I want to see what people have to say about this topic. Pretty much work of futurist fiction from The Matrix right back to 1936 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (Don't forget, George Orwell, Phillip K. Dick et al. ) paints a dismal grim and gritty picture of the future ... usually (tastefully) repulsive and brutal. Why do we as humanity so persistently lack in a positive forward-looking attitude? The end of the world has been nigh for the best part of 3000 years ever since someone dreamed up the idea it could end. We are so vague in our apoclyptic fantasies that we even try to pin it on numbers with dates like 1000 a.d. 1666 and of course Y2K. It actually seems the more positive Athur C. Clarke-ian prediction of the future is closer to the truth than the more bleak outlook. We might not have built the space travel engineering envisaged in his novels, but he was 100% right that all the science has been done. We even have the science and materials right now to build his space elevator. It could be done in 5 years and for 10 billion dollars according to a New Scientist article. Asimov might be not too far off the mark either, the robot/ai revolution is only a decade away. I'd be suprised if its more than 15 years infact. Of the more reccent future fictionists something like David Brin's Uplift saga or Peter F. Hamilton's Nights Dawn Triology might be a more likely future history for mankind. Then there is the modern day prophet Vernor Vinge... who seems to be increasingly right every 18 months. Is it in the nature of human beings to be consistently wrong? From the past looking to 'the future' we live in now it is so positive. As now, as a society we think back "Gosh we were so naive n decades ago" ... we are climbing out of the dark ages slowly but surely. Things are better now than they ever have been in terms of knowledge, peace and standards of living. It seems the tide is turning agains enviromental ruin, even the WHO and the UN now believe we are set for a worldwide population crash as opposed to planetary population overload. But no, thats not enough. We love doom and gloom, we must have our the end-of-the-world-is-coming rants. We roll our eyes when we hear optimists. We think of the penalties of optimism. Remeber the 80's and the share marekt crash? The 90s and the dotcom bubble burst? The asian flu? In the 50s and 60s we were promised things like jet packs and flying cars never happend now did they? Mass media would have you believe that the world is ramping up into a drug fueled crime spree and the moral fabric of society is falling apart. In developed countries there has be something of a renaisance. Over the past two decades rates crime, drug use, teen pregnancy, have been steadily falling from all time highs. Meanwhile the IT industry has exploded, and science is progressing at a exponential rate. In the next 10 years (perhaps much less) there will be more information produced than every written world in the whole of human history before it. The doomsayers amongst us are becoming less and less credible as their favourite indicators of societial collapse improve. (Personally I blame video games) So the big question. Why are we so pesimistic in future vision, when there is IMHO so much to be optimistic about, and if its all just pessimism for entertainment value, why do we love it so much?
RE: venomx The optimism which Jules Verne shoved, and the pessimism concerning the future in contemporary literature may have to do with the 20th century wars. First was fought for a couple of hundreds square metres of ground and left 10.000.0000 young people dead. The second cost even more dead and also children were deliberately killed and buldozered in heaps towards their graves. Damage of such magnitude (what can a civilised society fall into) is irreparable and its shadow will hang over us for years and years. (I happen to be friend of computer games.)
doom and distruction sales barnie dosen't...! humans by nature are predetors. the falling crime rates are due to those video games. and if we dont get off this planet and out of this solar system then yes we will eventualy destroy our selfs as we are also our own prey. with respect
Far more people are pessimistic than are opptomistic, it is human nature. Most authors take some idea and try to weave it into a full novel length based on that idea. Given both suppositons to to be true you have a basis for why most futuristic novels have a dark side to them. It is not necessarily true that the future will be dark or foreboding. Only that the visions you hear of are. If you are exposed to more things happening that are "black of nature" then you are lead to believe that it will indeed be worse. At one time or another I have made comments on the nature of the future and how unsuccessful we generally are when it comes to predicting such on everything but the most short term of events. We always hope to move the future along at a faster rate than what will actually happen. We can not predict the occurance of a leap of inititution that leads to an early breakthrough. One that if you look at what is known in the knowledge base, there is no indication that anything will go in that direction. Then suddenly you find that there is a leapfrog in knowledge and you have something that was not in the looking glass of the predictions. Thse leapfrogs happen often enough to make any prediction on the long term projection curve impossible to do. Take most any age since the invention of writing and there will be one there at some point. Something so basic that it changes our way of life. Forever and permanetly. My favorite example of this is electricity. Something anyone of us would hate to face the future without for any long term period.
I think it is a combination of pessimism and marketing necessity. What kind of plot could you come up with for a movie or book set in an environment where everything was perfect?
Hmm.. your right the only plot i could come up with is where something goes catastrophicly wrong in paradise..... lol
before people try to move into space they should try to help their fellow earthly brothers. The ones that starve.
What kind of plot could you come up with for a movie or book set in an environment where everything was perfect? (galt) hard core porn featuring nubile young asian girls in a lesbo fest like galt more or less said, fear sells. pehaps it keeps us motivated? anyway..... solid post venom.
