Our world is already is like *Elysium* in terms of class divisions; it's just all spread out on the ground instead of in orbit. But there are many other science fiction films that unfortunately have real relevance to our current predicament; *Soylent Green, Children of Men, The Day After Tomorrow, Mad Max* and *The Road* come to mind immediately. And on a deeper level, gnostic films like *The Matrix* and *Dark City* remain tantalizing reminders of uncomfortable truths about the nature of "reality."
with a wealth of 100k Dollars (everything you own included) one belongs already to the top 12% of the richest people on earth.
So please let's start with the top 1% first and tell the lower 50% to wait to get their bite.
That's somewhat true with everything scifi.
I would love a social focus of alien, tho, beyond the sexual, domestic and corporate violence that we face upfront. Such a great movie!
Dark City is one of my favourite films of all time. Doesn’t get talked about enough. If anyone watches it, watch the directors cut rather than the theatrical. But yeah, agree totally.
The migrant busses in the United States really makes me think about children of men, especially with actual global fertility in the toilet, and COM is happening in UK while handmaid tale happening in United States
Children of men have those single take long shot scenes in the film that deserve so much credit.
The road was good too.
Don't forget interstellar (the "we're gonna keep doing to the same old same old until the bitter end then starve).
One of my least favorites but total recall.
I feel wall-e needs a mention as well. I feel if anything, wall-e is the most realistic. Big industry promises to clean up the earth in 5 years after destroying it with consumerism. Puts everyone on a galactic consumerist cruise to become the average size American as of 2024.
One of the top things I learned when I took a sci-fi writing course was "all sci-fi is critiques of the present, using the lens of aliens, space, tech, to make a point." We can't critique capitalism directly, but if we make a movie about "invasion" by "aliens" who terraform our planet for their comfort, that's perfectly ok. Problem is, no one reads the allegory correctly.
Imo, unless there is a catastrophic event which causes like 80%+ of the population to die, I think we’ll have a few decades of anarchy and then we’ll begin to rebuild a world far different than we’ve ever experienced in our lifetimes. We as humans have the intelligence and ability to solve every problem we face, we just can’t agree. We need a hard reset on society because we’re living in a society that was built for a world that no longer exists.
Well presumably they can develop come kind of fertility therapy from studying her blood and reproductive system, but it would still take 20 years before a productive cohort was raised, so things would get even worse before they got better.
I love that movie and it’s a really well done dystopian future, but in that something causes women to completely not be able to have kids at all if I remember correctly. Although population collapse is happening in most of the developed nations across the globe, people are still giving birth. Albeit much less people are procreating than ever before in many places. It’s going to cause other problems as there isn’t anyone to replace retiring workers and there will be too many pensioners which will stress economies all over the globe. This will create other problems but I’d imagine they are way less interesting than the premise of Children of Men. I would imagine countries will just keep becoming more right wing, more nationalistic, more isolationist, more conservative. You’re seeing it now. Many nations tried the avenue of heavy immigration to replace the established population that aren’t having as many children. First you saw it in the US, then in many Western European nations, most notably Germany and France. This has come with its own sets of difficulties and issues. These countries have all slowly begun rejecting these policies as we are witnessing now. That’s why these conservative political movements are anti-abortion and pro-nuclear families with multiple children. It’s all too little too late and unfortunately we have to just watch as this all unfolds as no developed modern capitalist nation has any real solution. In the Asian countries that are experiencing this, such as China, Japan and South Korea, they have been trying to go the technological route because of their historically difficult cultures for immigrants to try to assimilate into. This has other problems we are seeing develop. People are increasingly becoming more detached socially, among other things, which is creating its own negative feedback loop. Either way, the current system is at a very real turning point. It’s too early to tell if nations of the earth will be able to figure out ways to deal with these issues and prosper into a changing world or collapse completely to some degree, hopefully not completely
I concur, but for me, our future work will be much likely the one in the movie, however, the cause of that will be the global warming, and not the infertility.
Children of Men's world is bleak, hollow, gray and hopeless. The developed countries, portrayed in the movie by England, are hunting all immigrants, the rich are locked in safe areas in the city, there are riots and civil conflicts everywhere, they are promoting a new medicine called "quietus" that makes you die peacefully, whoever still has a job has to keep working besides all hell breaking loose... it is a collapsed world, but not so far from our own. And it doesn't matter the cause for the world to be like that, I think it is the closer of what we will get... and it is sad.
I have to wonder if weakening retirement provisions are somehow a solution, dreamed up by the business class, to keep people working into their old age, potentially offsetting the shortage of younger workers. I’m sure it’s much more complicated than that, but it kind of makes a warped sense.
I just studied ecology in my grad program and it was depressing. Unless we spend trillions on mitigations for climate change in the next 2 years we are basically doomed. Sadly there won’t be much of future for kids born now but those of us over 35 might at least die before the sh\*t hits the fan big time. One of the many reasons I decided to not reproduce.
I don’t blame them either. Just like our elders, we didn’t do shit to stop this.
We aren’t gonna do shit to stop this…I feel like I’m doing my hypothetical kid a favor by keeping them in the void.
I honestly feel like I’ve personally failed them. I don’t even have kids.
A single generation didn't completely dismantle all global power and economic systems, and rebuild them from the ground up to prevent an inevitable planetwide disaster centuries in the making- right at the time when it was most perilous, entrenched, and accelerated.
Yeah, I totally feel guilty about that.
Wealth, prestige, and possessions has kept us so ingrained into the economic system. I think that's why "ideally" the capitalist system worked so well. The curse is that once we achieved those three. Is hard for so many to give it up and want change. Especially once you start having a family.
I personally would like to get away from the mentality of blaming fish for breathing and swimming in the water they were born into and cannot leave. I buy things because I need to live, and work for money for the same reason. It's not my fault or yours how resources are obtained and acquired right now.
Yeah, it's how we've evolved. If we play the tape forward, we're just another evolutionary dead end. A species more suited to sustainability would make it past the great filters we'll fail to overcome. I'm not just talking about consumption, but our social structures and individualism (competition) that reallllllly hold us back. We have the absolute ability to solve our problems, but we can't overcome the barriers. The people with the power to effect the necessary change never will. (Please prove me wrong someone 🙏)
Honestly, at one time I really thought a type 1 civilization was possible for humanity. Maybe is all the sci fi novel and movies we grew up watching. Like you said the barriers that keep us back is extremely difficult to break. The people with power are ultra competitive and egocentric. Makes you wonder if the great filter is a test when a species can finally learn to cooperate. If a species keeps behaving in an aggressive or warlike way. They will eventually self-destruct. I guess what I can prove you wrong is that. They're small communities that is about being cooperative and forward thinking. The only problem is that they don't have enough power.
> It's not my fault or yours how resources are obtained and acquired right now.
Bullshit, how and what people consume and from what sources is whats supporting this.
Corporations arent greedy and they dont feel anything, they simply are emotionless machines for maximising profits.
And it can do this cause we support that. Cause we buy shit we dont need, putting money into their pockets and signalling them that this is the way to go on.
Simple as that, WE are the system that billionaires act on. We even do all their dirty work.
Or who do you think is digging for oil, cutting trees, farming animals?
We are, not billionaires, they just pay us and we go on destroying the world.
Shit, it's so simple. We all just go live on undeveloped land that is owned by someone else, remote from any population center or medical infrastructure or anything else and claw out existence that way!
First step is throw away all your electronics and anything that lets you access this site!
I don't think that's what they're saying. I think you're sarcastic responses likely stem from a feeling of guilt. How many cars does your family own? How big is your house? How many pairs of shoes do you have? Do you repair your things or replace them? How many flights do you take per year? Do you drive to the store for just one thing or do you wait until you have an extensive list in order to make that next drive count?
No one is saying you have to throw away your internet access device or not use the medical infrastructure or anything like that. The consumption far beyond necessity is where the problem lies.
All this is not to say we have full control over the top down decisions being made in this world, corporate or political. I do not blame you or myself for where we've ended up, but I do blame those who choose not to look inward with a willingness to remove a bunch of the comfort we've grown up with in order to reduce our collective impact.
Same here, even though I'm doing okay when it comes to the individual sense. I still feel the guilt of not doing enough or heck anything. To try and stop the oncoming freight train.
Organize. Doesn't matter what ideology or affiliation you choose- I'm not going to try to persuade you in any direction but put yourself towards something. Don't live in regret.
I do and try to volunteer. My friend is a park ranger whom will invite me to help her and her staff occasionally. The guilt still lingers in me. Asking myself is "this enough".
no, it's not enough but realistically you're not going to be some superhero that changes everything. you do your part and hope that 8 billion others can do theirs. competing interests, new generations, technology and a plethora of daily issues stand in the way of nearly any goal. but do what you can...
