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Comment by zipppy | Hacker News Reader

I tend to have an opposite reaction -- I get annoyed with futurism that is unrealistic compared to how far in the future the story takes place.

Even Star Trek is completely unrealistic - it takes place less than 25 decades from now. There's no way we have space vehicles so advanced so soon.

(edit: even ignoring 'warp speed')

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Star Trek lore assumes multiple major wars on Earth followed by contact between humans and a significantly more advanced alien race by 2063.

It's not our technology 250 years from now, it's our galactic neighborhood's technology 250 years from now.

That's a good point.

I don't really agree. 250 years is a long time if you take account the fact that certain technological innovations incur exponential advancement. In less than 100 years from Edison, we put humans on the moon and not much more than that, we are debating this issue on HN. Compare this 1000 years prior; sure there were innovations but it is clear that advancement is not linear.

People alive today still don't believe we were able to get to the moon; what makes you so sure about your predictions?

Scale perhaps?

Moon is 380,000 km away. The nearest galaxy is 1×10^18 km away.

Scale for sure. Not just in terms of how far they were able to travel, but how big everything is and how many resources they would take to build, not to mention time.

Even if we knew exactly how to build everything in the movie, it would still take a TON of time to build it. Now start in the future and work backwards -- it's simply unrealistic.

That isn't to say that we won't have tons of things even 100 years from now that we can't imagine currently. I just tend to think the unimaginable is more easily attained than the evolution of those things already made.

If you understand the basics of physics and the nature of Earth and the moon, as we did by about 1700, it's easy enough to grasp how you might get from one to the other given sufficient energy. A little over 250 years later, it happened.

I wouldn't necessarily rule out a major breakthrough in space travel, though it seems extremely unlikely. But transporter technology is so wildly implausible as to be effectively impossible, certainly in that time frame. Reassembling a full human being doesn't even begin to fit our current understanding or any suggested theory of physics.

Just think about where we were 250 years ago (that's around 1760), and how far we've come technologically since then.

Perhaps I'm missing your sarcasm, but 2500 years is a very, very, long time. Never mind the last 2500 years - just think how far technology has advanced in the last 250.

25 decades is 250 years, not 2500.

Uh, yeah, I was just checking whether this thing was on.

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