a very broad category that goes all the way from, say, the
| Iain M. Banks _Culture_ series, which really poses the question
| of what an ultra-high tech post-scarcity civilization looks like
| to something like _The Handmaid 's Tale_ (yes, that's sci-fi).
| We've also had some superb sci-fi on the screen in recent years
| like _Severance_ , _Silo_ and _The Expanse_.
|
| For me, fantasy is a far more limited genre. Like I'm trying to
| read Brandon Sanderson recently and while he's a good writer,
| it's just not hooking me yet in the same way that, say,
| _Revelation Space_ did. I think the last fantasy series to really
| hook me was _A Song of Ice and Fire_. The first three books are
| some of the finest books ever written.
|
| But as for the decline of starships, I think that the readership
| has evolved too. More vintage sci-fi simply projected the era of
| exploration and colonization onto space and it's become pretty
| clear how unrealistic that is because of the vast distances
| involved. You have to remember that popular media in the 1960s
| expected Moon bases and such in the not-too-distant future. _Star
| Trek_ was really the last gasp of this and, interestingly, _Star
| Trek_ is fundamentally socialist, which is noteworthy given that
| it originated in the Cold War.
|
| Star Wars on the other hand was a tale of the resistance to
| imperialism. George Lucas has said he modeled the resistance on
| the North Vietnamese. Cyberpunk came about in the 1980s (eg
| _Neuromancer_ , _Blade Runner_ ) that had nothing to do with
| starships but they really reflected a societal pessimism.
| Cyberpunk is inherently xenophobic (ie because of fears of the
| Japanese).
|
| I wonder if the popularity of fantasy is fundamentally escapist
| and an expression of helplessness. Think about it: fantasy
| usually revolves around the outsized impact of individual
| actions, of a hero or heroine.
| nephihaha wrote:
| I've never really agreed with putting SF together with Fantasy,
| because they are slightly different genres. Some science fiction
| writers have used genuine science to underpin their writings, one
| of the more recent examples of that would be "the Martian".
| Fantasy doesn't need that kind of technical detail.
|
| It parallels other developments. There is an increasing
| scepticism around science, and a significant number of people do
| not believe in the Moon landing. The heroic age of space travel
| has been replaced by school teachers and guys busking in tin cans
| in near Earth orbit. It's become mundane and the most exciting
| things in space exploration are being done by probes not humans
| nowadays.
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