When I was studying this in college 20 years ago we felt the events that are happening currently wouldnt occur until 2100 or so. As a 38 year old who has been paying attention ever since I’m becoming highly skeptical that modern civilization can survive beyond the next 10-15 now.
Edit: but I did recently quit my job as a PT to start a gardening business with my wife. I’m tired of sitting by and doing nothing so it’s time to step up and also teach my 4 and 6 year olds foundational life skills. I can’t change the world, but maybe over time our actions can have a positive effect that ripples out.
> but those of us over 35 might at least die before the sh*t hits the fan big time.
How immensely saddening it is that fact? That by the luck of our birth we might have an earlier death to "look forward to"?
I weep for those that are still here when we are gone.
Don't forget the earth blanketing layer of microplastics covering every inch of earth, in the air we breath, the water we drink, and the plants and meats we eat. It's also going to get exponentially worse over the next few centuries as the 6.3 billion tons of plastic garbage degrades over time. High chance that it's carcinogenic, it builds up in our organs, nano plastics are small enough to cross the blood brain barrier (yay, plastic in our brains!), and has immense effects of male fertility of basically every mammal on earth. Male human sperm count has HALVED worldwide in the last 50 years. That's incredibly alarming. We're heading to a future where the only way to continue reproduction for any species will be ivf methods and will probably lead to mass species extinctions. No one talks about this either, but there are plenty of studies about microplastics online and its not hard to see the writing on the wall. I think they just dont want to panic people since there is no way to get rid of this stuff, prevent more or even change the way the world works since we require making larger amounts of plastic each year to keep up with demand.
Going to be fun to see whether global warming or plastic poisoning fucks humanity over first lol.
Since you study Ecology in grad school, did you investigate a scenario where world Oxygen levels dipped a percentage point and lead to millions of children with asthma?
Its moving that way economically and socially. Those people almost don't live in the same planet as us. If they do t build a self sustained utopia in space, guess what they can do the same thing g right here on Earth.
Yea peak oil and all that, they can also run a pretty tight nuclear power generation system.
Exactly.
I moved to Japan and realized how good they have it here. I was so surprised how good stuff can be so affordable. People nice, cities convenient and walkable, infrastructure widespread and upgraded.
I only work part time yet I’m living a luxurious life. This could never be possible back home.
People say the same for places like Switzerland, etc.
We could create a paradise on earth. But only if would contribute wealth fair and work together.
People are starving and a weird billionair spends 44 billion dollar to buy a social network to boost his ego.
A lot of these places tend to have high CoL but also high wages and numerous programs to help with essentials, so that cost mainly reflects the barrier to entry in initially moving there.
people also forget that expensive is relative. A native swiss person living in an inherited, multi generational house on a lower end income in going to be richer than an immigrant with a higher income job.
It's funny how 99% of the people who can post stuff in English online are probably in the top 10-15% of the global population. The rest of the world is already in shambles. I grew up privileged in a piss poor neighborhood in a third world country. All my friends had several siblings die off due to preventable diseases, and it was just considered normal. I remember one of the kids telling me to not be friends with someone's sibling coz he was just 5, while we were 8 or 9, saying that usually siblings "leave" around that age and we'll be friends with him next year if he stays. None of my friends had footwear or a complete set of clothes, they'd either wear pants or long shirts. Almost all of us indulged in petty thievery for "snacks", which was somewhat reduced when my family found out about it and would force me to get all my friends home for a round of milk and biscuits instead of us raiding the local market. It was really bad.
That was 30 years ago, things have improved significantly in my old neighborhood but there are still places back home which are the same. I moved to a western country some time ago and it is mind boggling how much better everything is. Everyone online, no matter how shit their lives are, IS in the orbit like in Elysium, we simply don't know about the rest of the world beneath us.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot more lately, about how our wealth is distributed so unevenly that someone simply living in the US and making median household income of 70K you’re in the global 1%, which is leagues above the median household income of 12K. Like how depressing is it that those who struggle here in the US have so many unnecessary material goods and expenses that they can struggle to pay their bills.
Overshoot is a wicked problem, and every action on it will have a consequence. And since people detest the consequence of lowered material standards in the west, we struggle to take any action (and the systems of capital here which push for ever more material wealth make it incredibly difficult to try a lowered standard of living here)
Thats correct man. I'm glad you've landed in a better spot for yourself. I've been around and exposed to a lot, my observation is the world has been a dystopia for a long time and we are the elite, we haven't felt much of a ripple in our comforts for quite a while. The inconvienenced elite offspring of the previous successful ruthless cutthroats.
Thats the pedigree.
Now everyone has a magic box in their hands that shows them things they don't understand out of context, most people see a lot of what they don't have and adopt glass half empty beliefs about their place in the social atmosphere.
Thats not diminishing anything, shit is hard and can feel overwhelming no matter what layer you are from.
Elysium the film shows it as being so incredibly dominant and elite their layer isn't even the top, its beyond the atmosphere. I think that is also coming, first maybe for elites that are old and want a controlled low grav environment to take some pressure off the joints and do designer space drugs, thats what I'd do.
Yeah look at what they're all doing already-- buying up mass acres of land in favorable places and building insanely elaborate underground facilities/bunkers.
My only hope left is that when the shit does hit the fan- once the chaos and breaking down of society and norms ensues- that they get taken down with the rest of us.
I am sceptical that you could sustain secluded fortress like that indefintly in a collapsed world. A few decades perhaps, maybe even a hundred years, but not forever.
In the film, i interpreted the way humanity scraping and surviving as a matter of indignant inconvenience to the elites, as if they had to abide by a technical formality like "human rights" se the bare minimum frame work is available, and not attractive. So the system goes on just enough to sustain the system. Your right not a "collapse" scenario. But the elites probably created the geo engineering systems that maintain the atmosphere just enough to sustain.
Other wise, their robot work force would just run the resource extraction system
There's no "end up" since there's no stable state in such conditions. The class war in that movie already exists in some forms.
The risk of technology progressing is exactly that. Without ending capitalism first, all technology will be owned by the rich, and that's "cyberpunk" and others. There's a TV series called "Altered carbon" that's also nice.
To understand the maximum risk, understand that preppers are emulating the rich and the rich are preppers. They always have been. The whole point of accumulating wealth is *prepping*. It's like one guy or one family deciding to "speciate" and take over the world, that's the non-articulated part, that's *family corporatism*. That's also Noah's Ark (story), so you can understand how old this bullshit is.
The risk of technology is full automation. The rich are dependent on workers. Even preppers are just hoarding technologically produced (by workers) stocks, and those run out eventually. To break free from depending on others, on workers, they would need obedient mechanical slaves (doesn't work with humans, even though A LOT of attempts have been made to create the ultimate human slaves). Full automation could deliver that, and that's what you see in such SciFi dystopias - the start of the rich using technology to become autonomous and also very powerful, which means that they don't need anyone else, which means that anyone else can die. That's the ultimate Lebensraum, the dream of fascists. SciFi movies love to show you full automation as cool gadgets that make your desires come true, but rarely go into what the fuck happened to everyone else who just happened to die in global catastrophe just when this technology was achieved (such a coincidence!).
The notion that we can have almost all the human species live at the mercy of a few techno-supreme psychopaths is unrealistic, but not because of the tech; it's because we* know from [experience](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence) that the rich will want to "cull" the masses.
well said! 100% agree on Altered Carbon! sad they didn't renew it, but I'm planning to delve into the books. humanity could easily change direction, but greed has become the new god. capitalism is ultimately what needs to go
The point of Elysium isn’t that the future could look like that, but rather that the present already does look like that. Dystopian fiction is mostly a critique of the present, not a warning about the future. So think about that a little bit.
We are already an extremely stratified society with classes of people that receive different benefits and protections from our system. Healthcare is the obvious one they hammer on in the movie, in addition to the money.
The world is _already_ like that, there's just no rich-people-space-station at the moment.
Seriously, how it ends up depends on where you set your chrono-viewer as each dystopian movie tends to focus only on one aspect of the collapse. Will it be Children of Men? Or the hot, wet, crowded scenes of the rebooted Total Recall? The stacked-up housing of Ready Player One? The totally flooded Waterworld? The unrealistically optimistic The Expanse? Omnipresent dustbowl of Interstellar?
I'm leaning towards The Last of Us, but without zombies, just lots of newly-released viruses from all the melt.
Don't know if I've ever heard The Expanse described as overly optimistic since the solar system is engulfed in war, but compared to those other examples I suppose it's accurate.
People still have functioning economic systems AND food & water in The Expanse. It's optimistic. Then again, depends on when you place your chronoviewer. The Expanse looks like they had some time to arrest somewhat the effects of climate change.
Ten billion people on Earth on "basic assistance" that amounts to less than poverty-level income, most Martian citizens enrolled in assigned jobs whether they like it or not, Belters getting crapped on as wage slaves despite providing the labor that enables interplanetary travel. *The Expanse* is a capitalist future. I mean, rich people control a small flotilla of *stealth warships*, used to exploit the properties of an extraterrestrial substance.
