The DU Lounge

Most of the stuff that people call science fiction is pure fantasy, especially anything that has people living on other planets or traveling to other stars.

For a lot of reasons one can say with great confidence that faster than light travel and time travel (two sides of the same coin) are not possible in this universe. A universe where these were possible wouldn't look like the one we live in and would certainly be inhospitable to life as we know it.

Closer to earth, the big elephant in the room is that manned space travel is extremely expensive, dangerous, and largely pointless. Keeping humans alive and healthy in space becomes increasingly difficult with distance. More to the point, anything people can do in space robots can do better. The intangibles -- pride, politics, adventure, whatever -- don't outweigh that. It's likely that humans will send a few more people to the moon and that will be that. If we are lucky no one will die. I don't think there will be any human mars colonies, asteroid miners, manned expeditions to Jupiter, etc. in our future.

A lot of dystopian science fiction hits too close to home. I think I'm done with stories set in post-apocalyptic worlds that feature fascist governments tracking our lives in such detail that they can predict our behavior. I think I'm done with stories about civilizations destroyed by nuclear or biological warfare. I think I'm done with stories about the total collapse of earth's natural environment.

I'd like to see more science fiction that maps out possible paths to a brighter future. If we abandon hope we are doomed. Stories where space aliens save us from ourselves don't count.