I was rewatching Babylon 5 last night, which takes place in 2258. And I can’t stop thinking about how much I thought we’d definitely be out there in space living the sci-fi dream in 200 years when I was a kid watching this, & how now I…kind of think we won’t.
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It was one thing when Bill the Stonecutter started rolling in plague bodies, making up stories about vampires, & hoarding the good pig guts for himself. It sucked, but it wasn’t a political movement. You could talk to Bill about sucking less if he didn’t just die of stupid.
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But now this madness is a huge number of people with real power & Bill the Stonecutter wants to cut a lot more than that This isn’t going away, the internet isn’t going away, & it’s gonna slow everything up for a good long while You can’t progress if you can’t agree on reality
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If we just make it 200 years, every day life wasn’t nearly as different from 1620 to 1820 as it is from 1820 to 2020. Oh yes, new inventions & nations & wealth, but you would recognize the world if you popped forward Which is where the temporal optimism of space opera comes from
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But I don’t think it’s gonna keep up like that. I think the difference will look way more like 1620 to 1820 than 1820 to 2020. I think we’re heading for a bottleneck partly organic & partly of our own dumbfuck making. Unless aliens or techno-magic.
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I think there’s a bigger change of 2258 looking like Mad Max than Babylon 5. All it takes is a real bad sunspot & we’re twiddling our thumbs for a long time. I wish I didn’t feel that way. I want to believe in the beautiful future. But the present & the past won’t let me.
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On the other hand, Babylon 5 could envision space travel but not a cell phone or the internet. Our imaginations are always most limited by our assumptions. So maybe the truly inconceivable is on the horizon, fits in your pocket, & I’ve just been stuck inside too long.
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True. I wonder how much that would change with a real UBI? Are they this way because the “work to survive” cycle has deprived them of a really meaningful lifestyle? Or are they just trolls, and with more spare time and resources they’d just ... do more trolling?
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Lots of them aren’t working now. They just keep trolling. It’s not about comfort or money. Some of the biggest village jerks were always comfortably middle class. Ask Jane Austen.
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Solutions to this are the fiction I want to read. The current baby generation when old will likely be far more tolerant than any prior generation if past trends continue, idk what living in that world looks like much less 150 years past that
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