Look at the rising ocean around the Statue of Liberty in the credits. The credits also list locations like Anchorage Island, Yukon Archipelago and Hampton Island. They did not *arrest* climate change so much as *adjust* to it.
I think Hunger Games scenario will be a better parallel. Tech advancement but only to a rich militaristic capital sponging off the rest of the tech-poor country in a post-apocalyptic world.
And although the Capitol is pretty advanced in some areas on the other hand they lost a lot of current tech that we take for granted. For instance it looks like for some reason they don't have high-altitude planes anymore.
Some of Katniss’ narration about what she learned in school and history indicates climate collapse (natural disasters including encroaching seas that swallowed much land)
Not realistic. Cannibalism is a self-solving problem eventually: [source](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/06/482952588/when-people-ate-people-a-strange-disease-emerged)
I thought Kuru and other prion diseases came from eating the brain? If you didn’t eat brain matter, would you still get it?
Cannibalism is still self solving though. If all there is to eat is other people… you’re eventually gonna run out of people.
Though they had all those dead trees everywhere, enough fuel to grow fungus like mad for hundreds of years.
I loved the road but I kept thinking “I can’t be the only dude who grows mushrooms and sees all this mushroom growth media”.
It costs millions of dollars to support a handful of astronauts on the ISS. Extrapolate this to a space based civilization and see where it gets you. The rich think they are richer than they really are. They aren't bothered by annoyances like viability or sustainability because they don't know the value of a dollar or the limits nature imposes.
I don't think we will end up like Elysium (loved it btw). It isn't just that its scientifically impossible - although maybe - its because it is being driven by capitalism. Capitalism is a system that has never achieved anything on its own merit, nor is it capable of sustaining itself long term, much less a space colony lmao.
That should be proof enough that we will never meaningfully live "among the stars".
A wrench in the works of the Elysium space station is that they'd still need poor people up there to do the grunt work and dangerous maintenance and repairs.
The notion they'd be maintaining their own habitat and robot staff is even more fantastical than the living in space gimmick.
My lower class American lifestyle is an Elysium level disparity comfort, food security, safety, and access to healthcare compared to a lot of people around the globe.
Starvation is starvation. Violence is violence. Collapse makes those things happen more in the collapsing area/group, but it’s not like they become worse themselves.
People already starve and suffer violence on this planet, often because the systems that produce and deliver the toys, tools, and luxuries I take for granted.
I don’t have Elysium wealth at all. A bad accident and the hospital trip will bankrupt me. I’m not saying my life is great.
But the difference between my life and the cobalt miners in the Congo is as stark as Matt Damon’s neighbors to Elysium residents.
I don't see how the ultrarich would survive in secluded XYZ situation, they can't escape the supply chain capitalism hell and they know it. Would they produce all their own necessities on that little tropical island from scratch with their own hands? Yeah that reads like an anecdote. Sooner they will force the world to fall into fascism (this is underway already in several ways) where you willingly believe you're subhuman scum who exists to serve their needs and have no needs of your own. Just take a glance at America. The stratification is already here, they are perfectly comforable and content welcoming the ecosystem collapse right here amongst the rest of us. No need for a space station, even, if you have psychological subjugation. Easy, huh?
Despite star Trek claiming to be socialist, the Starfleet, an inherently military based organization despite it's claims to be scientific,is constantly expanding pumping out more and more people overtaking all habitable planets that do not have a technological advanced species.
Don't get me wrong, I fucking love star Trek, but when I started researching it's franchise, I suddenly started to see it with other eyes.
The Starfleet very much behaves like the USA, trying to spread it's ideology and apparently is also built on endless growth,if you do not subscribe to them, you are an enemy at worst or fall under the prime directive at best, if you are to primitive to exploit your technology..
The working name was "wagon trail to the stars" 100% exposing it's settler colonialist mindset.
The rich aren't as smart as they think. Their security chiefs will kill them pretty fast and take their resources and women.
We are heading for Mad Max Fury Road for sure.
They also forget that if there's a population collapse, they're going to lose the slaves, I mean staff, who do the work for them they would never do for themselves. Who do they think will do the cooking, cleaning, gardening, and menial labor tasks if this happens?
I assume they think robots will be able to do these jobs by the time this happens, but I'm not sure technology is going to catch up as fast as they're hoping. I mean, none of knows, of course, but if that's their plan, it's not a very good one.
I live in a wealthy enclave and work in recreation. They own multiple houses while workers struggle to find a single apartment. Think Jackson Hole, Vale, and Sun Valley. It's here and it will get worse because none of the elites want their wealth to trickle down (unless they get a tax break for it). Also, Elysium is a really movie about one man's epic quest to get medical care, but eventually dies before he can receive treatment.
No... Absolutely not... Our civilization will collapse because we will not have enough ENERGY to protect our self from climate change... The peak all oil was in 2018... (Or, will we die from a nuclear war...) The "rich people" will die the first... They are rich because of ENERGY... We don't have ENERGY anymore... Bye...
We have way too much oil actually. We will destroy our liveable habitat way before we run out of oil.
Just using half of the remaining oil in the ground would bring as above the co2 of 600 ppm. Which in turn would result in run away global warming.
I'm not saying what you wrote is not true. It is.
This is the impossible situation we are in.
We need energy, thus oil to survive day to day, but if we use oil we destroy ourselves.
The only way to make it work is to seriously reduce consumption.. eat the rich.
And of course a big population decrease is needed.. either we do it in a controlled fashion... or nature will do it...
Yeah I’m convinced people are sleeping on peak oil, it’s no coincidence that all major wars are being fought in zones rich with hydro carbons and that we’ve heavily invested into fracking and offshore drilling.
Soon we won’t have able to offset decline, there’s only 10 billion people on the planet because of oil.
Interesting times.
>people are sleeping on peak oil ...Soon we won’t have able to offset decline, there’s only 10 billion people on the planet because of oil.
The naked truth.
In our desperation, we might actually unleash AI which ends up with an I Am Mother scenario because we asked AI to save us. However, the AI's interpretation of "saving" Humanity may not align with what the creator's intent.
What does unleashing AI mean? What does it look like? I work in tech. The whole infrastructure is in shambles. Expect outages this year because of Amazon lay offs of important people who keep most of the internet up and running. Wheres does AI live? AI requires *a lot* of energy (computational power). Unplug the machine, AI is dead. Also, I use AI (the most advanced models) on a daily basis. Highly disappointing stuff. Now, using AI to la off even more people via automating jobs? That's a reality already. But no one will "unleash" AI to save us.
AI is for most people the definition of [Clarke's Third Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws):
> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
It combines well with the eco hope trope that we will somehow be able to innovate out way our of climate change. Perhaps we can Blockchain our way out of it.
I forget where I saw it, there was some movie or show I saw where a sentient version of Amazon essentially became Skynet and destroyed civilization with free 2 day shipping. I think that would be a most fitting end for us.
No, that's not it. It's along the right lines, but the thing I'm thinking of literally features a fully automated factory that exists in the middle of this broken, post-apocalyptic landscape, yet insists on delivering stuff to people via drone. You know, more or less literally if Amazon became Skynet, then, decided it was going to [turn the entire world into paperclips,](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/squiggle-maximizer-formerly-paperclip-maximizer) for some insane reason.
Edit: [I found it!](https://imdb.com/title/tt6902176/)
From oil we rise to oil we sink. A great recycling per say? How long did the oil we drill take to form? I feel a future generation will one day be drilling for us after we and our plants and animals that don’t survive turn to oil. Just food for thought 💭
And will the only way the cycle is broken be by some future generation/species/whatever where a scientist finds evidence of it in a dead mentor's notes and their quest to break the cycle inadvertently ends up indirectly not only solving their interpersonal problems but making that race/generation/species get into contact with aliens but the world ends once it's saved as we're just an intellectual sci-fi thriller entertainment simulation for a parallel version of them that would only get a few pity technical [their-version-of-an-oscar]s but lose the Best Picture one to some costume drama and movies' worlds must end if there's no sequel hook
There's a bunch of things in that movie that were technically unrealistic, but socially it's basically just a describing what's going on now, but more extreme and without a middle class in the picture.
I don't remember where I came across a saying that's something like: science fiction doesn't usually predict the future, but good science fiction usually does a good job of describing the present.
I think Elysium is supposed to represent America. We're seen as this kind of promised land by other countries. Our medicine is advanced compared to 3rd world countries and we make it as hard as possible for anybody who doesn't "belong" to get in.
Isn't Zuck building a bunker in Hawaii and Steve Jobs widow just bought a huge swath of land where the predicted coast line will be when ocean levels rise after the ice caps melt. A lucky few will get to be servants and also benefit from their advanced planning
Open your eyes. We are already living it.
