Comment by snowwrestler
10 months 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.
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.
Perhaps… but for a couple decades after the Berlin wall fell, it had sorta seemed like we (collectively) were figuring it out. Granted, 9/11 damaged that narrative, but that was "barbarians" attacking "civilization." The assumption was that winning the war on terror could end history the same way the fall of the Soviet bloc was supposed to.
Yet there's an expansionist land war in Europe, and US allies are engaged in ethnic cleansing in the Middle East. The current American government is overtly fascistic, and now that they've admitted they're seeking to extra-judicially imprison citizens in El Salvador, I don't think that's even up for debate anymore.
I think people are increasingly coming to believe that we'll never figure it out. Technology will advance, but humans are liable to stay the same forever. In light of this, utopian science fiction begins to feel naive. The most optimistic story we can stand is about humanity temporarily prevailing against its own worst impulses, rather than featuring the kind of… solved society that something like Star Trek envisioned.
> Perhaps… but for a couple decades after the Berlin wall fell, it had sorta seemed like we (collectively) were figuring it out.
> Yet there's an expansionist land war in Europe
Maybe you simply weren’t paying attention? There’s been several expansionist land wars in Eastern Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union, it took 3 years ignoring civil wars.
“The First Chechen War, also referred to as the First Russo-Chechen War, was a struggle for independence waged by the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria against the invading Russian Federation from 1994 to 1996. After a mutually agreed on treaty and terms, the Russians withdrew until they invaded again three years later, in the Second Chechen War of 1999–2000” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Chechen_War
Then there’s the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia.
It’s arguable if this is even a separate war after the initial Annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014.
So no there hasn’t been several decades of peace after the 1991 fall of the USSR. It’s been the same crap for centuries with different governments playing shockingly similar roles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_betwee...
I think that we are approaching a "solved" state of society, but that solution involves some level inequality. It is "solved" in the sense that a game of Monopoly is "solved" and approaches steady-state as one player wins. Hypernormalization is a good movie that presents this thesis.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
We could, though. Absolutely. Literally feeding all the starving people in the world would cost a fraction of the world's surplus wealth, and a briefly disruptive but manageable readjustment of global logistics. The rest of it would be costly, but still totally doable at the cost of some inconvenience for the world's top 10%.
The problem isn't lack of solutions. It's lack of cooperation on every level from individuals to organizations to social groups to nations to transnational organizations.
> We can do a lot for individuals, but even with cooperation, maybe can’t immediately give food and shelter to everyone
It oddly isn't all that desirable. You don't want to depend entirely on the generosity of others. What you want is a fighting chance to take care of yourself. Helping there, even a little bit is both very effective and very easy.
> You don't want to depend entirely on the generosity of others.
Spoken like someone who knows they'll eat today.
End game, yes, everyone needs a degree of autonomy. But there are plenty of families in Palestine and Ukraine and Nigeria that just need food, today.
It's not either/or. We can provide both jobs and a safety net.
Well all I can say is I did exactly that and produced an optimistic 370,000 word Sci-fi series which was totally utopian, and tried to be realistic and scientific (at least up to the point that any Sci-Fi novel could be) - https://rodyne.com/?p=1252
> (hunger, homelessness, many diseases, overpopulation, climate change, war)
This is a profoundly, even comically, contradictory set.
You cannot actually "solve" any half of these without causing the other half.
How would access to food and freedom from hunger, sickness, and homelessness cause war and climate change? We already have enough food; it's poorly distributed. Medicinal challenges aren't solved with substantially more energy; they're solved with more information. Housing: plenty of room on this planet, just not situated between your San Fran tech job and the mall.
War and climate change are not caused by full bellies and healthy spleens, as you claim.
Overpopulation is the last problem to solve, and reproduction trends downwards in affluent, well-educated countries. So, possibly even that is solved by these three benefits.
What's the name of the common fallacy, "I can't imagine it therefore it cannot exist"?
Can you, truly?
Not with that attitude, no. Why so pessimistic?
Is the purpose of mankind to support drug-addled hobos?
Yes, at least proximately. If you walked up to anyone on the street and asked them, "should we help desperate people," they'd say yes. This isn't even controversial.
I am not opposed to helping homeless people, I'm opposed to this idea that humanity's main purpose is essentially to harbor as many people as possible who have no agency. I think that we should have greater goals far beyond that. Art, science, exploration. I don't know, take your pick.
Thanks to GMOs and the industrial revolution we have more food than any point other point in history. Almost no one works in agriculture anymore. In the USA we have food stamps and who knows how many pounds of government cheese preserved in case of an emergency. Who is still dying of hunger?
Thanks to vaccines and modern medicine, disease is hardly a problem anymore (with the exception of cancer, heart disease and other problems largely associated with OLD AGE). Who is really dying of preventable diseases anymore?
Still, we're told that hunger and disease must be eradicated before we do anything of importance. At what point can we say that we have done enough?
The homeless people i've interacted with are the bottom of the barrel of humanity, and are typically held back by serious mental illness or drug addiction. They don't have some rich inner world, they are just a blight on the public. The homeless largely drive people to avoid public parks or transportation. Why don't we have public transport anymore in America? Is it really logistically impossible, or is it simply that anyone who can afford to will avoid riding a train or a bus with deranged homeless people? We have public libraries, but they're not shrines to knowledge or places of public gathering as they effectively serve as an air-conditioned building for homeless people to jack off. And you know what, I don't blame them, they are merely individuals at the mercy of this incomprehensible brave new world we are building around them.
There's this star trek idea we have been fed that once we eliminate human need, there will be no more human suffering and we will all be free to do "more enlightened things". We already have a surplus of pretty much everything, and the result is that we are a society of wireheads, our lives lonelier and more meaningless than ever. How would this be improved by further star-trek technology? Holodeck, simulate a hundred prostitutes. Replicator, make me one hundred pounds of crack cocaine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUnu_U2yKXY).
When you look at the kinds of people who went out and explored the new world, it was always the groups of people that were most dissatisfied with society, the pilgrims, the prisoners and such. Those are the groups willing to take a chance for freedom and prosperity. I don't think the future of humanity will be like star trek, it will be more like the ender's game series where the explorers of new frontiers will be venezuelans or brazilians whatever 2nd-world groups of people who are currently having a bad time on earth, but still have the skills and resolve to explore beyond that. I think happiness itself is orthogonal to a having meaningful life, and we shouldn't pursue it directly.
I don't think the solution for drug addicts is more narcan. I think the solution for drug addicts is mortal danger. For the majority of human history, people did not live long enough for their vices to catch up to them. I would liken my attitudes towards the homeless to factory farming: even if the goal is to make the cows as happy as possible, the factory farm is still wrong. It's better to be a free, self-sustaining, wild animal, even if you are suffering than to be a happy cow on a factory farm.
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Are they my relatives? Are they desperate because their own preventable actions? Will you steal from me to help them?
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