The future is a branching path

They saw the invention of air travel and space travel within 70 years. As far as they were concerned, nothing was too extraordinary.

Make no mistake, that is the future that we were entitled to, but which was stolen from us by capitalists and despots.

The old sci-fi writers weren't wrong in their aspirations for us, we were wrong for letting our futures be taken away from us.

It is the distant future of the year 2024. Our intrepid hero uses her pocket computer to argue that the world is flat.

I enjoyed how in Foundation novels they had mathematics that could predict the outcome of the future, had intergalactic travel, had personal shields, and a bunch of other fancy shit, but they were still using tapes to record information.

For those of you born after, or near the turn of the century, you don't understand how magical the year 2000 was. It was a completely different eon, and seemed so futuristic. Conan O'Brien had a whole gig about In the Year 2000. The term "2000" was used to indicate something was fancy, or ultimate, or high-tech. 2000 was the future, and therefore amazing. We did have a sense of optimism though, that is nowhere to be found nowadays.

And here we are with people who think the gubberment made the eclipse happen.

I'm actually super mad at the stagnation in the way of life.

The first manned flight was 1903, Apollo 11 was in 1969. I'm still going to work by chasing an exploding machine on four round dinosaurs, the same way someone in 1969 would. I still get hungry and homeless the same way someone in 1969 would. I have an 8 hour, five day work week just like someone in 1969 did.

This is bullshit.

And yet somehow the lead character smokes cigarettes.

And then there's Dune: it's the year 40'000 (or something) and mankind is fighting a religious war in the desert over natural resources. Haha!

Idiocracy sadly was the only futuristic story to get it right. Wall-ee probably a pretty safe bet too. At this point, any "blue future" sci-fi writers still out there are disillusioned dreamers.

The Jetsons:

George Jetson went to work everyday at Spacely Sprockets and pushed a button. A single button. That was his whole job. The whole businesses was automated to the point George did not have to do anything except sit and press the button.

And he made enough money in that job to support a family of 4 in a nice house, as the sole bread winner.

Imagine that: A future where the benefits of automation technology are not solely for the wealthy and business owners. Automation and AI making people's jobs easier, instead of simply replacing them. Businesses that employ people to do jobs that could be automated, but don't, because people need living wages regardless of how easy the work has become.

back to the future thought we would have flying cars by 2015

Back to the Future 2 is set 30 years in the future... in 2015.

Blade Runner was set in 2019.

They had such high hopes for the future of humanity, but their selfish-ass boomer kids ruined the fucking planet.

it's 2030, the world is notching but hurricanes abd forest fires, also we got 1 guy on mars

The "deep corners" of their universe probably extended bout as far as alpha centauri

Sci-fi is merely a mirror upon society. Hopeful times? Hopeful sci-fi. Dark times? Dystopian sci-fi.

They saw us go from the wheel to cars to planes to space travel in a crazy small amount of time.

It’s not their fault everyone just decided to stop there.

There are a myriad of reasons we are on the shitty timeline, but a non-insignificant one to me is how terrible classic sci-fi writers were at writing humans rather than planks with faces drawn on them that periodically state the author’s views on something. The focus of sci-fi on massive space operations and colonization of other planets from the beginning was warped by a dis-interest from sci-fi writers in the positive potentialities within the human psyche that are outside the grasp of cynical structures of power and control, the part of ourselves that just wants to tend a garden in their backyard and nothing more.

I think this has lead to very hollow visions of the future that were well suited to becoming the basis for people like Elon Musk’s world view. Sci-fi looked to the stars and tried to see into the future while ignoring the one thing we can count on about the future, humans will still be humans.

(I know this is a generalization and isn’t true as a rule)

Meanwhile Philip K. Dick writing in the late 1940s: In the 2020s humanity is almost completely extinct on account of WWIII, and Earth has been taken over by an AI who constructs more and more elaborate war robots who are hunting down the last surviving humans hiding in nuclear proof bunkers.

I can't remember what it was, maybe some short story by Ray Bradbury, but I first read it in high school (so somewhere between 1999 and 2003) that took place in the distant future of 1998.

Also, wasn't 1984 set in the future of when it was written? 🤔

I honestly believe that if the US alone used all of its military funds on researching fusion power, we'd have figured it out by now lol.

NASA made remarkable innovations in its prime during the Apollo missions because of the amount of people efficiently working on so many new technologies with proper funding.

I think this still happens. People have no concept of time when we look 10+ years out. 10 years isn't really that long. I think life is going to look very much the same in the next 40 years with the biggest change being AI tools if they can get past the "idiotification" of LLMs and the like as they are subject to human interaction.

"Future events like this will affect us in the future..."

It is not so much about the year the story plays at but also about shying away from some stories nowadays.

A story where humans are Cool Bastards and the Aliens just Plain Evil?

Can't have that. It wouldn't be social critic enough.

Humans being smart and solving problems without crying and discussing their feelings in face of impending doom?

Naaah... would alienate the audience.

c/HFY and r/HFY show how to do it different... (shameless self propaganda, noteworthy The Typo which saved humanity, Day of the Fat Man, Deterrence)

Retrospectively, wasn't a lot of the space-exploration-based SciFi from the 50s 60s 70s serving the purpose of justifying massive government spendings in big rockets, mainly used to build ICBMs, to justify imperialist policies and the cold war?

were we (the scifi afficionados) the useful idiots of this missile race?

For example a ball that poops out people, like the expendables they were.