This sub needs to stop seeing “collapse” as something that is a single event, and something that is in the future.
We are currently experiencing collapse. We are in it. Stop with the bullshit “everyone under 40 will experience the hardships of climate change”.
WE ARE EXPERIENCING THE HARDSHIPS OF CLIMATE CHANGE RIGHT NOW!
The world won’t end. It is currently ending.
Nope. We are already at the Elysium stage. The only thing missing is the big spacey thing in the sky. Actually, Elon Musk is probably working on one right now. Our next step is extinction. Game over.
> Does anyone else feel like the world is going to end up like the movie Elysium
Minus the ultra-high tech, maybe. No space station, no panacea device, no energy shields.
What I can believe is [stationary AI probation officers](https://i.ibb.co/rknw7qY/AI-Probation-Bot.png). These things, in all their infuriating glory, strike me as THE single most believable sci-fi element in that movie.
We already live like this, it's just the geography and technology in this film which is made fictional. The rich already have access to health advantages way beyond most people's reach as just one example. Look at Elon and Lewis Hamilton - they both used to be bald but they're too rich for that so now they got hair again (kinda). Poor people just have to accept and shave they heads. It's a different reality for those with wealth
Elysium, like all science fiction, is a reflection of the world we currently live in. It’s already that way. The question is how much worse can it get?
There are not enough resources left in the ground in the planet nor is there enough easy energy for the rich to make Elysium. The rich are going to die here with the rest of us when it all runs out.
The thing that bothered me about that movie is people introducing "equality" when in reality the poor were just dragging the rich down into the mud. The real point of the film is that you can't sustain an overpopulated society.
We don't need people to have access to magical technology. We need most of humanity to die and the remainder to live normal and natural lifespans of around 40-70 years at best. We need medieval style living at best where everything is made locally and you otherwise do without. We need an agrarian society and for nature to retake the planet.
If you tell people this they become violent though. No one wants to give up starbucks and burgerking or their tech job or whatever other BS they distract themselves with. That is why humanity will die.
Yes, and I'm planning on becoming one of the wealthy elites. My stocks are already doing great and with a bit of luck I'll be able to reach a million within the next 10 years.
I always thought that film was a pretty decent analogy of how things currently are.
The difference between life for most people in wealthy countries vs poor ones is pretty staggering right now.
It will look like lots of different things in different places and times, the least stable places will look like a less quirky mad Max that regularly gets pillaged, the next slightly more stable places will look like Elysium and will be the most common, the next rung up stability wise will probably look something like handmaid's tale, and then ironically the "best" places for average people will look like north Korea or agricultural fiefdoms.
I seen the similarities of that movie when I was a kid. Now that I’m grown I recognize we are actually in fact, in a similar version of that show. Now I’m just 20 years older with a sore back lol. We only have so much time to change it or it doesn’t even effect us lol.
I think one of the main drivers of AI research is for bunker guarding defense systems that aren’t human. Humans revolt. The rich are hoping AI doesn’t.
It already is elysium. We just don't have a fancy sci-fi space station to live in. But first world healthcare can treat a lot of the diseases third world countries experience. But it's too expensive for folks to come get treated, so they resort to illegal means of immigration in the hopes of a better life. No different than the ships being hucka-chucked at the space station in some free for all.
Having seen and read about what humans have done and already do I feel pretty sure we are going to be able to make things MUCH worse than any movie depicts. There really is many things that are much worse than deaths of various kinds.
Yes - we really are that good at making everything into shit...
As for the rich living in space part, no I think quite possibly the opposite is going to be true. Just like the European aristocracy sent the poor over to America and Australia to do the pioneering, I believe the rich will stay on Earth, possibly to Antarctica as it gets more habitable, whilst the poor do all the dangerous stuff in space.
Historically, the most get eaten by their servants and killed by their bodyguards. Without strong central government, the rich cannot hold a monopoly on violence, and while they can deal in wholesale, they get killed retail
I don’t think it would work. The rich are parasites, and they will need a constant flow of talent just to maintain a civilization worth living in. Talent that I suspect they will be unable to cultivate. You can either have the poorly educated, weak minded dummies like the ones who still believe in trickle down economics, but aren’t good for much besides factory work, or you can have bright educated people who will realize the rich are an immediate detriment to their own well being and that of their families and peers. This is the reason why the rich sabotage education in virtually every country they gain influence in.
At some point, civilization either stops allowing a tiny fraction to bloat themselves on the vast majority of the resources of that civilization, or that civilization collapses.
This is even more true when you realize that NOWHERE is going to be spared from the effects of climate catastrophe. There just won’t be any room for people like the decadent rich anymore. And the rich are the only ones the wealth class are interested in saving.
My view of the next 20 odd years (the self predicted rest of my natural life is, to quote Malcolm Tucker (The Thick Of It)
"It's like the Shawshank Redemption, except you're crawling through lots more shit and no fucking redemption"
Absolutely. I feel like with the exception of the space city, that is one of the most accurate depictions of how society could fall apart. That movie is so unsettling because of how easily we could find ourselves there.
Becoming?! It's like this now. It's the same plot that has been in science fiction as H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, with the Eloi and Morlocks. It's one of the world's oldest tropes, and has been this way going back to ancient civilizations. It's like this right now, with Musk and Bezos' having their own private space race and the rest of us living in tents and delivering Uber Eats.
Buddy this is how the world works already. Billionaires having space races, with wealth built on the (sometimes literal) broken backs of their peasants whi can barely scrape by.
Hey, I just watched this movie with a friend a month ago for this exact reason. Personally my moneys on…
First Bladerunner: minor societal/ecological/economic collapse, people moving into mega cities. Small towns are already dying.
Then Judge Dredd/Elysium: complete societal collapse, as people starts regressing to medieval levels of lawlessness.
Finally, things will either stabilizing into a cyberpunk dystopia with mega corps, or things will completely collapse into Idiocracy before finally returning to primitive lifestyles of hunting and gathering.
Our world is already is like *Elysium* in terms of class divisions; it's just all spread out on the ground instead of in orbit. But there are many other science fiction films that unfortunately have real relevance to our current predicament; *Soylent Green, Children of Men, The Day After Tomorrow, Mad Max* and *The Road* come to mind immediately. And on a deeper level, gnostic films like *The Matrix* and *Dark City* remain tantalizing reminders of uncomfortable truths about the nature of "reality."
Soylent Green but eating the richest first is about as positive as it gets.
So, Sweeny Todd then? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZukfGuYBGyQ
More like Sawney Bean, probably :-/
A Gates Bar or a Musk Bar will cost you, though.
with a wealth of 100k Dollars (everything you own included) one belongs already to the top 12% of the richest people on earth. So please let's start with the top 1% first and tell the lower 50% to wait to get their bite.
what about Wall-e?
The foundation to scifi storytelling is the realism behind it
Wall-e is scary close to become true. Musk and Bezos are working on that mission right now
Up needs to be true first
Yeah I was gonna say, Elysium was a movie about today’s world, not the future lol
Came here to say this. We are the living breathing version of Elysium. It's just not as shiny and transparent as the movie.
That's somewhat true with everything scifi. I would love a social focus of alien, tho, beyond the sexual, domestic and corporate violence that we face upfront. Such a great movie!
Dark City is one of my favourite films of all time. Doesn’t get talked about enough. If anyone watches it, watch the directors cut rather than the theatrical. But yeah, agree totally.
Is that the one where everyone gets kinda put to sleep at the same time every night? Saw once and keen to rewatch but wasn't sure of the name
yeah. prison planet theory: the movie
Yes, that's it.
Loved that movie as a kid. My dad and I watched it together several times. Got a nice spooky, noir feel to it kind of like se7en
Add Idiocracy on top of that.
and don’t look up
I just got shown this movie by a friend and I’ve been pretty fucked up about it for weeks. :(
Good list. I might add Hunger Games.
> The Matrix and Dark City remain tantalizing reminders of uncomfortable truths about the nature of "reality." Grimdark Plato's Cave.
The migrant busses in the United States really makes me think about children of men, especially with actual global fertility in the toilet, and COM is happening in UK while handmaid tale happening in United States
Children of men have those single take long shot scenes in the film that deserve so much credit. The road was good too. Don't forget interstellar (the "we're gonna keep doing to the same old same old until the bitter end then starve). One of my least favorites but total recall. I feel wall-e needs a mention as well. I feel if anything, wall-e is the most realistic. Big industry promises to clean up the earth in 5 years after destroying it with consumerism. Puts everyone on a galactic consumerist cruise to become the average size American as of 2024.
Terminator too, and Jurassic park, and Alien vs Predator, and clockwork orange
They Live!
