One note - in the 1984 novel the technology (or at least the product quality) didn’t work very well either. Eg the “victory” cigarettes that fall apart, or terrible coffee with a daily allocated saccharin pill.

ChatGPT suggests the story is "Local Effect" by D. L. Hughes, published in 1968.

An alien named Firefoal of Swaylone observes that human physicists mistakenly believe in a constant light speed because humanity was unknowingly situated in a region of space where the speed of light had been artificially reduced. Humans discover they can modify the speed of light but find they can only make it slower.

Well, since light travels slower in non-vacuum space, like air or water or glass, I'd say we've already discovered that.

Something similar to this comes up in Death's End, the last book in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy.

But at even just 4%, the thermal emissions from a partial Dyson swarm would still be enough to heat Earth by twice what anthropogenic climate change has managed so far: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092702482...

Sure, but 89 % of that 5% will be still used for interplanetary yacht fleet of owner of Chocó-Darién Inc.

It would also cost more power to construct than humanity is currently capable of generating in 10,000 years, so I am not sure what your point is.

Presumably a 5% functional Dyson sphere would be a corrupt boondoggle in the same way as a power plant which is down for maintenance 95% of the year, but the financial calculation would use much larger numerators and denominators than we are used to.

> - learn we are not alone in the universe

This is neither a message that is optimistic nor pessimistic. Isn't it much more likely that this species (despite having something that can be called "intelligence" in an appropriate sense) simply be so different that the difference is insanely much larger than between an human and an octopus?

Example:

Stanisław Lem; Solaris

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)

where the alien species is an intelligent ocean.

I think Greg Egan writes very optimistic science fiction that only really does 2 sort of. Exceeding the speed of light is, from my point of view, so absurd a premise as to make me feel that any hard science fiction which tries to get around it is not serious.

Its not that I can't enjoy that kind of science fiction, its just I can't take it seriously as having anything to do with actually reckoning with our position in the universe as human beings. Universe Big.

Do you mean a market/profit-based economy when you say "capitalism"? Because it's becoming increasingly obvious that giving all the profit to the people with the investment capital is not a great way to structure either an economy or a society. There are other ways to harness the profit-motive than capitalism.

I agree. Capitalism definitely has its merit especially when comparing with Feudal, but then again, maybe we need something new after all those centuries.

I sincerely hope that we discover some serious alien stuffs (like TMA-1) so that humans can finally have a very good excuse to move ourselves to a new paradigm.

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.

> 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.

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.

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"?

Not with that attitude, no. Why so pessimistic?

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.

The "optimistic" science fiction that people are pining for was written during the World War period, during the social unrest of the 1960s, during the inflation and oil shock of the 1970s, during periods of racial violence, during the heights of the Cold War (the Fallout series came from real societal trama, not just a neat schtick about putting a 1950s face on disaster movies), during environmental scares, nuclear disasters, terrorism, during social upheavals and economic crises and international crises.

The 20th century was not a cakewalk either. I'm not saying it was or was not better than today, I am saying, "gee there's an awful lot of reasons to be depressed" isn't new.

Applied cynicism is deconstruction in the sense that all that is being offered is criticism and disbelief in a thing. There is no message of doing something else because it is better, only a message to do something else because it isn't the thing the cynicism is targeting. Sometimes not even an alternative is offered. The thing just sucks and it shouldn't be done, according to the critic.

You will notice how in current political conversations that no matter what the problem being discussed is, the solution is almost always the destruction of something or someone. There's this stubborn perspective that X would be resolved if we could just somehow eliminate Y.

To be crude, the pattern I described isn't aspirational, it's bitchy. You'll also notice how very little gets accomplished in the current cynical environment for the same reason that nagging people doesn't motivate them as much as inspiring them does.

I think elysium isn't an effective sci-fi in the sense that it discusses the effect of technology on mankind. It is just a metaphor for the US/Mexico border.

The only takeaway I got from the movie is that the robots look cool, it's the same robot design from chappie. Both half-baked scifi movies, but I would like to imagine they both exist in the same world.

>I didn't buy the premise of the movie that only that rich would be able to use them. Given they were robots, governments, hospitals, could and would make them readily available since ultimately it would massively lower their medical costs.

Given Big Pharma's current ability to get lots and lots of money for vital medicine, I'm not optimistic they'd price a theoretical medical machine low enough for a government to afford.

Plus, if overpopulation is a concern, a wealthy person wouldn't necessarily want the machine to get into the hands of everyone. Given that the creator of this machine would become very wealthy, the incentives would probably lean towards offering it to a select group.

> Or, everything gets so abundant that we can actually have high UBI

Now, that's not as clear. Reaching the point that all the essential tasks to keep society going can be done cost-effectively by robots is quite a ways off.

you assume their compotence and forethought. Such things cannot be taken for granted.

> Do we have any complex mechanism which works for last 100 years nonstop without fail ?

For the following examples, this question is open, and you might have a different opinion whether they fit your opinion of "complex", but the following are candidates that I am aware of:

The 10,000 Year Clock (Clock of the Long Now)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now

https://www.10000yearclock.net/index.html

The organ in the St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt (Germany) that is used to play the ORGAN²/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible) by John Cage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible

https://www.aslsp.org/

This is really a question of slack. How long can it fail for? For a 100 year mission you likely want at least a month of slack in your air supply. Things are going to break. You build in redundancy.

I mean, we have systems of government and other organizations which have lasted (significantly) longer than that. I think that's an important indicator of such questions.

