I grew up watching the original Star Trek series in reruns in the 1970’s.
2021 is not what I imagined.
Back to the Future 2 took place in 2015
Blade Runner was 2019
So, I’d say we all expected quite a bit more.
The world changed much more in the 50 years before I was born than 50 years after
Something definitely went wrong somewhere
Yep. Not old enough to actually verify this, but somehow I have feeling that in the old days the smartest kids of the block were lured to figure out how to get to the moon and how to get electricity from splitting atoms. Then somehow, we as a society came up with this novel idea that maybe we should lure the smartest kids to figure out how to circumvent financial regulation. We all know how that went. Then, we decided that maybe it would be good that the smartest kids started to figure out how to make people click more ads. I almost feel like we deserve what is coming.
Why would then people not just chose short-term gain?
And when innovation saved the world from a global pandemic you guys are still arguing about the tiny miniscule risk of side effects of a game-changing vaccine rather than getting back on the curve here. So great, enjoy your brave new world of amusing yourselves to death. That seems to be about all we're good at anymore.
If the situation is not to our liking, perhaps we should consider addressing the root cause(s) so the same thing doesn't happen the next time a crisis pays us a visit.
If the West had always been this risk averse with respect to science and technology, we wouldn't have gone to space let alone the Moon. We wouldn't have antibiotics and we probably wouldn't even have flight. So tell me how to restore America's healthy level of risk tolerance? Because taking medical advice from online pundits is incredibly risky and yet it's seen as safer than trusting science by a disturbingly large minority. And that's just one example of how badly we gauge risk.
And to be fair, I have the same viewpoint about the irrational fear of nuclear power.
They’re an adversary and should be taken seriously however they are not the threat that the Soviet Union was. China has too many headwinds to reach true superpower status.
The one child policy was a resounding success and a total disaster as now they have the fastest aging population on the planet. This has lead to massively increasing labor costs and a hollowing out of their consumer base which then makes their economy export-dependent right when the consumer base of the developed world is hollowing out. They are reliant on energy imports to keep the lights on and those imports go through the first island chain full of their most vicious and ancient geopolitical enemies. They are reliant on food imports to feed their population that rely on the same global trade routes that are or are about to go completely to hell. Their historically unprecedented growth over the last couple of decades was fueled by the most irrationally exuberant money printing and debt driven bender that makes the USA look like a miserly spend-thrift.
Exponential in regards to which variable? Money? Time? Effort? Or did you simply mean "vastly"?
This may be nitpicky, but we should expect people to get basic terminology right – at least on HN.
There are countless species in this world and all of them are doing just fine without the giant brain. A large part of humanity really just wants to live their live, reproduce, enjoy a meal, sleep properly, sit in the grass and look at the lake and the forest.
We keep arguing that we have to think our way out of whatever the current situation is but you cant find a single problem that was not created by similar "solutions" for the previous "problem".
It sort of blew my mind!
It took a very large brained human to come up with the bread and circuses. It takes such very large brain to punish innovation or to have people ignore it. It takes an even larger brain to argue "what is desperately needed". You talk of saving the world but the world doesn't need to be saved. People are going to die sooner or later regardless. If you or me get to live a little bit longer that would be fantastic for you or for me.... but for the world? The world needs me for what exactly? We are the parasite devouring the host.
I do get it! It seems terrible this "amusing yourselves to death" but why not amuse yourself until you die? Utopia is a world full of 300 year old grumpy old men? I'm sure we will get there eventually if we push hard enough but that will simply become the new problem that those few bright men with their large brains so desperately need to solve for us.
I look at my cat sleeping on the sofa, why doesn't she get to have this complicated disposition? Why isn't she worried about the economy and innovation? What a joke, after the great collapse she will just go fishing, catch birds, spiders and mice, fight the neigbours, roll in the grass, look at the lake and the trees. At least, assuming we leave any of that behind.
Think about it!