It's sort of been mentioned, but would you buy a book entitled "The Next 6,000 Years will Look Alot like this Past One. A Guy in Georgia Will Invent a way to Grow Really Tasty Turkey Meat in the Lab, but Everything Else will be Pretty much the Same." Hardback $27.00 Random House, Inc. c2003
Ever heard of culture shock? Its a byproduct of these fancy notions on globalization. Its likely that as you typed this little post of yours, there were shoes on your feet, clothes on your back, and the room was air conditioned. The tide only seems to be turning against environmental ruin if your watching it roll from a deck in an industrialized country. There are people dropping like flies in Bombay, diseased filthy and dirty in third world countries just around the corner from where you are, the lush forests of Africa and the southern Americas are balding and yet you can sit here with a straight face and talk about peace and knowledge. There's a wonderful Buddhist saying that when told the rule is that you NEVER forgot and I never have: To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell. In science we've found it, but its being wasted in warfare and political self-interest. In the natural sciences the use of this key has til now been used borderline well, but in the social sciences fails miserably. Its a wonder the balls men have to keep asking why the hell they're still miserably pessimist. Wouldn't you say?
This is something that comes up a good bit. The question of, "Are we spending in the right place?" Thing is that technology is what feeds the world today. That technology was at some time in the past the cutting edge of scientific discovery. We can not put the genie back in the bottle. If we were of the mind that we would not use the discoveries of (say as an example) past 100 years then literally we would starve to death before long. There is a reason that folks are starving. It is that they are having more babies than they can feed. Now we can look at this two ways... It is their own problem so let them solve it. Either they should grow more food or have less babies. Through out the history of this planet, starvation has always been the method that nature uses to control population explosions, be it bacteria, animal, or human. It is the sign that something is out of balance. The second way to look at this is that we can do as you suggest and help them to the very end of our resources. Further that it is not a kindness to help feed them, except on the most short term of times. If you feed the starving today, you must once again feed them tomarrow. At some point you no longer have the resources to continue feeding them and they will resent that when that time comes and they are once again starving. Without population control there will always be starvation. Technology can and does help relieve this problem but we can not stand still on our accomplishments. Every year means more mouths to feed. Presently there are three driving forces that discover better ways to do things through technology. They are war, space exploration, or medical and gene research. Medical means folks live longer and must be feed longer. As cold as it sounds, are you sure that feeding the hungry is such a good thing?
I think the colonization of other planets would be the answer to that problem, actually. Think about it- poor people(the physically healthy ones, anyway), are poor due to many factors, such as a lack of a good education, poor economy, or just plain laziness, to name a few. If the government were to choose THEM to colonize a new planet, it would be a fresh start for them. They plant and hunt their own food to eat, seek/build their own shelter, and make their own clothes. If they starve, they can only blame nature, or themselves. Sure, it'd be primative, but I think many of those people would prefer to live wearing crudely woven wool shirts and leather pants, and eating unseasoned meat; rather than starving in a modern society. Hey, the puritans risked it in the new world for less extreme reasons than starvation.
Sending humans into space to solve the problem of over-population is pure, impossible fantasy. Read Carl Sagan's Billions and Billions.
Good point, Nebula. I was saving that for later if the above arguement wasn't enough. No matter how you look at it, we are in a race. The race will be won or lost here, on this planet. We have not the ability, nor the logistical capability to move the amount of people it would take to make a difference. Either we will continue to develop more efficent methods of growing food or we will starve. Not just the third world countries but the developed nations as well. There is one other choice, we can willingly decide to have no more children than we can support. I do not see that happening. The failure to limit children brought into this world, or the lack of ability to continue to discover better ways to produce food will both lead in one direction. Mass war. Study history...
http://www.unfpa.org/6billion/populationissues/demographic.htm some good news, some bad. if i were to predict i would say negative growth worldwide eventually
Your right, current growth trends now show decreasing world populaiton. Oddly enough, people dont breed like rabbit sunless they have to to survive. Help them survive and make it an economic factor that your children are expensive to rear well, and hey presto, first world birth rates. As for food, we have enough, its just a matter of distribution. if you want sci-fi set in a broign future, how about Iain M Banks culture novels, where The Culture is a pan species super hi tech civilisaiton spread across the galaxy with all the fancy high tech you can wish for, tehrefore the lives of trillions of its citizens are ultimately quite boring to us the reader,cos of the normality and sex and doing things you want to and never having to be miserable sort of thing. Oddly enough the books take place at the fringes of the culture where it interacts with less powerful civs who still have annoying problems like birth rates and power struggles. Much as I dont like saying this, anotehr driver of technology you missed is the market one. More smaller flashier gizmos that do the job better/ faster etc do well, and help drive the technology forwards. Anyways, pessimism in futurism- one point is htat you need to take a more pessimistic outlook, otherwise you'll just ignore all the nasty things that do go wrong. Admittedly pessiists have been wrong, but at least as much as the ones who said that we'd all have rocket properlled backpacks by now etc.