I just watched the 1951 The Thing movie last week. The humans win at the end.

The 1982 movie... some humans survive. Maybe.

> if we paid real-life things not as a subscription, but based on usage, like an API.

We used to do that before the push for subscriptions.

And in the digital world this is the micropayments dream...

> if we paid real-life things not as a subscription, but based on usage

Are you thinking a flat rate or one based on local population density?

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I was as disappointed as everbody else by Artemis, but Project Hail Mary was a great return to form and a great Space MacGyver Procedura. Definitely left me fired up and feeling positive as well. I really appreciate just the joy in knowledge that Weir's books revel in.

i tried "half built garden" and just could not continue reading it. why is everyone so obsessed with their genders and pronouns?

Thanks, hopepunk is a fun new concept to learn about.

agreed, especially the first book. the other becky chambers books in the "long way to a small angry planet" series are also quite good.

But it begins with a nightmarish heatwave that kills hundreds of thousands in India, which may be a little hard for some people to handle (judging by the reactions of people I've recommended it to...)

When you realize all that must work (not in the physical world, but in the human one) perfectly for that problem to be solved it becomes very pessimistic.

The human part of that book is fantasy, and not a great one. At some point the suspension of disbelief crash into pieces.

You and I must have read different books or imagine vastly different things under the term "optimism".

Sadly its present-day incarnations are often anything but, so it's not an easy rec anymore.

I liked the _The Deluge_ (great characterization), Doctorow is generally good and _Walkaway_ was great, his _The Lost Cause_[1] is also a fairly hopeful novel.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Cause_(novel)

another piece of advice, when I wrote I used a keypuller to remove my backspace key. Following the example of Phillip K. Dick, think like a serial writer, uncanny ideas are the birth of great literature

I grew up with sci-fi as it was one of the very few genres allowed in Communist Romania. It was a mix of authors from Asimov to Strugatski, from Philip K. Dick to Ursula K Le Guin. It was sometimes very dark, sometimes moderate, but overall even Asimov's future is not optimistic in many ways, but I don't think I missed anything or it was better to be different. I did not become a grumpy pessimist nor an antisocial geek, I think reading a lot made me a better person overall, including the mix of sci-fi that was for sure not optimistic.

I find it particularly hilarious that some AIs insist in deal with communism saying stuff like "stated goals" or "theoretical", but for the sci fi plot they go full throttle on the make believe like "pff, don't worry bro"

To be fair, we have a grand total of two independent examples to learn from.

No form of economy/government will protect you from being pillaged by a more powerful neighbor. (There's some word I'm trying to think of that refers to international analysis, but I can't remember it ...)

That is exactly what the AI told me.

In theory, communism works but in practice it was different.

The AI also tells me that the sci fi plot is not like that, that it will work in practice.

In the words of the famous prophet Dave Mustaine "if there's a new way, I'll be the first in line, but it better work this time" and also "you know your worth when your enemies praise your architecture of aggression".

> Considering how every attempt of communism has turned out

People make too much of ideology. "Communism" was the table stakes for getting the USSR to support your government during the 20th century, in the same way that "democracy" [1] was table stakes for US support. You can't really talk about "every attempt" at communism—it's mostly the story of a single superpower and its proxies.

[1]: "Democracy" in quotes, because US intervention in South America in the 20th century was overwhelmingly to the detriment of actual democracy.

The USSR had a lot economic failures, but consider that it began the 20th century as a pre-industrial backwater before suffering an extremely bloody civil war and sky-high casualties during WWII. And they still did industrialize. A lot of their command-economy stuff was highly unsuccessful, but plenty of capitalist economic projects have been unsuccessful too. The Great Depression was a homegrown capitalist catastrophe—2008 too, to a lesser extent—and capitalist economics learned from those mistakes. The USSR was in a much worse position to survive its mistakes, and it didn't. In the aftermath, America imposed shock-doctrine economics on Russia to make it capitalist, and that in turn caused even more damage. Conversely, China modernized in style, on its own terms, and retains substantial state control over private enterprise. Is that a "communist success story"? It depends how you define communism. Is it a command economy? A totalitarian dictatorship? A red colour scheme?

Communism generally defines itself as a classless society: an egalitarian democracy of workers without aristocrat, bureaucrat, or plutocrat. It's a set of ideals for founding a nation—ideals which have never really materialized anywhere. In the aftermath of bloody revolutions, the people who come out on top are generally military strongmen with little interest in democracy, no matter what ideology they tout. So Mao said he stood for democracy! So did Pinochet, so did Assad. They're just words. The differences between how "communist" and "capitalist" societies have worked out is mostly just historical circumstance. Governments that put ideology before success tend not to last. Neither the US nor China nor the USSR fit into that category, though they've all had their hyper-ideological moments (the US is in one now!). In the long run, a powerful state with a big bureaucracy will be ruled mostly by pragmatism. That doesn't mean that policy positions don't exist, but China certainly wasn't shackled by any particular economic position. The upshot is that China basically looks like the rest of the world now, modulo better infrastructure, greater political stability, and fewer civil rights.

The real question has less to do with capitalism or communism and more to do with whether founding a nation on principles really means anything in the long run. Can we really build a better world, or do we just naturally cohere into predetermined social structures as a product of material factors? Ironically, Marx basically believed the latter. He was just optimistic that new technological developments would change the natural structures of society into something more egalitarian, where the oligarch would go the way of the aristocrat. History, unfortunately, has proven him wrong.