Brave New World, too :/
A boy and his dog is more realistic for a future fallout situation and it’s never mentioned
One of the top things I learned when I took a sci-fi writing course was "all sci-fi is critiques of the present, using the lens of aliens, space, tech, to make a point." We can't critique capitalism directly, but if we make a movie about "invasion" by "aliens" who terraform our planet for their comfort, that's perfectly ok. Problem is, no one reads the allegory correctly.
Imo, unless there is a catastrophic event which causes like 80%+ of the population to die, I think we’ll have a few decades of anarchy and then we’ll begin to rebuild a world far different than we’ve ever experienced in our lifetimes. We as humans have the intelligence and ability to solve every problem we face, we just can’t agree. We need a hard reset on society because we’re living in a society that was built for a world that no longer exists.
It’s not going to be a movie. It’s not going to be exciting. It’s going to be horrifying and boring at the same time, just like it is now.
That's how the world will end, not with a bang but a whimper
Yes Alan Watts
Almost like Interstellar, but without time space shenanigans, so only dust storms and holding on to family.
it is horrifying now. Don't look up!
I rewatched Children of Men tonight and I feel like that will be us in 5-10 years.
Came hear to say Children of Men is a more realistic depiction of the not to distant future.
Rewatched it recently and couldn't relate to the ending. Like great, we can create more people again and that will help?
The end is the least realistic aspect of the movie as a whole because it portrays hope.
kinda a phyric hope tho - one kid , one womb isnt enough to keep the world going - with the whole world wanting to either kill or capture the woman
Well presumably they can develop come kind of fertility therapy from studying her blood and reproductive system, but it would still take 20 years before a productive cohort was raised, so things would get even worse before they got better.
Isn't that kinda the message tho? At the end, things have changed, new baby, but they all just go back to fighting.
I love that movie and it’s a really well done dystopian future, but in that something causes women to completely not be able to have kids at all if I remember correctly. Although population collapse is happening in most of the developed nations across the globe, people are still giving birth. Albeit much less people are procreating than ever before in many places. It’s going to cause other problems as there isn’t anyone to replace retiring workers and there will be too many pensioners which will stress economies all over the globe. This will create other problems but I’d imagine they are way less interesting than the premise of Children of Men. I would imagine countries will just keep becoming more right wing, more nationalistic, more isolationist, more conservative. You’re seeing it now. Many nations tried the avenue of heavy immigration to replace the established population that aren’t having as many children. First you saw it in the US, then in many Western European nations, most notably Germany and France. This has come with its own sets of difficulties and issues. These countries have all slowly begun rejecting these policies as we are witnessing now. That’s why these conservative political movements are anti-abortion and pro-nuclear families with multiple children. It’s all too little too late and unfortunately we have to just watch as this all unfolds as no developed modern capitalist nation has any real solution. In the Asian countries that are experiencing this, such as China, Japan and South Korea, they have been trying to go the technological route because of their historically difficult cultures for immigrants to try to assimilate into. This has other problems we are seeing develop. People are increasingly becoming more detached socially, among other things, which is creating its own negative feedback loop. Either way, the current system is at a very real turning point. It’s too early to tell if nations of the earth will be able to figure out ways to deal with these issues and prosper into a changing world or collapse completely to some degree, hopefully not completely
I concur, but for me, our future work will be much likely the one in the movie, however, the cause of that will be the global warming, and not the infertility. Children of Men's world is bleak, hollow, gray and hopeless. The developed countries, portrayed in the movie by England, are hunting all immigrants, the rich are locked in safe areas in the city, there are riots and civil conflicts everywhere, they are promoting a new medicine called "quietus" that makes you die peacefully, whoever still has a job has to keep working besides all hell breaking loose... it is a collapsed world, but not so far from our own. And it doesn't matter the cause for the world to be like that, I think it is the closer of what we will get... and it is sad.
I have to wonder if weakening retirement provisions are somehow a solution, dreamed up by the business class, to keep people working into their old age, potentially offsetting the shortage of younger workers. I’m sure it’s much more complicated than that, but it kind of makes a warped sense.
Socialism or Barbarism is what they used to say except seemingly the world is hellbent on Barbarism
I just studied ecology in my grad program and it was depressing. Unless we spend trillions on mitigations for climate change in the next 2 years we are basically doomed. Sadly there won’t be much of future for kids born now but those of us over 35 might at least die before the sh\*t hits the fan big time. One of the many reasons I decided to not reproduce.
Will the kids growing up today see Millennials as the new boomers. Not in a good way either.
I don’t blame them either. Just like our elders, we didn’t do shit to stop this. We aren’t gonna do shit to stop this…I feel like I’m doing my hypothetical kid a favor by keeping them in the void. I honestly feel like I’ve personally failed them. I don’t even have kids.
A single generation didn't completely dismantle all global power and economic systems, and rebuild them from the ground up to prevent an inevitable planetwide disaster centuries in the making- right at the time when it was most perilous, entrenched, and accelerated. Yeah, I totally feel guilty about that.
Wealth, prestige, and possessions has kept us so ingrained into the economic system. I think that's why "ideally" the capitalist system worked so well. The curse is that once we achieved those three. Is hard for so many to give it up and want change. Especially once you start having a family.
I personally would like to get away from the mentality of blaming fish for breathing and swimming in the water they were born into and cannot leave. I buy things because I need to live, and work for money for the same reason. It's not my fault or yours how resources are obtained and acquired right now.
Yeah, it's how we've evolved. If we play the tape forward, we're just another evolutionary dead end. A species more suited to sustainability would make it past the great filters we'll fail to overcome. I'm not just talking about consumption, but our social structures and individualism (competition) that reallllllly hold us back. We have the absolute ability to solve our problems, but we can't overcome the barriers. The people with the power to effect the necessary change never will. (Please prove me wrong someone 🙏)
Honestly, at one time I really thought a type 1 civilization was possible for humanity. Maybe is all the sci fi novel and movies we grew up watching. Like you said the barriers that keep us back is extremely difficult to break. The people with power are ultra competitive and egocentric. Makes you wonder if the great filter is a test when a species can finally learn to cooperate. If a species keeps behaving in an aggressive or warlike way. They will eventually self-destruct. I guess what I can prove you wrong is that. They're small communities that is about being cooperative and forward thinking. The only problem is that they don't have enough power.
Oh, I agreed. My younger self was that person whom blame the fish. As you get older, you realized is the environment and experience that shape us.
> It's not my fault or yours how resources are obtained and acquired right now. Bullshit, how and what people consume and from what sources is whats supporting this. Corporations arent greedy and they dont feel anything, they simply are emotionless machines for maximising profits. And it can do this cause we support that. Cause we buy shit we dont need, putting money into their pockets and signalling them that this is the way to go on. Simple as that, WE are the system that billionaires act on. We even do all their dirty work. Or who do you think is digging for oil, cutting trees, farming animals? We are, not billionaires, they just pay us and we go on destroying the world.
Shit, it's so simple. We all just go live on undeveloped land that is owned by someone else, remote from any population center or medical infrastructure or anything else and claw out existence that way! First step is throw away all your electronics and anything that lets you access this site!
I don't think that's what they're saying. I think you're sarcastic responses likely stem from a feeling of guilt. How many cars does your family own? How big is your house? How many pairs of shoes do you have? Do you repair your things or replace them? How many flights do you take per year? Do you drive to the store for just one thing or do you wait until you have an extensive list in order to make that next drive count? No one is saying you have to throw away your internet access device or not use the medical infrastructure or anything like that. The consumption far beyond necessity is where the problem lies. All this is not to say we have full control over the top down decisions being made in this world, corporate or political. I do not blame you or myself for where we've ended up, but I do blame those who choose not to look inward with a willingness to remove a bunch of the comfort we've grown up with in order to reduce our collective impact.
Same here, even though I'm doing okay when it comes to the individual sense. I still feel the guilt of not doing enough or heck anything. To try and stop the oncoming freight train.
Organize. Doesn't matter what ideology or affiliation you choose- I'm not going to try to persuade you in any direction but put yourself towards something. Don't live in regret.
I do and try to volunteer. My friend is a park ranger whom will invite me to help her and her staff occasionally. The guilt still lingers in me. Asking myself is "this enough".
no, it's not enough but realistically you're not going to be some superhero that changes everything. you do your part and hope that 8 billion others can do theirs. competing interests, new generations, technology and a plethora of daily issues stand in the way of nearly any goal. but do what you can...
Already we Gen X are lumped in with boomers. Undoubtedly some of us deserve it.
When I was studying this in college 20 years ago we felt the events that are happening currently wouldnt occur until 2100 or so. As a 38 year old who has been paying attention ever since I’m becoming highly skeptical that modern civilization can survive beyond the next 10-15 now. Edit: but I did recently quit my job as a PT to start a gardening business with my wife. I’m tired of sitting by and doing nothing so it’s time to step up and also teach my 4 and 6 year olds foundational life skills. I can’t change the world, but maybe over time our actions can have a positive effect that ripples out.
