I know well this frustration, I am statistically older and have had to face this much sooner, that despite being born on the cusp of our species truly being capable of doing something totally new and amazing, we're going to be stuck in this hell forever, building and tearing ourselves down because there's always going to be a few who want for themselves rather than build community, always someone who will want to control others rather than be part of a functioning whole.

It's a feeling of "And that's it? So I just get a peek at this absurd universe that almost came so close to having meaning and direction but then just 'nah'?"

[–] GlassHalfHopeful@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Probably the reason I rewatch so much Star Trek. I love seeing what humanity is capable of.

(Yes, I still read/watch dystopic and apocalyptic stories, but I've been doing this less and less because it's honestly depressing when I look at society today and realize this seems to be where we're heading instead).

[–] ameancow@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

My belief is the future is going to be a combination of both the fantastic and the apocalyptic. From my experience in forward-time-travel for decades now, I have seen that every prediction of the future fails to predict just how much more of everything there always is. For example, we live in a world that simultaneously has AI machines decoding proteins and deciphering whale language, we have fusion reactors close to coming online and can read the shape of distant black holes through gravitational waves. Some true star-trek shit happening every day... but across the fence from all that exist shanty-towns and subsistence farmers and squalor and poverty and humble people living like they did three centuries ago.

One of my first trips across Asia I was in the deep back country, mist-filled valleys and ancient villages, and saw a farmer in his rice field pushing a plow with an an oxen (Carabao) and he was staring at his phone and scrolling as he worked. This is what science fiction misses, for better or worse, the collision between past and future that is always happening.

In some ways the future will be more interesting because of this, we are going to see a lot more things we never expected, but we're also not going to see a homogenous "lift" to our species where we suddenly all become space socialists. Not without significant artificial modification of all our brains, we're too human, too primate. We will not have the stars in our current form.