The moon? mars? why not go to Antartica if you feel we ran out of self-made problems to solve? Antartica seems just as much umpf as Mars?
Today, our external and internal enemies blind our people in every way they can. For example, convincing our brightest minds that they will be the most fulfilled if their bank accounts are the most overflowing.
My impression is that the smart kids from a few blocks would go to Nasa, and those are the ones we remember. Many smart kids had no access to higher education, or were lawyers and doctors (which is absolutely fantastic).
When I recently watched For All Mankind I wasn't thinking "people did cooler shit then". I was thinking "that particular shit was really cool, overall most people then and there were worse off, including most smart people".
May be it has to do with me being spanish and our specific culture, but Im pretty sure there were plenty of geniuses doing bullshit or evil back then. Why do you think otherwise?
I was not discussing whether we as a society are better off now than in the old days. (To me it is obvious that we are better off in most ways) I was discussing why it feels that the technological progress was faster in the old days than nowadays.
Why I think this? As said, I have absolutely no data, but only a hunch, that if you compare the incomes of nuclear engineer, aerospace engineer, banker and adtech engineer (whatever that was in the old days...), I would be quite surprised if the relative income has not tilted towards bankers and adtech engineers over time.
Technological reverse salients litter the landscape, making it harder to push forward with what we have and already know.
People have to spend time traversing high risk, low-payoff fields to unlock new slopes that will take us higher. It certainly isn't always obvious.
Why build more stuff if no one is going to buy it (near today's prices) and labor is already cheap?
To be fair these things were only invested in because we wanted the capability to bomb eurasia to the stone age
Part of it I think was just money. Wasn’t that all funded by the government? If you throw money at it, people will go there. It’s the same now.
There was also a naive optimism of what the future could bring with space travel and free energy from nuclear power … then reality hit.
The world changed even more in the second 50 years, just not the western world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NASA_budget_linegraph_BH....
That's not as much, of course, but it's hardly chump change -- and yet I can't help but think that they're a lot less than half as impressive as they were back then. Look at the Constallation program, meant to develop a crewed launch system as a replacement for the Space Shuttle. Five years after it started it was over budget and behind schedule, and after it was estimated to eventually cost more than the entire Apollo program it got canceled. Or look at the Space Launch System program, another rocket-making attempt: it started in 2011, has spent over $20 billion so far, was supposed to start launches in 2016, and might launch something next year.
NASA's general level of competence seems to have dwindled over time. They can still do impressive things, but not nearly as impressive as you'd expect if the same budget had been given to 1960s NASA with 2021 technology.
- If American industrial declines overall, outside the bloodsucking defense contacting sector that is naturally NASA-adjacent, won't those dollars travel less far?
- Nothing about NASA is a productive investment on short enough timescales to make it somewhat self-funding, boosting the economy as a whole very efficiently, (same with defense spending) so it's the exactly wrong foundation for industrial policy. First boost "productive" capacity, then funnel some extra riches into NASA. It has to be icing on the cake, not the cake!
Constellation was an earnest attempt that strangled itself with process and procedure. SLS is just a battleground for politicians and contractors trying to keep the money flowing in their own directions.
The NASA that people usually think about is found in the smaller projects, where they can go relatively unnoticed by those who would ruin them. But even then, there's probably too much risk aversion. The very idea of that kind of defeats the purpose of NASA, in my opinion.
Since then, so much else has grown immensely while NASA hasn't.
I'm not sold on the lack of competence though. They were just flying around a helicopter on Mars. It mildly amused the public for a couple days, but you could certainly argue it's among the most impressive feats ever accomplished.
Heavy disagree. It might seem that way but only because tech and science are so specialized now that the average person can't wrap their heads around all of it at once anymore.
Society, technology, and culture are all changing faster now than at any point in human history.
Developing an electric self-driving car takes a monumental effort. It's easier to continue releasing a new internal combustion model every year. The factory only knows how to do one thing and it is expensive to change.