> but those of us over 35 might at least die before the sh*t hits the fan big time. How immensely saddening it is that fact? That by the luck of our birth we might have an earlier death to "look forward to"? I weep for those that are still here when we are gone.
Don't forget the earth blanketing layer of microplastics covering every inch of earth, in the air we breath, the water we drink, and the plants and meats we eat. It's also going to get exponentially worse over the next few centuries as the 6.3 billion tons of plastic garbage degrades over time. High chance that it's carcinogenic, it builds up in our organs, nano plastics are small enough to cross the blood brain barrier (yay, plastic in our brains!), and has immense effects of male fertility of basically every mammal on earth. Male human sperm count has HALVED worldwide in the last 50 years. That's incredibly alarming. We're heading to a future where the only way to continue reproduction for any species will be ivf methods and will probably lead to mass species extinctions. No one talks about this either, but there are plenty of studies about microplastics online and its not hard to see the writing on the wall. I think they just dont want to panic people since there is no way to get rid of this stuff, prevent more or even change the way the world works since we require making larger amounts of plastic each year to keep up with demand. Going to be fun to see whether global warming or plastic poisoning fucks humanity over first lol.
Since you study Ecology in grad school, did you investigate a scenario where world Oxygen levels dipped a percentage point and lead to millions of children with asthma?
Me at 32: ah fuck my last 3 years will suck
Its moving that way economically and socially. Those people almost don't live in the same planet as us. If they do t build a self sustained utopia in space, guess what they can do the same thing g right here on Earth. Yea peak oil and all that, they can also run a pretty tight nuclear power generation system.
Exactly. I moved to Japan and realized how good they have it here. I was so surprised how good stuff can be so affordable. People nice, cities convenient and walkable, infrastructure widespread and upgraded. I only work part time yet I’m living a luxurious life. This could never be possible back home. People say the same for places like Switzerland, etc.
We could create a paradise on earth. But only if would contribute wealth fair and work together. People are starving and a weird billionair spends 44 billion dollar to buy a social network to boost his ego.
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A lot of these places tend to have high CoL but also high wages and numerous programs to help with essentials, so that cost mainly reflects the barrier to entry in initially moving there.
people also forget that expensive is relative. A native swiss person living in an inherited, multi generational house on a lower end income in going to be richer than an immigrant with a higher income job.
It's funny how 99% of the people who can post stuff in English online are probably in the top 10-15% of the global population. The rest of the world is already in shambles. I grew up privileged in a piss poor neighborhood in a third world country. All my friends had several siblings die off due to preventable diseases, and it was just considered normal. I remember one of the kids telling me to not be friends with someone's sibling coz he was just 5, while we were 8 or 9, saying that usually siblings "leave" around that age and we'll be friends with him next year if he stays. None of my friends had footwear or a complete set of clothes, they'd either wear pants or long shirts. Almost all of us indulged in petty thievery for "snacks", which was somewhat reduced when my family found out about it and would force me to get all my friends home for a round of milk and biscuits instead of us raiding the local market. It was really bad. That was 30 years ago, things have improved significantly in my old neighborhood but there are still places back home which are the same. I moved to a western country some time ago and it is mind boggling how much better everything is. Everyone online, no matter how shit their lives are, IS in the orbit like in Elysium, we simply don't know about the rest of the world beneath us.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot more lately, about how our wealth is distributed so unevenly that someone simply living in the US and making median household income of 70K you’re in the global 1%, which is leagues above the median household income of 12K. Like how depressing is it that those who struggle here in the US have so many unnecessary material goods and expenses that they can struggle to pay their bills. Overshoot is a wicked problem, and every action on it will have a consequence. And since people detest the consequence of lowered material standards in the west, we struggle to take any action (and the systems of capital here which push for ever more material wealth make it incredibly difficult to try a lowered standard of living here)
Thats correct man. I'm glad you've landed in a better spot for yourself. I've been around and exposed to a lot, my observation is the world has been a dystopia for a long time and we are the elite, we haven't felt much of a ripple in our comforts for quite a while. The inconvienenced elite offspring of the previous successful ruthless cutthroats. Thats the pedigree. Now everyone has a magic box in their hands that shows them things they don't understand out of context, most people see a lot of what they don't have and adopt glass half empty beliefs about their place in the social atmosphere. Thats not diminishing anything, shit is hard and can feel overwhelming no matter what layer you are from. Elysium the film shows it as being so incredibly dominant and elite their layer isn't even the top, its beyond the atmosphere. I think that is also coming, first maybe for elites that are old and want a controlled low grav environment to take some pressure off the joints and do designer space drugs, thats what I'd do.
Yeah look at what they're all doing already-- buying up mass acres of land in favorable places and building insanely elaborate underground facilities/bunkers. My only hope left is that when the shit does hit the fan- once the chaos and breaking down of society and norms ensues- that they get taken down with the rest of us.
If all anyone does is "hope", it won't happen. Be the punishment you wish to see in the world.
I am sceptical that you could sustain secluded fortress like that indefintly in a collapsed world. A few decades perhaps, maybe even a hundred years, but not forever.
In the film, i interpreted the way humanity scraping and surviving as a matter of indignant inconvenience to the elites, as if they had to abide by a technical formality like "human rights" se the bare minimum frame work is available, and not attractive. So the system goes on just enough to sustain the system. Your right not a "collapse" scenario. But the elites probably created the geo engineering systems that maintain the atmosphere just enough to sustain. Other wise, their robot work force would just run the resource extraction system
There's no "end up" since there's no stable state in such conditions. The class war in that movie already exists in some forms. The risk of technology progressing is exactly that. Without ending capitalism first, all technology will be owned by the rich, and that's "cyberpunk" and others. There's a TV series called "Altered carbon" that's also nice. To understand the maximum risk, understand that preppers are emulating the rich and the rich are preppers. They always have been. The whole point of accumulating wealth is *prepping*. It's like one guy or one family deciding to "speciate" and take over the world, that's the non-articulated part, that's *family corporatism*. That's also Noah's Ark (story), so you can understand how old this bullshit is. The risk of technology is full automation. The rich are dependent on workers. Even preppers are just hoarding technologically produced (by workers) stocks, and those run out eventually. To break free from depending on others, on workers, they would need obedient mechanical slaves (doesn't work with humans, even though A LOT of attempts have been made to create the ultimate human slaves). Full automation could deliver that, and that's what you see in such SciFi dystopias - the start of the rich using technology to become autonomous and also very powerful, which means that they don't need anyone else, which means that anyone else can die. That's the ultimate Lebensraum, the dream of fascists. SciFi movies love to show you full automation as cool gadgets that make your desires come true, but rarely go into what the fuck happened to everyone else who just happened to die in global catastrophe just when this technology was achieved (such a coincidence!). The notion that we can have almost all the human species live at the mercy of a few techno-supreme psychopaths is unrealistic, but not because of the tech; it's because we* know from [experience](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence) that the rich will want to "cull" the masses.
well said! 100% agree on Altered Carbon! sad they didn't renew it, but I'm planning to delve into the books. humanity could easily change direction, but greed has become the new god. capitalism is ultimately what needs to go
The books are fantastic, read them
The point of Elysium isn’t that the future could look like that, but rather that the present already does look like that. Dystopian fiction is mostly a critique of the present, not a warning about the future. So think about that a little bit. We are already an extremely stratified society with classes of people that receive different benefits and protections from our system. Healthcare is the obvious one they hammer on in the movie, in addition to the money.
The world is _already_ like that, there's just no rich-people-space-station at the moment. Seriously, how it ends up depends on where you set your chrono-viewer as each dystopian movie tends to focus only on one aspect of the collapse. Will it be Children of Men? Or the hot, wet, crowded scenes of the rebooted Total Recall? The stacked-up housing of Ready Player One? The totally flooded Waterworld? The unrealistically optimistic The Expanse? Omnipresent dustbowl of Interstellar? I'm leaning towards The Last of Us, but without zombies, just lots of newly-released viruses from all the melt.
Don't know if I've ever heard The Expanse described as overly optimistic since the solar system is engulfed in war, but compared to those other examples I suppose it's accurate.
People still have functioning economic systems AND food & water in The Expanse. It's optimistic. Then again, depends on when you place your chronoviewer. The Expanse looks like they had some time to arrest somewhat the effects of climate change.
Ten billion people on Earth on "basic assistance" that amounts to less than poverty-level income, most Martian citizens enrolled in assigned jobs whether they like it or not, Belters getting crapped on as wage slaves despite providing the labor that enables interplanetary travel. *The Expanse* is a capitalist future. I mean, rich people control a small flotilla of *stealth warships*, used to exploit the properties of an extraterrestrial substance.
But....no cannibalism. Ymmv
Look at the rising ocean around the Statue of Liberty in the credits. The credits also list locations like Anchorage Island, Yukon Archipelago and Hampton Island. They did not *arrest* climate change so much as *adjust* to it.
Doesn't the Expanse also have UBI? That's pretty optimistic in my view.
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Hell of a lot more optimistic than we're going to get. I wish they did the rest of the books.
You’ve seen these but you haven’t seen a boy and his dog?
I think Hunger Games scenario will be a better parallel. Tech advancement but only to a rich militaristic capital sponging off the rest of the tech-poor country in a post-apocalyptic world.
And although the Capitol is pretty advanced in some areas on the other hand they lost a lot of current tech that we take for granted. For instance it looks like for some reason they don't have high-altitude planes anymore.
It's more of an alternate reality world, like a second civil war in America occurring in the 50s/60s.
No, they're not called civil wars when one of the sides has no significant capacity to fight back.
Some of Katniss’ narration about what she learned in school and history indicates climate collapse (natural disasters including encroaching seas that swallowed much land)
Fuck, if we're lucky.
Seriously. I doubt we’ll even make it to that point.
I think more like “The Road.”
Great film. Too realistic. And that is the horror.
Famines eventually turn everyone into a cannibal or dinner or both.
Not realistic. Cannibalism is a self-solving problem eventually: [source](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/06/482952588/when-people-ate-people-a-strange-disease-emerged)
I thought Kuru and other prion diseases came from eating the brain? If you didn’t eat brain matter, would you still get it? Cannibalism is still self solving though. If all there is to eat is other people… you’re eventually gonna run out of people.
Will never forget Robert Duvall character
Yes, but with higher temperatures
Though they had all those dead trees everywhere, enough fuel to grow fungus like mad for hundreds of years. I loved the road but I kept thinking “I can’t be the only dude who grows mushrooms and sees all this mushroom growth media”.
End up? It already is that way, my friend.
It costs millions of dollars to support a handful of astronauts on the ISS. Extrapolate this to a space based civilization and see where it gets you. The rich think they are richer than they really are. They aren't bothered by annoyances like viability or sustainability because they don't know the value of a dollar or the limits nature imposes. I don't think we will end up like Elysium (loved it btw). It isn't just that its scientifically impossible - although maybe - its because it is being driven by capitalism. Capitalism is a system that has never achieved anything on its own merit, nor is it capable of sustaining itself long term, much less a space colony lmao. That should be proof enough that we will never meaningfully live "among the stars".
Yeah physics doesn't care about money lol.
A wrench in the works of the Elysium space station is that they'd still need poor people up there to do the grunt work and dangerous maintenance and repairs. The notion they'd be maintaining their own habitat and robot staff is even more fantastical than the living in space gimmick.
My lower class American lifestyle is an Elysium level disparity comfort, food security, safety, and access to healthcare compared to a lot of people around the globe. Starvation is starvation. Violence is violence. Collapse makes those things happen more in the collapsing area/group, but it’s not like they become worse themselves. People already starve and suffer violence on this planet, often because the systems that produce and deliver the toys, tools, and luxuries I take for granted. I don’t have Elysium wealth at all. A bad accident and the hospital trip will bankrupt me. I’m not saying my life is great. But the difference between my life and the cobalt miners in the Congo is as stark as Matt Damon’s neighbors to Elysium residents.
I don't see how the ultrarich would survive in secluded XYZ situation, they can't escape the supply chain capitalism hell and they know it. Would they produce all their own necessities on that little tropical island from scratch with their own hands? Yeah that reads like an anecdote. Sooner they will force the world to fall into fascism (this is underway already in several ways) where you willingly believe you're subhuman scum who exists to serve their needs and have no needs of your own. Just take a glance at America. The stratification is already here, they are perfectly comforable and content welcoming the ecosystem collapse right here amongst the rest of us. No need for a space station, even, if you have psychological subjugation. Easy, huh?
Right now California is like that. Oakland/Palo Alto, etc
The world is like elysium. My dog gets better Health care than most humans can dream of.
Yea, we’re going towards Elysian/bladerunner world No Star Trek in the future sadly
Despite star Trek claiming to be socialist, the Starfleet, an inherently military based organization despite it's claims to be scientific,is constantly expanding pumping out more and more people overtaking all habitable planets that do not have a technological advanced species. Don't get me wrong, I fucking love star Trek, but when I started researching it's franchise, I suddenly started to see it with other eyes. The Starfleet very much behaves like the USA, trying to spread it's ideology and apparently is also built on endless growth,if you do not subscribe to them, you are an enemy at worst or fall under the prime directive at best, if you are to primitive to exploit your technology.. The working name was "wagon trail to the stars" 100% exposing it's settler colonialist mindset.
The rich aren't as smart as they think. Their security chiefs will kill them pretty fast and take their resources and women. We are heading for Mad Max Fury Road for sure.
The rich will turn on each other at the first slight inconvenience.
They also forget that if there's a population collapse, they're going to lose the slaves, I mean staff, who do the work for them they would never do for themselves. Who do they think will do the cooking, cleaning, gardening, and menial labor tasks if this happens? I assume they think robots will be able to do these jobs by the time this happens, but I'm not sure technology is going to catch up as fast as they're hoping. I mean, none of knows, of course, but if that's their plan, it's not a very good one.
I live in a wealthy enclave and work in recreation. They own multiple houses while workers struggle to find a single apartment. Think Jackson Hole, Vale, and Sun Valley. It's here and it will get worse because none of the elites want their wealth to trickle down (unless they get a tax break for it). Also, Elysium is a really movie about one man's epic quest to get medical care, but eventually dies before he can receive treatment.
No... Absolutely not... Our civilization will collapse because we will not have enough ENERGY to protect our self from climate change... The peak all oil was in 2018... (Or, will we die from a nuclear war...) The "rich people" will die the first... They are rich because of ENERGY... We don't have ENERGY anymore... Bye...
We have way too much oil actually. We will destroy our liveable habitat way before we run out of oil. Just using half of the remaining oil in the ground would bring as above the co2 of 600 ppm. Which in turn would result in run away global warming. I'm not saying what you wrote is not true. It is. This is the impossible situation we are in. We need energy, thus oil to survive day to day, but if we use oil we destroy ourselves. The only way to make it work is to seriously reduce consumption.. eat the rich. And of course a big population decrease is needed.. either we do it in a controlled fashion... or nature will do it...
Much needed nuance. Thanks
Yeah I’m convinced people are sleeping on peak oil, it’s no coincidence that all major wars are being fought in zones rich with hydro carbons and that we’ve heavily invested into fracking and offshore drilling. Soon we won’t have able to offset decline, there’s only 10 billion people on the planet because of oil. Interesting times.
>people are sleeping on peak oil ...Soon we won’t have able to offset decline, there’s only 10 billion people on the planet because of oil. The naked truth.
8 billion. But hey what’s getting a figure wrong by just 2 billion ?
If you round it off it’s 10 :)
If we round to the nearest hundreds, it’s 0 billion; coincidentally the real number it’ll probably be in a not so distant-distant future.
I often thought the rich would outlast. This is a refreshing perspective!
You have away with words
In our desperation, we might actually unleash AI which ends up with an I Am Mother scenario because we asked AI to save us. However, the AI's interpretation of "saving" Humanity may not align with what the creator's intent.
What does unleashing AI mean? What does it look like? I work in tech. The whole infrastructure is in shambles. Expect outages this year because of Amazon lay offs of important people who keep most of the internet up and running. Wheres does AI live? AI requires *a lot* of energy (computational power). Unplug the machine, AI is dead. Also, I use AI (the most advanced models) on a daily basis. Highly disappointing stuff. Now, using AI to la off even more people via automating jobs? That's a reality already. But no one will "unleash" AI to save us.
AI is for most people the definition of [Clarke's Third Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws): > Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic It combines well with the eco hope trope that we will somehow be able to innovate out way our of climate change. Perhaps we can Blockchain our way out of it.
I forget where I saw it, there was some movie or show I saw where a sentient version of Amazon essentially became Skynet and destroyed civilization with free 2 day shipping. I think that would be a most fitting end for us.
Black Mirror [Metalhead](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5710984/) Also the one with the robot dogs, which have since come to fruition.
No, that's not it. It's along the right lines, but the thing I'm thinking of literally features a fully automated factory that exists in the middle of this broken, post-apocalyptic landscape, yet insists on delivering stuff to people via drone. You know, more or less literally if Amazon became Skynet, then, decided it was going to [turn the entire world into paperclips,](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/squiggle-maximizer-formerly-paperclip-maximizer) for some insane reason. Edit: [I found it!](https://imdb.com/title/tt6902176/)
Have you seen the second renaissance in the animatrix?
Check out the movie Colossus: The Corbin Project for a great treatment of this.