So we may never have cars like the Jetsons. Fantasy also wants to over-estimate the future for dramatic effect.
Broadly: Political gridlock, defunding of science endeavors, the Forever War on Terror, etc.
Economically: increasing wealth disparity
More specifically: brightest minds being thrown at the most profitable, versus the most socially beneficial, outcomes.
I am glad that things went better than dystopic predictions.
At least until the recent Star Trek, fans understood the Federation to be utopian. That was Gene Roddenberry's optimistic view of human potential. That we would get past our current issues. Q even puts the Enterprise crew on trial in TNG's first episodes for various historical crimes, and Picard is able to argue that humanity has evolved past much of that.
It's only really with external threats and other cultures that the Federation's values are challenged, and sometimes compromised.
I think pre-1968 if there were fan theories by that point, they wouldn't have been so drawn to calling out some optimism that doesn't make sense.
But I really haven't watched enough Star Trek let alone caught up with fan theories to carry this further :).
Did George Takei get casted thinking "fuck this bullshit, I'm going to subtlety undermine the nonsense utopia with my acting?" Or was the pain and skepticism of cold war rhetoric more a subconscious war of vacillating between hope for the future, and skepticism that "United Space Ship" and "United States Ship" had enough distance between them?
I don't think many people were on that former level, say, pre-1968 at least.
But he’s wrong based on Star Trek canon (and throughout this I am not referencing Discovery and concurrent series, which are charged with being a change of tone) except maybe on war, and even then only if you take “on Earth” to mean, for war, “between nations of Earth, since they are all subordinated to a single government” and not “physically occurring on Earth”.
> Picard tells Lilly in the same movie that money is no longer used
This may be true on Earth, which seems like it uses centralized (possibly exchangeable) centralized rationing rather than (or at least to an extent that most people need not, if they do not choose to, interact with) a money economy, though profit-seeking independent traders exist in Federation space at least in the TOS era, and Federation citizens have and spend various forms of money for various things throughout the various series.
Gibson and Stephenson were two of the people who actually tried to talk about the future, and they got a lot of things right. We didn't get the Jetsons type retrofuturism with flying cars and 60s suburbs on mars, but the internet alone has made the world a lot stranger than people imagine.
Economics, GDP measurements and so on are very good at capturing the world of commodity production, and indeed not much has changed, but when you look at how information moves around today a great deal has changed, and gdp statistics don't capture it.
the entire idea that 'the future' is measured in terms of economic output, where people are flying on huge rockets or something like that is itself a symptom of being stuck in the industrial age
> Internet dopamine is a huge brain-drain
> The world is far more complex now, i.e. were having to either clash with older systems/ideas or try updating legacy systems.
> Age distributions show many more old people who usually want things to stay similar.
And you are still alive today, that means you lived through the transition from analog to digital and the arrival of the Information Age. That’s a pretty big thing that has happened.
I remember Star Trek canon says 2021 Earth was a hell due to World War 3, but I'm not sure that idea was already at the original series.
One other aspect is that engineering is hard. It's probably harder to become a millionaire through engineering than by becoming a banker, say.
Yes, the TV and Movie industries created a lot of unrealistic expectations in your mind.
1970-2020
I think most people would agree that in the 50 years before 1970, the world changed more?
Also my grandfather took a commercial plane in 62 from France to visit a California factory that sold screws already packaged in boxes of 50. Weird, but he smelled a good idea.
Also got paid leave in the 30s. That was huge.
Printing infinite money might have fucked up the economy.
Care to elaborate?
If no one is buying, the future isn't worth investing in.
Conversely, if everyone is buying, tech will unleash material prosperity validating those larger dollar flows faster than "too many dollars" make us "go Weimar" and society falls part.
The mistake has been relatively inefficient forms of stimulus that arguably prop up asset prices more than they increase spending, but hopefully the pandemic checks demonstrate us turning a new leaf there: they clearly worked better than whatever shit Larry Summers told Obama to do, as the original graph shows!