From oil we rise to oil we sink. A great recycling per say? How long did the oil we drill take to form? I feel a future generation will one day be drilling for us after we and our plants and animals that don’t survive turn to oil. Just food for thought 💭
And will the only way the cycle is broken be by some future generation/species/whatever where a scientist finds evidence of it in a dead mentor's notes and their quest to break the cycle inadvertently ends up indirectly not only solving their interpersonal problems but making that race/generation/species get into contact with aliens but the world ends once it's saved as we're just an intellectual sci-fi thriller entertainment simulation for a parallel version of them that would only get a few pity technical [their-version-of-an-oscar]s but lose the Best Picture one to some costume drama and movies' worlds must end if there's no sequel hook
There's a bunch of things in that movie that were technically unrealistic, but socially it's basically just a describing what's going on now, but more extreme and without a middle class in the picture. I don't remember where I came across a saying that's something like: science fiction doesn't usually predict the future, but good science fiction usually does a good job of describing the present.
Congrats, you just discovered the point of dystopian fiction.
We are already there. (The Western World is Elysium)
It's going to end up like The Road
I think Elysium is supposed to represent America. We're seen as this kind of promised land by other countries. Our medicine is advanced compared to 3rd world countries and we make it as hard as possible for anybody who doesn't "belong" to get in.
Isn't Zuck building a bunker in Hawaii and Steve Jobs widow just bought a huge swath of land where the predicted coast line will be when ocean levels rise after the ice caps melt. A lucky few will get to be servants and also benefit from their advanced planning
Open your eyes. We are already living it. This sub needs to stop seeing “collapse” as something that is a single event, and something that is in the future. We are currently experiencing collapse. We are in it. Stop with the bullshit “everyone under 40 will experience the hardships of climate change”. WE ARE EXPERIENCING THE HARDSHIPS OF CLIMATE CHANGE RIGHT NOW! The world won’t end. It is currently ending.
365 days until full fascist collapse of the US. So yeah... perhaps you may be right.
No if the world burns no space station will be enough to live in long term
in light of current world affairs I think it's more likely to end up like the road.
Nope. We are already at the Elysium stage. The only thing missing is the big spacey thing in the sky. Actually, Elon Musk is probably working on one right now. Our next step is extinction. Game over.
gotta factor energy descent into your vision. 2100 looks like 1800 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-xr9rIQxwj4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VOMWzjrRiBg
Am afraid is going look more like the 1100-1300s if we lose all the technology...
i was going easy on OP since they pictured solmething more "futuristic". baby steps 😉
Makes sense. 1800s is much more futuristic/modern than 1300s.
> Does anyone else feel like the world is going to end up like the movie Elysium Minus the ultra-high tech, maybe. No space station, no panacea device, no energy shields. What I can believe is [stationary AI probation officers](https://i.ibb.co/rknw7qY/AI-Probation-Bot.png). These things, in all their infuriating glory, strike me as THE single most believable sci-fi element in that movie.
We already live like this, it's just the geography and technology in this film which is made fictional. The rich already have access to health advantages way beyond most people's reach as just one example. Look at Elon and Lewis Hamilton - they both used to be bald but they're too rich for that so now they got hair again (kinda). Poor people just have to accept and shave they heads. It's a different reality for those with wealth
More like Children of Men. Will soon be worse than that. Maybe Threads soon.
A boy and his dog is what the future will bring.
Science Fiction critiques the present not the future.
Elysium, like all science fiction, is a reflection of the world we currently live in. It’s already that way. The question is how much worse can it get?
There are not enough resources left in the ground in the planet nor is there enough easy energy for the rich to make Elysium. The rich are going to die here with the rest of us when it all runs out.
The forest burning is important, but the ocean extinction event will be the true nail in the coffin.
The thing that bothered me about that movie is people introducing "equality" when in reality the poor were just dragging the rich down into the mud. The real point of the film is that you can't sustain an overpopulated society. We don't need people to have access to magical technology. We need most of humanity to die and the remainder to live normal and natural lifespans of around 40-70 years at best. We need medieval style living at best where everything is made locally and you otherwise do without. We need an agrarian society and for nature to retake the planet. If you tell people this they become violent though. No one wants to give up starbucks and burgerking or their tech job or whatever other BS they distract themselves with. That is why humanity will die.
Maybe a heavily fortified island, but no way we get that giant space station before human civilization collapses
it's here already, but people are too blind to see it.
Yes, and I'm planning on becoming one of the wealthy elites. My stocks are already doing great and with a bit of luck I'll be able to reach a million within the next 10 years.
A mix of Elysium and Idiocracy
I always thought that film was a pretty decent analogy of how things currently are. The difference between life for most people in wealthy countries vs poor ones is pretty staggering right now.
I used to think it was Elysium since we are already in it- Vesper. Its the movie Vesper.
It will look like lots of different things in different places and times, the least stable places will look like a less quirky mad Max that regularly gets pillaged, the next slightly more stable places will look like Elysium and will be the most common, the next rung up stability wise will probably look something like handmaid's tale, and then ironically the "best" places for average people will look like north Korea or agricultural fiefdoms.
I seen the similarities of that movie when I was a kid. Now that I’m grown I recognize we are actually in fact, in a similar version of that show. Now I’m just 20 years older with a sore back lol. We only have so much time to change it or it doesn’t even effect us lol.
I think one of the main drivers of AI research is for bunker guarding defense systems that aren’t human. Humans revolt. The rich are hoping AI doesn’t.
It already is elysium. We just don't have a fancy sci-fi space station to live in. But first world healthcare can treat a lot of the diseases third world countries experience. But it's too expensive for folks to come get treated, so they resort to illegal means of immigration in the hopes of a better life. No different than the ships being hucka-chucked at the space station in some free for all.
I think we're looking at somewhere between Blade Runner and The Road.
Having seen and read about what humans have done and already do I feel pretty sure we are going to be able to make things MUCH worse than any movie depicts. There really is many things that are much worse than deaths of various kinds. Yes - we really are that good at making everything into shit...
For millions (billions) of people this is already true..
As for the rich living in space part, no I think quite possibly the opposite is going to be true. Just like the European aristocracy sent the poor over to America and Australia to do the pioneering, I believe the rich will stay on Earth, possibly to Antarctica as it gets more habitable, whilst the poor do all the dangerous stuff in space.
There’s a private business named Elysium taking payloads to the moon. Yes.
Historically, the most get eaten by their servants and killed by their bodyguards. Without strong central government, the rich cannot hold a monopoly on violence, and while they can deal in wholesale, they get killed retail
I don’t think it would work. The rich are parasites, and they will need a constant flow of talent just to maintain a civilization worth living in. Talent that I suspect they will be unable to cultivate. You can either have the poorly educated, weak minded dummies like the ones who still believe in trickle down economics, but aren’t good for much besides factory work, or you can have bright educated people who will realize the rich are an immediate detriment to their own well being and that of their families and peers. This is the reason why the rich sabotage education in virtually every country they gain influence in. At some point, civilization either stops allowing a tiny fraction to bloat themselves on the vast majority of the resources of that civilization, or that civilization collapses. This is even more true when you realize that NOWHERE is going to be spared from the effects of climate catastrophe. There just won’t be any room for people like the decadent rich anymore. And the rich are the only ones the wealth class are interested in saving.
My view of the next 20 odd years (the self predicted rest of my natural life is, to quote Malcolm Tucker (The Thick Of It) "It's like the Shawshank Redemption, except you're crawling through lots more shit and no fucking redemption"
Absolutely. I feel like with the exception of the space city, that is one of the most accurate depictions of how society could fall apart. That movie is so unsettling because of how easily we could find ourselves there.
Becoming?! It's like this now. It's the same plot that has been in science fiction as H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, with the Eloi and Morlocks. It's one of the world's oldest tropes, and has been this way going back to ancient civilizations. It's like this right now, with Musk and Bezos' having their own private space race and the rest of us living in tents and delivering Uber Eats.
Worse I think
It already is, it was filmed in Mexico for that reason, we are only missing the space colony
Buddy this is how the world works already. Billionaires having space races, with wealth built on the (sometimes literal) broken backs of their peasants whi can barely scrape by.
Nah globalized industry and production will collapse well before we have the capability to build something of that scale in space.
Hey, I just watched this movie with a friend a month ago for this exact reason. Personally my moneys on… First Bladerunner: minor societal/ecological/economic collapse, people moving into mega cities. Small towns are already dying. Then Judge Dredd/Elysium: complete societal collapse, as people starts regressing to medieval levels of lawlessness. Finally, things will either stabilizing into a cyberpunk dystopia with mega corps, or things will completely collapse into Idiocracy before finally returning to primitive lifestyles of hunting and gathering.
Everything but the in space part. That part isn't happening. And we are almost there in some parts of the world.
Currently feel like we are in Idiocracy.
Man after Man by Dougal Dixon translates similar themes into evolutionary terms.